#symbolism

The story behind it, from what I can find, is a princess shut in a tower by her father and a god who gets in by turning himself into a shower of gold. It's a small canvas too — under a metre either way, which you'd never guess from a photo of it.

It's the old Greek story — a princess chained to a rock as an offering to a sea monster, waiting on a rescue that's supposedly on its way. They say the painter spent twenty-odd years working in nothing but charcoal black before he let colour in at all.

Part of a long series he kept adding to and rehanging for years — love, jealousy, illness, death, all of it as one run. Supposedly this one went under a second title along the lines of 'After the Fall', which tells you roughly where in that story we've arrived.

He belonged to a group in Vienna who'd walked out on the official art establishment and built their own place to exhibit in, from what I've read. This comes from the stretch afterwards when he was deep into gold and pattern, and doing big pictures about the stages of a life.

The juniper behind her is supposedly a pun — 'ginepro' is Italian for juniper, so it doubles as a nod to her name. It's also, they say, the only Leonardo painting on public display anywhere in the Americas, part of why it made headlines when a museum bought it for a record sum in the 1960s.

Apparently the cross here is modelled on a carved wooden one from a small local chapel, repainted bright yellow and dropped into a working field with the women dressed the way locals actually did back then.

They say he knew Munch's work from early on, and was after a feeling more than an accurate view — this reads like a mood he wanted you to sit in, not a real place.

For decades he mostly made dark, unsettling charcoal prints — this bright, ordinary bouquet came from a total swing late in his career.

According to Wikipedia he spent the first half of his career working almost entirely in black — charcoal and prints, most of it pretty grim — and only came round to colour late on. The story behind the title is the usual one: a woman, a box she's told to leave shut, and everything bad in the world getting out of it.

From what I could find, the man with the beard was a sculptor, and a friend — apparently he sat for him more than once. They were both fairly big names in Switzerland around then.

This came just after a long public row in Vienna over some ceiling paintings he'd been commissioned to make for the university — they got called ugly and obscene in the papers, and he ended up handing the money back. Supposedly he wanted to title this one 'To My Critics', and the woman grinning out over her shoulder was the reply. He was talked out of the title.

One out of a huge cycle he kept adding to for decades — love, jealousy, death — built to hang together as a set rather than be met one at a time. He came back to two people kissing over and over, in paint and in prints, and from what I can find the two of them get harder to tell apart with every version.

For most of his life he drew in black and white — charcoal nightmares, spiders with human faces — and apparently only went over to colour near the end. He came back to this same saint several times.

The death in it happened when he was a boy — his sister — but he didn't paint it until decades later, and from what I can find that's why the family in the room are all the age they were when he picked up the brush, not the age they were at the time.