10 Noteworthy Paintings at the Ashmolean Museum

Samuel Palmer belonged to a group of Romantic artists known as the Ancients, who aimed to breathe new life into the religious art of the day. This painting dates from the start of their association in the mid-1820s. The subject is a variant of The Flight into Egypt, which had long been a popular theme in Western art. After learning of the birth of Christ, Herod took brutal measures to find and kill the Holy Child. Joseph took his family into Egypt to escape the slaughter. In some accounts (the pseudo-Gospels in the Apocrypha), they broke their journey to rest under a palm tree. There, angels brought them food, or, in alternative versions, Christ caused the tree to bend its branches so that they could reach its fruit. Palmer specialized in painting idyllic landscapes, suffused with poetic mysticism, so the subject held an obvious appeal for him. With the exception of the palm tree, however, there was no attempt to conjure up a Middle Eastern scene. Instead, the landscape depicts the countryside near Shoreham, the Kent village where the artist settled in 1826. The picture appears to have been painted for Palmer’s cousin, John Giles. He was a stockbroker, rather than an artist, though he was also a member of the Ancients, providing invaluable financial support for the group. In artistic terms, the Ancients took their lead from William Blake. They admired the visionary quality of his pictures and strove to translate it into their own work. They also mimicked his use of archaic media—hence Palmer’s use of tempera in this scene. (Iain Zaczek)

Paolo Uccello’s elegant hunt—one of the great treasures of Oxford University—has been enjoyed by generations of bleary-eyed students tired of reading their classics. In this late work the great pioneer of matrix-making pictures brings his themes to bear upon the dark heart of night. Some theories link the image to Lorenzo de’ Medici hunting outside Pisa, but there is no way to prove this; others think that the picture is an illustration of an unknown novella. Renowned art historian and leading authority on Uccello John Wyndham Pope-Hennessy regarded this painting as “one of the most unaffectedly romantic paintings” of its time. There certainly is no shortage of competitors, yet The Hunt in the Forest is as mysterious in origin as it is beguiling in formal inventiveness. As the eye adjusts to the darkness of the scene, one sees the characters light up in their regal costumes, soft caps, and assorted scarlet regalia. Never before in the history of painting had red been used for such a dappled orchestration of color. Rather than the broken bodies in the battle scenes for which he was famous, here Uccello adopts the same visual language of orthogonal lines in fallen wood. The verdant mesh of the forest floor gives life to the flora that sprout and the fauna that spring into action. The four foregrounded trees, which expertly slice the scene into three equidistant spaces, balance the scene and draw the eye in from both directions toward an undefined vanishing point. (Steven Pulimood)

On a stone sill before a niche lie grapes, apricots, cherries, blackberries, and a peach devoured by ants, with a cabbage-white butterfly and a bumblebee. This rich visual composition combines an elegant harmony of color with hyper-accurate renderings of objects, very much in keeping with the Dutch Masters, including the artist’s most famous grandfather Jan Davidsz de Heem—one of the greatest painters of still life in the Netherlands. This painting is signed on the edge of the sill on the left: “D.De HEEM.” The form of the signature recalls the large letters with which David de Heem’s father—Cornelis de Heem—signed his name. A letter “J” would be added on some paintings to give the impression that the painting was by Jan Davidsz. This painting has been attributed to the grandfather, probably thanks to clerical confusion soon after the painting’s completion. It is likely to have been begun by Jan Davidsz, but it was almost certainly completed by his grandson, using his grandfather’s style as a model and his barely-begun canvas as a foundation. The work must have been painted early in de Heem’s career, but it is difficult to date because it is not known when he died; he also did not date any of his known paintings. But it is known that de Heem was born in Antwerp, Belgium, and that he moved later to Holland and was married in the Hague in 1690. His lineage is known but not the date of his death. Remarkably also, all known works by him are still life paintings of fruit and flowers. (James Harrison)

This is Claude Lorrain’s last picture, painted in the final year of his life, and it is a fitting epitaph to his work. It relates a tale from Virgil’s Aeneid, as classical mythology was considered a suitably elevated subject for art in Claude’s time. Claude has lent a uniquely poetic mood of an idealized Arcadia to the scene. Ascanius is on a hunting trip when an angry Juno directs Ascanius’s arrow to kill the stag of Sylvia, daughter of Tyrrheus, which sparks war. The trees bending in the wind signify the storm to come and the presence of Juno’s helper, Allecto. The classical columns that help to frame the work are a reference to the emblem of the Colonna family for whom this was painted. This painting is typical of the landscapes of Claude’s mature years, when he concentrated increasingly on the effects of light. A high viewpoint directs the eye over a breathtaking vista to the misty horizon. The artist has captured how certain light seems to lend solid forms a shimmering, ethereal quality—the gods here look like elongated ghosts. The episode depicted is not a peaceful one, yet Claude has chosen to show the calm before the storm, as Ascanius takes aim and the trees sway portentously, retaining his usual timeless serenity and at the same time adding poignancy to the story. Works such as this show Claude at the vanguard of artistic development, sharing his understanding of light with contemporaries, such as Johannes Vermeer, and future masters such as J.M.W. Turner, who cited him as a major influence. (Ann Kay)

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo is best known for his frescoes in the palaces of Germany, Venice, and Madrid. He was Venetian-born; he traveled a great deal; his work was renowned throughout Europe, where he was employed by a number of very wealthy and influential patrons. He was usually assisted in his work by his sons, Domenico (also known as Giandomenico) and Lorenzo. Tiepolo’s portraiture is less well known, but it was equally sought after. The identity of the model in A Young Woman with a Macaw is not recorded, but it is believed to be Tiepolo’s daughter. The provenance of this painting is not certain, but it was probably produced for the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna of Russia. Paintings of women with parrots were popular during the 18th century, and they symbolized the exotic world, along with lavish, decadent lifestyles, and hinted at sexual indiscretion. The themes for Tiepolo’s large-scale works were based on classical mythology, ancient literature, biblical stories, or grand events in history—always high-blown and glorious, but also witty and hinting at irreverence. This portrait’s detailed brushwork highlights the intense clarity for which his fresco and mural work was famed. This arresting work demonstrates Tiepolo’s excellent draftsmanship, impressive understanding of anatomy, and use of brilliant colors. British author Philip Pullman has cited the painting as among the inspirations for the daemons in his His Dark Materials trilogy. (Lucinda Hawksley)

William Holman Hunt was a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and remained truest to its original aims. This picture dates from the early days of the group, when its work was still attracting fierce criticism in the press. Hunt produced paintings with a strong moral purpose, executed in a scrupulously detailed manner. This particular subject began as an entry for a competition at the Royal Academy on the theme of “An Act of Mercy.” The Royal Academy’s size restrictions proved too limiting, and the picture was eventually acquired by Thomas Combe, one of the Pre-Raphaelites’ chief patrons. Combe was a keen supporter of the High Church revival that was taking place at the time, spearheaded by the Tractarians. Among other things, these revivalists were keen to stress the historical continuity of the Church of England along with the importance of the sacraments and clerical vestments. Hunt’s picture contains many symbolic references to Tractarian ideas. The missionary’s pose is reminiscent of Christ’s descent from the cross, while the girls who tend to him carry a thorn branch and sponge—two of the instruments of the Passion. On the left, the bowl of water symbolizes the rite of baptism while, behind it, two children squeeze grapes into a cup, a reference to the eucharist. At the back of the hut, a painted cross and hanging lamp form a makeshift altar; the hanging nets allude to the Church’s role as “fishers of men.” Hunt expanded the theme still further, with a series of biblical quotations on the picture frame. (Iain Zaczek)

Relying on practical experience and not abstract theories, the original aim of the Impressionists was to paint what they saw at one given moment in time. In 1860s France, they moved art quite literally out of the studio, often painting en plein air, using rapid brushstrokes and experimenting with color to capture the play of light and shadow and the ever-changing, fleeting mood, not only in landscapes but also in scenes of modern life. Camille Pissarro was the only member of the group to exhibit at all eight of their shows, held between 1874 and 1886. Although a central figure to the movement, in his early career he shunned depicting Paris, preferring instead to paint rural landscapes outside the city. However, during the 1890s, forced inside a rented Paris apartment by failing eyesight, he became the preeminent painter of the modern city. The Tuileries Garden in the Rain is one of a series of “weather studies,” canvases painted from the window of an apartment looking out over the gardens toward the River Seine. It shows Pissarro’s dedication to the Impressionist style: his use of complementary colors, the pale blue sky, and brownish-orange pathways, juxtaposed with flecks of white and silvery gray to capture the unique atmosphere of a rainy day. Pissarro’s commitment to his art and his encouragement to artists, such as Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, to use “nature as a guide” meant that he bridged the gap between one generation of artists and the next, from Impressionism to Post-Impressionism. (Alice Bell)

Born in Berlin, Lucian Freud became a British national in 1939. He studied at the Central School of Art, London, and then at Cedric Morris’s East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing. After having briefly served in the British army as a merchant seaman during World War II, he had his first solo exhibition in 1944 at Lefevre Gallery, London. His first paintings were associated with Surrealism, but from the 1950s onward he began to paint Realist portraits. From the mid-1960s he usually painted nudes, using a thick impasto technique. Preferring an autobiographical quality to his subjects, for models he took friends, lovers, family members, and fellow artists such as Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, and Leigh Bowery. In Small Naked Portrait Freud depicts a young woman with short black hair, lying naked, exposed, and vulnerable on a white mattress. Apart from the plain mattress and dark wall, there are no background or external elements. Consequently, the viewer’s eye is forced to confront the unprotected body, lit up brightly with an artificial studio light, a process typically used by the artist. Freud concentrated his study on the painting of the model’s flesh; its volume is created by a palette of pink, gray, and white. (Julie Jones)

This painting is of the view from Pablo Picasso’s room on the top floor of an apartment in the Boulevard de Clichy. The penetrating blue of the slate Parisian roofs is briefly mirrored in the sky overhead, where yellow and green flashes are also evident in the thickly rendered clouds. The side of the roofs are washed with a pale sunlight. This is a reflective painting of the scene that Picasso saw from the window of the room where he lived and worked; it is dreamlike and provides clues to the artist’s concerns at this embryonic stage of his career. This was a period of discovery and experimentation for Picasso. A critique of his exhibition at the gallery of Ambroise Vollard in June 1901 compared his work to a broad range of contemporary artists, from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec to Henri Matisse. Picasso had a magpie instinct for uncovering the new and vital and for creating coherent images that referenced these evolving styles. In Blue Roofs the Impressionist style is strongly evident in the short, energetic brushstrokes. Yet the serenity of this scene belies the turmoil of Picasso’s life at the time. His friend Carles Casagemas had committed suicide, and a grieving Picasso was only to stay in Paris for a short period, returning to Barcelona in 1902. Before leaving France he embarked upon a series of paintings that later matured into his Blue Period: melancholic evocations of the poor and stricken, death and mortality. Blue Roofs is an unknowing precursor to these images, in that it silently evokes a fleeting moment of calm contemplation. (Roger Wilson/Jane Peacock)

Piero di Cosimo was a Florentine painter of unusual temperament about whom contemporary stories abound—such as his refusal to eat anything except boiled eggs, his tendency to require hermitlike solitude, and tales of his fantastic, and probably highly dangerous, inventions conjured up for carnival time. Most well known for his religious paintings, he was also inspired by classical myths, and he painted portraits that verged on caricature. In The Forest Fire, smoke indicates that the animals’ habitat is threatened; the more fortunate birds fly from their branches, while in the background a herdsman attempts to escape with all his charges. The animals in the foreground—those with which the viewer can identify most strongly—are those that are doomed. The fact that many of the animals pictured would never coexist in the wild seems irrelevant to Piero’s boundless imagination. His works also include Perseus and Andromeda, a fantastic and yet oddly bawdy scene inspired by mythology, and the spectacular Visitation with St. Nicholas and St. Anthony Abbot, in which Mary, pregnant with Jesus, meets Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist. On first sight it is a traditional, peaceful religious scene, yet in the background are images of a quiet Nativity alongside a hellish scene of children being massacred. It is a hallmark of Piero di Cosimo’s paintings that they teem with life and unexpected incident; every time one looks at his paintings afresh there is always something new that escaped notice before. (Lucinda Hawksley)