Top 60 Paintings - Third Part - From 1800 to 1915

In the third instalment of his selection of 60 great paintings, the Principal chooses 15 favourites from 1800 to 1915, and reveals why he likes them.

1.     The Bather, Ingres. 1808

This is an undeniably beautiful painting, perhaps all the more so because we see the woman not from the front, but from behind, perched on her bed, in an ordinary domestic moment. The tone is cool, and the skin smooth as the enamel of a bath, yet the turn of her neck and the tangle of her feet in the sheet help to charge this painting with the thrill of recognition.

2.     The Third of May, Goya. 1814

The French critic Roland Barthes spoke of a ‘punctum’ in a picture, a focus for the eye, even if not always at the centre. Here, as if lit by a magnesium flare it is the man’s white shirt. Arms raised, he seems to taunt the soldiers as they take aim at the rebels. Soon this man will join his dead comrades, but in this suspended moment, his defiance is luminous.

 

3.     The Great Wave, Hokusai. 1823

The image is as iconic as any piece of Western art, juxtaposing the solidity of Mount Fuji in the background, its pyramidal shape topped with snow, with the fluidity of the waves, their blueness edged with tumultuous white, like the claws of a bird or large cat ready to seize its prey – here, two boats, the tiny faces of passengers overwhelmed in scale by the seascape. 

 

4.     Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory), JMW Turner. 1843

Turner was painting a hundred years before the American critic Clement Greenberg announced colour and abstraction were the ultimate end points of art, so pooh-poohing representation as fake. Here, while there are representational elements present in the centre, the painting comprises a breath-taking swirl of colour, molten reds and golds.  

 

5.     The Gleaners, Millet. 1857

Painted in the same year Madame Bovary and Baudelaires’s Fleurs du Mal were published, this serves as a reminder that France remained largely rural at the time. This captures, with careful symmetry and a finely graded use of colour the dignity as well as the labour of manual farming, and seems a far cry from the next painting on the list. 

 

6.     Le Déjeuner Sur l’Herbe, Manet. 1863

No surprise that this caused a scandal when it was first exhibited and challenged the artistic establishment. No prizes, either, for guessing this was painted by a man. The objectification of female bodies is clear here, and yet there is something mischievous in the spilled fruit of this flâneurial version of Eden, the agency of the women, the casual entanglement of limbs. 

 

7.     Sunrise, Monet. 1872

This comes a bit later than the Turner (above), yet is close to his project in the vivid and impressionistic use of colour, the smudgy representation of boats and mists, the characteristic lily-green smearing of paint. But it is the blob of orange that turns out to be the sun that steals the glory here. The sun is rising, and so too is a new way of creating art. 

 

8.     Wheat Field with Crows, Van Gogh. 1890

There’s a line in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary which I often think of in relation to this painting: ‘In a darkening sky, crows were on the wing.’ It is a prelude to Emma Bovary’s suicide, just as this painting presaged Van Gogh’s own suicide. It was his last painting. And the closest he came to abstraction, the large bands of colour, gold giving way to blue, to black, to death. 

 

9.     The Scream, Edvard Munch. 1893

Much parodied, including an episode of The Simpsons, this is the archetypal howl of modern angst. Norwegian Airlines once had a picture of Munch on the tailfins of its planes, which I thought was like the Four Seasons commissioning Rothko to turn their restaurant into a slaughterhouse. The swirls echo Van Gogh in their raw if more northerly dark despair. 

 

10.  Mont Saint-Victoire, Cezanne. 1904 - 6 

‘I will conquer New York with an apple,’ Cezanne is reported to have said, and it’s true no one paints an apple quite as well as Cezanne. But he was equally obsessive, and ever better, at drawing his favourite mountain from every angle. He completed over 60 paintings of Mont Saint-Victoire, its faceted parts dabbed in complementary greens and blues and golds.    

 

11.  Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Pablo Picasso. 1907

Representing Picasso with one painting is like choosing one composition from Mozart or one scene from Shakespeare. This is perhaps his first major piece, and you can see him taking the faceted aspects of Cezanne, applying them to naked flesh and fracturing them more. An unsettlingly primitive yet sensuously fragmented representation of female beauty.

 

12.  The Dancers, Henri Matisse. 1910

There’s more simplicity in the blocking of colour and more harmony enacted in the circular dance than in Picasso’s painting (above). But the distorted forms and the anarchic angles make this a vividly modern painting, and you can already see in the shapes of Matisse’s figures the late-career cut-outs of the human form to come. 

 

13.  Nude Descending a Staircase, Marcel Duchamp. 1912

Just as much modern painting from the late nineteenth century may be in reaction to the new technology of photography, and a recognition that painting needed to do something new, so it’s hard to imagine this being conceived without seeing the rapid images of motion pictures starting to appear. An early brilliant attempt to capture movement in slices of time.  

 

14.  Self Portrait in an Orange Jacket, Egon Schiele. 1913 

Egon Schiele’s paintings never seem quite finished, but this is part of their appeal. I prefer Schiele’s evident sketchiness to the opulent golds of Klimt, for instance. There is a proto-punk aesthetic going on here – rebellious, dissolute, tormented – yet absolutely alive. And I’m already connecting the flaming orange with Monet’s sun, Matisse’s dancers, and…  

 

15.  The Song of Love, Giorgio Di Chirico. 1915

I chose this image as the cover for my second book of poetry. I love the juxtaposition of a white classical bust (Alexander the Great), a green ball, and – the real stroke of genius – an orange rubber glove. All framed by ancient porticoes on the one hand, and the smoke and brick of a modern factory on the other. Together with the title, a witty and brilliant piece.

 

Chris Greenhalgh
Principal & CEO