George Frederic Watts and Assistants - Hope [1886]

George Frederic Watts and Assistants - Hope [1886], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

In the Bible (Hebrews, 6:19), hope is 'an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast, and which entereth into that within the veil.' Here, Hope is blindfolded, seated on a globe and playing a lyre of which all but one of the strings are broken. Watts (London, 1817 - 1904) wanted to find an original approach to allegory on universal themes. But Hope's attempts to make music appear futile and several critics argued that the work might have been more appropriately titled Despair. Watts explained that 'Hope need not mean expectancy. It suggests here rather the music which can come from the remaining chord'.

[Oil on canvas, 1422 x 1118 mm]

Caspar David Friedrich - Monk By The Sea [c.1808]

Caspar David Freidrich - Monk By The Sea [c.1808], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Friedrich worked for two years on this, ultimately his most famous work. The composition is divided horizontally into land, sea, and sky with a clear simplicity that shocked his contemporaries. A monk stands, bareheaded, on the shore. Seagulls circle around him. The lonely figure faces the leaden blackness of the immeasurably vast sea. The grey band of cloud over the water surprisingly gives way to blue sky along the top edge of the picture. No artistic composition had ever been as uncompromising as this: the main space of the picture seems like an abyss of some kind; there are no boundaries, there is nothing to hold on to, just a sense of floating between night and day, between despair and hope. In 1810 Heinrich von Kleist put into words, as no other could, the magical fascination of this painting: “Nothing could be more sombre nor more disquieting than to be placed thus in the world: the one sign of life in the immensity of the kingdom of death, the lonely center of a lonely circle. With its two or three mysterious objects the picture seems somehow apocalyptic, like Young’s Night Thoughts, and since its monotony and boundlessness are only contained by the frame itself, contemplation of this picture gives one the sense that one’s eyelids have been cut away.”

[Oil on canvas, 110 x 171.5 cm]

Caspar David Friedrich - Abbey Among Oak Trees [c.1809]

Caspar David Freidrich - Abbey Among Oak Trees [c.1809], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Abbey Among Oak Trees is the companion piece to Monk by the Sea. Friedrich (Greifswald, September 5, 1774 - Dresden, May 7, 1840) showed both paintings in the Berlin Academy Exhibition of 1810. At the request of the 15-year-old crown prince, they were bought by King Friedrich Wilhelm III. In their perplexing remoteness and formal radicalism they were to become key works in German Romanticism. In Monk By The Sea a human being stands lost in the apocalyptic loneliness and infinity of nature and the cosmos. He meditates on life and its boundaries. In the companion piece, the gates of death have opened. Monks carry a coffin into a deserted Gothic ruin to hold a requiem mass under the cross. The graveyard with its crooked, sunken tombstones is equally deserted. Bare oaks reach up into the sky as though in complaint. The first light of dawn is appearing over the horizon like an ocher-yellow veil, outshining the tender curve of the crescent moon. The visionary gleam of the heavenly realm is completely detached from the earthly regions, which are still sunk in darkness. One sign of hope is in the two single lights on the crucifix. For the painter Carl Gustav Carus, who was also a friend of Friedrich’s, this painting was “of all recent landscapes, possibly the most deeply poetic work of art.”

[Oil on canvas, 110.4 x 171 cm]

Theodor Rombouts - Card Game [1620s]

Theodor Rombouts - Card Game [1620s], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Theodor Rombouts (July 2, 1597 – September 14, 1637) was a Flemish Baroque painter specialising in Caravaggesque scenes of card players and musicians. From 1628-1630 he was deacon of the Guild in Antwerp. He painted many music scenes and parties at a table drinking.

[Oil on canvas, 143 x 223.5 cm]

Jan Gossaert - An Elderly Couple [c.1520]

Jan Gossaert - An Elderly Couple [c.1520], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

The only known double portrait by Gossaert. The sitters have not been identified. On the badge on the man's hat a young naked couple with a cornucopia are depicted, clearly providing a contrast with the age of the subjects, and perhaps an ironic comment on their present state.

Jan Gossaert, sometimes called Mabuse, is often described as a pioneering Romanist: he was one of the first Flemish artists to travel to Italy, and to use aspects of Italian art in the Netherlands. Gossaert's experience of Italian art, however, radically affected his output. He adopted ideas from classical art and from 16th-century works, and created statuesque nudes, in pictures such as the Adam and Eve.

[Oil on parchment laid down on canvas, 46 x 66.9 cm]

Karel Dujardin - A Woman and a Boy with Animals at a Ford [1657]

Karel Dujardin - A Woman and a Boy with Animals at a Ford [1657], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

The peasants, a bare-breasted young woman and a boy, who is shown urinating in the water beside her, have halted at the ford in the heat of the day. The cow faces towards the road leading to the ford, while the mule stoops to drink. The grouping of the figures is echoed in the structure of the rocky embankment in the background, which forms a solid mass to the left, with a sunlit outcrop immediately over the heads of the figures. The woman and mule also appear, in reverse, in an undated etching by the artist. Fords became a popular subject with Italianate landscape painters in Holland. Scenes such as this are evocations of the Roman Campagna, which Dujardin sketched during his stay in Italy.

Dujardin was probably born in Amsterdam, the son of a little-known painter, Guilliam du Gardin. According to his biographer Houbraken, he trained with Berchem; he later visited Rome. In the early 1650s he is recorded in Amsterdam and in 1656 in The Hague. By 1659 he had apparently returned to Amsterdam. He visited Italy again in 1675, and he died in Venice three years later.

[Oil on canvas, 37.7 x 43.5 cm]

Lord Frederic Leighton - And The Sea Gave Up The Dead Which Were In It

Lord Frederic Leighton - And The Sea Gave Up The Dead Which Were In It, a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Dramatic in scale and execution, Leighton's design depicting the resurrection of the dead before the Last Judgement (Book of Revelation) was originally created for the dome of St Paul's Cathedral. Leighton may have used Michelangelo's 'Last Judgement' from the Sistine Chapel, Rome as an inspiration. Figures are shown rising out of tombs or the depths of a vast ocean. The main group are a husband, wife and child who have emerged united. Their posture and skin tones underline the stages of resurrection, from the limpness and pallor of death to the vigour and reddish hue of renewed life.

[Oil on canvas, 2286 x 2286 cm]