The second but last of the many self-portraits of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1780, when he was fifty-seven years old.
This Venus from 1785 is one of the very few mythological pieces by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and one of the very few nudes.
John Simpson, of Bradley Hall, Northumberland, was sixty-five when Sir Joshua Reynolds painted his portrait. His style of dress is somewhat different from anything I’ve seen in contemporary portraits, it may have been slightly eccentric at the time, I don’t know. But in general the idea that men should not be allowed to wear bright colors had not entered anybody’s mind yet.
After his marriage, the newly appointed court painter Rubens started the construction of a new house of his own design in the Vaartstraat (now the Wapper), based on his studies of Italian palaces. It was finished in 1610. He painted The Abduction of Ganymede not long afterwards. It is now located in the Prado.
Grecian Reverie is another one of Godward’s earliest paintings. If you compare the similarily named Grecian Girl, you will find that in these two decades his technique has improved, but his style and his preferences have remained unchanged.
John William Godward: A Grecian Girl (1908)
THE SIMILARITIES of A Grecian Girl, painted in 1908, with Grecian Reverie, painted nearly twenty years earlier, are remarkable. All through his life, John William Godward was haunted by the same dreams and obsessions.
Waiting for an Answer is one of Godward’s oldest surviving paintings, from 1889, the year he moved away from his controlling family into his own studio. His first one, The Yellow Turban, exhibited 1887 by the Royal Academy, seems to be lost or at least no longer accessible.
The male figure is often thought to be a self-portrait. Since all photographs of Godward were destroyed, this is our only hint to what he may have looked like.
Megilla was one of the last paintings by John William Godward, after his return to England.
The Muse Erato at her Lyre is one of the few paintings by Godward with an explicitly mythological motif.
The exact date of this picture is not known, but Ethel Warwick was a well-known artists’ model in the 1890s.
Vivat! Crescat! Floreat! 