The Atlas Collection
Travel posters
For places worth remembering. Modern prints inspired by favourite coastlines, towns and landmarks.
New destinations added regularly
Posters from the places you love
Curated by Artists
Museum Quality Prints
Crafted to Last
Designed for Interiors
Style It Your Way
Popular prints available framed or on canvas
Timeless Art For Beautifully Designed Homes
Why Choose Us ?
What customers say
Over 5000
Happy Art Lovers
From Our Journal
Géricault Painted the Raft of the Medusa From a Government Cover-Up
On 2 July 1816, the French frigate Medusa ran aground on the Bank of Arguin, off the coast of present-day Mauritania. The ship had been carrying troops, settlers, and supplies to re-establish the French colony at Saint-Louis in Senegal, returned to France by the British under the terms of the post-Napoleonic settlement. The captain, Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, had been appointed for political reasons by the restored Bourbon government despite having spent twenty years out of service. He had run aground because he had refused to listen to his more experienced officers. There were not enough lifeboats. Six lifeboats carried 250 officers, sailors, and first-class passengers safely to shore. The remaining 147 people were placed on an improvised raft, twenty metres long and seven metres wide, constructed from the ship's masts and yards lashed together. The raft was to be towed to shore behind the lifeboats. Several kilometres from the wreck, the lifeboat crews cut the towlines and left the raft to drift. The Thirteen Days The raft drifted for thirteen days in the open Atlantic. The 147 people on board had a small supply of biscuits, several barrels of wine, and no fresh water. By the second night they had begun to fight; by the fourth night they had begun to die. The strong attacked the weak. The wine was drunk. The biscuits ran out. By the fifth day, some of the survivors had begun to eat the bodies of the dead. On the thirteenth day, the brig Argus, which had been sent to look for them, sighted the raft by accident. Fifteen of the original 147 were still alive. Five of those died within days of rescue. The final ten survivors gave depositions on their return to France. The Cover-Up The Bourbon government had every reason to suppress the story. Chaumareys was a Bourbon appointee. The decision to cut the towlines had been made by Bourbon-appointed officers. The whole episode was an indictment of the restored monarchy's policy of placing political loyalists rather than competent officers in command of military vessels. Two survivors, Henri Savigny (the ship's surgeon) and Alexandre Corréard (an engineer), wrote a detailed published account of the disaster. The account appeared in November 1817, titled Naufrage de la frégate la Méduse. It was a sensation. The book was attacked by royalist journals, defended by liberal ones, and circulated rapidly through Parisian society. Both authors were dismissed from government service shortly after publication. Théodore Géricault, Portrait of a Woman Suffering from Obsessive Envy (one of the Insane Portraits series), c. 1822. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. Géricault painted ten psychiatric patients at the Salpêtrière in the years after The Raft. Géricault Théodore Géricault was twenty-six in 1817 when he read the Savigny and Corréard book. He was the son of a wealthy Norman family, trained as a painter under Carle Vernet and Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, and was already known for several large equestrian paintings he had shown at the 1812 and 1814 Salons. He had recently returned from a year in Italy, where he had studied Caravaggio's Roman religious paintings and the late Michelangelo Sistine ceiling. Géricault was a liberal and was furious about the Medusa cover-up. He decided to paint the raft for the 1819 Salon, in a deliberately massive scale that would make the picture impossible to ignore. The Method The painting that resulted is 491 by 716 centimetres. It is the largest painting Géricault ever made and one of the largest paintings of the nineteenth century. The composition shows the moment of rescue: the survivors on the raft sighting the Argus on the horizon, the figures arranged in a rising pyramid from the dead at the front to the figure waving a cloth at the back. Géricault prepared the picture obsessively. He shaved his head so that he would not be distracted by his own appearance and would have to stay in the studio. He had a carpenter build a scale model of the raft. He read every account of the disaster he could find. He visited the morgue at the Hôpital Beaujon to study the colour and decay of corpses. He bought severed limbs from the morgue and arranged them in his studio to study at length. He interviewed Savigny and Corréard at length. Corréard appears in the final painting: he is the figure in the centre-left, standing with his arm outstretched, pointing toward the horizon where the Argus has been sighted. Géricault hired the surgeon Savigny as a technical consultant. The carpenter who built the raft model also built the studio model of the rescue. What the Painting Shows The Raft was hung at the 1819 Salon in October 1819. The reception was sharply divided. Liberal critics praised it as a political statement. Royalist critics attacked its size and its colouring. The painter Antoine-Jean Gros, an older neoclassicist whose own work had once held the avant-garde position Géricault now occupied, said the painting was "the corpses of the Bourbons painted by a former Bonapartist." The picture did not sell at the Salon. Géricault had hoped it would be purchased by the government for the Louvre. It was not. He exhibited it privately in London in 1820, where it drew large paying audiences and made him roughly the equivalent of £20,000 in modern money over a six-month exhibition run. The painting was eventually acquired by the Louvre in 1824, the year of Géricault's death, for a price that was lower than what he had been paid in private London ticket sales. It has hung there since. The Short Career Géricault produced about 300 paintings and several thousand drawings in his lifetime. He died in January 1824, aged thirty-two, from complications of a riding accident. The Raft was the only major political painting of his career. After it, he had moved to a smaller scale: a series of psychiatric patient portraits made at the Salpêtrière in 1821 to 1822 (ten paintings, of which five survive), several lithograph series, and the equestrian studies that had always been his side interest. The early death has been a kind of biographical asset to his reputation. Géricault is the founding example of the doomed Romantic painter: huge ambition, formal innovation, political engagement, dead at thirty-two. The model carried through Delacroix (who modelled for one of the figures in The Raft), through Manet a generation later, through Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec, and into the modern myth of the painter who burns hot and brief. What the Raft Did The Raft of the Medusa was the first large-scale modern history painting that took its subject from contemporary news rather than from classical or biblical history. The convention of nineteenth-century history painting had been to ennoble the present by allegorising it: to paint a Napoleonic victory, but with the figures dressed in Roman costume. Géricault refused the convention. He painted a contemporary disaster as a contemporary disaster, with the survivors named, the captain identifiable, the political failure visible. The painting changed what large-scale public painting could be. Within a generation, Delacroix would paint the 1830 Revolution (Liberty Leading the People, 1830) on a similar scale and with a similar refusal of allegorical distancing. Manet would paint the execution of Maximilian in 1867 on the same Raft-scaled canvas. The line of large modern history paintings of the next century has its origin in the wall of the 1819 Salon. The Raft also stayed politically useful. It became a reference point in French left-wing politics through the nineteenth century, an image that liberal papers would invoke whenever a Bourbon (later, a Napoleonic, later, a Bonapartist) regime committed an avoidable disaster. The painting did the political work Géricault had built it to do. The Bourbon regime fell in 1830. Chaumareys, the captain who had grounded the Medusa, was court-martialled and given three years in prison: a sentence that Géricault's painting had helped make politically necessary.
Matisse Painted a Window in 1905 and Critics Called Him a Wild Beast
The 1905 Salon d'Automne opened in Paris on 18 October at the Grand Palais. Henri Matisse, then thirty-five, was hanging four paintings in Room VII, including Open Window, Collioure and Woman with a Hat. André Derain, ten years younger and Matisse's recent collaborator, had several canvases on the same wall. In the centre of the room stood a small Donatello-style Renaissance bronze. The critic Louis Vauxcelles wrote about Room VII for the Gil Blas newspaper. He pointed at the contrast between the conventional bronze and the surrounding paintings and produced the phrase that named a movement: "Donatello au milieu des fauves" — Donatello in a den of wild beasts. The word fauves stuck. Matisse, Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Albert Marquet, Henri Manguin, Charles Camoin, and Othon Friesz became Les Fauves. What Was On the Wall The Fauve paintings of 1905 used colour the way no European painting had used it since the medieval illuminators. Pure, unblended pigment straight from the tube. Cadmium red next to viridian. Cobalt blue against zinc yellow. No earth tones, no subtle modelling, no atmospheric grey. The colour was applied in broad flat areas, often outlined in another colour, often departing entirely from the colour of the actual subject. Open Window, Collioure shows the view from Matisse's hotel room window in the southern French fishing village of Collioure, where he had spent the summer of 1905 with Derain. A small balcony, three flower pots, and a window-frame in the foreground. A small harbour beyond, with three boats. The sky and the sea are painted in pink, peach, blue-green, and salmon. The walls of the balcony are red and pink. The shutters are green and red. The painting was not naturalistic and was not trying to be. Matisse had begun, in summer 1904, working on a series of pictures that pushed colour past Impressionist observation toward what he called "expression through colour." Open Window was the fullest statement of this practice he had yet made. The colour did the work. The Critics Vauxcelles's wild-beast review was relatively mild. Other critics were not. The reviewer for L'Illustration wrote that Woman with a Hat was "the most unpleasant thing in the entire Salon." Charles Morice, an established Symbolist critic, wrote about Matisse's paintings as "the products of an apparent disorder of the cerebral functions." The pictures were also defended. Gertrude and Leo Stein, the American collectors who had just begun acquiring contemporary French painting, bought Woman with a Hat for 500 francs after watching the painting be mocked in front of them by other Salon visitors. The Russian textile-magnate collector Sergei Shchukin began buying Matisse the following year and would acquire 37 Matisse paintings over the next decade. Henri Matisse, Le Bonheur de vivre (The Joy of Life), 1905-06. Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia. The large summary picture Matisse painted directly after the 1905 Salon controversy. The Joy of Life In autumn 1905, immediately after the Salon, Matisse began the largest painting of his career to date: Le Bonheur de vivre (The Joy of Life), 175 by 241 centimetres, oil on canvas. The picture shows a sunlit meadow with figures relaxing in various states of nudity: dancing, lying down, embracing. The colours are even more saturated than the Fauve room of 1905. The drawing is simplified to long flowing contour lines. Bonheur was finished by spring 1906 and shown at the 1906 Salon des Indépendants. It was the public statement of what Matisse thought Fauvism could do at full scale. The painting was attacked again, but this time Matisse had a defender at hand: Leo and Gertrude Stein bought Bonheur for 1,000 francs and hung it in their Rue de Fleurus salon, where it became the most-discussed contemporary painting in Paris for the next several years. The Steins' salon was where the Fauve picture met the next generation. Picasso saw Bonheur there in spring 1906 and began working on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) partly in response. The competition between Matisse and Picasso that would define European painting for the next twenty years began at the Steins' apartment in 1906. Why Fauvism Lasted So Briefly Fauvism as a coherent movement existed from roughly 1905 to 1908. By the end of 1907, the group had begun to fragment. Derain shifted toward a darker, more structured manner influenced by Cézanne. Vlaminck moved similarly. Braque, who had begun working in a Fauve idiom in 1906, switched in 1908 to early Cubism alongside Picasso. Matisse himself kept developing what he had begun, but increasingly along his own lines. By 1909 he was producing paintings (Dance, The Conversation, The Music) that were Matissean rather than Fauvist. The collective movement had served its purpose. It had broken the hold of post-Impressionist atmospheric colour and opened up the possibility of using pigment for its own properties rather than as a vehicle for description. What the Window Argued The Open Window of 1905 was a small painting (55 by 46 centimetres) that did a large amount of historical work. It argued that European painting could continue without being bound to the colour conventions that Impressionism had developed and post-Impressionism had partly modified. The argument was made through the painting's structure. The view through the window is composed of horizontal bands of colour. Sea and sky take up most of the upper half of the picture; the balcony and pots occupy the lower half. Each band is a different colour, and the bands are separated by hard edges rather than the soft transitions Impressionist painters used. The colour does not describe what is being seen; the colour decides what the painting is. This shift, from colour as observation to colour as construction, is the foundation of all twentieth-century colour painting. Mondrian, Rothko, Newman, Kelly, Diebenkorn: each of them descends from the 1905 Salon room. The lineage runs through Matisse's late cut-outs of the 1940s and 1950s, which carried the original Fauve logic to its conclusion. What Happened to the Wild Beasts Vauxcelles's joke became a movement name within weeks. The painters he had called fauves accepted the label and used it. The Salon d'Automne of 1905 became, in retrospect, the foundational exhibition of twentieth-century French painting. Open Window, Collioure is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Woman with a Hat is in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Le Bonheur de vivre is at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. The four paintings Matisse hung in Room VII in October 1905 are now in major American museum collections, on display every day, drawing larger audiences than they ever drew in Paris. The painters of 1905 had been told they were monstrous. They turned out to be the first painters of the century.
Holbein Hid a Skull in The Ambassadors That You Can Only See From One Angle
In 1533, Hans Holbein the Younger painted two French diplomats at the court of Henry VIII. The painting, now called The Ambassadors and hanging in the National Gallery in London, is two metres by two metres, in oil and tempera on oak panel. The two men stand on either side of a tall double-shelf cabinet covered in instruments, books, and globes. The floor is patterned in a geometric mosaic copied from the Westminster Abbey pavement. Between their feet, across the lower third of the painting, is a smudge of grey-brown paint. From the centre of the painting, the smudge looks like a piece of damage or an unfinished section. From the right side of the painting, viewed from below at floor level, the smudge resolves into a perfectly drawn human skull. The technique is called anamorphosis, and Holbein's deployment of it here is the most technically accomplished use of the device in the sixteenth century. What the Painting Shows The two sitters are Jean de Dinteville, on the left in pink satin and ermine, and Georges de Selve, on the right in a long black robe. De Dinteville was the French ambassador to the English court in 1533. De Selve, his close friend, was the Bishop of Lavaur, on a visit to London at the time of the commission. Both men were in their twenties. The objects on the cabinet between them are a careful inventory of contemporary intellectual life. On the upper shelf: a celestial globe, a portable sundial, a quadrant, a torquetum (a complex astronomical instrument), and a polyhedral sundial. On the lower shelf: a terrestrial globe, a German hymnal (Walther's, 1524) open to two specific hymns associated with Lutheran reform, a lute with a broken string, a case of flutes, an arithmetic textbook, and a German hymnbook. The objects are not decorative. Each one carries specific symbolic weight. The lute's broken string and the partly open hymnbook reference the religious schism that was tearing Europe apart in 1533: Henry VIII had broken with Rome that same year. The astronomical instruments reference the new mathematical understanding of the universe. The arithmetic textbook references the rise of commercial culture. The Skull The anamorphic skull occupies the lower third of the composition. Holbein has painted it by setting up his picture plane at an extreme oblique angle, drawing the skull in perspective from that angle, and then reorienting the picture so that the skull appears stretched and distorted when viewed straight on. The optical effect requires the viewer to stand at a specific position to see the skull correctly: approximately a metre to the right of the painting's centreline, with the eye at roughly the level of the painted floor. From that position, the smudge resolves into a skull rendered with the same precision as the rest of the painting. Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Henry VIII of England, c. 1537-47. The royal portrait that became the template for every later depiction of the king. What the Skull Means The skull is a memento mori, a reminder of death. The convention was familiar in sixteenth-century European art: still-life paintings included skulls, portraits of scholars often had skulls on the desk, devotional images of saints frequently showed them holding skulls. What is unusual about Holbein's skull is the optical trick. The trick is the point. The painting argues, in its structure, that knowledge of death is something the viewer has to work for. From the front of the picture, the diplomatic pomp and intellectual achievement of the two sitters are perfectly visible. The skull is hidden in plain sight as a stretched smudge. Only by moving to a specific angle can the viewer see what underlies everything else. This is a sophisticated theological argument, and it would have been read as such by Holbein's contemporaries. The skull's invisibility from the centre, and its visibility from the side, mirrors a Christian commonplace: that death is always present in life but rarely attended to. The painting requires the viewer to physically perform the act of attention. You have to move to see it. The Crucifix In the upper left corner of the painting, partly obscured behind the green curtain, is a small silver crucifix on a chain. It is easy to miss. Holbein placed it there to balance the skull diagonally: the skull at the lower right, the crucifix at the upper left. Together they make the painting's frame: death below, salvation above, the ambassadors and their worldly inventory between. The compositional balance is exact and was certainly intentional. Holbein worked from carefully prepared cartoons (preparatory drawings at full scale), and the placement of every element in The Ambassadors was decided before any paint was applied. Holbein at the English Court Holbein was born in Augsburg in 1497, trained with his father, and worked in Basel before moving permanently to England in 1532. He had visited London briefly in 1526 to 1528, carrying letters of introduction from Erasmus to Thomas More. The 1532 move was permanent because the Swiss religious reformations had reduced demand for the kinds of religious painting he had been doing in Basel. He arrived in London the year before The Ambassadors and quickly built a portrait practice. By 1535 he was the King's Painter. Over the next eight years, until his death from plague in 1543, Holbein produced the canonical portraits of Henry VIII, the court, the king's wives, and the diplomatic corps. The Ambassadors, painted in his first full year in England, was the commission that established his reputation. What the Painting Shows Beyond the Trick The anamorphic skull is the famous thing, but the rest of the painting is doing similar work less spectacularly. Each object on the cabinet is positioned exactly. The astronomical instruments have working settings: a specialist can read the time and date of the painting's depicted moment from the instruments' positions. The lute has been drawn so accurately that musicologists can identify the instrument's maker. The carpet on the upper shelf is a recognisable type of mid-sixteenth-century Anatolian Ottoman weaving. The two men's clothes are similarly precise. De Dinteville's pink satin lining is a specific dye colour produced in Lyon. His ermine is the winter pelt of a specific marten species. The medallion he wears is the Order of Saint Michael, the highest French chivalric honour, awarded to him in 1531. De Selve's black robe is the cassock of a French bishop; the colour and cut are correct for his rank in 1533. What Holbein Left The painting hung at de Dinteville's country house at Polisy in Champagne for the rest of his life. It passed through several French private collections after his death, was bought by the National Gallery in 1890, and has hung there since. The skull continues to require viewers to move sideways to see it. Holbein produced approximately one hundred and fifty paintings, several thousand drawings, and a substantial body of woodcut and engraving designs in his fifteen-year career. He died in London in October 1543, aged forty-six, during a plague outbreak. He left no major students and no school of followers in England; English painting for the next century looked nothing like Holbein. The kind of painting he could do (the technical precision, the intellectual programme, the formal experiment) had no native heir in England and was not picked up there. It was picked up elsewhere, slowly. The anamorphic device became fashionable in the seventeenth century, particularly in France and the Low Countries. Vermeer used optical aids of a related kind. The whole question of what a painting can hide in plain sight has Holbein's skull at its origin point.