Ars Est Mendacium

I laughed the first time I saw it. Not out loud, but internally, that reflexive flicker of amusement you feel when something looks like the setup for a joke. Two Napoleonic soldiers, back-to-back in exaggerated postures of surprise, a hat on the ground, a well between them. It felt staged. There was a kind of timing to it. The composition had the rhythm of a punchline, like a military-themed skit paused before the reveal. But then I noticed the blood. And then the monk. Just like that, the comedy curdled. Jean-Claude Bonnefond’s painting doesn’t reward a quick glance. It punishes it. The initial tone, composed, quiet, and almost humorous, turns out to be a setup. But the joke, if there ever was one, is on you. Bonnefond was a technician. He painted with the clarity of someone trying to show you everything, but not all at once. A painter of the Lyonnais school, he prized realism, a tight brush that left no stroke behind. In this piece,  Military Event from Napoleon’s First Spanish C...

I first saw the painting at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. You go into these galleries the way you walk into a quiet church, out of respect, maybe routine. Some paintings catch your eye, and we've discussed some of those finds here. Others just blur into one another. But this one didn’t catch. It stopped me. It was the tree. Not the figures, not the sheep, not even the sunlit hillside unfurling like a memory. The tree, dead, jagged, enormous, stood in the foreground like a thing that refused to fall, and dared you to ask why. It didn’t lean or flourish. It loomed. Its bark had split down the middle, its arms twisted in mid-collapse. It was ugly, almost violent. An arresting and beautiful violence. The painting is called  Shepherds and Their Flock Resting Under a Tree , by Charles Hoguet, a 19th-century German painter trained in the French tradition. Most of his landscapes are soft, meditative, full of light and coastl...

The first thing you notice is the light. It pours in through a tall Gothic window, draped with a red curtain that softens it, slows it, and then sets it down gently on three women who share a room but not a mind. One speaks, animated and sure of her own point. Another reclines, her face turned toward the speaker, but her thoughts drifting far beyond her words. The third is somewhere else entirely, not in the room so much as in her own world, her eyes on the page before her, her hand resting on a globe as if the entire earth had paused to wait for her. The painting is  The Three Sisters , made in 1824 by Jean-Antoine Laurent. At first glance, it might seem like a quiet domestic tableau. But the quiet is deceptive, the stillness loaded with tension. Laurent wasn’t merely making a pretty scene; he was working in the  Troubadour style , a French movement that pulled moments from the Middle Ages and Renaissance into intimate, anecdotal paintings. The style traded in historical nost...

The first time I saw Job’s arm at the Richmond Museum of Fine Arts, I didn’t think about theology. I thought about hospitals. Specifically, the way someone looks when they’re beyond needing help and just want to be seen. His body was curled inward, as if someone were trying to disappear into their own bones. But the arm reached up. That arm changed everything. It’s a pale, drawn thing, ribs visible, skin translucent, hand half-open like it forgot what fists are for. Reaching not like he expects an answer, but like asking the question is all he has left. He’s alone, lit by an eerie lunar light that makes him look more like stone than flesh, though he’s definitely still alive. Barely. Around him sit three men cloaked in silence. Their backs are turned to us or their faces obscured. One might be looking at him, or maybe just through him. They don’t touch him. They don’t help him. They’re just there. Watching. The painting is called  Job’s Comforters , and it was painted by Alfred Bram...

Carle Vernet,  A Boar Hunt in Poland , ca. early 19th century. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Photograph by the author. The moment you look at it, you can feel the dirt fly. Not metaphorically. Literally,  A Boar Hunt in Poland  by Carle Vernet seems to detonate right in front of you. Horses rear, dogs snarl, a pike catches the light mid-thrust. In the middle of it all, a dying boar still fights back, a lump of muscle and defiance against the crimson swirl of aristocracy on horseback. It’s not a painting so much as a tableau frozen milliseconds before either triumph or gore. But beyond its bravado, the painting whispers something older and colder: this isn’t just a hunt, it’s a ritual. A performance of dominance. A mirror of empire. And the more you look, the more it begins to resemble a history painting in disguise, a drama of class, conquest, and the spectacle of control. Carle Vernet’s  A Boar Hunt in Poland  is an early 19th-century oil painting, pa...