Fine Arts News

"Willem van Heythuysen," 2005. Oil and enamel on canvas. Wiley says his subjects pick their poses from art history books — as in this take on an old Dutch painting.

Katherine Wetzel/Virginia Museum of Fine Arts/Copyright Kehinde Wiley



Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps, 2005. Wiley says he fell in love with classical art as a young child.



The Two Sisters, 2012. Wiley says he wants to see black and brown bodies depicted in the visual vocabulary he learned as a young art student.

Jason Wyche/Courtesy of Sean Kelly/Copyright Kehinde Wiley



Arms of Nicolas Ruterius, Bishop of Arras, 2014. Wiley works in many traditional media, including oil, bronze sculpture, and here, stained glass.

Courtesy of Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris/Copyright Kehinde Wiley



The exhibit (visible in the foreground is 2008's Femme piquée par un serpent) closes this week in Brooklyn. It travels to Fort Worth, Texas, in September, then on to Seattle and Richmond next year.

This week, the Brooklyn Museum is wrapping up its mid-career retrospective of artist Kehinde Wiley — which means 14 years of work and something like 60 paintings.

It's been drawing a diverse and large crowd, partly because Wiley's work has been featured on the TV show Empire, and partly because he is a well-known and, in some ways, controversial figure in the art world. Wiley takes contemporary figures — oftentimes young black men and women — and places them in old European art traditions: Oil paintings, portraits, stained glass and even bronze sculpture.

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01. The right tools

In order to achieve a desirable result with watercolour it’s important to have the right tools. While you don’t have to invest in an expensive set of supplies, you don’t want to use paint or paper that is not suitable for watercolour either.



02. Start with sketches



03. Colour studies

04. Preparing paint and paper

05. Understanding watercolour as a medium



06. What to do first



07. Getting experimental



the source

Why does there seem to be such a vast space between Etsy and blue-chip virtual auction houses like Sotheby's? Where's the website where you can spend $200 or $2,000 on quality art online? New companies are trying to fill that gap.

Let's say you're not a millionaire but you're still interested in buying affordable art from the comfort of your living room. Where do you find something that is between craft-oriented websites like Etsy and high-end auction houses like Sotheby's? Now, new companies — like Paddle8, Ocula, Artline, Saatchi, Artsy, Amazon Art — are trying to fill the gap.

In a sun-drenched loft near downtown Los Angeles, carefully coiffed curatorial assistants are talking art with buyers over the phone. This is the West Coast office of Paddle8, an online marketplace that sells mid-range art. It was co-founded in 2011 by Alexander Gilkes, 35, formerly the chief auctioneer for Phillips, the third-largest auction house.

Much of the art on his site is within reach of a middle-class consumer, he says: "Our average selling price across the site is $5,000."

Online art sales went up more than 30 percent last year, according to an analysis by the European Fine Art Fair. It found the online market is mostly mid-range art — a growing and lucrative — niche. Even Sotheby's teamed up with eBay this spring, after its online art sales shot up 100 percent last year, according to a company video.

Like eBay, Paddle8 is an auction site, but unlike eBay, everything's curated and authenticated. And being in the digital space comes with some economic advantages that Paddle8 says it passes along to its customers. For example, Paddle8 does not have to staff and schedule expensive viewings in posh locations or take months to produce costly catalogs.

"You can send an image, we can do a remote appraisal," explains Paddle8 managing director James Salzmann. "We can have it up for sale in a matter of days."

The downside, of course, is getting art lovers to connect with a piece of art viscerally through a computer screen, says artist and former art critic William Powhida.

"That's harder to do online," he mulls, adding that, in a hierarchical and elitist art world, it's hard to see how online art sales will even work if they sideline critics, shows and the pleasure of seeing art with other art lovers.

"It becomes so much more transactional," he says.

That doesn't bother the tech entrepreneurs behind Ziibra, another new art-sales website. Matt Monahan, 29, a tech investor turned artist, says, "Historically, the problem has been that the gatekeepers are curators and gallarists and the people over at Sotheby's who decide who gets to be a famous artist. Me and my tech buddies are about to change all that, we're going to disrupt it!"

Just as Uber disrupted transportation, he says.

Ziibra's founder, 24-year-old Omri Mor, seeks to create a personal connection between buyer and artist. He scouts for artists on Instagram, and then posts slick videos of Ziibra's artists in their studios.

Ziibra is trying to make consumers feel like collectors, says Powhida, and he thinks it's a smart strategy — to a point. "I just don't know how much is real and how much is marketing," he says.

Powhida believes that much of the art sold online seems meant to appeal to a mass audience. As a result, it's generally not particularly challenging. "Most of the work I saw was sort of colorful and decorative and had a strong visual appeal," he says. "That's probably the nicest way I can say it."

But the visual appeal is crucial, says Mor, who plans to improve technology for seeing the art you might want to buy online.

"I'm going to build holograms," he declares.


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Courtesy of Myles Johnson and Kendrick Daye

Like lots of little kids, Jeremiah Nebula — the main character of a children's book called Large Fears — has big dreams. He wants to go to Mars.

But Jeremiah is also pretty different from the characters that Myles Johnson, the author of the Kickstarter-backed book, met in the stories he read when he was growing up. Jeremiah is black, and he really, really likes the color pink.
"He's queer, and he's a bit unconventional. He's essentially myself as a child," says Johnson, a 22-year-old freelance writer based in Atlanta.

Johnson says the idea for Jeremiah Nebula came to him while dancing around to some 80's music in his room one day. "I started thinking, what is Jeremiah like? What are his fears and dreams? What does he like to eat?" Johnson says.

So Johnson called up his friend, Kendrick Daye — a 26-year-old visual artist who runs a magazine called Art Nouveau in New York — and told him about his idea. They began collaborating on the book last year.




The book opens on Jeremiah daydreaming about jumping so high, he lands on Mars. On his way to Mars, he has to hop-scotch across a series of stars, which, it turns out, represent his fears and anxieties.




The storyline reflects Johnson and Daye's childhoods — they both say they grew up with large fears of their own. "When you're black and queer, you learn at a very early age that what you like or who you are isn't accepted everywhere," Johnson says. "You realize that you're not safe everywhere."

Dreaming up alternative universes was a form of escape. "When I was in school I got into a lot of trouble for daydreaming," Daye says. "If you grow up and you feel like you don't fit in, you just start to live in a fantasy world."

As Johnson and Daye were developing Jeremiah's story, they realized they wanted to create something for "any kids who feel like they don't quite fit in or blend in," Johnson says.




Johnson spent his formative years watching far too much 'Twilight Zone' ("I loved the really scary ones!" he says), while Daye was engrossed in R.L. Stine's Goosebumps series. They loved those stories, but something was missing.

"Growing up, there were rarely any characters who were black, and never queer. Not being visible in the media really does something to your psychology," Johnson says. "It's easy to feel invisible, its easy to believe you're invisible."

The two met about four years ago, in Atlanta, where Daye was studying literature at Morehouse College and Johnson was a student at Georgia State. They hit it off almost immediately. "I seeing him around, and I really admired him. I was like, 'I want to work with him, and I want to be his friend!'"

So far, the pair has raised about a third of the $3000 in Kickstarter funds they need to publish and promote the book. They're planning to use a portion of the funds toward workshops helping young kids discuss their own fears about not belonging.

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A blind visitor to Spain's Prado Museum runs his fingers across a 3-D copy of the Mona Lisa, painted by an apprentice to Leonardo da Vinci.

It's a warning sign at art museums around the world: "Don't touch the artwork."
But Spain's famous Prado Museum is changing that, with an exhibit where visitors are not only allowed to touch the paintings — they're encouraged to do so.

The Prado has made 3-D copies of some of the most renowned works in its collection — including those by Francisco Goya, Diego Velazquez and El Greco — to allow blind people to feel them.

It's a special exhibit for those who normally can't enjoy paintings.

"Since I went blind, I've been to museums maybe twice," says Guadelupe Iglesias, 53, who lost her vision to retinal disease in 2001. "I can listen to the audio guide, but I have to imagine — remember — what the paintings look like."

Now Iglesias is back at her beloved Prado, rubbing her hands all over copies of the masterpieces she used to view from a distance.
"I used to come to the Prado all the time," she says. "I love Velazquez. I used to bring my daughter and her friends here to see this very painting."

Iglesias stands in front of a 3-D copy of Velazquez's 17th century work, Apollo in the Forge of Vulcan. While a tour guide describes the painting's layout, Iglesias runs her fingers over a prickly crown of laurels on the god Apollo's head.

"Fantastic!" she exclaims, beaming.




A Different Way To Experience Art

Most visitors to the "Touching the Prado" exhibit are not vision-impaired. The museum provides opaque glasses for them — like blindfolds.

"It's kind of weird. I sort of kept checking over the top of the glasses to see what I was touching, because you kinda can't tell," says Isabel O'Donnell, 20, a college student visiting Madrid from Buffalo, N.Y.

"I think it's a really cool way to experience art even if you're not vision-impaired. I like art, and I've always kind of wondered what art feels like," O'Donnell says. "Touching paintings seems like a really cool idea. It's more like what the figures feel like, if they were real."
The Prado consulted Spain's national organization for the blind, ONCE, about which paintings could best be adapted for touch. Curators began by taking a high-resolution photo of each masterpiece, and then used special pigments to paint on top of it.

"It's a special type of paint designed to react to ultraviolet light and rise like yeast when you're baking," says the curator of the exhibit, Fernando Pérez Suescun, who ordinarily works on the Prado's education team. "It creates volume and texture."

The pigments were developed by a printing company in northern Spain and have been used in previous exhibits at Bilbao's Fine Arts Museum.

Color And Texture

"Touching the Prado" is not the world's first 3-D art exhibit for the blind, but it is one of the only ones to incorporate both color and texture, Pérez Suescun says. Previous projects at museums in New York, London, Florence and Mexico City have allowed blind visitors to touch duplicates of famous sculptures, crafted with 3-D printers, or paintings reduced to black-and-white with texture.

"For people with partial vision, this exhibit is perfect, because what you can't see, you feel," says Ana Rosa Argente, whose vision is deteriorating, but who is not yet classified as blind. "I can see light and some colors, but the rest, I use the texture to complete the picture in my mind."

The small exhibit is comprised of six duplicated paintings from the Prado's collection, including a copy of the Mona Lisa painted by an apprentice to Leonardo da Vinci. Some have been reduced in scale, to allow visitors to touch them easily without having to move around. All are accompanied by Braille text.

On his way out of the exhibit on a recent visit, the curator, Suescun, says he still can't shake the feeling that he's encouraging museum-goers to break the rules.

"I'm actually telling people to put their fingerprints all over the paintings!" he says, laughing.

This is the only exhibit where the Prado has installed dispensers for hand sanitizer — and water dishes for seeing eye dogs.
"Touching the Prado" runs through June 28.


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George Caleb Bingham's The Jolly Flatboatmen (1846) became wildly popular after an East Coast art union bought it and started disseminating it as a print. National Gallery of Art

Eight Midwestern river men — all jolly fellows — traveled from St. Louis to New York recently on a museum-to-museum voyage. George Caleb Bingham's 1846 painting The Jolly Flatboatmen is the star of a show opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Wednesday, but Bingham's painting belongs to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where it's hung, on and off, for more than 50 years.

The National Gallery bought the painting in May. And while the gallery's director, Rusty Powell, won't say how much they paid ("We never discuss those matters," he declares) the last time it was sold — to a Detroit collector in 1986 — it went for $6 million. Almost 30 years later ... well, you can do the math.

"It's the most important genre painting in American history," Powell says. The Jolly Flatboatmen depicts an everyday scene in 19th-century life: eight men floating downstream from trading posts along a great Midwestern river (the Mississippi or the Missouri, the artist doesn't say), where some merchant sent them on a shopping spree.

"This is a scene of them coming back down the river," says curator Franklin Kelly. "So in fact you see the flatboat is very low in the water." It's loaded with furs, a coonskin and rolls of blankets. Kelly says they're heading back to port, their hard work mostly over. One of the river men steers and the rest are loafing and making music.

"One man's got a fiddle," Kelly says, "the other, younger man is banging on a pan." Another is lying on his back doing what at Gold's Gym they call a crunch. He's watching a guy in a pink shirt and blue pants, his arms raised, his hair blowing.
"[He's] dancing up a storm," Kelly says. " ... It's a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky. There's a little bit of mist in the distance hanging over the river. But it's a nice time."

This 1846 painting made George Caleb Bingham's career. Known around Missouri primarily as a portrait painter, he went national with The Jolly Flatboatmen with help from an East Coast arts group. Judith Brodie, curator of prints and drawings at the National Gallery, says, "If it weren't for the American Art Union, this painting may never have been painted."

It's very democratic. These are working people; they're wearing their ordinary clothes — tattered — but they're having a good time. It's that notion of a democratic art in a democratic society.

Curator Franklin Kelly

Several New York businessmen formed that union to promote paintings of American scenes by American artists. Every year, the union bought a painting — in Bingham's case, for $290. Then they held a lottery to decide who took the painting home.

The Jolly Flatboatmen ended up in the hands of New York grocer Benjamin van Schaick. It only cost him $5, the money he had paid to join the union. Other members just got prints of the painting, but those prints became wildly popular — some 18,000 were circulated. And a great American icon was born. Curator Franklin Kelly explains what makes it iconic:

"It's part of that American experience, that 'Go West, young man.' But it's also about work and play. It's very democratic. These are working people; they're wearing their ordinary clothes — tattered — but they're having a good time. It's that notion of a democratic art in a democratic society."
The Jolly Flatboatmen is part of the Met exhibition "Navigating the West: George Caleb Bingham and the River."

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In 2010 the Detroit Institute of Arts hosted the exhibit "Fakes, Forgeries, and Mysteries" — about how experts figure out whether artworks are authentic. Above, a painting titled A Female Saint (left) that was once attributed to Italian artist Sandro Botticelli is exhibited alongside The Resurrected Christ (right), a Botticelli painting from around 1480.

Michelangelo is known for masterpieces like the Sistine Chapel and the statue of David, but most people probably don't know that he actually got his start in forgery. The great artist began his career as a forger of ancient Roman sculptures, art scholar Noah Charney tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies.

By the time Michelangelo's forgery was revealed, the Renaissance master was famous in his own right. But many other artistic forgers continue to copy the work of past artists in the hopes of passing their creations off as authentic.

The art industry, says Charney, is a "multibillion-dollar-a-year legitimate industry that is so opaque you can't quite understand why anyone participates in it." In his new book, The Art of Forgery, Charney traces a tradition of fakes and forgeries that dates back to the Renaissance.

In many instances, forgery is a question of economics; a forgery that is authenticated may be worth millions of dollars. But Charney says that many other art forgers are doing it as a "sort of passive aggressive revenge" against an art world that was not interested in their original work — but was too dim to tell forgeries from true masterpieces.

Charney adds that the business practices of the art world provide a "fertile ground" for criminals: "You do not necessarily know who the seller is when you're buying a work of art. You might have to send cash to anonymous Swiss bank account. You may or may not get certificates of authenticity or any paperwork attributing to the authentic nature of the work in question. You may not be certain the seller actually owns the work. You might have gentlemen's agreements and handshakes rather than contracts — and this is normal in the legitimate art world."

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Interview Highlights





On Michelangelo's forged sculptures
In the Renaissance ... an ancient Roman sculpture was far more valuable than a work made a few weeks ago by this character Michelangelo ... who no one had ever heard. And so he, in cahoots with an art dealer, contrived to make a marble sculpture called Sleeping Eros. And it was buried in a garden and dug up, broken, repaired and sold as an antiquity to a cardinal who was an expert in antiquities and should probably have known better.
But the cardinal, after a few years, started to get suspicious and tried to return the sculpture to the dealer, but by this time, Michelangelo was the most famous sculptor in Rome. So the dealer was very happy to take the sculpture back and he sold it very easily as now a Michelangelo original.

On the problem with art expertise
One of the odd things about the art world is that there has never been any objective determination of expertise in a specific period or artist. You could have a Ph.D. or even two in Rembrandt and that doesn't necessarily mean that you can identify a Rembrandt from a copy after Rembrandt or something done by someone in his studio. In the world of wine, you need to go through elaborate steps to become a master of wine over many years and fulfill these objective tests — the art world doesn't have that.
So expertise has always been a matter of personal opinion and it's been quite subjective. It's very unscientific, and yet, for centuries, expertise has been the primary way to authenticate something. The secondary way is provenance research, looking into the documented history of the object, but knowing this, criminals can insert themselves into the history of the object and pass off forgeries with remarkable ease because the art world, unfortunately, is often inadvertently complicit in authenticating forgeries.



Noah Charney is an art historian and writer, and the founder and president of The Association for Research into Crimes against Art, a non-profit research group devoted to issues of art crime.

On what to look for in a painting
It depends on the type of painting, but if we're talking about an oil painting one of the things that has to be replicated in order for it to appear old is called craquelure. Craquelure is the web of cracks that appears naturally in oil paint over time as it expands and contracts and that literally looks like little webbing on the surface and you can study that and you can determine whether it was artificially induced to make it look old quickly or whether it appeared naturally.
There are various tricks to try to make it appear that it was old when it was artificially induced, but that's usually a good clue for oil paintings. ... We actually have some accounts, voluntarily presented by famous forgers, for their own recipes for how to make forgeries and a handful of the forgers in the book volunteer themselves — they were never caught — because they wanted the notoriety.

On his favorite forger
One of them is Eric Hebborn, and if I'm allowed to have a favorite forger it would be him. He's the only forger in this pantheon of forgers in this book who I would argue was at the same artistic skill level as the people he imitated. And he published a book called The Art Forger's Handbook which was literally — it was like a cookbook of recipes for how to create forgeries and artificially age them — and one of the techniques is to take an oil paint and cover it in a shortening, like Crisco or Bake Rite. And you literally bake it in an oven at a certain temperature for a certain amount of time and it artificially induces something that looks like craquelure. He also explained how you could paint on craquelure, which is very painstaking, but he was able to successfully pull it off.

On how forgers get caught
Most forgers are caught on the charge of fraud, and for that to happen, someone has to be defrauded out of money, or perhaps their reputation. And what tends to happen and the way that they're caught, is that they accidentally leave some sort of anachronism in one of their works of art.
For example, the famous German forger Wolfgang Beltracchi, who got out of prison just a few weeks ago, he was caught because he used a pigment called titanium white in a painting that had been made, supposedly, before titanium white was invented and so that's what gave away the game. But on the other hand, there are forgers who intentionally insert anachronisms in order to be able to reveal themselves later on.

On master art studios
We tend to think of artists as individuals creating the work of art in their entirety and that is not the way it has been for many centuries. That's a very romantic notion of how art is created. ... All of the great old masters ran art studios and depending on how much you paid them, they would create themselves a relevant proportion of the work of art.
If you want a Rubens, for example, you pay him the maximum amount then he paints everything himself and he designs it, too. You pay him the minimum, it's still called a Rubens, but he supervises and designs the object, but it might be entirely painted by his pupils and, in practice, it's usually a mixture. Faces, eyes and hands are almost always done by the master because they're the more difficult (if you're talking about portraits). But backgrounds, architectural elements, still lifes — those were almost never painted by the master. And yet anything coming out of the master studio is considered the work of Rubens.
So when people get upset about artists like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst — who design works and supervise it, but they have a team of people in a factory making it for them — that's actually in keeping with a centuries-old artistic tradition.


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Artist Bob Wysocki and geologist Jeff Karson, both of Syracuse University in upstate New York, have their own personal volcano. It's an old furnace that used to melt bronze for statues. Now, it melts hundreds of pounds of basaltic gravel at a time, mimicking the process inside the earth's crust that creates lava. The driveway where the two men perform their experiments (and create their art) is the only place you can find flowing lava within a thousand miles of NPR's Washington, D.C., headquarters.

So of course, I had to drive up and see it.
In this video, I learn how lava once caused a diplomatic standoff in Europe, nearly have my eyebrows burned off while leaning over a giant cauldron, and roast marshmallows without the help of a campfire. And along the way I, too, discover lava's allure.

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A Philadelphia mural titled You Go Girl by Jetsonorama and Ursula Rucker. This is just one of many murals that the city's Mural Arts Program helped create.


It took artist Katherine Craig about a year to create her nine-story mural on 2937 E. Grand Blvd. in Detroit. Most people who drive around the city have seen it — one side of the Albert Kahn-designed building is covered in a blanket of electric blue, and a flowing waterfall of multicolored paint splatters descend from the roof line. It stands in stark contrast to the rest of the landscape of low buildings and muted Midwestern colors.

It's called "The Illuminated Mural" and it's become emblematic of Detroit's North End neighborhood.
This week, it was also on the auction block.


Katherine Craig painted Illuminated Mural in Detroit with the help of neighborhood children. The building it's on was auctioned this week.

Well, the building is. But what does that mean for Craig's mural? What rights does a muralist have to the wall she painted on?
That's a question that echoes throughout the country right now, as muralists try to lay claim to their artwork under the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990.

A Massive Loss, A Huge Win

California muralist Kent Twitchell was in a hotel room in Sausalito, Calif., when he got the call — his six-story mural of Ed Ruscha in Los Angeles had been painted over. It was June 2, 2006, a date he remembers vividly because it was the day he lost his mural, and also the day of his daughter's wedding.



Kent Twitchell's Ed Ruscha Monument, located on the side of a building in Los Angeles, was destroyed in 2006. Melba Levick/Courtesy of Kent Twitchell

Twitchell had worked on the mural over the course of nine years, and it was ruined in one day.

"It's hard to describe," he says. "It's like being kicked in the stomach, I guess. It takes the wind out of you."
So he took the case to court. He sued the U.S. government, which owned the building, and 11 other defendants for damages under the Visual Artists Rights Act, which prohibits the desecration, alteration or destruction of public art without giving the artist at least 90 days' notice.

He won $1.1 million, which is regarded as the largest win under VARA.

"If the work is destroyed, it's like part of your resume being destroyed," says Eric Bjorgum, the lawyer who won Twitchell's case, and the president of the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles.

Many disputes surrounding murals have a lot to do with advertising, Bjorgum explains. When an area of a city is downtrodden, muralists choose highly visible walls for their works to spruce up the space. But when that area is developed, large spaces that are seen easily from the street are ideal real estate for advertisers.

Money is always a motivator — in one of Bjorgum's cases, a brewing company was paying $18,000 per month to have a beer ad on a wall, covering up a mural.

Muralist Robert Wyland knows how that goes all too well. In 27 years, he painted 100 whale-themed murals, called Whaling Walls, in cities around the world. With that many murals, it makes sense that he's run into problems. Some of the murals were painted over, relocated or destroyed.

Others were covered with gigantic, multistory advertisements.

That's what happened in his hometown of Detroit. Whale Tower, painted in 1997, is on the back side of the 34-story Broderick Tower. The Grand Circus Park area wasn't very populated when he painted the mural, Wyland explained, so when the new stadium, Comerica Park, went up next door in 2000, the wall his mural was on became a hot commodity for advertisers.
In 2006, a gigantic vinyl ad for Chrysler's Jeep Compass was put up over the mural. Verizon Wireless followed suit. Wyland was angry, but knew that even if he sued the companies under VARA, it would only be a "drop in the bucket" in comparison to the ad revenue they were getting from the space. They'd pay him off and keep his mural covered.

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Wtewael revisited the adultery of Mars and Venus several times. In this version of Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan (1604-1608), Apollo raises the curtain on the bed as Vulcan, Venus' husband, approaches with his net, hoping to ensnare the couple. Cupid — Venus' son — takes aim at Apollo, as Mercury, Diana and Saturn look on and laugh. The J. Paul Getty Museum/National Gallery of Art

The Dutch have given the world an array of master painters — Van Gogh, Vermeer, Rembrandt. But the brilliant and risque work of a lesser-known Dutchman is currently on display at the National Gallery of Art.



In his 1601 Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan, Wtewael shows Mercury raising the bed curtain to let the other gods see the couple.

Joachim Wtewael (pronounced U-te-val) worked in Utrecht in the late 1500s and early 1600s. He loved painting stories from the Bible and mythology — impressively buff Roman gods and goddesses in — at times — downright salacious comportment.
"You know, gods didn't always behave particularly well," says curator Arthur Wheelock Jr. "And that was something Wtewael and people from his generation loved to explore."

In vivid colors, with precisely painted details, on huge canvases as well as small copper plates, naughty gods and goddesses frolicked and fooled around.

Wtewael depicts Mars and Venus "having at it," says Wheelock, "and this was not so good because Venus was married."



In 1610, Wtewael paints Venus looking up at Mercury as Apollo and Minerva raise the curtain of the bed. Vulcan, with his net, stands to the side of the bed, with Apollo, Jupiter, Saturn and Diana above.

Her husband, Vulcan, caught them in the act. He got a big metal net and trapped them inside it. In three separate small paintings, Wtewael shows Vulcan revealing Venus and Mars to the other gods.

"All the gods are lying around, looking and laughing at them being caught in the act," says Wheelock.
Large canvases show gods getting married, taking baths, waging wars. Wtewael also did Christian scenes — adoration of the baby Jesus, the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. They're all gorgeously painted works, just teeming with life.

In the late 1500s, inspired by a story from Genesis, Wtewael painted Lot and His Daughters:
They've just fled Sodom. Lot's wife looks back at the destroyed sin city and is turned into a pillar of salt. Lot and his daughters hide in a cave, thinking the world is coming to an end. His daughters fear that — with no men left — they'll never have children. So ...



Sodom burns in the background as Lot's daughters seduce him in Wtewael's 1597-1600 depiction of a scene from Genesis.

"In the efforts to maintain the line and keep the line going, Lot's daughters got Lot drunk. ... This [painting shows] the moment when they're all partying. Lot doesn't know what's going on," Wheelock explains.

And then a Lot of things got out of hand; Wtewael paints him blotto, surrounded by his voluptuous, naked daughters. "He's clutching one of their breasts, and she is reaching up to tickle his chin," Wheelock says. "It's a very sensual work."

The daughters end up with two sons. Incest! Booze! Lust! Adultery! And to make it even more intriguing— the painter himself was such a proper 16th century fellow — a very strict Calvinist, a pillar of the community. But with his paints and brushes, he embraced the fullness of life.
"I think that is what I love about Wtewael," Wheelock says. "The engagement in all aspects of life: the sensual, the spiritual, religious, all these things are there. It's a fun show; nobody's having a bad time."

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