Can anyone identify this picture?

November 4, 2006 11:15 PM

Can anyone identify this picture ?

We bought it at a junk sale or something and would really like to know what its meant to depict and whose work it is.

posted by bunglin jones to media & arts (8 comments total)

Tough one. Appears to be a mash-up of the Adoration of the Christ with the Fountain of Life or Fountain of Grace. Which probably means it's neither!

Two resources:

Searchable painting database.

Illustrated Dictionary of Christian Iconography
posted by Rumple at 11:56 PM on November 4, 2006

Captive Andromache by Lord Frederic Leighton (probably his most famous painting is Flaming June.
posted by LobsterMitten at 12:26 AM on November 5, 2006 [1 favorite]

Great work. Thanks, LobsterMitten
posted by bunglin jones at 1:23 AM on November 5, 2006

I'm just curious, LobsterMitten- did you know that off the top of your head, and why? Are you an art history major or other such art buff? If not, how did you go about figuring it out? I think it could be useful for the rest of us to know how you did it.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 1:31 AM on November 5, 2006

Picture now deleted?
posted by A189Nut at 3:02 AM on November 5, 2006

A189Nut, I deleted the picture from my flickr page because LobsterMitten's link points to a better (colour) version of the painting to which I referred.
posted by bunglin jones at 8:07 AM on November 5, 2006

Didn't know it off the top of my head. I'm not an art history major, but I do know something about art history (mostly post-Renaissance western art) just from reading on my own. From the look of the painting I figured that it was made in the 1890s or so and probably by a British artist. Leighton has a pretty distinctive style, but I didn't recognize it as him to begin with.

I figured the best way to find it would be to figure out the title; I thought it would be a scene from the Bible or from Greek or Roman mythology. My first searches were for the names of Biblical women plus the phrase "at the well". (I don't know the Bible well enough to know what are famous scenes of women at a well.) Got a few good leads that way, and then just blundered onto the Humanities Web site, which has a very convenient interface. So I started looking at artists whose work I knew was similar in style -- only took a few of these before Leighton's name came up, and then I knew it had to be him, so I looked through their list of his stuff.
posted by LobsterMitten at 9:41 AM on November 5, 2006 [1 favorite]

Oops?
posted by JJ86 at 8:23 AM on November 6, 2006