Enjoying the day

Conditions were perfect at Hollingworth Lake today, with warm sunshine, a sky with fluffy white clouds and still waters.

A first listen today to Dr Feelgood's 1975 album Malpractice on which my favourite track was I Can Tell.

There were three paintings to read about today. The most interesting was Anselm Feuerbach's Medea (1870) a subject from classical antiquity, in which Medea prepares to murder her children. The Greek myth describes the quest of Jason and the Argonauts for the Golden Fleece, possessed by the King of Colchis (the modern day coast of Georgia.) The King set Jason a series of tests of courage and strength.  He passed these with the help of Medea, the grand-daughter of the sun god, Helios. She had fallen in love with Jason and used her magic powers to help him to win the Fleece.

Jason promised to marry Medea.  She killed the dragon who guarded the fleece and her own brother to aid the couple's escape. She gave birth to two sons of Jason, who then decided to abandon Medea and marry the young daughter of another king. By way of revenge, Medea poisoned Jason's young bride and stabbed her own sons to death.

Like all the best myths, this story has been told in many different ways down the centuries. In 431BC Euripedes presented it as a cautionary tale to a society in which women had a position close to that of slaves.  In the 14th century, Boccaccio made it a warning that those who follow only passion sew evil. In the 1990s an opera by Rolf Liebermann -Acquittal for Medea and a novel by Christa Wolf - Medea: Voices were inspired by feminist thinking. Liebermann shows Medea to be the representative of a matriarchy, superior to Jason's patriarchy and Wolf portrays her as an autonomous woman, whose self-confidence is intolerable to men.

The composition of the painting is striking. Medea on the left is huge.  If she stood the would outgrow the canvas. The pyramid seated shape of her and her sons is balanced by a similar shape of the Argonauts struggling to set sail on the right. In the centre is a shaded shape of a woman, thought to be a nurse or a servant. This composition and the clear draughtsmanship of the painting make it an interesting compromise between the traditional classicism of the subject and the modernist approach to the design and layout of the work.