Jason Charming the Dragon (1665 - 1670) - Salvator Rosa 

Saul Bass: Film Title Sequences— It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Anatomy of a Murder, Something Wild, North by Northwest, Edge of the City, Psycho, The Man With the Golden Arm, Goodfellas, Cowboy, Spartacus, Bunny Lake Is Missing, Vertigo

Anonymous asked: Hi, I'm just curious about your picture-painting of a young woman looking at a knight. I'm not sure if you had this question before but could you tell me the history behind that particular painting please? Long-time follower, first-time asker. Thanks.

Sure! It’s John William Waterhouse’s La Belle Dame sans Merci (“The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy”), a figure from John Keats’ ballad of the same title who was, like many siren-like women from myth and lit, the subject of several Victorian/pre-Raphaelite paintings - examples: Frank Dicksee, Frank Cadogan Cowper, Henry Rheam, Arthur Hughes.

Basically the ballad tells of a narrator who comes upon a “haggard and woe-begone” knight, who in turn describes a woman - the titular Lady Without Mercy - with wild eyes and long hair, who enraptures him, frolics in fields with him, and then lulls him to sleep. As he sleeps, he has a nightmare about dead kings, princes, and knights, presumably all men who had succumbed to the Lady’s charms, and they warn him “La Belle Dame sans Merci/Hath thee in thrall”, whereupon he wakes up in the dazed and lonely state the narrator finds him in. 

So yeah! La Belle Dame sans Merci. 

Basically a variation of the femme fatale siren-type figure. Waterhouse (and a lot of writers/artists of that era, in general) liked those…. you see with that in Lamia, Hylas and the Nymphs, and The Siren. 

J.M.W. Turner → ships

April 23, 1775: J.M.W. Turner is born.

[Turner] became known as ‘the painter of light’, because of his increasing interest in brilliant colours as the main constituent in his landscapes and seascapes.

Harbor of Trieste (1907) - Egon Schiele