Rivers as Muse: 10 Paintings Spanning Art History

Key facts

• Thomas Cole's 'The Oxbow' (1836) depicts the Connecticut River after a thunderstorm, contrasting wild nature with cultivated land.
• Vincent van Gogh painted 'Starry Night Over the Rhône' in Arles in 1888, using blue shades to dissolve the horizon.
• Georges Seurat's 'A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte' (1884–1886) uses pointillism to show Parisians relaxing on the Seine.
• James Abbott McNeill Whistler's 'Nocturne in Black and Gold—The Falling Rocket' (1872–1877) depicts fireworks near the Thames, embracing modernism.
• Emanuel Leutze's 'Washington Crossing the Delaware' (1851) commemorates the 1776 crossing during the American Revolutionary War.
• J.M.W. Turner's 'The Fighting Temeraire' (1839) shows the warship being towed on the Thames, symbolizing technological obsolescence.
• John William Waterhouse's 'The Lady of Shallot' (1888) illustrates Tennyson's poem, with the lady floating down the river to her death.
• Eugène Delacroix's 'The Barque of Dante' (1822) depicts Dante and Virgil crossing the Styx, inspired by Théodore Géricault's 'The Raft of the Medusa'.
• Peter Paul Rubens' 'The Four Continents' (1612–1615) personifies rivers (Danube, Ganges, Rio de la Plata, Nile) with a colonial hierarchy.
• Lawrence Alma-Tadema's 'The Finding of Moses' (1904) shows the Nile as an idealized ancient Egyptian setting, reflecting Victorian antiquarianism.