The Fall of Phaeton, c.1620/25 Johann Liss (c.1597-c.1630/31)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

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Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

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We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
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Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

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Once the painting The Fall of Phaeton is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

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A pink hand flares against a nearly black fold of cloth, tiny and helpless beneath a sky that has caught fire. Johann Liss’s The Fall of Phaeton, now in London’s National Gallery, is a catastrophe seen from below, where bodies feel danger before the mind can order it. High above, Phaeton tumbles headlong through orange-brown smoke, his limbs lit like embers after Jupiter has shattered the sun chariot. Ovid gives the story its terrible logic: a son borrows his father Phoebus’s horses, loses control of the heavens, scorches the earth, and is struck down to save the world.

Liss makes that cosmic disaster startlingly physical. At lower left, three water nymphs cling together, each nude body turned differently, as if fear itself were being tried from several angles. One woman twists upward, mouth open, palm lifted; another turns away, her back pale as cream in the dimness. Beside them, the great dark drapery rears like a second cloud. It reads almost black today, though it was once a sea-green, and that loss has made the group more theatrical, more Caravaggesque in its plunge from flesh into shadow.

Across the picture, panic repeats in smaller echoes. On the right-hand slope, Phaeton’s sisters, the Heliades, gesture with the same helpless eloquence, while below them the river god Eridanus reclines heavily beside the stream that will receive the fallen youth. Listen for the water. It comes down through the centre in white broken steps, cold and insistent, cutting through the heated air like a counter-argument to the burning sky.

Johann Liss painted this while working in Italy, after absorbing Venice and Rome, and one feels both places here. The colour has a Venetian appetite: rose flesh, umber rock, blue distance, sulphurous orange cloud. Yet the compression and urgency belong to the Baroque, and Rubens is not far away in the swollen movement of bodies and draperies. Liss lays on the nymphs’ flesh with a generosity that is almost edible, thicker and freer than the more dissolved landscape beyond. Notice the small turquoise-green patch near the foreground cloth, still glimmering amid purples and browns; it is a leftover coolness in a scene being consumed.

Perhaps the most unsettling thing is that Phaeton is not quite the emotional centre. He is the cause, yes, but Johann Liss cares most about witnessing: the recoil, the raised hand, the body that cannot help. Disaster happens overhead; human feeling gathers below. That is why the painting still feels near. We know that upward look.