Shades and Shadows

 Don Juan and the Statue by Alexandre-Evariste Fragonard, French, 1780-1850. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

  Preparing to seduce a young noble lady, Don Juan is challenged to a duel by her father and kills the father. Later, he passes the Commander’s tomb and a specter’s voice warns him he will be punished.

 The statue comes to life, takes Don Juan’s hand and drags him off to hell.

 The story became Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Byron’s Don Juan and Moliere’s play, The Stone Feast. 

 The Grey Lady, 1888, photograph scanned from catalog of the work of John Everett Millais and published on Wikipedia. The painting is in a private collection.

  Millais, British, 1829-1896, could have been referring to many legends and ghost stories featuring a grey lady and hauntings. One of these is at Rufford Old Hall in Rufford, Lancashire, England, where a grey lady, Queen Elizabeth I and a man in Elizabethan clothing reportedly have been seen.   

(Source: Wikipedia)

ponderful:

George Henry Boughton (1833-1905), The Vision at the Martyr’s Well

(Note: George Henry Boughton, 1833-1905, self-taught American landscape painter, illustrator and writer. Born in England, Boughton moved with his family to the United States and grew up in Albany, New York, influenced by the Hudson River School.

 Boughton illustrated The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow among others. His paintings are in many museums in the United States and Europe. — Shades and Shadows)

(via fragilityofart)

 Apparition at Midnight, also known as Haunting at Midnight, etching by Albert Welti, Swiss, 1862-1912.

  A painter of dreams, nightmares and scenes from Richard Wagner operas, Welti had been a student of Arnold Bocklin. He studied at the Munich Academy in Munich, Germany.

 This etching was most recently in the auction house of Dobiaschofsky in Bern, Switzerland.

 The Apparition in the Woods, 1825, by Moritz von Schwind, Austrian, 1804-1871. The scene is a pen and brown ink with brown wash drawing and is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., USA.

 von Schwind was a painter, graphic artist and designer. He worked on book illustrations and woodcuts for Filegende Blotter, a humorous Munich periodical.  He was also a friend of composer Franz Schubert. 

 Lord William and the Ghost of His Nephew, British School, 19th Century. No artist identified.

 Scene is graphite and watercolor on paper. The painting was purchased by Tate Britain as a part of the Oppe Collection with assistance from the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund in 1996. 

 Gravedigger and a Ghost by George Moutard Woodward, 1760-1809, British amateur caricaturist and humor writer. He was published in many places including in Caricature magazine and his drawings were often etched by others.

 Woodward was a friend and drinking partner to fellow Britain, Thomas Rowlandson..

oldbookillustrations:

What fearful shapes and shadows beset his path amidst the dim and ghastly glare of a snowy night!

Frederick Simpson Coburn, frontispiece from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving, New York, 1899.

(Source: archive.org)

(Note: Coburn, 1871-1960, was a Canadian artist who illustrated not only Washington Irving, but Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe among others. He worked in many mediums and his illustrations, up to 1914, were done in black and white oils.

  On a side note, Coburn was a dancer who operated a studio in Quebec. — Shades and Shadows)

 The Canterville Ghost illustration by Frederick Henry Townsend, British, 1868-1920, for Oscar Wilde’s short story.

 The tale first appeared in The Court and Society Review in 1887. Wilde’s popular story has all the wonderful Gothic trappings and traditional ghost story clankings and moanings. Adults as well as children can enjoy it on many levels, including it’s comic qualities.

 ”I fear that the ghost exists,” said Lord Canterville…”It has been well known for three centuries, since 1584 in fact, and always makes its appearance before the death of any member of our family.”

 ”Well so does the family doctor for that matter,” replies Hiram Otis, the American who was buying Canterville Chase and its ghost. 

  Wilde, 1854-1900, was an Irish author, playwright, essayist, poet and wit.

 Memento: Scene of Horror, 1895, oil on cardboard and cloth by Laszlo Mednyanszky, Hungarian, 1852-1919.

 Mednyanszky was also known as Ladislaw and was a member of the Hungarian aristocracy. His subjects were landscapes and genre scenes of Slovak people. This painting is owned by the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava, Hungary.