Angels Descending 1897

Rupert Bunny painted ‘Angels Descending’ with oil on canvas sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century. Here we see the artist referencing earlier Renaissance ideas about perspective, but through the soft filter of Aestheticism and Symbolism. Bunny creates an ambiguous narrative around classical, allegorical figures. The ‘angels’ are fashionable young women in loosely draped gowns. They are not so much spiritual beings as artistic ideals, muses perhaps. Bunny lived as an expatriate in Paris, within a thriving, international art scene. While he exhibited at the Paris Salon, the institutional heart of the French art world, his subject matter owed more to the alternative artistic languages of the fin-de-siècle. His paintings engage with the era’s widespread yearning for beauty and artifice. To fully understand an image like this we need to engage with both its institutional and cultural context. We must also consider how the artist mediates between established tastes and current trends. In the end, it is this context that gives the image its meaning.