A rainbow lasts a few minutes, and a large canvas can take years. Painters kept painting it anyway, from Flemish estates to Jamaican gorges. On this page, an arc leads the eye to the painter's signature on a tomb, and a meteorologist has followed a second one down to the house of the painter's friend, on the day that friend died.
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How These Were Chosen
A rainbow appears when the sun, low and behind the viewer, shines into falling rain. So it only shows at the edge of a storm, while rain and sunlight share the same sky. For a painter, it fixes a landscape to one passing minute of weather.
It also came with a meaning. In the Book of Genesis, God sets the rainbow in the clouds after the Flood as the sign of his covenant, and many viewers still read it that way.
Every picture here gives the arc a job in the scene, whether it fills the whole sky or stays faint at its edge. A rainbow that is only one more detail in a wide view did not count.
12. Joseph Anton Koch, Heroic Landscape with Rainbow (1812)
Each of the small white birds rising over the town carries a snake. Below them, in Heroic Landscape with Rainbow, a double rainbow stands over a wide valley after a storm, and a few figures in the foreground look out over the calm.
Joseph Anton Koch began the canvas in Rome around 1804, without a commission, and finished it in 1812. He started from a real coast, the Gulf of Salerno south of Naples, which he had studied in a watercolor of 1795, and turned it into an imagined Ancient Greece.
The birds belong to that Greece. The snakes they carry off are poisonous, and lifting them away from the town is the sign that a Golden Age has returned. The rainbow over the valley repeats the message in the sky: the storm is over.
Koch had supported the ideas of the French Revolution, and the picture is usually read in that light, as an Arcadia rebuilt into a society without war.
At a Glance
Artist: Joseph Anton Koch (1768 to 1839)
Painted: Begun about 1804, finished 1812
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 188.4 × 170.1 cm (74 × 67 in)
Where to see it: Neue Pinakothek, Munich
11. Camille Pissarro, The Rainbow, Pontoise (1877)
Camille Pissarro called this picture The Rainbow, then painted the arc so pale that it is one of the last things the eye finds, a thin stripe low on the right of a stormy sky over the fields outside Pontoise, northwest of Paris. For a painter who chose that title, it is an odd way to treat his subject.