Same but Different
- Elle Bee
- Jan 2
- 12 min read
Artist inspire one another. For example, according to the Van Gogh Museum, the artist "collected hundreds of Japanese prints. He started his collection when he lived in Paris with his brother Theo. He studied the prints and was convinced that the art of the future had to be colourful and joyous, just like Japanese printmaking."
In the example below, Van Gogh meticulously traced the example of Hiroshige's print on a numbered grid. He used this to enlarge the composition to scale onto the canvas for his oil copy (text by the British Museum).
Same but Different aims to illustrate how stories inspire artists and how artists derive inspiration from life, as well as from the composition of subjects by their peers or mentors. Additionally, it explores the everyday connections that art inspires.
The first example in the piece is a true intersection of culture, era, and artistic expression. In Shakespeare's Hamlet, Ophelia is the daughter of Polonius. She is the potential wife of the titular prince and meets a tragic fate when she loses her sanity and eventually drowns.
*'Hiroshige: artist of the open road' exhibition (01 May – 07 September 2025).
Shakespeare's Ophelia
Found at Tate Britain, London, United Kingdom. This painting by Millais depicts the death of Ophelia. Traumatised by her family, her cancelled betrothal and the murder of her father by her fiancé, Ophelia drowns in a stream after roaming the countryside looking for flowers. John Everett Millais painted the setting leaf-by-leaf by the Hogsmill River in Surrey. Artist and model Elizabeth Siddal posed as Ophelia by wearing a wedding dress in a filled bathtub. Siddal and the other working-class women who joined the Pre-Raphaelite circle as colleagues, friends and wives challenged Victorian expectations of arranging marriages for money and status (text by Tate Britain).
Seen at The Long Now: Saatchi Gallery at 40 exhibition in London, United Kingdom (5 November 2025 - 1 March 2026). The Way Home takes inspiration from John Millais's Ophelia, showing a young girl whose journey home from one such rave was curtailed by falling into the canal and losing herself to the dark slippery, industrial motorway of a bygone era. Through the influence of Pre-Raphaelite artists and the intertwining of beauty and nature, Hunter has reinvestigated a maligned inner city landscape to create an unusual chronicle of contemporary, urban Britain (text by Saatchi Gallery).
The new-old Zeigeist: The Fate of Ophelia, song by Taylor Swift, 2025.
Whilst the opening sequence in the song’s accompanying video may have been inspired by the Friedrich Heyser painting of Ophelia (in the Wiesbaden Museum in Germany), many think The Life of a Showgirl album cover reminiscent of Millais’s painting. (Swift’s album: Photographers - Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott.)
The Great Wave
Major Collections Holding "The Great Wave":
Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC, USA): Holds several impressions.
British Museum (London, UK): Has multiple prints, viewable in the Asia Department study room.
Sumida Hokusai Museum (Tokyo, Japan): Dedicated to Hokusai, features replicas and sometimes originals.
Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) Boston (USA): Known for having seven impressions.
From Beyond the Great Wave: works by Hokusai, British Museum International Touring Exhibition in London, United Kingdom (21 October 2023 – 07 January 2024). The breathtaking composition of this woodblock print, said to have inspired - amongst others - Debussy’s La Mer (The Sea) and Rilke’s Der Berg (The Mountain), ensures its reputation as an icon of world art. Katsushika Hokusai cleverly played with perspective to make Japan’s grandest mountain appear as a small triangular mound within the hollow of the cresting wave. The artist became famous for his landscapes created using a palette of indigo and imported Prussian blue (text by The Metropolitan Museum).
Wave Too
Seen at Royal Academy of Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition 2025 in London, United Kingdom. Though Jacklin does not specifically reference Hokusai, the vibe is unmistakable.
Seating Plans...?
L to R (desktop view)
Van Gogh's Chair, 1888. Found at National Gallery, London, United Kingdom. One of Van Gogh's most iconic images. Painted soon after fellow artist Paul Gauguin had joined him in Arles in the south of France. The picture was to pair to another painting, Gauguin's Chair, 1888 - found at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. They were to be hung together, with one chair turned to the right, and the other to the left. Both chairs function as surrogate portraits, representing the personalities and distinct artistic outlooks of the two artists (text by National Gallery, London).
Hockney held Van Gogh in high regard and often alluded to his art. The 1985 painting draws inspiration from Cubist influences, portraying a household object in an unconventional manner and using reverse perspective.
Familiar Patterns
Found at Modern One, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. Roger Brown uses gradual shifts in colour to create a sense of atmospheric perspective within the flat painted surface. In 1978 he explained the idea for Misty Morning came from driving through the hills of northern Alabama [USA], where it's awfully misty in the early morning or late evening and you see the hills get lighter and lighter.' The painting's gradual transition from dark to lighter tones creates the illusion of depth in the landscape, of receding mountains and disappearing car headlights.
The painting's sharp style, colour palette, and decorative pattern were influenced by comic books, contemporary architecture, Byzantine mosaics, and late medieval painting (text by Modern One).
The Everyday
Though the text accompanying Brown’s artwork does not mention Japanese influence; the pattern on this Japanese plate is oddly similar. The plate features the traditional Seigaiha pattern, which translates to "blue sea and waves," is a classic geometric design of overlapping concentric semicircles. This example is from a great little casual Japanese restaurant called Konjiki located in Kensington Church Street, London, United Kingdom.
Artist's Muse: Jane Morris
Born Jane Burden, Morris came to the attention of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites in 1857. In 1859 she married William Morris, but shortly after began a long affair with Rossetti.
Sharing a deep emotional attachment, Morris and Rossetti's relationship was the source of many of Rossetti's mid-to-late paintings, regarded by many as being among the best of his career.
L to R (desktop view)
The Day Dream, Study (1878). Chalk drawing. Found at Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, United Kingdom.
The Day Dream (1880). Oil on canvas. Found at Victoria and Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom. Rossetti was also a poet, and the subject relates to his work of the same title which ends:
She dreams; till now on her forgotten book Drops the forgotten blossom from her hand.
La Ghirlandata (1873). Found at the Guildhall Art Gallery, London, United Kingdom. The model who sat for the painting was Alexa Wilding. May Morris - daughter of Jane and William Morris - was the model for both angel heads in the top corners of the painting.
Proserpine (1874). Found at Tate Britain, London, United Kingdom.
This painting captures the moment after the goddess Proserpine bites into a pomegranate. Imprisoned in the underworld, she is lit by a beam of sunlight from the world above. According to Roman legend, Hades, the God of the Underworld, stole and imprisoned Proserpine. Because she ate six pomegranate seeds while captive, he curses her to remain in the underworld for six months of every year. The model was Dante Gabriel Rossetti's friend Jane Morris, whom he painted repeatedly in his later years. He was working on an eighth version of Proserpine in the month of his death.
Sunflowers & Bedrooms
Sunflowers x 7
Vincent Van Gogh made multiple versions of paintings of Sunflowers. Five are now found at museums all around the world, from Tokyo to Amsterdam.
In addition to these five famous versions of Sunflowers, he painted another two versions. One is in private hands, and the other painting was unfortunately lost during World War II.
The sunflower pictures were among the first paintings Van Gogh produced in Arles that show his signature expressive style.
Top row: L - R (desktop view)
Sunflowers, 1888. Found in National Gallery, London, United Kingdom. "The sunflower is mine', Van Gogh once declared. The different stages in the sunflower’s life cycle shown here, from young bud through to maturity and eventual decay, follow in the vanitas tradition of Dutch seventeenth-century flower paintings, which emphasise the transient nature of human actions. The sunflowers were perhaps also intended to be a symbol of friendship and a celebration of the beauty and vitality of nature. Van Gogh made the paintings to decorate his house in Arles in readiness for a visit from his friend and fellow artist, Paul Gauguin (text by National Gallery, London).
Sunflowers, 1889. Found in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. With nothing more than three tints of yellow, he achieved a colour harmony that shimmers like a vision (text by Van Gogh Museum).
Sunflowers, 1889. Exhibited at National Gallery London (2025). Found at Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA. The Mr & Mrs Caroll S. Tyson Collection.
Bedroom x 3
Vincent van Gogh so highly esteemed his bedroom painting that he made three distinct versions: the first, now in the collection of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; the second, belonging to the Art Institute of Chicago, painted a year later on the same scale and almost identical; and a third, smaller canvas in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, which he made as a gift for his mother and sister. Van Gogh conceived the first Bedroom in October 1888, a month after he moved into his “Yellow House” in Arles, France.
This moment marked the first time the artist had a home of his own, and he had immediately and enthusiastically set about decorating, painting a suite of canvases to fill the walls. Completely exhausted from the effort, he spent two-and-a-half days in bed and was then inspired to create a painting of his bedroom. As he wrote to his brother Theo:
“It amused me enormously doing this bare interior. With a simplicity à la Seurat. In flat tints, but coarsely brushed in full impasto, the walls pale lilac, the floor in a broken and faded red, the chairs and the bed chrome yellow, the pillows and the sheet very pale lemon green, the bedspread blood-red, the dressing-table orange, the washbasin blue, the window green. I had wished to express utter repose with all these very different tones.”
Although the picture symbolized relaxation and peace to the artist, to our eyes the canvas seems to teem with nervous energy, instability, and turmoil, an effect heightened by the sharply receding perspective (text by the Art Institute of Chicago).
Bottom row: L to R (desktop view)
The Bedroom, 1888. Found at Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. The first of the bedroom paintings. "When I saw my canvases again after my illness, what seemed to me the best was the bedroom". (Van Gogh in a letter to his brother Theo).
The Bedroom, 1889. Found at Art Institute of Chicago, USA (exhibited in National Gallery London 2025).
La Chambre de Van Gogh a Arles, 1889. Found at Musee d'Orsay, Paris, France. This was produced for his family in Holland.
Friendly inspiration
Adrian
Seen at Frieze London (UK). Adrian Berg is one of the most innovative and ultimately influential landscape painters of his generation. Despite this, he has often been overlooked and under appreciated outside the circle of those he inspired or taught.
During his time at the Royal College of Art, he met fellow student David Hockney. In Hockney, Berg found a close friend and someone who appreciated both the significance of culture (Berg introduced Hockney to the poetry of Cavafy and Whitman, which inspired many of Hockney’s early etchings) and the importance of painting.
The friendship and mutual respect between Adrian Berg and David Hockney lasted a lifetime, with both frequently citing each other as influences—particularly in their depiction and reinterpretation of the English landscape. Hockney delivered the eulogy at Berg’s memorial dinner at the Royal Academy of Arts on London’s Piccadilly in 2011.
David
Seen at David Hockney 25 Exhibition at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France (9 April to 1 September 2025).
Bigger Trees nearer Warter, Winter (2008). Collection of the Artist.
Bigger Trees nearer Warter, Summer (2008). Collection of the Artist.
Bigger Trees near Warter or/ou Peinture sur le Motif pour le Nouvel Age Post-Photographique (2007). Now found at Tate Britain, London, United Kingdom.
These are not the droids you are looking for…
Found at Tate Britain, London, United Kingdom. Epstein began this sculpture in a period when artists in the Vorticist and Futurist movements were exploring the dynamic artistic potential of mechanisation. The original sculpture, first exhibited alongside works by Vorticist artists at the London Group exhibition of 1915, was a plaster figure mounted on top of a commercial rock drill.
He later described it as ‘a machine-like robot, visored, menacing, and carrying within itself its progeny... the armed sinister figure of to-day and to-morrow: After the machines of the First World War killed millions of people, Epstein removed the drill, cut the figure down at the waist and chopped off the left hand and right arm and cast it in bronze.
This newly truncated figure now looks more vulnerable, a victim rather than a perpetrator of violence (text by Tate Britain).
Meanwhile, in a galaxy far away...
B1 Series Rocket Battle Droid (from Star Wars). Doug Chiang led the concept design, incorporating ideas from Lucasfilm and focusing on a skeletal, cheap, and numerous infantry unit.
Juxtaposition
Plein Air
Located in the Giacometti Court at Fondation Maeght. The two versions of The Walking Man held by the Maeght Foundation are exceptional works, because, instead of a patina, the bronzes are painted by Alberto Giacometti.
Animé
Seen at Royal Academy of Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition 2025 in London, United Kingdom. The 2024 artwork’s title as printed! And it is by Glen Baxter. He is an English draughtsman and artist known for his absurdist drawings, often combining pulp fiction and adventure comic aesthetics with intellectual humour and references to art and philosophy. Here, Baxter uses Giacometti as a recognizable, yet incongruous, element to heighten the absurdity and wit in his unique artistic universe. He calls it “artrustling”.
L🎈L
Seen at Frieze London (UK), 2025. In 1919, Duchamp performed a seemingly adolescent prank using a postcard that represented the ideal of feminine beauty, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. He drew a mustache and goatee on her face and added the letters "L.H.O.O.Q." The caption combines Duchamp's gleeful sense of wit with his love of wordplay: eliding the letters in French sounds like, "Elle a chaud au cul" ("There is fire down below"). The image trespasses traditional boundaries of appropriation by presenting a reproduction, however tarted up, as an original work of art. The masculinized female introduces the theme of gender reversal, which was popular with Duchamp, who adopted his own female pseudonym, Rrose Sélavy, pronouced "Eros, c'est la vie" ("Eros, that's life"). La Joconde instantly became his most famous readymade and a symbol for the international Dada movement, which rebelled against everything that art represented, particularly the appeal to tradition and beauty. The term "rectified and readymade" indicates that the artist has altered a found, mass-produced object. (Text by Norton Simon Museum).
The original by Leonardo da Vinci is in the Louvre. Known as the Mona Lisa, it is a Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, Wife of Francesco del Giocondo.
Reflections
In 1964, Hockney visited California for the first time. The trip was a great source of inspiration, leading to a series a stylised landscapes and the first swimming pool paintings for which Hockney is best known. He mastered capturing the shimmering, complex patterns of water's surface and the way light plays on it, using swirling lines and bold colours.
The pool series solidified his status as a leading Pop artist, celebrated for their bright colors and focus on everyday modern life. The rich symbolism and psychological meaning associated with water and pools in Hockney's work continues to influence contemporary artists. Examples include those exploring gender dynamics or racial inequalities through the motif.
Here’s a personal favourite of all who have been inspired by Hockney’s pool series. It’s a humble print, 1 of 90 from an artist from Southeast Asia. Seow merges elements from various artistic traditions with digital tools that bridge traditional and contemporary art. His work explores cultural identities, artistic conventions, and the ever evolving nature of art in a globalised society, inviting the audience to examine the depth of his creations. Seen at Royal Academy of Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition 2025 in London, United Kingdom
Found at Tate Britain, London, United Kingdom. With just a few lines and flat areas of color, Hockney produced a smooth, intriguing image, set within a raw canvas border that in 1967, brought to mind the format of the recently launched Polaroid. A dive has happened. An invisible protagonist is thus visible in the center of the image, which became one of the artist’s most recognizable works, the embodiment of his Californian years.
The work first came to Paris for the exhibition that the Musée des Arts Décoratifs devoted to David Hockney in 1974. On that occasion, he said that this work was part of a series, and that, ‘Bigger’ refers to the size of the painting not the splash.”
Private Collection. The standing figure is often interpreted as Hockney's former lover Peter Schlesinger. This work sold at Christie’s auction in New York City for $90.3 million, setting an auction record for a living artist.
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