One century ago today, 7 November 1924, the German painter Hans Thoma died in Karlsruhe, Germany. This is the second of two articles commemorating his life and art. Prior to 1886, he had struggled to get the critical attention and patronage that he thought his work deserved.

Apollo and Marsyas (1886) is his painting of the grisly myth of the contest between the god Apollo and the satyr Marsyas, playing the aulos, a type of double oboe commonly referred to as a flute. This was judged by the nine Muses, and resulted in the horrific flaying of the satyr, a popular motif for the great classical narrative painters. Thoma chooses to show the contest itself, with Marsyas playing, and only three of the Muses in the background. Although not a strongly narrative painting, as it makes no reference to the outcome, this was probably appreciated by contemporary viewers.

Eight Dancing Women with Bird Bodies (1886) is a more puzzling mythological painting. The best-known women with bird bodies were the sirens, who range in number from two to five. In another painting showing the sirens trying to lure a passing ship, Thoma paints similar figures, suggesting these are intended to be sirens.

The Sower in Thoma’s 1886 painting is strongly reminiscent of Jean-François Millet’s sowers, here at work in the ploughed field in the foreground. Beyond, the heavens have opened in a sudden downpour.

Memories of Orte from 1887 refers to Thoma’s second visit to Italy, and this ancient town about forty miles north of Rome. Two cloaked riders are silhouetted against the glowing buildings of Orte, perched on its tuff butte above the valley of the River Tiber.

Lonely Ride (1889) shows a mediaeval knight riding alone in full armour, through rolling, hilly countryside. This and others of his paintings suggest Thoma may have seen and been influenced by paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite movement when he visited Britain.

In 1890, Thoma’s career was transformed by his first one-man show in Munich, which brought him critical acclaim and national recognition. For the next twenty years or so, he was ranked among the leading artists in Germany.

Summer (Landscape near Karlsruhe) (1891) shows a fine summer’s afternoon on a country track, on the plain which he must have known well.

He returned to his idiosyncratic mythology with this fascinating painting of Wondrous Birds completed in 1892. The birds shown here aren’t storks or cranes, but are based on the grey heron, a common sight across much of the countryside of Europe. There are various myths and legends associated with storks and cranes, but I’m not aware of any for the heron.

Spring (1895) refers not to the season, but to the source of water shown here, in German, Die Quelle, the source). Thoma avoids the conventional classical treatment with an old river god, but shows a young man slaking his thirst. The woman with the lute could perhaps be a water nymph, or Naiad.

Thoma does refer to the season in his Spring Fairytale, An Allegory (1898), showing a woman who may have been influenced by the figure of Flora in Botticelli’s famous Primavera (c 1482). She is surrounded by meadow flowers, two small fawns, and sundry winged putti. Thoma seldom if ever depicted his putti with bird-like wings, but seems to have preferred the more unusual insect or butterfly wings, with their rich colours.

By 1899, Thoma had become associated with the Kronberg artists’ colony, and could afford to move his family into an apartment with its own studio near to the Schloss Friedrichshof in Kronberg im Taunus, outside Frankfurt. He was appointed professor at the academy in Karlsruhe (to the south of Frankfurt), and director of the Kunsthalle in that city, posts he held until he retired in 1920.

Thoma’s Self-portrait in Front of a Birch Grove (1899) is his best-known self-portrait, and probably marked his sixtieth birthday that year.

The Lauterbrunnen Valley (1904) shows one of the deepest valleys in the Swiss Alps, a gorge travelling five miles up to the spectacular Staubbach Falls, with the Eiger and other peaks beyond.

From 1905 to 1918, Thoma served in the upper chamber of the Baden State Parliament.

Prior to the First World War, like many German artists of the day including Lovis Corinth, Thoma was strongly supportive of the militarisation of Germany. His painting of War from 1907 thus seems strange, with its bleak apocalyptic vision.

In the year that war broke out, Thoma painted Spring Melody (1914), which could be interpreted as an idealistic longing for peace, rather than a statement of nationalism.

Thoma continued to paint through the war, and completed this Landscape in 1917. Then in his late seventies, this almost deserted view expresses a tranquillity that must have been wishful thinking at the time.

His eightieth birthday in 1919 was marked by a celebration organised by Ernst Oppler and Lovis Corinth. He died five years later, in 1924.

Reference

Wikipedia (in German).

We’re spending this weekend in the city of Gloucester, to the north-east of Boston, Massachusetts, in the company of some of the fine paintings of its harbour and coast. In the first of these two articles, I showed views from those of pioneer Fitz Henry Lane in 1850, up to Frank Duveneck in 1910.

To remind you of the location, here’s the map from 1893 again.

Louise Upton Brumback was a pupil of William Merritt Chase, friend and contemporary of Frank Duveneck. She learned to paint en plein air in Chase’s summer school on Long Island, before moving to live in Kansas City, Missouri. From 1909, the Brumbacks spent their summers in the artists’ colony of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the rest of the year in Manhattan; those summers were to prove her most productive seasons.

From the outset, Brumback’s paintings reflected her nature. Bathers Along the Shore (1910) is decidedly post-Impressionist, highly individual, colourful, and expressed in strong terms.

Gloucester, Massachusetts (1912) is an unusual view of part of what had been one of the USA’s busiest seaports.

In 1912 the Brumbacks had a house built for them in East Gloucester, and Louise started to exhibit more frequently, and much more successfully. By 1914, she showed paintings at the National Academy of Design, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC and in Boston, and had a solo show at the Fine Arts Institute in Kansas City. Her husband had been able to retire early from his legal practice, and devoted his time and effort to supporting her career.

With her more mature style, she became best-known for vibrantly colourful beach scenes, such as her Good Harbor Beach, showing the coast near Gloucester in 1915.

Her undated Good Harbor Gloucester was probably painted in the same, or an adjacent, summer.

Three Umbrellas (undated) features impasto across the beach, and unusual brushstrokes in the sky.

Even some of her later paintings have a primitive look about them, as in Grey Day Gloucester from 1920, with its boxy houses, relaxed perspective, and simple reflections.

Although I have only been able to obtain this monochrome image of her later view of Gloucester Harbour from about 1921, its details show a marked contrast. She died in Gloucester in 1929.

My last artist was another of Chase’s pupils, who was influenced by Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists: the Modernist painter Marsden Hartley. Although more strongly associated with his native Maine, he too visited Gloucester.

Gloucester Fantasy (c 1934-36) shows the seaport of Gloucester Harbour, with graffiti made by Hartley using a pencil in the oil paint.

Both Brumback and Hartley visited a historic area in the hills between Gloucester and Rockport. Between 1693 and 1830, this had been a flourishing settlement known as Dogtown. In the middle of the eighteenth century this housed up to a hundred families. The growth of Gloucester drew people away, and in the early nineteenth century Dogtown had been largely depopulated, leaving a few occupants, some of whom were accused of witchcraft. The last building was demolished in 1845, and the land returned to dense forest.

Louise Upton Brumback’s Dogtown, Cape Ann, Massachusetts (1920) shows this area. Rocky and with poor soil, it now consists of woodland with a mesh of trails and old roads, as seen in the valley on the right.

When Marsden Hartley returned to the USA in 1930, he toured some of the classic locations in Massachusetts, including Dogtown. On an early visit there in 1931, he painted his Blueberry Highway, Dogtown, an unusual take on this desolate wooded and rocky area, which must have been in the fall/autumn. He wrote that Dogtown was a cross between Easter Island and Stonehenge.

Dogtown Common (1936) is Hartley’s later and more conventional depiction of this abandoned settlement.

This weekend I’d like you join me on a trip to one of the oldest artist’s colonies in America, and once one of it’s busiest ports, the city of Gloucester in Massachusetts, just over thirty miles (50 km) north-east of Boston. Its large natural harbour has been painted by a succession of many of the greatest American landscape artists since the middle of the nineteenth century, and my selection of their works in this weekend’s two articles is a potted history of modern painting styles.

This map of the Cape Ann peninsula from 1893 shows the areas that you’ll see pictured, around Gloucester Harbor that encloses Ten Pound Island to the south of the city, surrounding beaches, and as a finale to tomorrow’s article, the old abandoned settlement of Dogwood in the hills to the north.

It was local artist Fitz Henry Lane who first started painting the coast here, in the first half of the nineteenth century. His early style steadily evolved through paintings like this of Gloucester Harbor from 1850 as he increasingly explored the effects of light and atmosphere.

By about 1860, when Lane painted Ship in Fog, Gloucester Harbor, this had reached Luminism, an approach allied with the writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalist movement.

In the summer of 1873, the aspiring Boston artist Winslow Homer visited, at a critical time in his career. He was in the process of making watercolour his preferred medium, and abandoning work as an illustrator, to devote his time to landscape painting.

This matching pair of watercolour (above) and oil (below) versions of the same motif demonstrate his skill in both.

Perhaps as a result of his visit to France, many of Homer’s paintings during the 1870s showed very loose brushwork, and greater emphasis on markmaking than previously. At first the critics were disparaging of his watercolours, but they were popular and sold well. He also developed and often used a wide range of techniques to enhance his watercolours. These included the use of both transparent and opaque watercolour, thin layered washes, scraping, texture, resist, splattering, and even abrasive paper.

In the late 1870s Homer became more reclusive, lived in Gloucester, and at one time in Eastern Point Lighthouse, before he travelled to England, where he lived and painted in the coastal village of Cullercoats in 1881-82.

Willard Metcalf, an American Impressionist who was born near Boston, visited and painted Gloucester Harbour in 1895. This is his view of Smith Cove in East Gloucester, looking towards its inner harbour, with the town itself on the opposite shore. It’s a superb set-piece of what had been a couple of decades earlier the busiest port in the USA. With the rapid decline of sail at the end of the nineteenth century, though, it was slowly returning to a quieter existence, with its supporting industries reducing.

In about 1899, Metcalf’s contemporary Frederick Childe Hassam, another American Impressionist, visited and painted Gloucester Inner Harbor. Hassam had also been born in Boston, and like Homer had been a successful illustrator before visiting Europe in 1883.

Frank Duveneck had been born in Kentucky and joined the German community in Cincinnati, Ohio, before studying alongside William Merritt Chase in Munich, Germany. When he returned to the USA, he found first success in Boston. Later in his career, he spent his summers in and around Gloucester, where he painted his Horizon at Gloucester (c 1905), showing the port’s distinctive skyline from Eastern Point.

The Yellow Pier Shed (c 1910) is another of Duveneck’s summer paintings of Gloucester’s harbour.

Curiously, in his final years he painted several views of Brace’s Rock (c 1916), off Eastern Point, Gloucester. Fitz Henry Lane had done the same shortly before his death.

Little known today outside his native Germany, Hans Thoma (1839–1924) was a prolific painter with a distinctive style, who died a century ago, on 7 November 1924. In this article, I look at his career and a small selection of his paintings up to the time that he achieved recognition around 1885, to be concluded next week marking the anniversary of his death.

Thoma was born in the Black Forest, in Germany, and started his training as a lithographer in Basel, before turning to painting ornamental clock faces. From 1859, he studied at the academy in Karlsruhe, under Johann Wilhelm Schirmer and Ludwig Des Coudres.

Autumn Tree, Wiesenthal was painted when he was still a student in Karlsruhe, in about 1862-63. It has the high chroma colours and gestural brushwork indicative of Impressionist style, at a time when Claude Monet was still painting in a tighter, realist manner.

After completing his training in 1866, Thoma moved from Karlsruhe to Basel in north-west Switzerland, then to Düsseldorf. At that time, Düsseldorf was home to one of the leading landscape painting schools in Europe, and was a significant influence on the Hudson River School in the USA, and several of its members trained there.

In Chickenfeed (1867), Thoma tackles this genre scene in a more traditional and detailed realist style.

At first sight, Thoma’s In the Sunshine (1867) appears to show an oddly flattened face, with both the woman’s eyes visible. In fact the woman’s head is shown in profile, and what seems to be her left eye is not part of her face at all. Otherwise he has combined colour contrasts with a carefully detailed landscape.

The following year he moved to Paris, where he came to admire the work of Gustave Courbet, and the Barbizon School. He returned to Germany in 1870, where he settled in Munich, then the centre of German arts, until 1876.

Under the Elderberry (1871) is a delightful portrait of a mother and her young child, with finely detailed hair and elder flowers. His colours are softer than before, as suits this subject.

These eight Children Dancing in a Ring (1872) are set in a Bavarian alpine meadow, with pastures and high mountains in the far distance.

Thoma’s painting of two lovers in Summer from 1872 returns to a more painterly style in its flowers and vegetation. It also demonstrates his inclination towards mediaeval romance and ‘faerie’ paintings, with the chain of three winged putti in the upper right.

Siblings (1873) is an example of his domestic genre scenes. The brother sits disconsolate at the table, while his sister reads intently. By the window is a spinning wheel, the wool above it adorned with a blue ribbon.

In 1874, Thoma visited Italy for the first time.

Ring dancing appears again in his Children and Putti in a Ring (1874), although now the winged putti have come down from the sky to follow a young faun-like figure and a nymph. At the bottom left is a snake threatening to disrupt the scene. As with his other mythical settings, Thoma doesn’t appear to be telling a specific story, but populates his enchanted landscape with curious creatures.

Thoma’s pure landscapes include explorations of big skies and the transient effects of light, as in his Mainebene (1875), showing the plain of the River Main lit by shafts of light. At the lower left is a team ploughing.

He handles backlighting skilfully in A Peaceful Sunday (1876). An elderly couple are sat at a plain wooden table, in their urban apartment. She works at her crochet, he reads. You can almost hear the soft, measured tick of the clock which is out of sight, slowly passing their remaining years.

Three Mermaids (1879) is a complete contrast, with its raucous nudity and frolics with fish under the light of the moon. Thoma’s mermaids are remarkably human in form, lacking fishtails.

In 1878, Thoma moved to Frankfurt, where he was a close friend of the painter Wilhelm Steinhausen. The following year he visited Britain, and a year later returned to Italy.

As was popular during the nineteenth century, Thoma repurposed Nordic mythology with a more Germanic interpretation. The Trek of the Gods to Valhalla (1880) shows a scene that may have been inspired by Wagner’s Ring cycle, first performed at Bayreuth in 1876. This is the group of gods known as the Æsir riding across the bridge Bifröst, which is formed from a burning rainbow and reaches between Midgard (the realm of humans) and Asgard (the realm of the gods). The Æsir traditionally include Odin, Frigg, Thor, Baldr, and Týr. Recognisable on the bridge are Odin, holding his staff, with Frigg, and Thor with his hammer. At the left is probably Iðunn, holding an apple of her youth aloft. In Nordic mythology, this is an event foretold as part of the process of Ragnarök.

I’m not sure of the mythical background to his Sea Wonders (1881), where four boys have raised up a surface on which stands a winged putto clutching an egg. It is, nevertheless, a powerful image.

The Öd, View of Holzhausenpark in Frankfurt am Main (1883) shows what is perhaps better-known as Adolph-von-Holzhausen Park, which started as the larger Holzhausen Oed in around 1552, and became a public park in 1912-13. The prominent white building is its distinctive moated baroque summer residence.

Reference

Wikipedia (in German).

Modern domestic cattle originated during the Stone Age from the aurochs, in the Fertile Crescent. Although they remained in Europe until they became extinct in the seventeenth century, aurochs were never domesticated, and few farmers would have known of their existence.

Cattle go under a bewildering variety of English names: cows are females, usually kept for their milk; an ox, plural oxen, can be a generic term for both males and females, or applied more strictly to castrated males commonly used for drawing carts and ploughs; bulls are males used for breeding; steers are young males, often castrated and reared for their meat; finally, bullocks were originally young males, but are now assumed to have been castrated.

Cattle have been bred and raised as draught animals, often seeing wider use than horses, particularly when power is required rather than speed, for their meat, milk and hide. As herbivores, their dung also makes good fertiliser.

One of Paulus Potter’s last paintings, Cows Grazing at a Farm from 1653, shows half a dozen cattle, typical for many small farms of the time, including those primarily working a sheep-corn system for cereal production.

Just as sheep were associated more with arable farming, cattle were often grazed on land unsuitable for crops, including open woodlands, as shown in Rosa Bonheur’s A Herdsman with his Flock from 1852. In some areas, particularly before the enclosures of the eighteenth century and later, these small herds grazed on common land that was shared by locals or all-comers.

Until the advent of the milking machine in the early twentieth century, milking of all domestic animals used as sources of milk could only be performed by hand, wherever the animals might be. Most cows were milked where they were grazing, and for much of the year that required the milkmaid (this being almost exclusively the task of women) to start work in the fields at first light.

Adriaen van de Velde’s undated Milkmaid with Cow and Goats in Front of a Barn is a farmyard delight, with the cow being milked looking directly at the viewer.

Jean-François Millet’s Woman Milking a Cow (1854-60) shows one of this secret army of milkmaids working on location as usual.

Alfred Roll’s full length portrait of Manda Lamétrie, Farmer from 1887 is a Naturalist depiction of a working woman farmer who has just milked the cow behind her. Although she’s far too clean and tidy, it’s of historical interest in that her pail is modern and manufactured from metal.

In the harsher winters of northern Europe, cattle were usually brought in to shelter from the worst of the weather, which would otherwise reduce the milk yield of cows. This allowed the milkmaid to share their shelter.

Gerard ter Borch put the milkmaid and her cow at the centre of this painting, A Maid Milking a Cow in a Barn from about 1652-54. As was universal at that time, milk was collected in a wooden bucket that would have been scrubbed thoroughly before use, but fell far short of modern standards of hygiene.

Cow’s milk wasn’t bottled until the end of the nineteenth century, when processing such as pasteurisation was also introduced. Until then, milk sold in towns and cities often came fresh from the cow.

George Morland’s painting of St. James’s Park from 1788-90 shows a military family together in what’s now a central London park, but was at that time still quite rural, with a cow being milked at the left. This appears to have been a common sight until well into the nineteenth century.

Milk was also transformed into foods such as cheese, as a means of preserving its nutritional value long after the milk would have become sour and inedible. Small-scale cheese production has been widespread throughout the world since long before historical records began. Processing methods have been varied, resulting in innumerable local varieties of cheese that are distinctive of their areas of origin. Milk has also been processed into curds, butter, cream and yogurt.

One great benefit of milking cows was exposure to cowpox, a mild viral illness that provided immunity against its mutilating and often deadly relative smallpox. In 1796, the British physician Edward Jenner made the association between the two diseases, leading to the introduction of vaccination using cowpox virus, and the eventual eradication of smallpox in 1980, long after the eradication of the milkmaids who had made it all possible.

Constant Troyon’s Oxen Going to Work from 1855 shows teams of oxen being driven off to be hitched up to carts or ploughs in draught.

From the end of the Middle Ages, farms started to specialise in breeding cattle for their meat. Across Europe, tracks and later roads developed for crews of itinerant drovers to drive herds to market, where they were sold for slaughter, to yield beef, and their hides were processed into leather.

Sidney Richard Percy’s On the Road to Loch Turret, Crieff (1868) shows a few cattle watering close to this drover’s road near the market town of Crieff in Scotland. Cattle were driven here from rough grazing to the north, and some were sold in Crieff to be driven south through England to the pastures of Norfolk, where they were fattened before walking onward to London, to become roast beef for diners there. Few Londoners would have realised how many hundreds of miles their dinner had walked to reach its plate.

Next week I’ll look at the second favourite food of cattle, hay.

In the early years of the twentieth century, the city of Venice grew in importance as a centre of art, with the Venice Biennale increasingly encouraging contemporary styles. That drew a succession of Post-Impressionists to depict the city and its famous canals.

Henri-Edmond Cross’s watercolour sketch of Venice – The Giudecca from 1903 is similar in approach to those painted by Paul Signac before he viewed Paul Cézanne’s late watercolours in 1908.

Cross’s Regatta in Venice from 1903-04 is a finished Pointillist painting in oils, bearing a strong similarity to those painted at this time by Paul Signac. In the middle distance there appears to be a race taking place.

Paul Signac’s fascination with Venice had been inspired by the writings of John Ruskin, in particular The Stones of Venice. In the course of the early years of the twentieth century, he turned his large collection of studies made in front of the motif into a succession of major Neo-Impressionist oil paintings. Among the first, which he completed in 1904, was this view of the Giudecca Anchorage showing the church of Santa Maria della Salute. This set the compositional approach for many of his views of ports, with colourful vessels in the foreground, and lofty buildings dissolving in the distance.

Another example from 1904 is Signac’s painting of The Lagoon. Yellow Sail with its rhythmic reflections.

Signac’s The Green Sail (1904) features the church of San Giorgio in the distance.

Meanwhile, John Singer Sargent found more unusual views of activities and parts of the city not normally seen by the visitor. This watercolour from 1904 shows Unloading Boats in Venice in the city’s port.

Basin of San Marco, Venice, completed by Signac in 1905, is one of the largest of his paintings of ports. This shows, at the left, San Giorgio Maggiore, in the centre Santa Maria della Salute, and to the right the Doges’ Palace and the Campanile of Piazza San Marco. In the foreground is a flotilla of bragozzi with their colourful sails. Signac’s preparations for this had been careful if not painstaking. They led from his watercolour sketches to a squared drawing with formal geometry and a planned colour scheme, which he then enlarged onto the canvas. He was clearly pleased with the result, and this work was featured in many of his subsequent major exhibitions.

My favourite among Signac’s views of Venice is his Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice (1905). Its foreground is dominated by a shimmering and jumbled parade of gondolas, and melting into the distance is the towering silhouette of Santa Maria della Salute.

Sargent’s bravura watercolour sketch Grand Canal, Venice (1907) gives an idea as to his approach and style. It’s composed of a sparse collection of brushstrokes of watercolour which assemble into a detailed view. He sees Venice from the level of a gondola, the bows of which are also shown. His palette for these sketches is generally centred on earth colours for the buildings, with blue for the sky, water, and usually the shadows too.

In 1908, Ivan Trush visited northern Italy, where he painted this famous view of Venice, San Giorgio Maggiore. One of the smaller islands there, it has been painted extensively, perhaps most famously in Claude Monet’s late series. The church and its high campanile are prominent landmarks whose detail Trush has captured in this impressive oil sketch.

Signac painted Venice. Customs House in 1908, following a return visit to the city. This reverses his previous compositions by placing the Customs House in the mid-ground, with masts and sails behind. This loses the depth and grandeur of those earlier works.

Martín Rico maintained his summer visits to Venice right up to the year of his death, when he painted this unusual view Near the Grand Canal, Venice (1908). A person is in the water beside the gondola, and the boatman is assisting them with a boathook while the other occupants seem quite detached from what is going on.

Sargent’s watercolours were by no means dependent on the sophistication of his technique: Rio dei Mendicanti, Venice from about 1909 works its magic almost entirely from a combination of wet on dry and wet on wet. There isn’t even much in the way of a graphite drawing under its thin washes.

Although the rise of Modernism brought fewer painters to the canals of Venice, they increasingly flocked to the Venice Biennale during the twentieth century, and Venice remains a focus of art.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the city of Venice had become established as an essential visit for every aspiring landscape artist. It not only attracted those painting traditional views (vedute) of its canals, but was drawing those in the avant-garde. This was encouraged by the start of the city’s biennial art exhibition, the Venice Biennale, the first of which opened on 30 April 1895.

The American Post-Impressionist Maurice Brazil Prendergast had a particular affection for the city, which he visited in 1898. The Canal, Venice from 1898-99 shows Riva di San Severo, and makes good comparison with Sargent’s looser watercolours of the canals, such as his Scuola di San Rocco from about 1903, shown later in this article.

Henri-Edmond Cross’s A Canal in Venice is also dated from 1899, and is an unusual Pointillist oil sketch of gondolas in one of the city’s smaller canals. Cross visited the city at this time, and again in 1903 and 1908.

The young Roger Fry, who was to become an influential critic and promoter of Post-Impressionism, went to Venice in 1899 to learn to paint. His early works, including this view of Venice, appear realist with Impressionist tendencies.

Martín Rico was still visiting Venice each summer. Some of his later paintings of the city are more populous and bustling, such as his San Lorenzo River with the Campanile of San Giorgio dei Greci, Venice from about 1900.

In about 1902, Rico painted this more direct view of the church of Santa Maria della Salute, Venice, with a small fleet of gondolas.

The British artist Walter Sickert visited Venice on several occasions between 1894 and 1904. His paintings make interesting comparison with those of John Singer Sargent, who was painting the city mostly in watercolour at the time. Sickert’s oil sketch of Venice, la Salute, thought to have been completed in about 1901, uses muted colours. He has cropped this unusually, showing only a portion of the famous domed church of Santa Maria della Salute. The artist also stressed how he had painted this in “full colour”.

John Singer Sargent visited Venice repeatedly from about 1874, even before he became a student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and continued to do so after he moved his studio to London in 1886. His watercolour of Rio dell Angelo from 1902 is typically painterly and rich in chroma.

Sargent’s Scuola di San Rocco from about 1903 is one of his best-known watercolours, and another bravura painting.

In 1903, Mykhaylo Berkos visited the city, where he painted this watercolour view of boats On a Canal Near Venice (1903). Although few examples appear to have survived, he was an accomplished and prolific painter in watercolours as well as oils.

Frits Thaulow was an accomplished print-maker, and I think that this version of the Marble Steps (1903) in Venice is an aquatint. It shows the different approach he used to represent the broken water surface and its reflections.

In the early twentieth century, Venice was to become a focus of attention for the more avant-garde, notably Post-Impressionists with Pointillist techniques.

Ancient farmers discovered that repeatedly growing the same crop on the same plot of land soon led to falling yields and crop failure. We now understand this is the result of falling soil fertility: as successive harvests extract nitrogen and other essentials from the soil, without their replenishment there’s none for the plants to incorporate into their fruit or seed. Although animal fertiliser could compensate to some extent, the only solution was to ‘rest’ that land, to allow its soil fertility to be restored.

In southern Europe, including lands bordering the Mediterranean, crop rotation had been adopted by classical times, and was described by the Roman poet Virgil. This typically followed a two-year cycle:

• In one year, the plot would be ploughed and sown, sometimes in both Spring and autumn, to grow crops for harvest.
• The following year, that plot would be left unused, lying fallow.

As a result, at any time half the arable land would be productive, and half fallow and without a crop.

In northern Europe, a three-year cycle developed during the Middle Ages and later. This might run:

• In one year, the plot would be ploughed and sown in the autumn with a winter grain crop.
• The following year, that plot would be sown in the early Spring, with a grain or forage crop, or legumes (peas or beans).
• The third year, that plot would left fallow until the autumn, when it started the cycle again with autumn ploughing.

This is reflected in a different pattern in arable land, with only a third of it being left fallow at any time.

During the seventeenth century, farmers in the Low Countries appear to have adopted more elaborate rotations, and those were imported to England as the Norfolk Four-Course Rotation in the following century. In this:

• The first year brought a wheat crop, sown in the Spring and harvested at the end of summer.
• The second year brought roots, such as swedes or turnips, normally used to feed cattle, which grazed the land and enriched it with manure.
• The third year brought barley or oats, sown in the Spring and harvested at the end of summer.
• The fourth and final year the plot was rested with grass and clover, again used to graze cattle which enriched it with manure.

This depended on integrating livestock production with arable farming, by adding cows to the sheep-corn system, which had become increasingly popular over this period.

One way to assess this is in paintings of farmed countryside, looking at the patterns of usage in fields. I show a small selection of examples here.

In Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Harvesters from 1565, much of the land visible is devoted to a single wheat crop, sown at the same time, and harvested together at the end of the summer. Some fields on the lower ground, closer to the town and estuary in the distance, are still green, though, suggesting they may be pasture being grazed during their fallow year.

At the same time as crop rotations were being developed, land was being enclosed and its use transformed from communal grazing for livestock to arable fields. John Crome captures this in this painting of Mousehold Heath, Norwich (c 1818-20), showing the low rolling land to the north-east of the city which had been open heath and common land until the late eighteenth century. By 1810, much of it had been enclosed and ploughed up for agriculture.

At about the same time, Alexandre Calame’s Swiss Landscape shows the shore of one of the country’s large lakes, probably Lake Geneva, with much smaller plots of land within large open fields, and a range of different crops being cultivated. This is more typical of the older sub-divided fields close to villages during earlier centuries in England.

By 1853, when the Pre-Raphaelite landscape artist Thomas Seddon visited Brittany and painted Léhon, from Mont Parnasse, Brittany, this small village had retained similar small plots being farmed in different ways, almost like the allotment gardens that developed around cities at this time.

Fields shown on the side of Les Jalais in Camille Pissarro’s Côte de Jalais, Pontoise from 1867 are divided into larger strips, and are at different stages of cultivation. Some are still earth brown following ploughing, others are green, and some may be ready to harvest. These appear to be in a longer crop rotation, perhaps four-course.

Although the classical two-year cycle was retained for longer in southern France, by 1890-92 when Paul Cézanne painted this Hillside in Provence, the pattern of colour in the fields makes it more likely that a three-year or longer rotation was in use.

By the early twentieth century, most farmland in England had been enclosed, but the fields in Percy Shakespeare’s painting of December on the Downs, Wartime, from the period 1939-44, remain open and still in use for a sheep-wheat system.

Perhaps the lesson here is that accounts of land use and crop rotations are too generalised to reflect the rich variety of local farming methods. As I have so far concentrated on arable and sheep farming, in the next article I’ll look at cattle and milk production.

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Venice became increasingly popular with painters. Access to the city had improved in the 1860s, when its Santa Lucia railway station opened at the north-west end of the Grand Canal, although the famous Simplon Orient Express train didn’t start operating into Venice until well into the twentieth century.

One of the earliest of this succession of artists was Martín Rico from Spain. It was his discovery of Venice in 1873 that led to the perfection of his artistic style and the creation of many of his most emblematic works. From this first trip until his death thirty-six years later, Rico spent every summer with the exception of one painting there, until he died in Venice in 1908.

Many of his paintings show lesser-known canals and less-frequented areas, like A Canal in Venice from about 1875. Although populated by the occasional gondola and a small clutch of children, they have a wonderful air of peace and serenity. His broken reflections are painted quite tightly although he is reputed to have painted mainly en plein air.

This undated view of the Grand Canal just catches the dome of the church of Santa María della Salute, Venice, and is also known by the fuller title of Grand Canal and the Church of Santa María della Salute, Venice.

Rico’s Canal in Venice is another undated view of one of the minor ‘backstreet’ canals that is deeply serene.

His undated cross-canal view of Venice appears to be a ‘proper’ plein air oil sketch with rougher facture for once.

The first of several Impressionists to visit Venice, Pierre-Auguste Renoir chose a view of the famous Piazzetta adjoining Saint Mark’s Square in his Doge’s Palace, Venice from 1881. The tops of the roofs follow the horizontal centreline, with the Campanile reaching well above that, and various boats below the band of buildings.

The American Impressionist John Henry Twachtman was one of several great American landscape painters who visited Venice. His watercolour Venice (1881) was clearly painted quickly en plein air. The lower half of his paper contains only reflections; the upper half is a view from the water placing the Campanile slightly to the right of centre, little higher than neighbouring church domes. Superimposed on that waterfront are passing boats, their sails and rigging complicating the buildings behind. His palette is also limited to earth colours, with grey-blue on the water below.

The French Naturalist Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret also visited Venice, where his brushwork was surprisingly loose and his marks painterly, as shown in his sketched View of Venice (1882).

While he was working in Europe, the American Frank Duveneck visited the city on several occasions. His Grand Canal in Venice (c 1883) was a study for his Water Carriers below.

Duveneck was also a successful print-maker, as exemplified in his Bridge of Sighs (1883).

Water Carriers, Venice from 1884 is probably Duveneck’s finest painting of Venice, combining the view from his earlier study with an intimate insight into the daily work of ordinary Venetians. His visits to the city stopped when his wife died in 1888, and he returned to the USA.

In about 1885, Henri Rouart, one of the patrons of the French Impressionists and a talented painter in his own right, visited Italy. While there, he painted Venice, San Michele, showing the church of San Michele in Isola, on the island with the city’s main cemetery.

Towards the end of his career in the 1890s, Eugene Boudin visited Venice several times. Among his paintings there is Piazzetta San Marco in Venice (1895), which adopts the same view and composition as Renoir’s earlier Doge’s Palace, Venice from 1881. This painting is sometimes mis-titled as the Piazza San Marco, which it doesn’t show, although the tower is its high Campanile.

Franz Richard Unterberger was a landscape painter from the Austrian Tirol who produced many fine views of Venice in a more traditional Romantic manner. His Rio San Barnaba, Venice (date not known, but probably around 1895) gives a good account of his approach and style. The motif isn’t far from Saint Mark’s, but the tower shown isn’t the Campanile.

Although not as highly finished as the classical works of Canaletto, Unterberger puts great detail into buildings, figures, and other staffage, even down to painting the ties and walking sticks of figures. However, fine brushstrokes are distinct over the faces of buildings and in the water, and the clouds display marks more clearly.

In just a few years, at the turn of the century, Venice was to become popular with the most radical artists, including Divisionists such as Henri-Edmond Cross and Paul Signac, as well as John Singer Sargent.

A century ago today, 12 October, the Spanish painter Antonio Muñoz Degrain (1840–1924) died in Málaga, Spain. Although now largely forgotten outside his native country, he was an accomplished artist and achieved international recognition. Of the relatively few of his works that remain accessible, there are several that are striking and individual.

He was born in Valencia, Spain, and started his studies at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Carlos there, before abandoning them and travelling to Rome, where he largely taught himself. He then returned to Spain, where he started exhibiting his landscapes in 1862.

Muñoz Degrain’s early Landscape of El Pardo as the Fog Clears from 1866 is set in El Pardo Mountain Reserve, the hunting grounds of the Spanish royal family, where one of its rangers is taking his horse to water. The mountain in the background is Guadarrama, which is surprisingly alpine and rugged. His style is detailed realist, perhaps a little behind the times.

He developed his skills as a narrative painter with a series of commissioned historical works, including a painting of Queen Isabella with Christopher Columbus, for which he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Charles III.

In 1880, he started painting a series showing the climax of William Shakespeare’s play Othello. The first, Othello and Desdemona shows Othello entering Desdemona’s bedchamber to find her asleep.

Muñoz Degrain returned to Rome in 1882 on a two-year fellowship.

In 1888, he appears to been commissioned to depict The Conversion of Recaredo for the Palace of the Spanish Senate in Madrid. This shows Reccared I (c 559-601) abandoning Arianism and converting to Catholicism during the Third Council of Toledo in 589. This was organised by Saint Leander but convened in the name of Reccared, the Visigothic King of Hispania and Septimania. The king had already renounced Arianism in January 587, and his public confession was read aloud at the council, which marked the start of his new Catholic kingdom.

The details of jewellery and costume in this painting are extraordinary.

Ten years later, he was appointed chair of landscape painting at the prestigious Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, where he became its director in 1901.

Over this period, his landscape paintings had grown steadily more painterly, although this view of the Port of Bilbao from 1900 remains in the earth colours of Barbizon rather than the bright hues of Impressionism.

In Washerwomen just three years later, he has become full Impressionist, with profuse visible brushstrokes and higher chroma.

A few years on, between 1905-10, his Seascape View of Palma de Mallorca is almost Fauvist, with a rich range of textures.

Muñoz Degrain’s view of the Alhambra from Albaicin District from 1914 is remarkable for the rhythm established by the poplar trees around its base, which become an integral part of the fortified ridge.

Finally, his undated View of the Alhambra is one of my favourite paintings of this motif, for its intriguing foreground details, and the poplars lit as white-hot pokers in the fiery light of sunset.

Muñoz Degrain died in Málaga on 12 October 1924, at the age of eighty-three.

Reference

Wikipedia.

Few cities in Europe have been painted as much as Venice, with its distinctive canals and other waterways. First popularised by Giovanni Antonio Canal (1697–1768), better known as Canaletto, a native of the city whose vedute (views) sold so well to rich tourists undertaking their Grand Tours during the eighteenth century, they had faded by the start of the nineteenth.

In this series of four articles, I show how they were revived in the paintings of visiting artists, and played important roles in the development of twentieth century art. We start today with an English painter who was only twenty-three years old, and was to die within two years: Richard Parkes Bonington.

On the Grand Canal (1826) is a brilliant plein air oil sketch painted from a boat, showing the entrance to the Grand Canal, which snakes its way through the centre of the city. Bonington has removed one of the palazzi, but otherwise appears faithful to the motif.

Riva degli Schiavoni, from near S. Biagio (c 1827) shows the San Marco basin from the Arsenal traghetto, near the south-eastern entrance to the Grand Canal. Although only a small watercolour, Noon considers it was painted well after Bonington’s return from Italy.

Ducal Palace with a Religious Procession (1827) was apparently painted in late 1827 for James Carpenter, from graphite studies Bonington had made during his visit in 1826. Painted on a white ground, it unfortunately underwent severe shrinkage, and was extensively retouched as a result. However, it was generally very well received at the time, despite the liberties taken with its representation of the view.

Grand Canal, the Rialto in the Distance – Sunrise (1828) is one of Bonington’s finest oil paintings, made in the studio from graphite and other sketches from 1826. This painting has quite commonly been described as showing sunset, but as the view faces almost due east, must have been set in the early morning.

The Grand Canal Looking Toward the Rialto (1826), painted on millboard, may have been started en plein air, but appears to have been completed later in the studio, when Bonington had returned to Paris, which may account for the difference in hues in the sky. By the summer of 1828, Bonington was back in London, where he died of tuberculosis at the age of only twenty-five.

Between 1838-1848, the English traveller, writer and painter Edward Lear lived in Rome, making occasional visits to Britain. This quick plein air watercolour sketch of Venice, the Doge’s Palace is undated, but may well have been painted during this period.

JMW Turner paid many visits to Venice, where he painted some of his most radical landscapes.

Although Turner wasn’t particularly consistent in his reflections, at his most faithful he remains accurate in this famous view of Campo Santo, Venice from 1842, where reflected sails appear angelic in form.

Turner’s clouds and buildings in The Dogano, San Giorgio, Citella, from the Steps of the Europa, from the same year, have a similar softness in form typical of his later oil paintings.

John Ferguson Weir visited the city in 1868, following which he painted The Grand Canal, Venice (1869) in the studio, probably when he was back in the USA in the autumn of the following year.

Next Sunday, I’ll show paintings from the closing years of the nineteenth century, when Venice became even more popular.

Five hundred years – half a millennium – ago today, the pioneering landscape painter Joachim Patinir died in the city of Antwerp. A friend of Albrecht Dürer, and contemporary of Albrecht Altdorfer, like them he was one of the first serious landscape artists in Europe, and is thought to be the originator of the World View, a forerunner of the panorama.

Patinir was born in about 1480 in the town of Dinant or Bouvignes, not far from Brussels in modern Belgium. He may have been an apprentice to Gerard David in Bruges, and first registered as a Master in his own right in the Guild of Saint Luke in Antwerp by 1515. Between then and his death in Antwerp on 5 October 1524, he led a large workshop and appears to have been productive if not prolific. However, only five of his signed paintings have survived, with a total of as many as 29 being attributed to him or members of his workshop.

Most of his surviving paintings are at heart landscapes, incorporating a scene from a religious story in their foreground to satisfy the expectations of his patrons.

He is thought to have completed this Landscape with St John the Baptist Preaching in about 1510, when he was thirty, and had probably only recently registered as a Master with the Guild. Already, he is using repoussoir with the foreground tree at the left, and has exaggerated aerial perspective to make its horizon appear almost infinitely deep. This is the start of the World View.

Patinir may have enlisted the help of his friend Quentin Matsys when painting this triptych of The Penitence of Saint Jerome in about 1512. The left wing shows Christ being baptised by John, with the penitent Jerome in the centre panel, and the temptation of Anthony in the right wing. The landscape is continuous across the three panels, with exaggerated aerial perspective again, and the red clouds of dawn or dusk in the centre. Among the animals featured in the distance beyond Jerome is a fully laden camel.

The Baptism of Christ from 1510-20 is a fully developed version of the left wing in that triptych employing similar details, such as the Holy Ghost, in the form of a white dove, flying down from God the Father in the heavens above. In the left background, John is preaching in a recapitulation of his earlier Landscape with St John the Baptist Preaching above.

Patinir is known to have joined forces with Quentin Matsys (1466-1530) in their Temptation of St Anthony, either from about 1515 or 1520-24, where Matsys is believed to have been responsible for the figures in the foreground. Anthony is being taunted and tempted by a small devil behind him, a trio of beautiful women, and an ugly old hag to the left. Suitable cameos are embedded in the landscape, and there appears to be a war going on up in the dark clouds overhead,

The Rest on The Flight into Egypt from 1515-24 features Mary with the infant Jesus on her lap, and Joseph’s traditional walking stick, although he is missing from the family group. The landscape is Netherlandish, with a major port town in the right distance, and a windmill closer. It also incorporates one of Patinir’s distinctive landscape forms, the castle nestling inside a rock pinnacle in the upper centre. That reappears in several of his imagined landscapes.

His Landscape with the Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah from about 1520 is perhaps more reminiscent of his near-contemporary Hieronymus Bosch. At the right edge, the Lot family are making their escape with the aid of angels, as the cities burn behind them. The cameo scene in a tent above them might show the temptation of Lot by his daughters.

His famous Crossing the River Styx (1520-4) is unusual for its mythological scene, including fire and damnation in Hell on the right. It’s perhaps his ultimate World View: the spectator is elevated above the surface and looks on and down over a richly-detailed landscape stretching to the far horizon.

There is some confusion, though. In classical mythology, the River Styx separates the earthly world from that of Hell. Here Patinir appears to show Charon the boatman navigating between Hell, on the right, and an Elysian vision, complete with angels, on the left. This may reflect an adjustment of myth to incorporate the Christian dichotomy of heaven and hell.

Although Patinir paints a crisp and clear horizon to the sea, he uses marked aerial perspective for the land on the left, making it recede into distant haze, to give the feeling of great depth of view, one of the key features both of the World View style and of panoramic landscapes more generally.

This wonderful World View of The Battle of Pavia has been attributed to Patinir, although there are strong reasons for disbelief, in that he is recorded to have died on 5 October 1524, but this battle didn’t take place until the morning of 24 February the following year. It does, though, follow Patinir’s lead with its World View.

Reference

Wikipedia

In the first of these two articles visiting the coast of Maine, I showed the work of nineteenth century artists, ending with Winslow Homer’s works made in and around his studio at Prouts Neck, just twenty-five metres/yards from the North Atlantic Ocean. To remind you of the locations named for these paintings, here’s Maine’s entry in the National Atlas of the United States (1997).

Many of the paintings in this article, covering the twentieth century, were made by one of America’s most prominent Impressionists, Childe Hassam (1859–1935). Born in Boston, his mother was a Mainer. Hassam returned to New York after completing his training in Paris, in 1889, and started to spend his summers in the country, often in his mother’s home state, and typically on Appledore Island, the largest of the Isles of Shoals, off the coast of Portsmouth and straddling the border between New Hampshire and Maine. Over the next twenty-five years or so, Hassam painted some of the finest views of this section of the coast, which also reflect his artistic development.

Thomas Laighton and Levi Thaxter were responsible for starting the tourist trade on Appledore Island in the middle of the nineteenth century. When she was only fifteen, Laighton’s daughter Celia married Thaxter, and later she became a popular poet, one of the leading figures on the island. Hassam’s Celia Thaxter’s Garden, Isles of Shoals, Maine (1890) shows the poet’s flower garden in his high Impressionist style, and tells how idyllic those summers must have been.

The following summer, Hassam moved his easel closer to the water’s edge for his Poppies, Isles of Shoals (1891), shifting his emphasis more to the coast itself.

Hassam then spent summers in other locations suited to his Impressionist leaning: Gloucester, MA, and sections of the Connecticut coast.

He seems to have returned to Appledore Island soon into the new century, when he found life in New York getting him down. His style had evolved and his brushwork and use of fine marks of contrasting colours are more typical of late Pissarro, and become Post-Impressionist in passages. This is shown well in his choice of motif and facture in Cliff Rock – Appledore from 1903.

The following summer, he dispensed with all land apart from a sliver of distant shore, painting just the sea and its white horses in The West Wind, Isles of Shoals (1904).

After a bout of depression and heavy drinking, Hassam reformed himself, taking his art outdoors again. He painted extensively in Oregon, including its rugged coast, visited Paris again, and worked with renewed enthusiasm and energy.

This took him back to Appledore Island, although his friend Celia Thaxter had died almost twenty years earlier. Isles of Shoals, Broad Cove (1911) once again shows his use of broken, contrastingly coloured brushstrokes, and his stark motif.

Part of his rejuvenation was to use a broader range of media, including pastels and watercolours. His Sunday Morning, Appledore (1912) is one of his briskly painted watercolour sketches.

This watercolour sketch of The Gorge, Appledore (1912) shows how differently he depicts the coastal rocks with bolder strokes of transparent colour.

When he returned to oils, though, he reframes completely with increasingly organised groups of brushstrokes, as in The North Gorge, Appledore, Isles of Shoals (1912).

The following summer he was back on Appledore Island, painting outdoors. In The South Ledges, Appledore (1913), his placement of a figure in a white dress and hat against near-white rock merges her with her surroundings. A more conventional approach would have set her against the darker rock in the distance, or dressed her in contrasting clothing.

Just as he had in The West Wind, Isles of Shoals from almost a decade earlier, Hassam pushed the land to each side, and in his Surf, Isles of Shoals (1913) concentrated his canvas almost entirely on the sea.

As an Impressionist, it was natural that he was repeatedly drawn to paint the coast of Maine. A more surprising visitor was Robert Henri (1865–1929), leader of the Ashcan school of realism in New York. Having made his reputation with gritty paintings of the urban landscape in New York City, he had the pochade gear and the technique.

Perhaps Henri too needed a break from city life, and in 1911 headed up to paint outdoors in front of the waves rolling in from the Atlantic. Marine – Break over Sunken Rock, Storm Sea (1911) is an example of what he painted in his pochade box. Two years later, Henri crossed the ocean to paint on Achill Island, on the north-western edge of Ireland.

George Bellows (1882–1925) is probably the best-known of Henri’s students. They had both been born in Ohio, and met in New York in 1904. Bellows made similarly rough-hewn cityscapes of New York City, concentrating on its human landscape, and painted a remarkable series depicting boxing contests.

When Robert Henri went to Maine for the summer, George Bellows went to paint on Monhegan, a small and barely populated island about fifteen miles offshore, south-west of Rockland. That first summer, one of his pochade panels was The Gulls, Monhegan (1911), its greyness broken only by the brilliant white of the birds. Bellows also visited Matinicus Isle, five miles further out into the Atlantic.

A couple of years later, Bellows painted this Rock Reef, Maine (1913).

His panels then became more colourful, capturing the unusual hues of the water and rock, in his Monhegan Island, Maine (1913).

Then, when the sun came out and the weather was set fair, Bellows’ coast burst into brilliant colour, in The Grove – Monhegan, from the same summer.

From Thomas Cole and his student Frederic Edwin Church, to Robert Henri and his student George Bellows, paintings of the coast of Maine represent much of the history of American landscape art, at least that of the East Coast. It’s a coast of great contrasts, of magnificent natural beauty, and the raw power of the ocean and weather.

This weekend I’m visiting the coast of Maine, the small state tucked away at the north-eastern extremity of the US. Although its climate may not be ideal for plein air work, its 230 miles (400 km) of ocean coastline include some of the most beautifully rugged on the North Atlantic. It has attracted many of the major landscape artists from the eastern cities, from Thomas Cole, born in Bolton, England, and raised in Ohio, to George Bellows, also born and raised in Ohio.

In these two articles, I show some of my favourite paintings of the Maine coast. This first concentrates on artists active in the nineteenth century, starting with Cole and ending with Winslow Homer. Tomorrow’s sequel features paintings by Childe Hassam and George Bellows, with a single work by Robert Henri, largely from the twentieth century.

As few of us are likely to recognise any of the locations named for these paintings, here’s Maine’s entry in the National Atlas of the United States (1997).

Generally accepted as the founder of the Hudson River School, many of Thomas Cole’s landscapes were painted in the Catskill Mountains in the south-east of New York state. In 1845, he travelled north-east to Maine, where he painted this View Across Frenchman’s Bay From Mt. Desert Island, After A Squall.

This island, larger than Martha’s Vineyard, for instance, is part of the archipelago stretching along much of the Maine coast, and now contains Acadia National Park, a popular tourist location. Cole shows this view as a squall is moving on, the wind and sea still showing its effects. It’s likely that Cole’s student Frederic Edwin Church was with him there.

Fitz Henry Lane was born in the port of Gloucester, MA, and made his career painting marine views in New England. His view Off Mount Desert Island from 1856 shows the same island in more peaceful weather, with a ship at anchor, its sails limp in the calm.

Frederic Edwin Church was another New Englander, best known for his huge and amazingly detailed panoramic landscapes of Central and South America. He had settled in New York by 1850, and seems to have taken trips most summers to the wilds of Maine to paint en plein air in oils. He painted this sparse view of Mt. Desert Island, Maine Coast in oils on paper in 1850.

The following year, Church returned to paint this rich twilight seascape of a Beacon, off Mount Desert Island (1851).

Church made his first visit to South America in 1853. I’m not sure whether he painted Schoodic Peninsula from Mount Desert at Sunrise (1850–55) before or after that trip, but it contrasts with the highly detailed and complex views he made of The Andes of Ecuador (1855), and similar later works. This peninsula is the section of mainland to the east of Bar Harbor on Mount Desert Island.

Church’s Eagle Lake Viewed from Cadillac Mountain, Mount Desert Island, Maine (1850–60) is a slightly later painting featuring a considerably more complex motif. Cadillac Mountain is relatively low, at 466 metres (1,530 feet), the highest point of Mt Desert Island, and affords spectacular views such as this, looking north-west from the east side of the island.

Alfred Thompson Bricher (1837–1908) was one of the last artists of the Hudson River School, and studied with Albert Bierstadt. Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on its border with Maine, many of his best works are coastal landscapes. Although he lived in Staten Island, New York, at some stage he travelled up to paint this tranquil view On the Coast of Maine.

Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904) was a latecomer to landscape painting, but made a speciality of painting coastal salt marshes in New England, before moving to Florida in 1883. In 1877, he seems to have made his way to the southern edge of Maine, to paint a stretch of marsh near the new tourist resort of York Harbor, Coast of Maine, to the north-east of Portsmouth. This is a marked contrast to the rough and rocky coast further north and east.

After Church, the landscape painter most strongly associated with the Maine coast was Winslow Homer. Born in Boston, his formative periods were spent on the coast. During the 1870s, he started painting in watercolour around Gloucester, Massachusetts, then spent 1881-82 developing his art further in Cullercoats, a fishing community in north-east England.

Shortly after his return from England, Winslow Homer moved to Prouts Neck in Scarborough, on the coast south of Portland, Maine. This was rapidly becoming a summer seasonal resort, and Homer’s new studio was only twenty-five metres/yards from the sea, overlooking Cannon Rock. His Incoming Tide, Scarboro, Maine (1883) (above) is a typical watercolour from this period, with Breaking Storm, Coast of Maine (1894) (below) demonstrating his versatility in technique.

Apart from the fashions, The Outlook, Maine Coast (1894) could have been one of his superb watercolours from Cullercoats over a decade earlier.

This oil painting of Cannon Rock from 1895 is more of a puzzle. It shows the rock just outside his studio at Prouts Neck, that he was greatly familiar with. Homer has a deserved reputation for careful realism that at times seems almost documentary. Yet the impressive breaker shown here could only have occurred when the tide was low; the inlet in the foreground shows that, in that part of the painting at least, the tide was high, not low. Perhaps even Winslow Homer took a little artistic licence at times.

Homer’s wonderful twilight view of West Point, Prout’s Neck (1900) sees us into the twentieth century, and the new generation of artists to paint the coast of Maine.

In the first of these two articles celebrating the work of generations of women who washed clothes and linen outdoors, and have been featured in landscape paintings, I covered the period up to the end of the 1870s, when Impressionism was at its height. This account resumes at about 1880, and moves on to the early twentieth century.

Alice Havers’ Washerwomen, which given her tragically brief life must have been painted around 1880, shows a wide range of ages, working together, some repairing the clothes, others talking. On the other side of the river, the fruit trees are in blossom.

Later in Eugène Boudin’s career he painted Washerwomen by the River (c 1880-85), above, and Laundresses on the Beach, Low Tide, Aval Cliff, Étretat (c 1890-94), below. The latter painting is remarkable for its rough facture, and for the number of women gathered by one of the most recognisable landmarks on the Normandy coast, the arch of Étretat.

Early in his career, the American artist Charles Courtney Curran painted a series of works showing young women at work outdoors, among which the most successful, A Breezy Day (1887) won the Third Hallgarten Prize for Oils from the National Academy of Design the following year.

Painted when Vincent van Gogh was at Arles, one of his best-known groups of works includes The Langlois Bridge at Arles with Women Washing (1888). This is one of four oil paintings, a watercolour, and at least four drawings he made of this motif, with the aid of a perspective frame he had made for himself. This shows a traditional wooden drawbridge, one of several over the canal running from Arles to Bouc. Built in the early nineteenth century, it was sadly replaced by concrete in 1930.

In the same year, Paul Gauguin painted a group of women hard at work near Arles in his Washerwomen of Arles I (1888).

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s The Laundress (1891) sets a single, quite well-dressed woman doing her washing in one of his sumptuously soft-focus landscapes.

The Norwegian painter Jahn Ekenæs teaches us that, even in the bitter Nordic winters, the washing still had to be done: his Women Doing Laundry Through a Hole in the Ice (1891) seem to have the toughest job of all. Note that only one of them is wearing anything on her hands.

Peder Mørk Mønsted’s Laundry Day (1899) shows kinder conditions during the summer, when doing the washing would surely have been a more popular task.

In common with many of these paintings, Manuel Garcia y Rodriguez uses the white of the linen heightened in sunshine to generate contrast, in his White and Black. Andalucian Landscape. Laundresses in the River Guadaíra from 1903.

As indoor domestic water supplies became widespread during the twentieth century, washing clothing and linen in the countryside died out, and vanished from the landscape.

Until well into the twentieth century, running water was what came through the roof when it rained, and didn’t come from a tap. Although only the rich could afford to wear clothes for short periods and expect them to be laundered, soiled clothing and linen still had to be washed, normally in the nearest outdoor body of water. This weekend I’m celebrating the many centuries that women washed clothes outdoors, and were painted as part of the landscape. This first article covers the period up to the height of Impressionism at the end of the 1870s, and tomorrow’s resumes in 1880 and concludes in the early twentieth century.

Pierre-Salomon Domenchin de Chavanne’s Landscape with Washerwomen, probably from around 1700-20, shows a common sight, as do many early landscapes: a small group of women have taken sheets and clothes in large wicker baskets to a small lake, and are washing them as well as they can.

Alessandro Magnasco’s Landscape with Washerwomen (1710-20) shows a similar scene, the women having walked down from the town glimpsed in the distance. At the lower left is a man out hunting with his dog and gun.

On a grey day of showers in 1842, the major French landscape artist Eugène Isabey caught laundresses at work above The Town and Harbour of Dieppe. There’s a second group at the extreme left edge whose washing looks in danger of being blown away over the town below.

Henri Harpignies had initially learned to paint in oils, but from 1851 also took to watercolour. He painted this dawn View of Moulins in watercolour between about 1850-60, close to the dead centre of France. This looks over the Allier River, past the line of washerwomen on its far bank, towards the spires and towers of the town whose linen was being cleaned in that river.

By this time, in northern France, the move towards Impressionism was just starting. The landscape painter Johan Jongkind returned to Paris in 1859, where he painted this view of Le Pont de la Tournelle, Paris (1859), with a small group of washerwomen at work by the water’s edge.

The bridge shown here had been built in 1654, to replace a series of predecessors from the first in 1620. It connects the city to the south with the Île Saint-Louis, which had originally been two smaller islands close to the Île Notre Dame, on which the cathedral stands. Jongkind isn’t interested in the market for topographic paintings, though, and his attention is on the washerwomen and the old bridge.

By the late nineteenth century, with the growth of towns and cities, laundry had became more organised, as shown in Martín Rico’s Washerwomen of Varenne (1865). A group of fifteen women, some with babies and children, are on the bank of the local river, most of them probably performing this as a commercial service, as it was one of the few occupations open to women of the lower classes. For Rico they transform his landscape with their activity and the rhythm of their figures.

Working women are also featured in some of Eugène Boudin’s painterly oil sketches made in front of the motif, such as this of Washerwoman near Trouville from 1872-76. This laundress appears to be beating her washing with a mallet to drive the dirt out.

In the early years of the Impressionist movement, Berthe Morisot’s Hanging the Laundry out to Dry (1875) shows a communal drying area at the edge of a town. The women have a large black cart to transport the washing, and are busy putting it out on the lines to dry in the sunny spells. Next to that area is a small allotment where a man is growing vegetables, and in the distance are the chimneys of the city.

While most of Alfred Sisley’s landscapes are relatively unpopulated, he also experimented with introducing more figures into the foreground of some, including this riverside view of Washerwomen near Champagne from 1879. They appear to have brought their washing down to the water in wicker baskets, on an ancient wheelbarrow.

Few of us ever get to visit the Pacific North-West, but one painter, more than anyone else, has defined its ‘look’. She’s also one of a very few prolific women artists for whom there are sufficient good images to justify a short series of articles: she is Emily Carr (1871–1945), one of the major painters of North America.

She was born in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1871, to parents who had emigrated from England. Their large family was quite affluent thanks to her father’s business dealings, but her mother died of tuberculosis when Emily was only fourteen, and her father died two years later. Thanks to her guardian, Carr started studies at the California School of Design in San Francisco in 1890, but in 1893, when family finances became tight, she had to return home.

Her still life of Melons dates from those years as a student in California, in 1892.

Back in Victoria, she started teaching art in her studio, enabling her to save up enough money to study abroad again.

In 1898, she travelled to Ucluelet, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, where she stayed among the Nuu-chah-nulth (‘Nootka’) people, her first exposure to First Nations culture. Cedar Cannibal House, Ucluelet, BC (1898) is a watercolour made during that visit. This group of tribes had early contact with European settlers; they had suffered badly from epidemics of infectious disease, and at the time that Carr visited, their population had probably fallen to around 3,500.

The following year, Carr travelled to London, where she studied at the Westminster School of Art. She found the teaching there was too conservative, and didn’t cope well with conditions in the sprawling city, so left there in 1901 to visit Paris, and later the Saint Ives art colony in Cornwall. She stayed there through the winter, being taught in the Porthmeor Studios by Julius Olsson (1864-1942) and his assistant. She later studied further in Hertfordshire under John Whiteley.

Carr then became unwell, and in 1903 entered the East Anglian Sanatorium with a diagnosis of hysteria. She was unable to paint there, and managed to return to Canada in 1904. She resumed teaching, this time in Vancouver. However, she didn’t get on well with society women who attended her classes, and they complained of her behaviour of smoking and swearing at them in class.

Carr’s Breton Church (1906) is a puzzle, as she was back in Canada at that time, and didn’t paint in Brittany until after 1910. This image also suggests that it’s high in chroma, which would have been more likely during or after her time studying with Harry Gibb there, when her style became overtly Fauvist.

In 1907, Emily and her sister Alice travelled to see the sights of Alaska, where she was enthralled by the totem poles of Sitka. It was here that Emily Carr first resolved to document the totems and First Nations villages of British Columbia, which may have been influenced by Theodore J Richardson (1855-1914), an American artist who spent years documenting in his paintings the peoples of Sitka and Alaska more generally.

One of the places that she visited was Skagway (1907), painted here in watercolour. Then a bustling small city, it was the port of entry to the south-east ‘pan-handle’ of Alaska. It had expanded greatly with the gold rush of 1897 onwards, but by the time that the Carr sisters visited that was long since over, and the economy was in sustained decline.

The sisters also visited Baranof Island, where they saw the famous Totem Walk at Sitka (1907), shown in this watercolour. These totems were made by the Tlingit and Haida peoples, but had been removed from their original locations for display at the St Louis World’s Fair in 1904. Following that, they were moved again into this newly constructed National Park.

Carr’s fascination with trees in the landscape developed early during her career. Her Arbutus Tree (c 1909) is a sophisticated watercolour portrait of one such tree, probably painted near Vancouver.

Beacon Hill Park (1909) is a watercolour in Impressionist style, showing a small corner of this 200 acre park in Victoria, on Vancouver Island. This overlooks Juan de Fuca Strait, and is shown here with the flowers of late spring or early summer, with arbutus trees in the distance. The Carr family home bordered on this park.

Carr also started painting distinctive works showing the dense trunks of a Wood Interior (1909), here lit powerfully by rays of low sunshine. This was to remain a recurrent motif throughout her career.

Alert Bay (1910) is another watercolour, showing a small village on Cormorant Island, at the opposite (north) end of Vancouver Island from Victoria. Home to the ‘Na̱mg̱is nation of the Kwakwaka’wakw, this illustrates her rapidly developing interest in documenting the totems of the north-west coastal area.

In 1910, Carr returned to Paris with her sister Alice, for a further year of study. Again she found living in a big European city was stifling, and spent time in a spa in Sweden. She studied with Harry Phelan Gibb (1870-1948) at Crécy-en-Brie just outside Paris, and in Brittany. This was her first exposure to Fauvism, and proved a major influence on her style.

I suspect that Carr’s already high chroma has been further exaggerated in this image of her famous painting of Autumn in France (1911), representing her Fauvism at its height. She uses bold and confident brushstrokes rich with raw colour to show the countryside of Brittany in brilliant summer sunlight.

Two of Carr’s paintings were accepted for the autumn Salon in Paris in 1911. She returned to Vancouver in 1912, and promptly exhibited her Fauvist work in her studio there. She then set out on her project to document the First Nations peoples of the north-west coast, as I’ll relate in the next article in this series.

References

Wikipedia.
Lisa Baldissera (2015) Emily Carr, Life & Work, Art Canada Institute. ISBN 978 1 4871 0044 5. Available in PDF from Art Canada Institute.
Ian M Thom (2013) Emily Carr Collected, Douglas & McIntyre. ISBN 978 1 77100 080 2.

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Contents of articles in the series An A to Z of Landscapes:

Alphabetical

• Aerial perspective
• Bridges
• Cloudscapes
• Dawn and Dusk
• Earth
• Flowers
• Greens
• Hedges
• Ice and snow
• Japan
• Kayaks and canoes
• Lakes
• le Midi
• Nocturne
• Oil sketch
• Panoramas
• Quais
• Rivers
• Seaside & Series
• Trees 1
• Trees 2
• Uplands
• Valleys
• Wind
• X marks the spot
• Yellow
• Zeitgeist

By class

Technical
Aerial perspective
Greens
Oil sketch
X marks the spot
Yellow
Zeitgeist

Location
Japan
le Midi

Themes
Bridges
Cloudscapes
Dawn and Dusk
Earth
Flowers
Hedges
Ice and snow
Kayaks and canoes
Lakes
Nocturne
Panoramas
Quais
Rivers
Seaside & Series
Trees 1
Trees 2
Uplands
Valleys
Wind

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