By the early 1860s, the large and ancient Forest of Fontainebleau, to the south-east of Paris, had been attracting those of the Barbizon School, who painted realist landscapes in front of the motif. The next generation started visiting in 1865, and went on to form the French Impressionists.

In May 1865, the young Frédéric Bazille left the city of Paris for the Forest of Fontainebleau, where he painted Landscape at Chailly (1865) in company with Claude Monet, and possibly Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley. Although clearly influenced by the Barbizon School, his colours are much brighter, and escape the rather sombre browns and greens that dominated much of the work of that earlier art.

Sisley painted this Avenue of Chestnut Trees in La Celle-Saint-Cloud to the west of the forest in 1865, again in Barbizon style. He didn’t submit it to the Salon until 1867, when it was refused. It then remained unsold for ten years before being bought by Sisley’s patron Jean-Baptiste Faure, a celebrated opera singer.

The following year, Sisley walked through the forest with Renoir. He then stayed in the village of Marlotte, where Renoir, Monet, Bazille, Pissarro and Cézanne also visited to paint.

Sisley was more successful with Women Going to the Woods, completed in 1866. This was one of his two paintings exhibited at the Salon that year, and shows the main street in the village of Marlotte with a little rustic staffage.

Clearing in the Woods (1865) is Renoir’s first substantial (surviving) landscape painting, and shows strong influence from Corot. He adopts quite a detailed realist style in this view of a clearing in the midst of massive chestnut trees. These are believed to be near the small village of La Celle-St-Cloud, to the west of Paris not far from Bougival, rather than in the forest. It’s likely that he painted there in the company of Alfred Sisley, who made two views of the same site in very different style.

The following year Renoir painted his friend Jules Le Coeur and his Dogs in the Forest of Fontainebleau. This is unusual among his works, as it was preceded by two studies, and all three were made using the palette knife rather than brushes. This makes it most likely to have been painted before Renoir abandoned the knife and returned to the brush, by the middle of May 1866.

The following year Abbott Handerson Thayer, an American artist who trained in Paris, painted this wonderful oil sketch of Landscape at Fontainebleau Forest (c 1876). This is probably the loosest and most Impressionist painting of his career.

At some time in the late nineteenth century, the wealthy industrialist, amateur painter and patron of Impressionism, Henri Rouart painted In Fontainebleau Forest. This may have been inspired by Corot, but is a realist study in light, shade, and the texture of bark.

John Ferguson Weir was another American painter who had trained in Paris, and became the first director of the School of Fine Arts at Yale University. He visited in about 1902, when he painted Forest of Fontainebleau (c 1902), with its tiny solitary figure against the fallen trunk.

In 1867 Théodore Rousseau died in the village of Barbizon, and he was followed in 1875 by Jean-François Millet. By the twentieth century the forest had fallen out of favour with the new generation.

This weekend we’re visiting what used to be a small village on the bank of the River Oise, where several of the French Impressionists developed their skills in painting landscapes en plein air. In yesterday’s first article we had reached 1876, the year of the second Impressionist Exhibition in Paris.

In complete contrast to his few landscapes influenced by Paul Cézanne, in 1876 Pissarro also painted some views of the commercial barges trading on the River Oise, including this of Barges at Pontoise, the only canvas in which the boats dominate his composition. This painting remained unsold at the time of the artist’s death, and wasn’t even exhibited until 1936.

The Oise near Pontoise in Grey Weather is another of Pissarro’s views of the River Oise from 1876.

The Rainbow, Pontoise, which Pissarro painted in 1877, was shown at the Third Impressionist Exhibition that year. It’s a panoramic view of the fields around the neighbouring area of Épluches viewed from Pontoise, with a modest and realistic rainbow.

Around 1877, when Pissarro was probably in company with Paul Cézanne at Pontoise, the pair of them painted the same motif hidden or revealed by the same trees. Pissarro’s version of Côte des Bœufs, Pontoise, above, is the more famous, and captures texture in everything, from the smoother surface of the track to the smaller branches, and presents an essay on the form and structure of trunks and branches.

Cézanne’s La Côte Saint-Denis à Pontoise shows little or no anatomical basis to the construction of his trees, whose branches are only loosely related to foliage. He simplifies throughout, with little or no texture, and more basic shadows, on the trunks, and the foliage is depicted as amorphous areas of leaf colour.

Béliard’s Moulin de Chauffour, Effect of Snow (1878) is another winter scene from the area near Pontoise, and is significantly less painterly than Pissarro or Cézanne.

By 1880, when Pissarro painted this Landscape at Le Valhermeil, Auvers-sur-Oise, his work was losing its conventional Impressionist facture, as he adopted smaller, staccato brushstrokes and his style became more ‘pointillist’.

Pissarro also started to transfer his attention from the land to its inhabitants, here the rural poor of these Cottages at Le Valhermeil, Auvers-sur-Oise (1880).

Pissarro’s Peasant Woman Digging, the Jardin de Maubuisson, Pontoise (1881) shows two women working in the vegetable garden of this large house in the village. This painting was first shown at the seventh Impressionist Exhibition the following year.

The Harvest, Pontoise, from 1881, is one of several of Pissarro’s paintings focussing more closely on agricultural activities, and now becoming overtly ‘pointillist’. Because of the brushwork involved, he couldn’t have painted this in front of the motif, and it turns out to be a second copy of an earlier and apparently identical painting.

This increasingly human content, in paintings such as his Peasant Woman and Child Returning from the Fields, Auvers-sur-Oise from 1881, drew comparisons with Millet, from whom Pissarro sought to distance himself in terms of modernity. This painting was bought by Durand-Ruel later that year, and shown at the seventh Impressionist Exhibition.

Pissarro later concentrated his attention on Éragny, then cityscapes of Paris. Cézanne returned to his family home in Aix-en-Provence, and Béliard became the mayor of Étampes further south. Today Pontoise is part of the ‘new town’ of Cergy-Pontoise, and its population has grown to well over 30,000, within an urban area of nearly a quarter of a million.

This weekend we travel to what used to be a small village of around six thousand on the bank of the River Oise, to the north-west of Paris. Pontoise was the centre of early Impressionist landscape painting in front of the motif, and appears in hundreds of works painted there from the late 1860s. It’s where Camille Pissarro lived and developed his skills, Paul Cézanne learned to paint en plein air, and others including Vincent van Gogh and Charles Daubigny painted.

The country around Pontoise has also been painted extensively. In these two articles, I include some from Auvers-sur-Oise, a little upstream, but exclude those from Ennery to the south, Éragny down river, where Pissarro settled later, and Osny to the north-west, all names you’ll see in the titles of significant Impressionist paintings.

We start in 1867, in the early days of the development of Impressionism, with Camille Pissarro’s Côte de Jalais, Pontoise. This realist view shows the hill of Les Jalais at l’Hermitage, where Pissarro lived at the time, viewed from the Chemin des Mathurins in Pontoise.

The year after he painted these Apple Trees at Pontoise, the House of Père Gallien (1868), the Pissarro family moved to Louveciennes, also to the north-west of Paris, where they intended to settle down in a large rented house. It was here that Pissarro first got to know Alfred Sisley well, when they painted in company, and alongside Monet and Renoir, all four of them starving and fighting off despair from their lack of sales.

The forgotten Impressionist Édouard Béliard may well have painted Boulevard de Fossés in Pontoise alongside Pissarro, Cézanne and Guillaumin in 1872.

Béliard’s Pontoise, View of the Lock (1872-5) was probably among his paintings shown at the first Impressionist Exhibition in 1874. Its composition is reminiscent of Sisley’s The Canal Saint-Martin, Paris from 1872, and its style is similar to those of Pissarro and Sisley at that time.

Paul Cézanne started learning to paint en plein air alongside Pissarro’s easel in 1873, when he painted this view of the House of Père Lacroix, Auvers-sur-Oise. As with all beginners, he took a long time getting the painting to look right, so different sections of the roof were painted several hours apart, as reflected in the orientation of the shadows here.

This view from Cézanne’s first campaign along the River Oise shows the northern bank near the hamlet of Valhermeil, slightly up-river from Pontoise.

Of all the paintings shown at the first Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1874, Cézanne’s The Hanged Man’s House, Auvers-sur-Oise (1874) was among the most successful, as he sold it to the collector Count Doria for three hundred francs.

Béliard’s Pothuis Quay in Pontoise, Effect of Snow from 1875 may have been exhibited at the second Impressionist Exhibition in 1876, and is similar in subject and style to the winter scenes painted around Louveciennes by Pissarro and Sisley from 1870 onwards.

In February 1875, with snow still falling, the Pissarros returned to their house in Pontoise, for Camille to paint there again. Effect of Snow at L’Hermitage, Pontoise (1875) strikes a fine balance between an impression captured in haste, and sufficient detail to make it more than just a passing moment.

That year a few of Pissarro’s paintings appear to have been influenced by Cézanne. Perhaps the best example is The Small Bridge, Pontoise, which could easily be mistaken for one of Cézanne’s views in the woods of northern France.

View of the Côte des Gratte-Coqs, Pontoise from the same year is also less distinctively one of Pissarro’s works.

In 1876, Pissarro painted this large view of one of the gardens in Pontoise: The Garden of Les Mathurins at Pontoise, belonging to the Deraismes Sisters. In fact, the sisters were only renting this large and impressive property, just down the road from where the Pissarros lived, in the Hermitage district of Pontoise. It had formerly been a convent until the French Revolution.

In 1868, Frédéric Bazille completed two of his most successful figurative paintings, The Family Gathering, started the previous summer, and View of the Village.

Another painting of figures in a landscape he made that summer is Fisherman with a Net (1868), which the following year was refused by the Salon jury. This was painted on the banks of the River Lez, close to Bazille’s family’s estate at Méric. Unlike most of his other figures in a landscape, it was executed relatively quickly with a single preparatory drawing.

The stark contrast between the flesh figures and the rich greens of the surrounding vegetation makes the two men pop out almost incongruously.

Bazille remained productive through the following winter, in part because he and Renoir reorganised their shared studio. His portrait of Pierre Auguste Renoir (1868-69) was a quick oil sketch that probably filled in some free time when waiting for models to become available. It was painted over an abandoned still life, and is a wonderfully painterly snapshot in oils.

His growing success ensured that he had no difficulty finding models. Woman in Moorish Costume was painted during the winter of 1868-69, and is a nod towards the vogue of ‘orientalism’ at the time.

He also painted his second portrait of Edmond Maître in early 1869. He had met Maître (1840-1898) in 1865. Like Bazille, he had moved to Paris to study, in his case law in 1859, but had become a civil servant to allow him sufficient free time to enjoy his pursuits, including music and art. They were to remain close friends until Bazille’s death.

He was visited by Daubigny, and Alfred Stevens invited him to his evening meetings. With continuing hostility from some members of the Salon jury, notably Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bazille had only one painting, View of the Village, accepted for the Salon of 1869. However, he wasn’t discouraged, and seems to have relished the ongoing battle between the Impressionists and Gérôme.

Bazille started painting Summer Scene, also known as Bathers, during the summer of 1869 when he was on holiday in Montpellier. He had already made a series of compositional studies starting in February that year, but when he was working on the canvas, he found it hard going, and complained of headaches and other pains.

He eventually opted for a composition based on strong diagonals, in which the bathers in the foreground are in shade, while the two wrestlers in the distance are lit by sunshine. The landscape background was painted from the hot green mixture of grass with birch and pine trees, typical of the banks of the River Lez near Montpellier. He completed this in early 1870, and it was accepted for the Salon of that year, where it was well-received by the critics.

La Toilette (1870) was one of his three planned projects for the winter of 1869-70. However, with three models required, he had to ask his father for money to cover their cost. This was refused by the Salon jury of 1870, when Daubigny resigned from the jury in protest.

Bazille’s Studio, or The Studio on the Rue La Condamine, was another project he worked on during that winter.

Bazille clearly liked painting his studio, but the three canvases he completed showing his different studios aren’t as simple as they might appear. Inspired by Fantin-Latour’s A Studio in the Batignolles Quarter (1869-70), which includes Bazille, it is in some ways its antithesis.

Bazille was careful in the choice of paintings shown, which include View of the Village on the easel, Fisherman with a Net, Terrace at Méric, and La Toilette as yet unfinished. The largest painting hanging is Renoir’s Landscape with Two Figures, and there is also a small still life by Monet. Bazille used these as pictures within a picture to map his career, from the past to his aspirations for the Salon in 1870, not in his successes so much as in the paintings refused, and better appreciated by the colleagues shown.

Flowers (c 1870) is one of a small group of floral paintings made during the Spring of 1870, when he moved to his own studio in the rue des Beaux-Arts.

Bazille painted two related but different versions of La négresse aux pivoines (Young Woman with Peonies) in the Spring of 1870. His professional model is the same as that used for La Toilette. She is normally read as being a servant engaged in making the floral arrangement, although in the other version (at the National Gallery of Art in Washington) she appears to be a flower seller.

At the time, the dominant flower, the peony, was a relatively recent import to France, and would probably have been seen as bringing a touch of exoticism to the two paintings. The striking vase may have been borrowed from Fantin-Latour. Rishel has proposed that this painting in Montpellier was intended as homage to Gustave Courbet, and that in Washington to Eugène Delacroix.

In the summer of 1870, Bazille worked on three paintings when he was staying alone at Méric. Study for a Young Male Nude appears odd because it was painted over an unfinished painting of two women in a garden, and the lower third of the canvas shows the lower part of their dresses.

On 19 July 1870, France declared war on Prussia. Within a month, Bazille had enlisted in the Third Zouave Regiment. He spent September training in Algeria, then returned into combat in France. On 28 November 1870, Bazille was killed at the Battle of Beaune-la-Rolande. He would have celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday just over a week later.

In but eight years of painting, Bazille had shown great technical skill, originality, and high promise for his future in the Impressionist movement. Unlike his close friends Monet and Renoir, he was particularly interested in and adept at depicting figures in landscapes. That brilliant future, which would surely have changed Impressionism too, was abruptly ended in a futile attempt to relieve the Siege of Paris.

References

Wikipedia.

Hilaire, Michel, & Perrin, Paul (eds) (2016), Frédéric Bazille and the Birth of Impressionism, Flammarion. ISBN 978 2 080 20285 7.

Impressionist painting is today known overwhelmingly from the many landscapes painted by Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro. The figurative paintings of Auguste Renoir are often thought of as more of a commercial undertaking, those of Edgar Degas are seen as exceptions, and Paul Cézanne’s are usually glossed over altogether.

One of the reasons that Impressionist figurative painting is now largely ignored is that its greatest exponent was killed in 1870, just as he was reaching his peak. When Frédéric Bazille was shot dead by Prussian soldiers during the Franco-Prussian War, that changed the course of Impressionism. This weekend I show some of the paintings from the seven short years of his career as an oil painter before his sudden death.

Jean Frédéric Bazille was born into an affluent family in Montpellier, France, a city on the Mediterranean coast with one of the oldest universities in the world. He was inspired to paint when he saw some of Delacroix’s works, but his family wanted him to study medicine. An accommodation was reached, and in 1859, he started his medical studies at Montpellier University.

In November 1862, Bazille left his home city to transfer to medical studies in Paris. A friend introduced him to Charles Gleyre’s studio, and some time in early 1863, he seems to have started as a pupil there, while continuing his medical training. He met Claude Monet there in March or April of that year, and started painting en plein air with him, probably with Sisley and Renoir too. By the end of 1863, he seems to have been making good progress with Gleyre, although his parents were keen to remind him of the precedence of his medical studies.

In January 1864, he started renting his first studio, and that summer travelled to Normandy with Monet. Shortly after that, he failed his medical exams, and dropped out from those studies, leaving him painting full-time.

In the late summer of 1864, in an effort to convince his family that he was serious about his career in art, Bazille started work on his La Robe Rose (The Pink Dress). Using his cousin Thérèse des Hours, aged fourteen, as his model, he painted this from a drawing he made at Méric, looking towards the village of Castelnau-le-Lez, near Montpellier.

In his drawing, the model is looking to the right and out of the picture plane, with her head rotated by about ninety degrees from that shown in this painting. As this was his first painting of a figure set in a landscape, Bazille seems to have wanted to avoid tackling her face, and opted for her looking away from the viewer.

This painting wasn’t seen by the public until 1910, but since then has become accepted as one of his major works, which is surprising for such a challenging motif and such a relative novice.

In the autumn of 1864, when he returned to Paris, Bazille didn’t go back to Gleyre’s studio, but painted mostly from the models in Monet’s studio. In January 1865, the two painters moved into a new studio together, above Delacroix’s former flat in rue de Furstenberg.

It’s not clear exactly when he painted his Self-Portrait with Palette, but it was most probably in 1865. It’s a remarkably accomplished work, given the complexity of arranging the mirror and canvas to result in this unusual pose.

In May 1865, Bazille left the city for the Forest of Fontainebleau, where the Barbizon School had been centred. There he painted Landscape at Chailly in company with Monet, and possibly Renoir and Sisley. Although clearly influenced by that style, Bazille’s colours are much brighter, and escape the sombre browns and greens that dominated Barbizon paintings.

In May of the previous year, Bazille and Monet had travelled to the Channel coast, to Le Havre. This was Monet’s home ground, but the first time that Bazille had explored this coast. Oddly, Bazille painted The Beach at Sainte-Adresse a year later, in May 1865, as one of a pair of paintings for an uncle. It appears to have been partially copied from a painting of the same name by Monet, made when the two had visited Sainte-Adresse the year before. Bazille re-arranged the yachts and changed the staffage of the beach, but the sea, sky, and coastline are essentially the same.

During the summer of 1865, Bazille painted Monet lying in bed, injured, at the Lion d’Or Inn, in The Improvised Field Hospital (1865); sadly I have been unable to find a good image of that painting.

In the late autumn, Gustave Courbet visited Monet and Bazille, and congratulated them on their work. However, in January 1866, Bazille left their shared studio to set up in his own at last. In the Spring, he submitted two paintings to the Salon, of which one, Still Life with a Fish, was accepted. For a while during the winter of 1866-67, Monet lodged in Bazille’s studio.

During this period, he started to paint The Little Gardener (1865-67), but seems to have abandoned it with the foreground incomplete. It was another step in his development of figures in landscapes, and a precursor to his paintings of 1868.

Bazille first wanted to paint at Aigues-Mortes, east of Montpellier, in the summer of 1866, but didn’t get there until May 1867. He then produced one of his most painterly and brilliant landscapes of The Western Ramparts at Aigues-Mortes, as well as several other views, including many sketches.

I include this Portrait of Paul Verlaine (1867) because of its controversial history. On the strength of the signature on it (which isn’t legible in this image), it had been attributed to Gustave Courbet, but most recently has been claimed to have been painted by Bazille. If that’s accurate, its painterly style is surprising and impressive.

In the Spring of 1867, Bazille submitted two more paintings for the Salon, but both were refused. He drafted a petition calling for a new Salon des Refusés, which was signed by Daubigny, a distinguished member of the Salon jury at the time.

During the summer of 1867, Bazille started work on Portraits of the *** Family also known as The Family Gathering, which he didn’t complete until January the following year. This seems to have been one of his most carefully composed paintings, and he devoted a series of sketches to getting the arrangement of the figures and the terrace just right.

The figures include the artist, squeezed in last at the extreme left, an uncle, Bazille’s parents seated on the bench, Bazille’s cousin Pauline des Hours and her husband standing, an aunt and Thérèse des Hours (model for The Pink Dress) seated at the table, his brother Marc and his partner, and at the right Camille, the youngest of the des Hours sisters. This painting marked a special version of a regular summer meeting, as Pauline des Hours and Bazille’s brother Marc married the partners shown in the late summer of 1867.

At the time, such group portraits were exceptional in French art, although they were popular in Britain, and had been so in the past in the Netherlands, of course. It’s perhaps unsurprising that it was exhibited at the Salon in 1868, and remains one of Bazille’s finest and most innovative works.

In January 1868, Bazille moved into a new studio with Renoir, at what was renamed the following year rue La Condamine, in the Batignolles. He was a regular attender at the Café Guerbois with Manet, Degas, Duranty, Zola, Astruc, and Cézanne.

Bazille painted another of his best-known works, View of the Village, during the summer of 1868. He based this on sketches made in the Spring at Saint-Sauveur, of a farmer’s daughter in her Sunday-best dress, in Bel-Air Wood, overlooking the River Lez, near Montpellier. Its location and composition are variations of the theme he first developed in The Pink Dress, and he was also reminded of his model for that painting, his cousin Thérèse des Hours.

He probably completed this in the autumn and early winter of 1868, and the following year it was exhibited at the Salon. Puvis de Chavannes and several of the critics were full of praise for it, and for Bazille. He also made an etching of it, the only print made from one of Bazille’s paintings during his lifetime. It remains his greatest success.

References

Wikipedia.

Hilaire, Michel, & Perrin, Paul (eds) (2016), Frédéric Bazille and the Birth of Impressionism, Flammarion. ISBN 978 2 080 20285 7.

Next month we will commemorate the centenary of the death of one of the most influential Nordic artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Christian Krohg (1852–1925). Although he never achieved great international fame, he was a key figure in the artistic development and life of Edvard Munch, was the first professor and director of the Oslo State Academy of Art, a widely-read author and critic, and a social and political campaigner.

Krohg’s background was anything but poor: his grandfather had been a government minister, and his father was a lawyer and statesman. However, his mother died when he was only eight years old, and the oldest of his four sisters, Marie, assumed responsibility for running the household and bringing him up. His family expected him to study law, but his aspiration was to become a painter. The compromise was that he studied law for four years at university, and attended a drawing school.

In 1873, with the death of his father and the completion of his law studies in Oslo, he went to study painting in Karlsruhe, Germany, where he was taught by the great Norwegian landscape artist Hans Gude among others. In 1875, he transferred to the Royal Academy in Berlin, where he was inspired to become a ‘naturalist’ by Max Klinger and Georg Brandes.

Among the earliest of Krohg’s surviving paintings is his Portrait of Lucy Parr Egeberg, 1876, a demonstration of his skills in line and form.

In 1879, on the encouragement of the artist Frits Thaulow, Krohg travelled to Skagen at the northern tip of Jylland (Jutland) in Denmark, where he joined the group of Nordic painters there who were working largely in Impressionist style. Krohg started his first major project to document the lives of the Gaihede family of Skagen over the next decade.

His early painting of Ane Gaihede as a Woman Cutting Bread (1879) was the start of his social realism. Krohg documents her in almost ethnographic detachment. She is aligned in profile, against an almost bare wall, perfectly framed at three-quarter length.

Another major work from this period began his career-long series of paintings of working seamen, in Port Side! (1879). Krohg started this when he was still in Berlin, and completed it when at Skagen that first summer. It was one of two of his paintings exhibited at the Salon in Paris in 1882, and although it didn’t attract much critical attention, its reviews were positive.

Krohg crops this closer, leaving just a few millimetres beyond the tips of his fingers. He adds the dynamics by ensuring that no lines are anywhere near horizontal or vertical, and you can almost feel the heel of the ship’s deck under your feet. The seaman’s oilskins have been patched repeatedly, and have deeply ingrained grime.

In Niels Gaihede Netting (c 1880), another of his Skagen series, he shows the Gaihedes together, with Niels at work on his fishing net, and Ane in the background, staring sternly. Their surroundings are less spartan, but still frugal: the furniture is basic wood, and has seen better days, probably long ago. A clock and some sheets of prints taken from a magazine are the only objects on the blank white wall behind. Niels wears large wooden working clogs, and his trousers have been patched many times.

After his time in Skagen, Krohg started teaching at an art school for women, which in common with others across Europe was trying to address the growing demand from budding women artists, and the conservative attitudes persisting in major academies at the time. Perhaps influenced by this experience, he opened another theme which he was to explore repeatedly, that of illness in the family, with his Sick Girl (1881). The sickness in question is tuberculosis, then prevalent throughout Norway and much of the rest of Europe, King Death as it was nicknamed at the time.

The girl’s face indicates that her end is drawing near. On her lap is a single pale pink rose, its leaves dropped like tears down the blanket covering her legs. He again crops the image closely. This was a direct inspiration for a motif taken up early in the paintings of Edvard Munch, who eventually made around twenty variants of the same theme.

In 1881, Krohg met the Skagen artist Peder Severin Krøyer, and went to live in Paris for a year. He was particularly influenced by the Impressionists, Edouard Manet, and Gustave Courbet, together with the social realism of Jules Breton, Jules Bastien-Lepage, and Léon Lhermitte.

Among the Impressionists, he seems to have been most attracted to the work of Gustave Caillebotte. Krohg’s Portrait of the Swedish Painter Karl Nordström (1882) (above) appears to have been motivated by Caillebotte’s Man on a Balcony, Boulevard Haussmann (1880), below, which in turn was developed from Caillebotte’s earlier painting of his brother as a Young Man at His Window (1875). Curiously, Krohg didn’t paint this in Paris, but towards the end of his time in France, in the artists’ colony of Grez-sur-Loing, in the Spring of 1882.

Perhaps just before Krohg went to Grez, he may have visited Normandy, to paint this interesting little view of a Village Street in Normandy (1882). Its curved recession of umbrellas with disembodied legs is striking.

Krohg then went to stay in Skagen over much of the next couple of years. His sailing painting Hard Alee (1882) was exhibited in the Salon in Paris that year, and was one of the silver wedding gifts from the Norwegian people to King Oscar II and Queen Sophia of Nassau, who were also the king and queen of Sweden, as the countries were in union at the time.

This time his seaman is sailing a small yacht singlehanded. The tiller, his arms, and a line he is holding, trace a bold and dynamic zigzag down the centre of the canvas. Again Krohg is careful to ensure that there is only one horizontal (or vertical) line, that of the horizon.

Krohg’s paintings from this period at Skagen form an absorbing account of life in the artists’ colony there, and several are displayed in the excellent Skagen Museum there. Charles Lundh in Conversation with Christian Krohg (1883) shows this Norwegian painter who lived from 1856-1908, and Krohg’s legs. Lundh stayed in Skagen that summer, living in a house with Krohg, then painted in Persia for five years. Krohg visited Paris again in the Spring of 1883, then returned to Skagen for the summer.

This Self-portrait (1883) of him clutching his huge smoking pipe with a well-used palette in the other hand, shows him at the age of about 31.

It contrasts with The Day After, Self-portrait (1883) which reflects the intensity of the social events held in Skagen, a true confluence of spirits.

References

Skagens Museum, Denmark
Øystein Sjåstad (2017) Christian Krohg’s Naturalism, U Washington Press. ISBN 978 0 295 74206 9.