This weekend we’re escaping from the chills of February to travel to Capri, off the coast of southern Italy. From the north coast of this island you can look across the Bay of Naples towards the crowded city to the north. It’s a small island, with two little towns: Capri in the east, spilling down to harbours on the north and south coasts, and Anacapri, nestling in the hills to the west.

It’s ruggedly hilly, with spectacular coastal scenery of high sea cliffs, small bays, and plenty of rock. Although only around 6 km (4 miles) long, it rises to nearly 600 metres (2,000 feet) at its highest point, Monte Solaro. It has everything to offer the coastal painter, including a superb climate, and a refuge from the winters of northern Europe.

Among the more famous artists who have stayed on this island are Albert Bierstadt and John Singer Sargent, while Adrian and Marianne Stokes honeymooned there. Although it has been claimed that Capri only became popular with painters in the late nineteenth century, its fame started rather earlier.

Carl Blechen visited the island in 1828, made hundreds of sketches there, and developed some into finished paintings when he was back in his Berlin studio. This painting of Tiberius Rocks, Capri (1828-9) seems to have been at least started en plein air, in oils on paper, although he may have finished it after his return. It shows the north coast, looking east to the peak of Monte Tiberio, with the Bay of Naples in the background.

Blechen’s superb finished painting of Marina Grande, Capri (1829) was made in the studio, though. This shows the north coast again, looking from the west of the Marina Grande towards the east, with the Tiberius Rocks and Monte Tiberio in the distance, and that may well be Vesuvius in the far distance.

Heinrich Jakob Fried’s painting of The Blue Grotto, Capri (1835) shows one of the island’s most famous sights, which has been the motif for many paintings since. This has to be visited by boat, and is at the north-western tip of the island. It features in August Kopisch’s book, published in German in 1838, describing his re-discovery of this cave in 1826, which popularised the island across northern Europe. Fried visited the cave in 1835, and probably painted this in a studio in Naples shortly afterwards, just in time for the book’s publication.

Jakob Alt’s view of Marina Grande, Capri (1836) is an extraordinary watercolour with painstaking detail. His view reverses Blechen’s, looking across the harbour from the east to the west, dropping almost to water level. Alt visited Italy in the mid-1830s, during which he too painted the Blue Grotto.

Marie-Caroline de Bourbon, Princess Caroline of Naples and Sicily, was an enthusiastic painter as well as being an avid collector of landscape paintings. The last serious Bourbon pretender to the crown of France, she visited Capri in the early 1840s, after she had been released from imprisonment in the Château of Blaye, and before moving to a palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice. Her unusual painting of Brothers in the Carthusian Monastery of San Giacomo, Capri (1842) incorporates a vignette landscape view of the coast, almost in the manner of the Renaissance.

The great American landscape painter Albert Bierstadt visited Capri on his way back to New Bedford in 1857, following his training in Düsseldorf, Germany, only six years after he had started painting in oils. His Fishing Boats at Capri (1857) is painted in oils on paper, suggesting it may well have been started in front of the motif, and is quite unlike his mature style.

Bierstadt’s The Marina Piccola, Capri was painted on canvas in 1859, when the artist made his first journey westward to sketch American landscapes, and is more typical of the drama of his mature style. This smaller harbour is on the south side of the island, to the south-west of the town of Capri, and this view looks to the east, showing the distant sea stacks of the Faraglioni at the right.

William Stanley Haseltine was another great American landscape painter associated with the Hudson River School, and first met Bierstadt in Düsseldorf in the mid 1850s. Haseltine lived in Rome in 1857-58, and drew and painted both the Roman campagna and Capri during that time. Having made his reputation with dramatic depictions of the New England coast, he moved back to Rome in 1867, from where he travelled to paint across Europe. His paintings of Capri from this period proved popular with visiting Americans, and remain among some of the finest realist views of the island. Arco Naturale, Capri from about 1870 shows another of Capri’s famous sights, a natural rock arch on its short eastern coast.

Haseltine’s Isle of Capri: The Faraglioni, from the 1870s, shows these stacks from the north-east, and was probably painted at the Villa Malparte, to the south of the Arco Naturale. He skilfully suggests scale with the tiny boats shown at their foot, although there may be a little exaggeration.

Alessandro la Volpe was an Italian who was born in, and worked from, Naples. His View of Capri (1875) shows the island in a heat haze, from the hills above Sorrento, to the north-east.

Hans Peter Feddersen was another former student from Düsseldorf, although after Bierstadt and Haseltine. He visited Italy and Capri from April to June 1877, when he painted this view of the Marina Grande, Capri in oils, probably en plein air. Rather than follow early examples, he looks to the north across the harbour, with Vesuvius in the background.

In the summer of 1878, John Singer Sargent had just completed his studies with Carolus-Duran, and had already started to have success at the Salon in Paris. He went off on a working holiday to Capri, staying in the village of Anacapri, as was popular with other artists at the time.

Getting a local model was tricky, because of the warnings that women were given by priests. One local woman, Rosina Ferrara, seemed happy to pose for him, though. She was only 17, and Sargent a mere 22 and just developing his skills in portraiture, following the advice of his teacher Carolus-Duran. Over the course of that summer, Sargent painted at least a dozen works featuring Rosina, who seems to have become an obsession.

One, Dans les Oliviers, à Capri, he exhibited at the Salon the following year. He sent a near-identical copy back for the annual exhibition of the Society of American Artists in New York, in March 1879.

Sargent also painted a pair of views of what was probably the roof of his hotel. In View of Capri, above, made on cardboard, Rosina stands looking away, her hands at her hips. In the other, Capri Girl on a Rooftop, below, she dances a tarantella to the beat of a friend’s tambourine.

Albert Hertel trained in Düsseldorf in 1868-69, prior to which he had lived as a student in Rome for several years. He established himself as a landscape painter in Berlin, from where he seems to have returned to Italy and visited Capri in the late 1870s. His View of the Shores of Capri with People (1879) shows a small bay near Punta Carena, at the south-western tip of the island.

Landscape painters came to the Alhambra in the Andalucian city of Granada relatively late. But once they started to visit the Prado in Madrid to view and copy its magnificent collection of masters, a steady succession travelled south to paint the Moorish palaces of the Alhambra.

To remind you, this plan from Openstreetmap and its contributors shows the modern site, as of 2013.

Constantin Uhde’s plan of 1892 shows the layout of the Nasrid palaces:

• Red is the site of the Palace of Comares and the Palaces of the Ambassadors.
• Green is the Palace of the Lions.
• Yellow is the Mexuar.
• Blue is the Garden of Lindajar and later quarters of the Emir.

For Edmund Wodick, who must have visited Granada to paint this spectacular landscape in early 1886, it was probably the last work that he completed. Shortly after this, he developed pneumonia and died at the age of 69. He painted this just outside the city walls, looking across at the Alhambra and its towers, down towards the lush green plain and the snow-capped peaks in the far distance.

Long before the brash colours of the Fauves, those who painted the Alhambra in the rich light of dawn or dusk surprised viewers with the intensity of its colours. Henry Stanier’s view of the Alhambra from San Nicolas from 1886 is a good example, and another from late in an artist’s career. Stanier was a topographical draughtsman and sometime Orientalist from the city of Birmingham in England, whose work is now almost forgotten.

Local painter and amateur archaeologist Manuel Gómez-Moreno González was fascinated by the history of the Alhambra, and the first to compile an account of its depictions in paintings. His own works showing the site include The Alhambra and Castle of Torres Bermejas from about 1887, painted from an unusual viewpoint below its ridge.

The Alhambra dominates the left, with the much smaller castle to the right. The snow-clad peaks of the Sierra Nevada rise to over 3,000 metres (10,000 feet), and resemble a bank of white cloud peeking over the skyline in between.

Hernandez Miguel Vico, another local artist, also favoured a view from below in his undated painting of Alhambra and Cuesta de los Chinos. In 1877, he exhibited an interior of the Alhambra at the Salon in Paris, but I have been unable to locate an image of that.

The founder of the School of Fine Arts at Yale University, John Ferguson Weir, had studied in Europe, and his brother Julian Alden Weir was a student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Later in his career, John Ferguson Weir returned to Europe on several trips, and in about 1901 painted this fine view of The Alhambra, Granada, Spain.

As far as I can tell, Laurits Tuxen was the first Danish artist to paint a View of the Alhambra, a year after marrying his second wife. He was one of the leading members of the Skagen Painters, ‘Danish Impressionists’, and completed this en plein air on 4 May 1902, in marvellously fine weather.

The early twentieth century brought two of the greatest artists to have painted the Alhambra: Joaquín Sorolla, who seems to have been most active in Granada in 1909, and John Singer Sargent, who visited in 1912 at least.

Sorolla came from Valencia, and is still best-known for his magnificent paintings of people and activities on the beach there. He travelled extensively during his career, but doesn’t seem to have painted in Granada until 1909, when he also spent five months in the USA. These four oil sketches are a marked contrast to the more familiar finished paintings that he exhibited.

Los Picos Tower is a virtuoso oil sketch looking along the precipitous walls and towers at the edge of the site, and beyond to the dazzling white buildings of the city.

Hall of the Ambassadors, Alhambra, Granada (1909) shows this classical view with some of Sorolla’s vigorous brushstrokes texturing the paint.

Tower of the Children (1909) looks past another tower towards the distant mountains, the sunlight filtering through a curtain of trees.

In Sorolla’s Albaicin, he looks down from one of the Alhambra’s towers at the bleached white buildings below.

The only available image of Sargent’s paintings of the Alhambra I have able to find is this watercolour showing his sister Emily, also a keen artist, sketching In the Generalife (1912). Behind her is Jane de Glehn, and to the right is a Spanish friend known only as Dolores. The unusual highlight effect seen in bushes above them, and on parts of the ground, was produced by scribbling with a colourless beeswax crayon, which resists the watercolour paint.

Théo van Rysselberghe had first visited Spain in 1881 or 82, when he too went to the Prado, and travelled on to Morocco. He visited Andalucia in company with John Singer Sargent in the Spring of 1884, but doesn’t appear to have painted the Alhambra until after his retirement to the Côte d’Azur in 1911. He then painted Fountain at the Generalife in Granada in 1913, in his late high-chroma style.

The last two paintings in my selection are both by the eclectic Valencian painter Antonio Muñoz Degrain, and demonstrate his wide range of styles.

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.

His 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 the sunset.

What better way to end our weekend away from the chill and gloom of winter.

Reference

Wikipedia.

After the flurry of paintings showing early ballooning in the late eighteenth century, painters had left it to photographers to capture pioneering achievements of aviation. Then, on 25 July 1909, the Frenchman Louis Blériot was the first person to fly an aircraft from France to England over the Channel.

There were many prints made claiming to show Blériot’s great achievement. Ernest Montaut’s Blériot Crossing the Channel on 25 July 1909 (1909) is particularly poignant, as Montaut died later that year at the age of only thirty-one. This is a hand-coloured pochoir print, one of Montaut’s specialities using a lithographic stone. Montaut was best-known as a poster artist, and is believed to have been the first graphic artist to use speed lines and perspective distortion, derived from photography, to depict rapid movement. Both techniques are shown here.

H. Delaspre’s chromolithograph of The Channel Flight. Blériot, July 25th 1909 (1909) is another of the better prints produced at the time. In contrast to Montaut, he didn’t use any devices to indicate the aircraft was moving at speed, apart from showing a propellor disc, and it accordingly looks static in the air.

Henri Rousseau had been ridiculed during his lifetime, but one artist who took him seriously and appreciated his paintings was Robert Delaunay. In the last couple of years before the First World War, Delaunay painted at least two works inspired by early aviation. Sun, Tower, Airplane from 1913 brings together two of the symbols of the early twentieth century: the Eiffel Tower in Paris, opened in 1889, and a Wright type aircraft in flight.

The following year, Delaunay painted his Homage to Blériot (1914). The Eiffel Tower appears again in the top right corner, and a brilliantly coloured image of Blériot’s distinctive monoplane in the lower left.

The First World War wasn’t the first in which aircraft played a role in combat. Balloons had even been used in the American Civil War, and most of the aviation firsts were set by the Italo-Turkish War of 1911-12: the first aerial reconnaissance flight, first aerial bombing, and first aircraft shown down by rifle fire.

The First World War was painted by a host of war artists, many going to the front, some of them highly accomplished painters. Its scale, devastation, and sheer inhumanity were hard to depict in photographs, and the many fine paintings of the war form its most vivid visual record.

Eric Walter Powell’s view of BE2C Aeroplanes over the Somme from 1916 is one of the first paintings to show the world above the clouds. Although people had become used to views from mountains, when the first aerial photographs were made in about 1885, they showed the earth in a completely new way. Powell shows this unfamiliar landscape/cloudscape with its oblique view of the ground below, and the scattered small cumulus clouds of a fine day.

One of the most famous paintings of aviation during the war is John Singer Sargent’s Crashed Aeroplane (1918). Two farmers get on with the harvest, with that British biplane planted in the hillside behind.

Louis Weirter’s An Aerial Fight (1918) is one of the first paintings showing the war in the air, as British and German biplanes fight among scruffy clouds. Comparison with Montaut’s use of speed lines from ten years earlier shows how static aircraft in flight look without them.

David M Carlile’s Hun Plane Caught in Searchlights – Arras-Cambrai Road – France – Sept 1918 (1918) is an atmospheric watercolour showing a scene from the final months of the war. I’ve been unable to discover anything about this artist other than that he was a Private at the time.

François Flameng’s superb watercolour of Return of a Night Bombing Flight of Voisin Aircraft from 1918 is perhaps one of the best paintings of the war in the air. Flameng was a successful portraitist, and a close friend of John Singer Sargent and Paul Helleu, who distinguished himself during his time as a war artist.

With the war over, painting was hurtling into modernism, and hardly an appropriate place for motifs such as aircraft or flight.

Paul Klee painted some exceptions to that, in at least two works showing balloons. Red Balloon from 1922 was made using oil paint and probably some sort of transfer process onto a gauze that had been primed using chalk, like a gesso. The red balloon of the title is shown as a circular disc amid other geometrical shapes.

Four years later, Klee turned to a modification of that motif, in his Der Luftballon (1926). Here his board was primed in black, and appears to have extensive graffiti.

My last artist is even more recent, a war artist of the Second World War whose paintings came to explore the skies above us: Paul Nash.

The startling distant view in Nash’s Battle of Britain (1941) incorporates many elements of air warfare, including vapour trails (contrails), smoke marking the spin and crash of a downed aircraft, formation flight, and defensive airships. Below this action are the low hills, estuary, and a winding river typical of much of the English south coast. By emphasising the forms and patterns made in the sky, as seen from high above the ground, Nash increases the distance from this air war, detaching the story of the battle from the people involved.

Using another aerial location, Nash’s Defence of Albion (1942) shows a Sunderland ‘flying boat’ operating in rough seas off the Portland, Dorset, coast; cues for the location are given by the large blocks of limestone from the quarries in the distance. Among the duties of these aircraft were anti-submarine patrols, and part of a German U-boat is shown in the right foreground to emphasise this, in an unreal composite.