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.

The Forest of Fontainebleau covers an area of about 250 square kilometres (almost 100 square miles) to the south-east of Paris. It’s mixed deciduous woodland, much of it ancient, with a royal castle at its centre. Around the edge of the forest are several small villages that have attracted painters since the early nineteenth century, and inspired two schools of painting: Barbizon, named after the village where most of its adherents gathered, and Impressionism. This weekend I show some of their paintings, starting today with examples from the Barbizon period up to the early 1860s.

The forest has been a favourite hunting ground for French kings, and for the Emperor Napoleon.

Among the paintings of François Flameng showing the Napoleonic period, one of the most striking is this scene of Napoleon Hunting in the Forest of Fontainebleau, where the pack is closing in on a cornered stag as the sun sets.

The royal castle, Château de Fontainebleau, was later used by Napoleon III for receptions.

Jean-Léon Gérôme articulated Napoleon III’s aspirations for empire in his elaborate formal painting of the Reception of Siamese Ambassadors by Napoleon III (1864), depicting the grand reception held at Fontainebleau on 27 June 1861. Gérôme attended in the role of semi-official court painter, made sketches of some of the key figures, and was further aided by photographs made by Nadar. He also included himself, and the older artist Ernest Meissonier (1815-1891), in the painting: I believe that they are both at the back, at the far left.

Achille Etna Michallon was one of the first great landscape artists to paint en plein air in the forest. His study of The Fallen Branch, Fontainebleau from about 1816 anticipates the Barbizon School in its motif, style and location. This large branch looks more like a dying animal.

A decade later, the British artist Richard Parkes Bonington visited briefly and both sketched and painted In the Forest at Fontainebleau (c 1825). The rocks here are particularly painterly, suggesting that this may have been started, if not completed, in front of the motif.

Towards 1830, inspired by the paintings of John Constable, several young French landscape painters started visiting the forest. The first was probably Camille Corot, who first painted there in 1822, and returned in earnest in the Spring of 1829, after his long stay in Italy to learn plein air painting technique in the Roman campagna.

In Corot’s Fontainebleau Forest (The Oak) from about 1830, the twisted limbs of the oak have taken time and care, sufficient to give texture and shadows to the trunks and branches. Where the canopy is more broken he painted the leaves in considerable detail.

Corot was joined by Théodore Rousseau, Constant Troyon, Jean-François Millet, Paul Huet, and later Charles-François Daubigny and Henri Harpignies. Although many of their paintings were made in the forest, few have been located with certainty.

When Harpignies was on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, he painted largely en plein air, including this fine view of Fir Trees in Les Trembleaux, near Marlotte from 1854.

The great animalière Rosa Bonheur lived on the edge of the forest, where she painted some fine watercolours, including her Deer in the Forest of Fontainebleau (1862). By that time, the next generation was getting ready to take over from the Barbizon School.

Before the Dutch Golden Age, painting scenes at night had been restricted to religious and other narrative works, and very few if any landscapes had been depicted during the hours of darkness. After all, what’s the point of a view if it’s all dark and you can’t admire it?

The Dutch Republic changed that, in part because it was in Northern Europe, where for several months each year it’s mostly dark, and these nocturnes had novelty value. Among those of the middle class who could afford to, it was fashionable to cover the walls inside your house with paintings, and nocturnes, known then as maneschijntjes (moonshines), certainly brought variety to those collections.

Aelbert Cuyp’s view of the Sea by Moonlight from about 1648 is one of the earlier maritime nocturnes, something of a sub-sub-genre that must have been sought after. Unlike many others, this appears to be faithful to the original light.

During the 1640s, Aert van der Neer, a landscape painter in Amsterdam, started experimenting with his first nocturnes, and came to specialise in them.

His River View by Moonlight from about 1650-55 shows a bustling village on a river, with several boats under way and two windmills in the distance. The moon appears to be depicted faithfully in terms of size, without the common tendency to exaggerate that as a result of the Moon Illusion. Surviving studies for some of these nocturnes demonstrate that van der Neer initially sketched a landscape in daylight, and based the detail in his finished studio painting on that.

In about 1655, he painted this finely detailed River Landscape with Moonlight, with a larger moon lighting clouds dramatically.

Some of his best nocturnes are lit by a combination of the moon and the warmer light from a fire. This undated Estuary Landscape by Moonlight uses light from both sources to great effect. Landscape details are shown largely in silhouette, and lack internal detail except in the group gathered around the fire in the foreground. Van der Neer is unusually faithful to reality in this monochrome, the result of the severely impaired colour vision we all suffer in conditions of low light, when there’s insufficient to enable colour vision using the cone cells in the human retina.

At some stage, van der Neer started painting more destructive fires, including this undated Fire in Amsterdam by Night, leading to another sub-sub-genre that was taken up by others.

In mid 1652, Jan Abrahamsz Beerstraaten seems to have witnessed the destruction by fire of part of the centre of Amsterdam, which formed the basis of his studio painting of The Old Town Hall of Amsterdam on Fire, 7 July 1652 (1652-55). Local inhabitants are walking in orderly queues to boats, in which they escape from the scene. This may have been the same fire painted by van der Neer, above.

Egbert van der Poel specialised in these brandjes,, and probably painted more than any other artist in history. He moved to Delft in 1650, and four years later was a victim of the massive explosion in a gunpowder store there on 12 October 1654. That killed one of his children, and he moved again to Rotterdam.

It has been thought that most of van der Poel’s Fire of a Church with Staffage and Cattle from 1658 is a carefully-composed composite of his experiences. A small church at the edge of a village is well ablaze, and the inhabitants are abandoning it, taking all the possessions they can, including their horses and livestock, and leaving the fire to burn itself out.

Van der Poel’s undated A Fire at Night shows a similar scene and composition, set this time on the bank of a canal.

One established exception to this is van der Poel’s Fire in De Rijp of 1654, completed in 1662. This shows a fire that worked its way through more than eight hundred buildings in the town of De Rijp during the night of 6 January 1654. This left only the northern section of the town standing and inhabitable, and resulted in more casualties than did the more famous explosion in Delft at the end of that year.

Doubt is cast on this received account of van der Poel’s work by sketches such as this, of The Fire in the Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam, in 1645, made in front of the motif using washes with touches of pen and brown ink. Perhaps he was the first ‘ambulance chaser’ who travelled out to sketch fires, from which he later painted his famous brandjes in the studio.

For the non-specialist like Jacob van Ruisdael, winter was an ideal opportunity to explore the effect of negative images, where objects that would normally be seen as dark on a light background were reversed to white on dark.

Van Ruisdael painted at least two such landscapes featuring trees. Both are now known by the same name, and are believed to be from the same decade. This Winter Landscape (c 1660-70), in the Mauritshuis, picks out frosted leaves in the half-light of dusk or dawn, by a hamlet at the water’s edge. In the far distance, to the left of the buildings, there is a church with a spire.

The other version of Winter Landscape (c 1660-70) is in Birmingham, Alabama. With similar sky, cloud, lighting, and composition, the water here appears to have frozen over. The frost on the trees is just as delicately handled.

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.

Landscape painting was another of the genres that had developed little before the Dutch Golden Age, when it became one of the most popular. It also proved an interesting challenge for its exponents, who had to fill their canvases with a land that was almost completely flat. The favoured solution was to look to the heavens, resulting in the first cloudscapes.

Simon de Vlieger’s Beach View from 1643 uses boats, many figures, and careful composition to swell the land over the bottom of its panel. It shows well, though, how important is the sky, marvellously rendered here, with a small group of white birds shown against the grey of the clouds. De Vlieger was born in Rotterdam, and painted in Delft and Amsterdam, where he was best known for his landscapes.

Jan van Goyen’s View of Dordrecht with the Grote Kirk Across the Maas from 1644 is another example of a low horizon cramming a lot of detail into the foot of the painting, leaving the major part devoted to sky.

The action and excitement, even fear, in Aelbert Cuyp’s Thunderstorm over Dordrecht from about 1645 is in its bolt of lightning, with the cattle lying passive in the fields below.

At about the same time, Jacob van Ruisdael painted his first panoramic landscape, this View of Naarden and the Church of Muiderberg from 1647. Still working on a very wide support orientated conventionally in ‘landscape’ mode, his immense sky is no passive backdrop to the land, but the scene of intriguing cloud formations.

Salomon van Ruysdael filled his panels and canvases with the sky, as in his View of Alkmaar from the Sea from about 1650, where he has turned his panel from the usual ‘landscape’ mode. Clouds had now become subjects in their own right, and differences in their form and texture some of the most important features.

At their best, Cuyp’s coastal landscapes, such as The Maas at Dordrecht from about 1650, are full of rich light, earning him the nickname of the Dutch Claude Lorrain. This shows a passage boat packed with passengers, together with its drummer, below a finely detailed sky.

Cuyp also populated the strip at the foot of his landscapes with farm animals. In his Cows in a River from about 1650, the landscape has been minimised to concentrate on the cattle, although most of his panel is still taken by its striking sky.

Unless backed by elevated dunes, there was no way that an artist could expand thin strips of beach and sea. The dominant towers of cumulus clouds in Adriaen van de Velde’s View of a Beach from 1663-65 have become his subjects.

Jacob van Ruisdael also turned his canvases for these portraits of towering clouds, as in his View of Haarlem with Bleaching Fields from about 1665. The distant town of Haarlem with its monumentally large church of Saint Bavo – works of man – are dwarfed by these high cumulus clouds, the works of God. This motif proved so popular that van Ruisdael painted many variants of the same view, making it now one of the most widespread landscapes across the galleries of Europe.

Other artists like Philip de Koninck marvelled at cloud formations, here in his River Landscape from just after the end of the Golden Age, in 1676.

Those of us in the northern hemisphere are just sliding into the autumn/fall, as those in the southern are entering Spring. This weekend I celebrate the seasons with the help of an array of some of the finest painters of their time. This article shows sets up to that painted by Pieter Brueghel the Younger. Tomorrow I conclude from the most famous set of all, completed by Nicolas Poussin shortly before his death in 1665, up to the early twentieth century. In each case, I show the seasons in chronological order, starting with Spring, and ending with winter.

The earliest paintings in modern Europe depicting seasons were calendar miniatures in Books of Hours like those of the Limbourg Brothers, such as the famous Très Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry, from about 1411-1416.

One of the early artists who transferred the theme to full-size easel paintings was Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who made several of his marvellous anthropomorphic portraits in sets of four. Less well-known, but more ambitious, is his Four Seasons in One Head from about 1590. He combines different passages to represent the seasons in turn. Spring is in the flowers on the body, summer in the sheaves of ripe corn, autumn in the fruits decorating the hair, and winter in the leafless face and branches.

Although best known for these anthropomorphic paintings, Arcimboldo was by no means their only exponent. At about the same time, Joos de Momper painted anthropomorphic landscapes, in which figures appear from crafted landforms. These come together in an undated series of four allegories of the seasons.

The most conventional platform for depicting the seasons was, inevitably, in landscape paintings. In another series, de Momper painted one of the finest landscape sets between about 1612-15. Each of these is carefully composed with a checklist of different details: trees and their foliage, domestic animals, birds both species and activity, human dress and activity, weather, sky, and so on. This provides much common ground with traditional East Asian paintings of the seasons, as shown in tomorrow’s article.

The Bruegels had also been working for many years on their series showing the seasons. Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c 1525-1569) had been commissioned to produce designs for prints in the mid 1560s, but after his early death the incomplete project was taken over by Hans Bol (1534-1593) and completed as prints in 1570. Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564–1638) used those as the basis for one of his standard series of paintings, of which two complete sets are known to survive. The images below are of the set in the National Museum of Art of Romania, in Bucharest.

In Spring, gardeners are planting out a formal Italianate flower-garden, a sight that was probably inspired by Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s visit to Italy. It has been suggested that this composition is even more ingenious, in showing March in the foreground, April behind, and May at the furthest end of the garden.

Summer shows the conventional country sight of the wheat harvest, as more fully developed in other paintings by the Brueghels, and one of the most familiar with its golden stooks and bustling activity.

The composition used for Autumn is taken from Bol’s print, although here the number of figures has been reduced to simplify and clarify. The villagers are busy slaughtering and preparing animals, as stooks of corn are laid up in lofts.

Winter draws on several earlier paintings showing skating on ice, and is influenced by those and Bol’s composition used in his 1570 series of prints.

In the closing years of the nineteenth century, following the publication of his illustrated edition of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Walter Crane was becoming more involved in teaching. He lectured at the Manchester School of Art, and for a short period was principal at the Royal College of Art in London. He also travelled, and in 1900 paid a successful visit to Budapest in Hungary to promote a retrospective exhibition of his work.

His watercolour portrait of the beautiful woman knight Britomart from 1900 was probably a sequel to his Spenser project, as she is one of the major figures in that epic, and an allegory of virtue. She is shown on a very English beach, with the chalk cliffs of the south coast behind her, staring wistfully into the distance, her chin propped on the heel of her right hand. She wears full armour, mixed with more feminine clothing. Her left arm rests on her shield, there’s an enchanted lance beside her, and her helmet on a dune behind her.

In the same year, Death, the Reaper may have drawn inspiration from faerie paintings of the previous century, in particular those of Richard Dadd, in the tiny humans cavorting among the wild flowers. Crane invokes one of the most exaggerated moon illusions I’ve seen, to add more atmosphere.

A Masque for the Four Seasons, painted in oils between 1905-09, is one of Crane’s most overtly Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and possibly his last major work in oils. Drawing on his memories of Botticelli’s Primavera, it uses a similar frieze of figures before a dense woodland background, and copious displays of seasonal wild flowers. The four Grace-like women wear loose classical robes, and are colour-coded. From the left they represent Spring, summer, autumn and winter.

Gaps in the trees provide two cameo glimpses of appropriately seasonal agriculture, with Spring ploughing on the left, and the grain harvest in the centre. At the right is Father Time playing the pipes, his hourglass beside him. This coincided with Evelyn De Morgan’s similar frieze The Cadence of Autumn, shown below, also from 1905.

Crane appears to have travelled more widely in the early twentieth century, as far as Colombo in modern Sri Lanka, where he painted this gouache Under the Palms at the Galle Face, Ceylon on 17 February 1907.

Original artwork for illustration can become more difficult to classify, as shown in this watercolour and ink drawing for The Mirror, one of Crane’s illustrations for Arthur Kelly’s The Rosebud and Other Tales from 1909.

Although Crane’s Race of Hero Spirits Pass from 1909 may have been in preparation for an illustration to accompany Charles Kingsley’s poem The World’s Age (1849), it was painted in tempera on canvas, suggesting it may have been intended as a standalone easel painting. This was accompanied by the quotation:
“Still the race of Hero-spirits
Pass the lamp from hand to hand;
Age from age the Words inherits –
‘Wife, and Child, and Fatherland.'”

The fourth modern Olympic Games had been held in London the previous year (1908), and may have been his inspiration.

The Judgment of Paris, painted in 1909 in watercolour, returns to the Pre-Raphaelite frieze. Although competent, it lacks the flair and innovation of his earlier depictions of myth.

On 27 February 1910, Crane was on his travels again, this time in North Africa, where he painted this watercolour of Porte de France, Tunis.

I also have two interesting undated paintings I suspect may have come from Crane’s later years.

Painted in a combination of transparent watercolour and gouache, A Diver is an unusual and challenging motif.

His more illustrative watercolour of Nyads and Dryads melds its Dryads in with their trees, puts the ‘Nyads’ or Naiads (water nymphs) in the water, and has a river god watching from the reeds in the distance.

Late in 1914, after the start of the First World War, his wife Frances became unwell and went on a ‘rest cure’ in Kent. She then suffered an episode of acute mental illness and killed herself. Walter Crane died on 14 March 1915, at the age of 69. Although his paintings had already lost their popularity, as a children’s illustrator his accomplishments live on.

References

Wikipedia

O’Neill M (2010) Walter Crane. The Arts and Crafts, Painting, and Politics, 1875-1890, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 16768 9.

The Dutch Golden Age brought the rapid development of painting genres such as still life, but its most explosive growth was in those depicting everyday life, from interiors showing domestic activities to maritime views. This article introduces some of those new themes.

Painting scenes of ordinary people undertaking the activities of everyday life, commonly if unhelpfully known as genre painting, was one of the most popular through this period.

Gerard ter Borch’s The Spinner from about 1655 is a fine example with its outstanding rendering of the properties of its different surfaces. Seated at her spinning loom in front of her bed, and with her lapdog in place, this ordinary woman is doing what she did as a matter of routine. Ter Borch’s life and career were based in the Dutch Republic, but he also travelled across Europe, and was even honoured with a knighthood when he was working in Madrid.

Jan Vermeer is now best known for his series of paintings of middle-class women in rooms in his house, lit from the windows on the left of the painting. However, he also painted two remarkable works showing the world outside his house in the city of Delft: this townscape of a street and its occupants in The Little Street above, and the View of Delft waterfront below.

The Republic’s thriving cities, where its artists had their workshops, became the focus of a novel type of landscape depicting their buildings and open spaces, instead of trees and fields.

Gerrit Berckheyde’s view of Groote Market in Haarlem from 1673 shows one the largest of the city’s marketplaces at the close of the Golden Age. He was based in this city, which he documented extensively in his cityscapes.

The Republic had a long shoreline, extensive rivers and canals, and the huge enclosed body of water Zuiderzee. Its merchant and military navies were among the largest of the time. Inevitably, water became a substantial part of Dutch painting, and seascapes were another novel development.

Jan van Goyen’s View of Dordrecht with the Grote Kirk Across the Maas (1644) shows a skyline dominated by the still-unfinished 65 metre tower of the Grote Kerk, built between 1285-1470. At the edges of the city are several windmills, which were already associated with the Republic. Van Goyen studied in Haarlem, then set up his studio in The Hague.

Meindert Hobbema’s view of The Haarlem Lock, Amsterdam from 1663-65 is a good example of a working lock with a raising bridge, showing the masts of many ships in the harbour beyond. A pupil of Jacob van Ruisdael, Hobbema was based in Amsterdam throughout his life.

The great masters of Dutch landscape art like Jacob van Ruisdael must have painted many hundreds of windmills, of which one of the best-known is this view of The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede from about 1670. This small town, now a city, is on the bank of the River Rhine, an ideal location for delivering grain by barge, and shipping the resulting flour. Van Ruisdael trained and started his career in Haarlem, then moved to Amsterdam.

With its long coastline and sandy beaches, the Republic was probably the birthplace of the beachscape.

Among Adriaen van de Velde’s earliest surviving paintings are several beach scenes, including The Beach at Scheveningen (1658), which are exceptional for someone who was only twenty-one at the time. Despite the dress and wagons, this has a timeless quality, and gives the most wonderful impression of light and space. Scheveningen is part of the coast of The Hague, although this artist worked in Amsterdam.

More traditional landscapes were adapted to cope with the flat land, and their emphasis shifted to the clouds above.

Under the clouds of Philip de Koninck’s Distant View With Cottages Along a Road (1655), a lone man sits by a pond at the lower right. Behind him a rutted road runs past cottages, down towards a bridge over a river and two towns beyond. The land forms a minority of the view, though, as most of it is cloud. De Koninck was another lifelong resident of Amsterdam.

The Golden Age coincided with a cold phase in the climate, the Little Ice Age, with 1650 the start of its coldest period. Dutch landscapes took advantage of the icy scenes each winter.

Aert van der Neer’s beautifully-lit Sports on a Frozen River (c 1660) includes several who are playing colf, an antecedent of golf which was also played during the warmer months, but was most distinctively played on frozen rivers and canals. This artist also lived in Amsterdam.

Perhaps inevitably, the Dutch Republic profited well from those harsh winters, its merchants doing a thriving trade exporting food to countries whose crops had failed because of the cold weather. Dutch artists appear to have done likewise, and their paintings of winter are now found across Europe, and remain popular on Christmas cards.

In the first article of this pair looking at paintings of windmills, I covered traditional views up to the first of the pre-Impressionists. This article takes this account from around 1850 up to the period between the two World Wars. Although the development of steam power during the nineteenth century brought great changes to many industries, windmills continued to flourish until the middle of the century, and even then they only declined gradually until the Second World War.

Samuel Palmer’s Summer Storm near Pulborough, Sussex from about 1851 refers to Dutch landscape painting, in a very Kentish context. A storm is seen approaching the rolling countryside near Pulborough, now in West Sussex. On the left, in the middle distance, a small bridge leads across to a hamlet set around a prominent windmill, whose blades are blurred as they are being driven by the rising wind.

Windmill styles differ outside northern Europe. When Jean-Léon Gérôme travelled down the River Danube in about 1855, he claimed to have witnessed this moving scene of Recreation in a Russian Camp, Remembering Moldavia (1855). A group of Russian soldiers in low spirits is being uplifted by making music, under the direction of their superior. Gérôme has captured an atmosphere which few of his other paintings achieved: the marvellous light of the sky, the skein of geese on the wing, and the parade of windmills in the distance, all draw together with the soldiers in their sombre greatcoats.

The following year, JC Dahl’s Burning Windmill at Stege is an unusual fire-painting following a traditional sub-genre of the Dutch Golden Age. Although painted well before Impressionism, Dahl echoes the red of the flames in the field and trees to the left of the windmill, and even in his signature.

During the winter of 1864, Johan Jongkind returned to the Netherlands, where he painted this Winter View with Skaters, which is more overtly pre-Impressionist.

Jongkind’s watercolour sketch of a Windmill at Antwerp of 1866 is even more painterly.

Claude Monet’s second visit to the Netherlands in 1874 ensured that The Windmill on the Onbekende Gracht, Amsterdam (1874) became a part of the history of Impressionism. This shows a windmill known as Het Land van Beloften, De Eendracht or De Binnen Tuchthuismolen, which was built in the late seventeenth century, and was moved from there to Utrecht just a couple of years after Monet painted it on the banks of the River Amstel.

Frits Thaulow’s painstakingly detailed View of Amerikavej in Copenhagen (1881) shows a windmill in the background, where it’s being used to provide power to the adjacent industrial site.

Volodymyr Orlovsky’s Ukrainian Landscape from 1882 shows one of the distinctive windmills on the elevated bank alongside a major river and its more populated floodplain to the right.

It may not have been Monet who first made the visual association between Dutch windmills and fields of tulips in flower, but his 1886 painting of Tulip Field in Holland must be its best-known depiction.

When Vincent van Gogh moved to Paris in 1886, he stayed with his brother Theo in Montmartre. He painted a series of marvellous views of the remaining windmills there, including the most famous of them all, Le Moulin de la Galette (1887), in whose gardens Renoir had painted his Bal du moulin de la Galette a decade earlier.

Paul Signac’s Rotterdam. The Windmill. The Canal. Morning (1906) is a Divisionist view of a windmill in the centre of this major port.

It was a Dutch painter who took windmills from Impressionism to the modernist styles of the twentieth century: Piet Mondrian.

Piet Mondrian’s gentle nocturne of Oostzijdse Mill on the River Gein by Moonlight from about 1903 is one of several views of windmills that he painted in Impressionist and post-Impressionist style.

When he started experimenting with vibrant colour and patterned brushstrokes in about 1908, this painting of a Mill in Sunlight marks his point of departure.

The Red Mill (1911) continues Mondrian’s move towards areas of flat colour. That year he left the windmills of Amsterdam and moved to Paris. To mark his move into the avant garde of that city, he dropped the second ‘a’ from his surname, going from Mondriaan to Mondrian. He became increasingly influenced by Georges Bracque and the Cubist works of Pablo Picasso, and the purely abstract paintings for which he remains well-known today.

Serhii Svitoslavskyi’s Ukrainian Landscape with Windmills, probably from about 1911, shows a small cluster of windmills with grazing livestock.

By the end of the First World War, milling grain had become more centralised, and the hundreds of thousands of small windmills across northern Europe lost their business. A few have been preserved, and some are still used for specialist products such as stoneground flour. But the unmistakable sight of a windmill on the skyline had been lost from much of the land.

During the 1930s, the Raviliouses started spending time in Sussex, where they became close friends with Peggy Angus, whose house The Furlongs at Beddingham, East Sussex, became a second home. Eric Ravilious became particularly fond of painting the chalk downs there, as in his Windmill (1934). This isn’t a windmill in the traditional sense, but a smaller wind-driven pump to extract water from the chalk, mainly for irrigation.

There seems to be some confusion over what windmills are, so this weekend I show a selection of paintings of them across Europe. This article covers the period between 1500-1850, when they remained popular. From the twelfth century until the twentieth, they were a common sight on many skylines in northern Europe. Preceding the better-known vertical windmills were various horizontal designs, and windmills continued to flourish until the middle of the nineteenth century. Used wherever there was a need for driving a rotating axle, they were widely employed to grind cereals into flour, power sawmills, make paper, grind materials, and thresh corn.

Hieronymus Bosch’s uniquely imaginative paintings often featured realistic background landscapes. One recurring setting is a city based on Antwerp or his home town of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, with a windmill closest to the viewer. This appears in the centre panel of his triptych The Adoration of the Magi from about 1490-1500, for instance.

A similar windmill appears in a slightly different setting in the version of The Temptation of Saint Anthony now in Lisbon, from around 1500-10, in its right wing. This is shown in the detail below.

The Bruegels also worked amid many windmills, but none seems so prominently out of place than in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Procession to Calvary from 1564. Windmills were commonly built on hills, where they would benefit from the most consistent wind, but this example on a towering crag is not only geographically inappropriate, but completely impractical. It stands on a circular platform to allow the mill to rotate according to the direction of the wind, but would hardly have been above Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion.

More at home are the half dozen windmills clustered around the port of Dordrecht in the Netherlands, shown in Jan van Goyen’s View of Dordrecht with the Grote Kirk Across the Maas from 1644.

Rembrandt painted few non-narrative landscapes, but among them is this dramatic view of The Mill (1645-48) seen in the rich rays of twilight.

The great masters of Dutch landscape art like Jacob van Ruisdael must have painted many hundreds of windmills, of which one of the best-known is this view of The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede from about 1670. This small town, now a city, is on the bank of the River Rhine, an ideal location for delivering grain by barge, and shipping the resulting flour. This should have kept the mill as busy as the wind allowed, and its owner prosperous.

This view of a Landscape with Windmills near Haarlem was painted by John Constable in 1830, almost two centuries after the original made by Jacob van Ruisdael.

Windmills were also a common sight along the lower reaches of the River Thames. William Hogarth’s print from his Industry and Idleness series shows its anti-hero Idle being rowed out to join his ship at Cuckold’s Point on the River Thames, opposite what were then the West Indian docks, between Limehouse and Greenwich. Long after these windmills had gone, this section of the river was still involved with the grain trade.

There were other windmills upstream of the city of London too. In what must be Thomas Girtin’s most famous painting of The White House at Chelsea, from 1800, the artist looks upstream of the River Thames from a location close to the modern Chelsea Bridge. The landmarks shown include, from the left, Joseph Freeman’s windmill (or Red House Mill), a horizontal air mill, the white house close to where Battersea Park is now, Battersea Bridge, and Chelsea Old Church. Girtin painted this when he was twenty-five, and showing greater promise than his rival JMW Turner. Two years later Girtin died of asthma.

A few years later the topographic painter John Varley painted this close-up view of the same Red House Mill, Battersea, Surrey, looking back in the opposite direction.

Some of the well-known windmills supplying the city of Paris with its flour were those above its outskirts on Montmartre Hill. Georges Michel’s view of The Mill of Montmartre was probably painted in about 1820, by which time there were only a few left.

Richard Parkes Bonington probably painted Barges on a River in around 1825-6 when he was travelling near the French town of Nantes. The windmill seen behind the trees is reminiscent of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting.

During his detailed realist period early in his career, Johan Jongkind painted this View of Maassluis in Winter (1848). Following the long tradition of landscape painting in the Netherlands, he sets his horizon low and paints a wonderful winter sky.

Once the ripe grain had been cut, the crop had to be gathered into sheaves, then those were assembled into stooks for transport by cart to await threshing, mechanical separation of the precious grain from straw. The latter was an important building material, and was used as thatch for the roof of most country buildings across Europe.

Anna Ancher, wife of Danish painter Michael Ancher, caught this procession of Harvesters on their way to their work in 1905, near her home in Skagen on the north tip of Jylland (Jutland). The leader carries his scythe high as they pass through a field of ripe wheat.

Léon Augustin Lhermitte’s famous Harvesters’ Pay from 1882 shows four harvesters bearing their heavy-duty scythes, at the end of the day. They are awaiting payment by the farmer’s factor, who holds a bag of coins for the purpose. In the right foreground are two tied sheaves of cut wheat, with a lightweight sickle resting on them.

Adrian Stokes had further to travel for this golden view of Harvest Time in Transylvania (c 1909), one of many paintings that he and his wife made of their protracted visits to Eastern Europe.

By tradition on Norwegian farms, cut cereal wasn’t left to dry in low stooks, as in most of Europe and America, but built onto poles. In a series of paintings and prints, Nikolai Astrup developed these Corn Stooks (1920) into ghostly armies standing on parade in the fields, the rugged hills behind enhancing their strangeness.

John Linnell’s Harvest Home, Sunset: The Last Load (1853) shows the final wagonload of cut grain leaving the fields at dusk, as the harvest is completed.

Félix Vallotton’s The Sheaves from 1915 is one of his moving and symbolic images of the Great War. It’s late summer in 1914, harvest time, and the ripe corn is being cut and stacked in sheaves. But where are all those farmworkers, whose rakes rest against the sheaves, and whose lunch-basket sits on the ground ready to be eaten? Where is the wagon collecting the harvest, and why is the white gate in the distance closed?

In PS Krøyer’s Threshing in the Abruzzi from 1890, teams of oxen are trampling the crop to thresh it.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Grain Threshers, Egypt (1859) also shows this as one of the more traditional employments for animals, here drawing a threshing sledge.

By the end of the nineteenth century, animals were being used as a source of power, as shown in Albert Rigolot’s painting of The Threshing Machine, Loiret from 1893. One of the early uses for steam engines was to power similar machines before they were made mobile under their own power, as traction engines.

This is the time of year when, in the Northern Hemisphere, the grain harvest is in full swing, when the fields of cereal crops have ripened gold in the summer sun and are ready to be cut. This weekend I celebrate the climax of the farming year with some of the finest paintings of harvest in European art. Today I concentrate on cutting using a reaping hook or scythe, and tomorrow I look at the formation of sheaves and stocks, and threshing to separate the grain.

In the centuries before mechanical harvesting, cutting the crop was hard work and labour-intensive. It took about 4 worker-days to cut an acre of grain using a sickle or hook, while using a scythe typically took only 2 sweated worker-days per acre. Scythes appear to have been used almost exclusively by men, while sickles and hooks were used by both men and women.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Harvesters from 1565 shows the whole village turned out to cut, process and transport the crop. This is a visual encyclopaedia of each of the steps involved in the grain harvest, as shown in the details below.

These men are cutting a crop of wheat close to the base of the stem using scythes, leaving short stubble. This ensures the best yield of straw as well as grain.

Behind these workers eating bread baked from flour ground from cereal grown in the same fields, cut cereal is tied first into sheaves before they are gathered into stooks.

In about 1833, when Samuel Palmer painted his wonderful Harvest Moon near Shoreham in Kent, harvesting usually went on well into the night. These are mostly women wielding sickles or reaping hooks to cut a small field of wheat. The cut stalks are then formed into stooks and piled onto an oxcart for transport to nearby farm buildings.

Palmer’s mentor John Linnell painted The Harvest Cradle twenty-five years later, in 1859. The harvesters have their backs to the viewer, but appear to be using scythes to cut this wheat crop. Bundles of cut grain are tied as sheaves, then assembled into stooks in the foreground.

He painted Wheat for the dealer Thomas Agnew in about 1860, and it became one of Linnell’s more successful works. It was shown at the Royal Academy shortly after completion, then at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867.

Jean-François Millet’s Ceres (The Summer) from about 1864-65 is unusual in showing the goddess holding a sickle with a serrated edge, surrounded by sheaves of wheat. On her left she holds a shallow winnow used to separate the lighter chaff from the heavier grain, after threshing.

During the nineteenth century some attached cradles to the blade, to make sheaving easier. This is shown in Laurits Andersen Ring’s painting of Harvest. The crop being cut here may well be rye rather than wheat. The artist got his brother to model for this “monument to the Danish peasant” during the summer of 1885, while working on his farm near Fakse, on Sjælland (Zealand), Denmark.

Volodymyr Orlovsky’s Harvest in Ukraine from 1880 shows wheat being cut on the steppe, with the worker in the foreground carrying a scythe, but those cutting in the middle distance bent over as if using hooks instead.

The young woman in Mykola Pymonenko’s portrait of a Reaper from 1889 has been cutting what could be rye or wheat using a heavier bagging hook, although she isn’t using the hooked stick normally required for the technique, so could be using it as a regular reaping hook. The woman behind her demonstrates that these harvesters are cutting low to keep a good length of straw on the harvested crop.

In the first of these two articles showing masterly landscape paintings of summer storms, I had reached John Constable in the early 1830s.

Of Constant Troyon’s early paintings the most outstanding must be The Approaching Storm from 1849. Set on a river worthy of Constable, two anglers appear to be readying themselves for the torrential rain heading towards them, while others still wander in the last patch of sunshine on the far bank.

Jules Noel’s Panorama of the Town of Dieppe (c 1865) shows a large picnic party on the cliffs overlooking the town of Dieppe on the coast of northern France. These families seem blissfully unaware of the dark clouds and heavy rain already over the land to the right.

One of the finest and most dramatic of Albert Bierstadt’s paintings from his second expedition to the West in 1863 is this of A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie from 1866. Its foreground shows a pastoral valley floor with a native American camp, in mottled light. Some people and their animals are seen making haste to return from the pastures to the shelter of the camp. A small rocky outcrop has trees straggling over it, which are silhouetted against the brilliant sunlight on the lake behind, in the middle distance.

Behind the lake the land rises sharply, with rock crags also bright in the sunshine. In the background the land is blanketed by indigo and black storm-clouds. Those are piled high, obscuring much of Mount Rosalie, but its ice-clad peaks show proud, high up above the storm, with patches of blue sky above and beyond them. A single large bird, an eagle perhaps, is seen in silhouette, high above the lake.

It was Volodymyr Orlovsky’s painting of Harvest on the steppe in Ukraine, in 1882, that apparently earned the artist’s promotion to Professor in the Imperial Academy.

Few artists ever get to witness tropical storms, but after his time painting winter storms at Cullercoats in England, Winslow Homer witnessed and painted this Hurricane, Bahamas in 1898.

In 1903, Gustav Klimt spent his summer holiday at Attersee with his partner’s family, where he painted this landscape of an Approaching Thunderstorm. Many of his other landscape paintings made during his summers away show no sky at all, but this is an exception.

Thunderstorm at Vernouillet is an atmospheric landscape painted by Pierre Bonnard in 1908, or the following year. Vernouillet is on the southern bank of the river Seine, midway between the centre of Paris and Monet’s property at Giverny.

The young Canadian artist and canoeist Tom Thomson excelled in rapid sketching in oils, with several witnessed accounts of him dashing off a painting in little more than fifteen minutes. As a result he was able to capture many transient effects, such as the passing thunderstorm in Thunderhead from 1912-13.

If you’re fortunate, the storm is soon gone, its humid air blows away, and summer returns.

Arkhyp Kuindzhi specialised in painting in spectacular light. After a Thunderstorm from 1879 is one of his oil sketches capturing the brilliant colour and light following heavy summer rain on the steppe.

As we near the grain harvest in the northern hemisphere, so come the summer storms. Just as the farmworkers have ventured out into the fields of dry, ripe wheat, the heavens above become inky black as towering clouds bring torrential rain and rolling thunder. This weekend we’re in for more than our fair share, in the company of many of the great landscape artists.

At the dawn of modern landscape painting, Giorgione’s The Tempest from about 1504-8 centres on an approaching storm. The sky is filled with inky dark clouds, and there’s a bolt of lightning in the distance. The figures here imply an underlying narrative, but today that can only be speculated.

Nicolas Poussin’s setting of a Landscape during a Thunderstorm with Pyramus and Thisbe (1651) shows the city of Babylon in the distance, along a picturesque and pastoral valley. But the peacefulness of this landscape has been transformed by the sudden arrival of a thunderstorm: the gusty wind is already bending the trees, and near the centre of the view a large branch has broken with its force. Two bolts of lightning make their way to the hills below.

There’s frantic activity in response not only to the storm, but to a lioness attacking a horse, whose rider has fallen. An adjacent horseman is about to thrust his spear into the back of the lioness, while another, further ahead, is driving cattle away from the scene. Others on foot, and a fourth horseman, are scurrying away, driven by the combination of the lioness and the imminent storm.

In the foreground, Pyramus lies dying, his sword at his side, and his blood flowing freely on the ground, down to a small pond. Thisbe has just emerged from sheltering in the cave, has run past the bloodied shawl at the right, and is about to reach the body of her lover.

Still attributed to Poussin’s pupil and brother-in-law Gaspard Dughet, this Landscape with Lightning from 1667-69 lacks the subtlety and finesse of the master himself, but shows a bolt of lightning striking ground and setting a fire in the countryside. In the foreground, a couple flee from among trees being shattered by the strong gusts brought by the storm.

The founding fathers of landscape painting in the Northern Renaissance weren’t to be outdone by those of the south: Aelbert Cuyp’s Thunderstorm over Dordrecht from about 1645 is amazingly effective and accurate, considering it was painted more than two centuries before anyone saw high-speed photographic images of lightning.

In Claude-Joseph Vernet’s series The Four Times of Day from 1757, by Midday the clouds of early morning have built into squally showers. While two people are fishing with nets, a couple with an infant and a dog, in the left foreground, are hurrying for shelter before heavy rain starts. Behind them a shepherd has brought their flock under a grove of trees. Seagulls are wheeling and soaring in the strengthening wind.

George Morland’s Before a Thunderstorm (1791) shows well the rising wind and threatening sky just before a summer storm strikes.

When he was only sixteen, in 1821, Samuel Palmer painted this watercolour sketch At Hailsham, Sussex: a Storm Approaching, a faithful representation of Cumulus congestus building in the distance.

Palmer’s watercolour Summer Storm near Pulborough, Sussex from about 1851 refers to Dutch landscape painting, but set in a very Kentish context. A storm is seen approaching the rolling countryside near Pulborough, now in West Sussex, in the south-east of England. On the left, in the middle distance, a small bridge leads across to a hamlet set around a prominent windmill, whose blades are blurred as they’re driven by the wind. Beyond that mill are fields of ripening cereal.

John Constable’s half-size and well-developed study for Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows places an angler in the foreground, as a thunderstorm builds over the Wiltshire countryside behind. Sadly, the fisherman didn’t survive into Constable’s finished painting.