Between about 1782-85, the great French landscape painter Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750–1819) built his personal library of oil sketches of the countryside around the city of Rome. He then returned to France, where he assembled them into finished paintings in his studio.

A Capriccio of Rome with the Finish of a Marathon from 1788 is a direct descendant from the pioneering landscapes of Nicolas Poussin of more than a century earlier. Groups of figures at the left and right are watching athletes run in to the finish of their race. Behind them is a town based on passages of Roman architecture, but isn’t recognisably a depiction of Rome. This is an intermediate between the completely idealised landscapes of Poussin, and later topographically accurate views.

Valenciennes then wrote up this technique of sketching in oils in front of the motif in his influential manual on landscape painting published in 1800. This remained the standard work well into the twentieth century, and was used by Impressionists including Paul Cézanne. Most budding landscape artists travelled across Europe to train in the Campagna during their formative years.

Achille Etna Michallon was one of the earlier visitors in about 1817-19, when he painted the spectacular scenery of Tivoli, shown here with a Goatherd Opposite the Falls of Tivoli. These waterfalls are more painterly than his early realism.

Michallon’s unusual View of Santa Scolastica in Subiaco from 1818 shows this famous Benedictine monastery in Subiaco, Lazio, dedicated to the sister of Saint Benedict of Nursia.

Carl Blechen studied at the Berlin Academy from 1822, then travelled to Dresden and Switzerland. After he was dismissed as a stage painter at the Royal Theatre in Berlin in 1827, he travelled first to the Baltic coast then south to Italy, where he too painted plein air in the Roman Campagna. His copious oil studies were in a similar style to those being painted in the early nineteenth century by others in the area, but back in Berlin were seen as being radically different.

Camille Corot was perhaps the first major landscape painter both to follow Valenciennes’ teaching and to show his sketches in public. During his first stay in Italy between 1825-28, he developed his skills painting outdoors in the Campagna, producing classics such as his View of the Convent of S. Onofrio on the Janiculum, Rome above, and The Bridge at Narni below.

Heinrich Bürkel’s Shepherds in the Roman Campagna from 1837 has an almost documentary quality, in the rough and dusty peasants slumped on their horses and donkeys. In the foreground a couple of ewes are looking up at their lambs being carried in a pannier, and a dog is challenging a snake by the roadside.

In 1850, the twenty-two year-old Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin moved to Rome, where he too started painting in the Campagna.

In the Alban Hills from 1851 is a fine depiction of these hills about 20 km (12 miles) south-east of the city of Rome. Unlike many artists working in the Campagna at the time, Böcklin must have painted this work in the studio from extensive sketches and studies made in front of the motif. Look closely, though, and there’s a dark figure standing beside a small smoking fire, to the left of the central mass of trees, and further to the left might be the entrance to a dark cavern.

Böcklin uses more dramatic lighting in this Roman Landscape from 1852. Its dark wood is very dark indeed, not the sort of place to enter alone. At the foot of the prominent tree at the right is what appears to be a woman undressing, as if going to bathe in the stygian gloom.

Nils Jakob Blommér’s undated Landscape from Italy is another plein air oil sketch of the Roman Campagna in the tradition of Valenciennes.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the young French Impressionists broke new ground by applying Valenciennes’ teaching to plein air sketches they made in the countryside around Paris, and on the north coast of France. They then exhibited those sketches as finished works, the working method of Impressionism.

The countryside around the city of Rome has played a vital role in the history of landscape painting. For nearly a century, from the 1780s until the development of Impressionism, painting oil sketches in this area became a mandatory phase in the training of all good landscape painters in Europe. This weekend I show some of the best examples of these exercises undertaken early in the careers of some of the greatest artists of the nineteenth century, from Valenciennes who started it, to Corot and Böcklin.

It was the co-founders of landscape painting in Europe, Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) and Claude Lorrain (c 1600-1682), who started painting the Roman Campagna, from about 1624 onwards. Although both were born in France, they spent almost their whole careers based in Rome, where they went out and sketched in front of the motif. They then used those studies to assemble composite idealised landscapes for their studio oil paintings, leaving little trace of their original sketches.

It was Claude Joseph Vernet (1714-1789), another pioneer French landscape artist who worked for many years in Rome, who first recommended to the young Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750–1819) that he should follow this practice by painting oil sketches en plein air in the Campagna. In about 1782 Valenciennes started to amass his personal image library of sketches of the Roman countryside, and when he returned to France in 1785 he used those for his studio paintings.

One of the finest and the best-known of all Valenciennes’ oil sketches is this showing Farm-buildings at the Villa Farnese: the Two Poplar Trees reputedly from an earlier visit in 1780. This shows a Renaissance villa now in the centre of the city of Rome, although here its park setting makes it look as if it is out in the country. It was built in 1506-10 for a banker, and appropriately contains superb frescoes by Raphael and others. It is now owned by the state and most is open to visitors.

View of the Convent of Ara Coeli with Pines is a superb view of what’s known as the Basilica di Santa Maria in Aracoeli, again in central Rome. This is on the top of the Campidoglio, and affords the view over the city appearing behind the pine on the right. It’s situated close to the Forum.

This untitled sketch shows a different view over the city.

Several of these surviving oil sketches are brilliant studies in the effects of light, such as Rome: Houses and a Domed Church above.

I’m not sure if anyone has identified the buildings shown in Rooftops in the Shadows, but suspect that this too is close to the centre of Rome, perhaps on one of its hills. Is this the first plein air painting of washing on the line?

Around forty years later, John Constable sketched clouds and weather in what he called ‘skying’. Here’s one of Valenciennes’ groundbreaking sketches from the early 1780s, in Rome: Study of Clouds. He wasn’t the first plein air painter by any means, nor the first to make sky studies, but it was he who established the practice among landscape artists, both in his direct teaching and in his book published in 1800.

The Louvre has most of Valenciennes’ surviving oil sketches, but by no means all of them. This superb Italian Landscape is now in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, has another of his sky sketches, this Study of Clouds over the Roman Campagna.

The Cleveland Museum of Art, in Ohio, has this magnificent View of Rome, which I think compares with the Villa Farnese above in its quality. Notable here is the depiction of the clouds of dust and smoke rising from the streets of the city, which surely qualify it as an ‘impression’.

Two hundred years ago today, on 13 March 1825, the great Norwegian landscape painter Hans Gude was born in what was then Christiania, now Oslo, capital of Norway. This second article celebrating his life and work resumes in 1860. During the 1850s his paintings had aroused some interest in the UK, so in 1862 Gude travelled to Wales to try to develop his British market.

This painting of what he called ‘Eføybroen’, which might be an ‘Efoy’ Bridge, in North Wales was completed in 1863 from studies he had made of the motif in the previous autumn.

He also painted some grander landscapes of The Lledr Valley in Wales (1864), where he stayed during this campaign, which conform more to Ruskin’s precepts.

Gude continued to work by painting studies en plein air, which he took back to the studio and worked up into a finished painting. In contrast, local British painters at the time tended to complete their finished works in front of the motif, and seldom painted landscapes entirely in the studio. When Gude’s paintings were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1863 and 1864, they achieved little recognition, and failed to sell.

At the end of 1863, Gude was offered the post of professor at the Baden School of Art in Karlsruhe, which he accepted, as there was still no academy of fine art in Norway. During his tenure there, many Norwegians were students; some of the best-known include Kitty Kielland, Eilif Peterssen, Christian Krogh, and Frits Thaulow.

While he was teaching in Karlsruhe, Gude continued to promote the practice of painting en plein air, and his figures steadily improved. Fjord Landscape with People (1875) shows a typical period scene, with figures, cattle, horses, sailing vessels, and another of his wide open views.

Gude also worked in watercolours, and during his later career visited Scotland on several occasions, where he painted this almost monochrome view of an Estuary at Brodick, Arran, Scotland (1877).

Gude’s watercolour Landscape with Tarbert Castle, Scotland (1877) shows one of the most famous ruined castles on the west coast of Scotland, on the shore of East Loch Tarbert, at the north end of the Kintyre peninsula.

Sandvik Fjord (1879) is a startlingly detailed depiction of a view from above Sandviken, now the northern suburbs of the Norwegian city of Bergen, looking to the west and the island of Askøy.

In 1880, Gude moved to teach at the Academy of Art in Berlin.

Oban Bay (1889) was painted following another visit to Scotland, and shows the small bay beside the town of Oban, on the west coast of northern Scotland. This bay opens out to the Sound of Kerrera, and is now a busy ferry port serving the Western Isles; at this time it seems to have been but a small fishing port. The prominent building in the distance just to the left of the centre of the painting is Saint Columba’s Cathedral, the seat of the Roman Catholic Bishop for the Western Isles. The distant mountains are those of the Morvern Peninsula, on the opposite shore of Loch Linnhe.

Kaien på Feste i nær Moss (The Jetty at Feste near Moss) (1898) shows another marine view in the far south-east of Norway, on the eastern side of the broad fjord leading north to Oslo.

Gude retired to Berlin in 1901, and died there in 1903, one of the founding fathers of Norwegian and Nordic landscape painting.

Like other detailed realists of the nineteenth century, Gude’s paintings lack the distinctive look of truly Pre-Raphaelite landscapes, but were far more practical to make, and more compatible with the business demands of the professional artist. They were rapidly being eclipsed in popularity by the Impressionist movement, and like all forms of representational painting were about to be displaced by the modernism of the twentieth century.

Reference

Wikipedia.

Tomorrow is the bicentenary of the birth of one of Norway’s greatest landscape artists, Hans Gude. In this and tomorrow’s article I celebrate his life and work with a selection of his paintings.

Gude was born on 13 March 1825 and was initially educated in Christiania (now Oslo, Norway), and in 1842 started his studies at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf, Germany. He there joined a recently-formed landscape class taught by Professor Johann Wilhelm Schirmer. Gude rejected conventional teaching that landscape paintings should be composed according to classical or aesthetic principles, preferring instead to paint thoroughly realistically, and true to nature. He also met Karl Friedrich Lessing (1808-1880), one of the German Romantic artists who had in turn been influenced by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840).

On completion of his studies, probably by about 1846, Gude returned to Norway.

Landscape Study from Vågå (1846) is a fine example of one of his early oil studies, and was probably completed in front of the motif, in Norway’s mountainous Oppland county north of the Jotunheimen Mountains. Although its background is loose and vague, foreground detail is meticulous for a work that appears to have been painted en plein air.

His depiction of lichens, mosses, fungi and plants is comparable to that of the best Pre-Raphaelites, although at this time the only manifesto advocating such an approach was the first volume of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, published in 1843. I think it most unlikely that Gude would have read or been influenced by Ruskin at that time.

Vinterettermiddag (Winter Afternoon) (1847) is a studio painting that wouldn’t look out of place on a greetings card, and a marked contrast.

Tessefossen i Vågå i middagsbelysning (Tessefossen in Vågå at midday) (1848) is a relatively large studio painting that might seem more typical of an American landscape painter of the day.

Early in his career, Gude struggled to paint realistic figures, and in several works he enlisted the help of fellow countryman Adolph Tidemand (1814–1876) to paint those in for him. Tidemand had trained in Düsseldorf immediately before Gude, between 1837-41, and the two met in Hardanger in Norway in 1843.

Among the results of this collaboration are some of their most spectacular works, such as Brudeferden i Hardanger (Bridal journey in Hardanger) (1848). Gude’s highly detailed and realistic landscape is set in the far south-west of Norway, in the region to the east of Bergen, where one of the world’s largest and most spectacular fjords carves its way from glacier to the sea.

Not a particularly large canvas, it is as meticulously detailed as might have been expected from a Pre-Raphaelite, although its colours aren’t as brash. Gude became particularly interested in reflections on water later in his career.

Gude’s By the Mill Pond (1850) seems to have been another plein air study, but is so detailed that it would be hard to class it as a sketch. When looked at more carefully, though, many of its apparently precise passages turn out to consist of gestural marks, as in the lichens on the boulders in the foreground, and the small waterfall at the back. It’s also interesting in containing a figure, perhaps that of Betsy Anker whom Gude married in the summer of that year.

This later collaboration with Tidemand, Lystring på Krøderen (Fishing with a Harpoon) (1851), is a wonderful nocturne showing night fishing in sheltered waters, and another masterpiece of detailed realism.

In 1854, Gude was appointed professor in succession to his former teacher Schirmer, remarkable recognition for the Norwegian who wasn’t yet thirty years old. He tendered his resignation three years later, but didn’t actually leave Düsseldorf for a further five years.

In its composition and foreground detail, Norwegian Highlands (1857) conforms to Ruskin’s precepts, although it was painted in the studio from plein air studies and retains more traditional earth-based colours.

Reference

Wikipedia.

This weekend we’re seeking refuge from the winter in Saint-Tropez on the Côte d’Azur, in the company of some of the artists who painted its warm light. By 1897 it had good connections by express trains to Paris, and Paul Signac had just bought a house in the old port and moved there with his wife. Although Théo van Rysselberghe didn’t move to the coast until he retired in 1911, he was a frequent visitor.

Their friend Maximilien Luce had first visited Saint-Tropez in 1892 with Signac, and continued to travel south despite remaining based in Paris until his death there in 1941.

Luce became skilled in colour lithography. His finest print is this of Saint-Tropez from 1897. Here he substitutes dashes of colour for the small dots of Pointillist painting, with the aim of getting adjacent colours to interact and generate a glow of colour. This is taken from Divisionist theory as first developed by Seurat, then later by Signac.

That year, Paul Signac painted this unusual view of Saint-Tropez. Route de la Foux, also known as Golfe Juan, (1897). This looks back at Saint-Tropez from the main road running west towards Port Cogolin at the end of the Gulf of Saint-Tropez. Visible to the left is Saint-Tropez lighthouse, and its bell tower in the centre.

Signac started painting Saint-Tropez. The Terrace on 16 August 1898, aiming to complete it about ten days later. It shows his wife Berthe on the Italianate terrace that they had built at their house La Hune. It looks north, over vineyards and the old town of Saint-Tropez with its distinctive bell tower, the small bay beyond, to the Maures hills in the distance. The artist envisaged the lone figure being a young woman in the sunset of her life as one of the many victims of tuberculosis.

Although Signac started work on this view of the port of Saint-Tropez in 1901, he didn’t complete it until early the following year. At its centre is the bell tower, and the citadel looks down from its upper right. Its Tartane sailing vessels are being loaded with their cargo of barrels. Although its Divisionist technique and colours are thoroughly contemporary, it harks back to a tradition of port views by Claude Lorrain and Joseph Vernet.

The Harbour Entrance, Saint-Tropez from about 1902 appears to be one of Signac’s oil sketches with some colour tiling in the water.

Saint-Tropez, Tartanes in the Port from 1905 is one of the many watercolours Signac painted of these distinctive Tartanes in the harbour of Saint-Tropez, with its prominent lighthouse in the background.

Maximilien Luce continued to visit the Mediterranean coast of France, where he painted these Bathers at Saint-Tropez in about 1909. His colours are considerably less brash and dazzling than other former Neo-Impressionists like Théo van Rysselberghe.

Signac’s Saint-Tropez, Boat being Careened from 1920 is an unusual watercolour of a boat that has been deliberately grounded alongside the quay, to allow maintenance to be performed on its hull. As a longstanding yachtsman he had considerable insight into this procedure.

Pierre Bonnard began to visit the Côte d’Azur long before he started moving to Le Cannet in 1924, and went sailing in the Mediterranean with Paul Signac. Bonnard painted this view of an almost deserted Port of Saint-Tropez on a breezy day, with small wavelets forming on the water surface. The mole at the right ends in a lighthouse, which merges visually with the sailing ship’s superstructure.

Paul Signac painted this view of boats at low tide alongside Saint-Tropez, the Pier on 21 December 1923. Even with Spring tides, the tidal range at Saint-Tropez is little more than 30 cm (1 foot), suggesting these boats have been deliberately beached alongside the pier.

During the 1920s Saint-Tropez became the most fashionable resort in Europe when it drew Coco Chanel and a host of other celebrities. Later in the twentieth century it attained fame again as a ‘topless’ beach resort despite its mayor ordering its police helicopter to check that sunbathers were correctly dressed, and ‘clothing fights’ broke out with the police. I hope you have enjoyed this weekend, whatever you were not wearing in Saint-Tropez.

This weekend, I invite you to join me in the fishing village of Saint-Tropez, where we’ll escape the winter blues in the warm light of paintings from the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries. With today’s super-yachts and tourists it might not seem much of a village now, but its population has changed little over the last two hundred years and remains around four thousand.

Saint-Tropez is unusual for a port on the north coast of the Mediterranean as it faces north, being on the south side of a deep bay, the Gulf of Saint-Tropez, and lies midway between Toulon and Cannes. Towering above the east of the old port with its sheltered harbour is its Citadel. There never was a Saint Tropez, but the village owes its name to a legendary martyr Saint Torpes of Pisa whose body is supposed to have reached this location in a rotten boat.

Like much of the coast around here, Saint-Tropez had a generally quiet life supporting its small fishing fleet until the railway came in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The main line to Marseille was completed in 1856, and by the 1880s regular express services transported folk from Paris at speed and in comfort. Like most of the better resorts along this section of the Côte d’Azur, Saint-Tropez requires you to travel an extra few miles from the nearest railway station, but that proved no deterrent to artists fleeing Paris for the summer.

Among the first was Paul Signac, who spent early May 1892 in Saint-Tropez, where he rented a cottage in the old town, and announced his intended marriage to Berthe Roblès.

Sunset over the Town is an oil study Signac painted on wood in 1892, which appears Fauvist in the intensity of its colours. It shows a view of Saint-Tropez that he turned into a finished Divisionist painting, as well as producing another sketch in Conté crayon, and an unusual drawing in watercolour and ink that is reminiscent of van Gogh, and prescient of his later watercolours.

During this short stay in Saint-Tropez, Signac painted its harbour from several different angles. The Port at Sunset, Opus 236 (Saint-Tropez) (1892) is one of the most successful of these, with its echoes of his earlier paintings of Concarneau.

While exploring Saint-Tropez during his return the following year, Signac came across a huge umbrella pine tree by the villa of a certain Monsieur Bonaventure, which he painted as The Bonaventure Pine.

Signac’s original title for this painting is Tartanes pavoisées, which translates loosely as Fishing Boats Dressed Overall. He painted three studies for this, to get its triangular composition right, and seems to have been pleased with the result, exhibiting it regularly. Two years later, he traded it for a bicycle, and in 1910 it became his first painting to enter a public collection, in Wuppertal, Germany.

Tartanes are vernacular fishing boats from this section of the Mediterranean coast, with a single mast bearing a lateen sail.

Later that year, and continuing his theme of trees, he painted these Plane Trees in the Place des Lices in the centre of Saint-Tropez. Instead of showing the boules players who frequented this area, he shows an old man sitting on a bench in great serenity.

Harbour (1894) is another of Signac’s many views of the harbour that he painted while he stayed there, leading to finished oil paintings such as his Red Buoy below.

Signac recorded in his journal that he started painting Saint-Tropez. The Red Buoy on 22 August 1895. It shows the Quai Jean-Jaurès behind the richly coloured reflections of those buildings, with a colour scheme dominated by the blue of the water, its complementary vermilion sail and buoy, and the pale orange of the buildings and their reflections. Signac developed the composition and colour harmonies during the summer of 1895 before starting this final version, which was exhibited to acclaim over the following two years.

At the end of 1897, Signac and his wife bought a house in Saint-Tropez and took up residence there. In the same year, his friend Théo van Rysselberghe moved to Paris, but had already started visiting the Côte d’Azur.

In Pointe Saint-Pierre, Saint-Tropez (1896) van Rysselberghe uses traditional anatomical technique to model these pines in the hot light of the Mediterranean coast. Their structure is explicit, each tree assembled from its hundreds of small marks laid along branches, then giving rise to foliage. This point is to the east of the old port.

The following year, van Rysselberghe was one of the first to depict bathers near Saint-Tropez in his aptly named Glowing Hour (Provence).

In the first of these two articles showing the more faithful accounts of winter with its inglorious mud, I had reached the late nineteenth century and sunk into the mud of a Polish country market. Today’s paintings take that on into the twentieth century and the Great War, claimed at the time to be the War to End Wars.

Mud plays a significant role in this unusual modernised religious story by Fritz von Uhde, A Difficult Journey from 1890. This imagines Joseph and the pregnant Mary walking on a rough muddy track to Bethlehem, in a wintry European village. Joseph has a carpenter’s saw on his back as the tired couple move on through the dank mist.

Although the Franco-Prussian War started in the summer of 1870, its later stages, including much of the fighting around Paris and its siege took place in the late autumn and winter, when mud was at its height, or depth.

Anton von Werner’s In the Troops’ Quarters Outside Paris, from 1894, shows muddy soldiers in the luxurious Château de Brunoy, which had been abandoned to or requisitioned by occupying forces. Every boot seen is caked in mud, which covers the trouser legs of the orderly who is tending to the fire.

Artists in the Nordic countries were also starting to depict mud more faithfully in their paintings.

Laurits Andersen Ring’s Father Coming Home from 1896 shows a mother and two children awaiting the return of their husband and father. He is still quite distant along the muddy track in this poor rural community in Denmark.

Further north in the valleys of Norway, Nikolai Astrup painted Farmstead in Jølster in 1902. Two women, sheltering from the rain under black umbrellas, are walking up a muddy path threading its way through the wooden farm buildings, guiding a young girl with them. Astrup delights in the colourful patches making up the turf roofs, and the contrasting puddles on the grass. His unusual aerial view might prevent us from seeing the mud covering the hems of their coats and dresses, but we know it’s there.

A few years later, Ring painted Short Stay (1909), showing an elderly man and woman standing in the mud in silence and facing in opposite directions. He’s towing a small sledge bearing a sack; she’s carrying a basket containing a large fresh fish wrapped in paper.

Ring’s friend Hans Andersen Brendekilde painted this Village Scene in the Early Spring in 1911. The rutted mud track is slowly drying from its winter role as the main drain. A man is out cleaning the tiny windows of his cottage, and two women have stopped to talk in the distance. Smoke curls idly up from a chimney, and leafless pollards stand and wait for the season to progress.

Three years later, this muddy peace was shattered when Europe went to war, digging trenches across great swathes of the muddy fields of northern France and Belgium.

An official war artist, CRW Nevinson’s Paths of Glory was exhibited with a quotation from Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written In A Country Church-Yard (1750):
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike the inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Like Marshall Ney, the bodies in Nevinson’s famous depiction of the aftermath of war lie face down in the mud. Here it isn’t dust to dust, or ashes to ashes, but mud to mud. Rifles, helmets and the men’s bodies are being engulfed in all-enveloping mud.

Other artists who went to the front recorded different aspects of its mud. François Flameng’s view of an Attack (1918) being made on duckboards over flooded marshland, brings home a clear picture of what actually happened over and in that deadly mud. His war paintings, many of which weren’t published until the end of the war, were criticised for being too real.

This scene of devastation at The Cliff of Craonne (1918) shows part of the battlefield of the Aisne in 1917 that gave rise to one of the famous anti-military songs of the Great War, La Chanson de Craonne. It’s a landscape where only the mud has escaped destruction.

Typical of Paul Nash’s paintings of the Western Front is his watercolour Wire (1918). It shows a characteristically deserted and devastated landscape, the mud pockmarked with shell-holes and festooned with wire fencing and barbed wire. Its only landmarks are the shattered stumps of what was once pleasant countryside.

Nash’s The Menin Road (1919) was commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee in April 1918 for its Hall of Remembrance, for which John Singer Sargent’s Gassed was also intended. It shows a section of the Ypres Salient known as Tower Hamlets, after what’s now a part of eastern London. This area was reduced to barren mud during the Battle of the Menin Road Ridge.

There I reach the end of this curiously brief history of mud in European painting. Perhaps it was just too commonplace to depict faithfully. But why might this mud be inglorious? There’s a wonderful Hippopotamus Song by the comedy duo Flanders and Swann with the refrain:
Mud, mud, glorious mud,
Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood.
So follow me, follow
Down to the hollow
And there let us wallow in glorious mud.

Across much of the temperate parts of the northern hemisphere, this is the wettest part of the year. It’s when puddles are everywhere, and what used to be firm ground turns into soft deep mud. Footpaths and bridleways become deep tracts of mud, impassable in anything but high boots. Yet look through paintings of winter and you’ll notice that few artists before 1800 have depicted people, vehicles or animals in mud of any significant depth. This weekend I look at some of the more faithful accounts of this ingloriously muddy time of year.

In the early nineteenth century, streets in major cities in Europe including Paris spent much of the winter as muddy morasses. Enterprising poorer inhabitants took long planks to locations where the more affluent would try to cross those rivers of mud, and hired them out to enable the rich to stay cleaner.

This is shown well in Louis-Léopold Boilly’s Passer Payez, or Pay to Pass, from about 1803, where a whole family is taking advantage of one of these crossings. This spared their footwear and clothing the otherwise inevitable coating of mud. As you can see, their shoes, lower legs and clothing are amazingly clean, as if they might actually have been painted in Boilly’s studio rather than the muddy streets of Paris.

As realism and real-world scenes became more popular in the middle of the nineteenth century, Adolph von Menzel showed a more accurate view of the problem of muddy roads in his Hussars Rescue a Polish Family from 1850. It had clearly been a wet autumn, with the leaves still burning red and gold on the trees in the background. These mounted soldiers are helping the elderly women from their carriage across the muddy ruts of the road. The hussar in the foreground, with his back to the viewer, even has mud on his riding boots.

One of the first artists to have used mud in a more meaningful way is Jean-Léon Gérôme, in his 1868 painting of The Death of Marshal Ney. Michel Ney (1769-1815) was a leading military commander during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and was made a Marshal of France by Napoleon. Following Napoleon’s defeat and exile in the summer of 1815, Ney was arrested, and tried for treason by the Chamber of Peers. He was found guilty, and executed by firing squad near the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris on 7 December 1815.

Gérôme shows Ney’s body abandoned after the execution, slumped face down and lifeless in the mud, his top hat resting apart at the right edge of the canvas. The firing squad is being marched off, to the left and into the distance. The mud only reinforces Gérôme’s powerful image of a cold, bleak, heartless execution.

Mud also has its recreational uses, as children of all eras will attest. Ludwig Knaus’s painting of Mud Pies from 1873 shows a group of children in the evening, near Dusseldorf, Germany, who are enjoying play in and with the mud, which is less fun for the swineherd behind them.

While other Impressionists had been exploring the effects of transient light on the River Thames, in 1875, Giuseppe De Nittis examined the city’s muddy and rutted streets, in his painting of The Victoria Embankment, London. This wasn’t one of the older roads in the city either: the Victoria Embankment wasn’t constructed until 1865, and had only opened to traffic five years before De Nittis painted it.

Muddy roads in northern British cities like Leeds were one of the favourite settings for the nocturnes of John Atkinson Grimshaw. At The Park Gate from 1878 (above) and November from 1879 (below) are glistening examples.

There’s an old English proverb “February fill dyke, be it black or be it white”, referring to the rain (black) or snow (white) that usually falls heavily during the month and fills all the ditches. Benjamin Williams Leader borrows that in his February Fill Dyke showing the waterlogged countryside near Worcester in 1881.

Mud became a favourite effect in the Naturalist paintings made so popular in France by Jules Bastien-Lepage.

Pas Mèche (Nothing Doing) (1882) shows a cheeky ploughboy equipped with his whip and horn, on his way out to work in the fields. His face is grubby, his clothing frayed, patched, and dirty, and his boots caked in mud.

But for real mud, deep enough for wheels and legs to sink in and cake clothing, I turn to central and eastern Europe.

Jakub Schikaneder’s The Sad Way from 1886 shows a single weary horse towing a cart on which a coffin rests. The woman, presumably widowed before her time, stares emptily at the rutted mud track, as a man walks beside them. It’s late autumn in a world that is barren, bleak, muddy and forlorn.

Józef Marian Chełmoński’s undated Market is one of the most vivid insights into country life in Poland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To reach this street market, carts are being drawn through a deep ditch full of muddy water. Market stalls are mounted on tables set in the mud, which forms the basis for everything.

Also undated is contemporary and fellow Polish artist Alfred Wierusz-Kowalski’s Meeting the Train. A couple of horse-drawn carts have gone to a rural railway station to meet a train. The winter snow still covers much of the ground, except where it has been turned into rutted mud on the road.

With so many artists flocking to see paintings of the Renaissance masters in Florence, it was only a matter of time before they stayed a little longer and stepped out into the open to paint views of the city before they left. Far less popular than views of the canals of Venice, and lacking a Canaletto to market them to tourists, you have to look a bit harder to find these marvellous landscapes.

To aid in their visualisation, I again include this map of the city engraved by William Barnard Clarke in 1835, showing:

1. The Duomo, the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, whose construction started in 1296, with its dome designed by Filippo Brunelleschi finished in 1436.
2. San Niccolò Weir, on the River Arno.
3. Boboli Gardens.
4. Ponte Santa Trinita, over the River Arno.
5. Ponte alle Grazie, over the River Arno.

Gaspar van Wittel’s undated View of Florence from San Niccolò Weir from the late seventeenth century is among the earliest. This looks west from Varlungo, near 2 on the map, along the north bank of the River Arno, with the centre of the city and the dome to the right.

With the rise in oil sketching en plein air during the late eighteenth century, it was only a matter of time before a landscape painter broke away from the Roman campagna and travelled north.

Camille Corot painted this oil sketch View of Florence from the Boboli Gardens in 1835, on one of his return trips to Italy, when he visited Venice and Florence. These gardens are on the south bank of the river, 3 on the map, and afford this fine view to the north of the Duomo on the opposite bank, and the Tuscan hills in the background.

The American landscape painter Thomas Cole visited Italy during his Grand Tour of Europe in 1842, so I suspect the claimed date of 1837 for his View of Florence may not be accurate. His vantage point appears to be in the Giardino Bardini, on the south bank, looking north over the Ponte Vecchio, Duomo and other major buildings in the central city on the opposite bank.

Carl Gustav Carus seems to have painted this View of Florence (1841) from the window of his accommodation when he was visiting. The dome of the Duomo appears slightly exaggerated in height.

Twenty years later, in November 1861, the aspiring landscape painter John Brett first visited Florence, but it was another year before he left England to paint what must be a unique view of the city, and one of very few Pre-Raphaelite landscape masterworks.

Florence from Bellosguardo (1863) was probably started in January 1863, painted without the aid of significant preparatory studies, and entirely from the motif. His viewpoint at Bellosguardo is slightly over a kilometre to the south-west of the centre. Even with Brett’s apparent eye for fine detail at a distance, much of it must have been painted with the aid of a telescope, and it has been suggested that he may also have used a camera lucida and/or photographs. Regardless of how he managed to paint such great detail, it’s a triumph of painting, both technically and artistically, and it came as a shock when it was rejected by the Royal Academy later that year.

Thankfully for Brett, the painting was purchased in May by the National Gallery, and he was acclaimed in the press as ‘head of the Pre-Raphaelite landscape school’, although by that time he was probably the last of its practitioners. Brett had also intended the painting as homage to the poet Robert Browning, who lived in Florence at the time, and had provided him great support.

My Terrace, Florence (1865) shows the terrace of the Florentine painter Odoardo Borrani’s home, against the city’s unmistakeable skyline.

Telemaco Signorini was another local artist, who studied drawing from life at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts. In 1855 he started meeting with the Macchiaioli, and travelled to Venice, where he met Lord Leighton. After military service and a period in Paris he returned to his home city to paint en plein air, when he made this view of Via Torta in Florence (c 1870). He was appointed Professor at the Florence Academy in 1892.

Karl Kaufmann’s undated and unusual view of central Florence shows the Ponte Santa Trinita crossing the River Arno, from the east, marked as 4 on the map above. This bridge was built using stone from a quarry in the Bobolino Gardens by Bartolomeo Ammannati in 1567-69, and its ornamental statues of the seasons were added in 1608 to mark the marriage of Cosimo de’ Medici to Maria Magdalena of Austria.

When visiting the city in 1880, the wonderfully named British landscape artist Hercules Brabazon Brabazon painted this oil sketch of Florence.

In about 1885-87, Odoardo Borrani returned to the Pazzi family’s history with this view of The Pazzi Chapel, Cloister of Santa Croce in Florence, a contrastingly peaceful scene compared to his earlier accounts of their downfall following their conspiracy to overthrow the de’ Medicis in 1478.

With William Merritt Chase and other young American artists, Frank Duveneck visited Florence when he was training in Europe. He had already met and taught the American Elizabeth Boott in Paris when he travelled to Florence. She had been born in Boston but raised in the Villa Castellani (c 1887) overlooking the square of Bellosguardo, near where John Brett had painted his view of the city.

This villa has achieved literary fame in two of Henry James’ novels, Portrait of a Lady in which it is Gilbert Osmond’s residence, and The Golden Bowl in which Adam and Maggie Verver were modelled on Elizabeth Boott and her father Francis, a classical composer. Duveneck married Boott in 1886, but she tragically died just two years later from pneumonia.

Via Calimala from 1889 is another of Telemaco Signorini’s vivacious street scenes of the city.

My last painting may come as something of a surprise: although only in the background, the city of Florence features in at least one Nabi painting.

While he was one of the Nabis, Paul Sérusier remained close friends with artists he had worked alongside when he had been in Pont-Aven, who were largely followers of Gauguin. Among them was Émile Bernard, who by 1893 had allied himself with Symbolists such as Odilon Redon, and travelled to Italy and the Middle East. Sérusier must have accompanied Bernard at least as far as Florence, where he painted this Portrait of Emile Bernard in Florence (1893). There again is that unmistakable red brick dome that Brunelleschi had designed almost half a millennium earlier.

In the first of these two articles visiting the Tuileries Gardens in central Paris, I showed paintings known to have been made before the Communards burned the Tuileries Palace in 1871, and those up to Monet’s views of 1876. As a result of damage to the palace, it was demolished in 1883, leaving the space it had occupied to become an extension to the garden.

Today the Tuileries retains two substantial buildings: the Jeu de Paume and Musée de l’Orangerie, both at the Place de la Concorde end and almost surrounded by terraces. Its broad Grande Allée joins the massive Arc de Triomphe with its smaller sister, the Arc de Triomphe de Carrousel, by the Louvre. Depending on the season, the gardens may be busy with runners, noisy with childrens’ amusements, or a well of relative calm amid the rumbling rush of Paris and its traffic.

Although Gaston de La Touche’s A Water Fountain in the Tuileries is undated, from its style it was painted after 1891, when he burned most of his earlier works and switched to this brighter style that could pass for Impressionism. Human figures are here, but dark, vague and subjugate to the jet of water in the fountain, the trees and the Louvre Palace behind. La Touche appears to have painted many fountains, and this may have been intended to form part of a series of such views.

Theodor von Hörmann’s undated In the Tuileries appears to be a brisk plein air sketch made in the late summer or early autumn. The child in the foreground is playing with a hoop.

The Tuileries Gardens, Paris (1895) may have been painted shortly before Maurice Brazil Prendergast left the city to return to Boston. While he was in Paris he met Édouard Vuillard, whose influence appears to have extended to his use of colour here, and Pierre Bonnard, an addicted sketcher of street scenes in Paris.

Childe Hassam’s Tuileries Gardens from about 1897 is an early work in Impressionist style, with visible facture and textbook linear perspective. Its gestural figures are skilfully executed, giving the viewer just sufficient detail to be able to distinguish different types of hats, for instance. This American Impressionist studied in Paris at the Académie Julian.

At the end of 1898, Camille Pissarro rented a flat for his family in Paris, from where he enjoyed a superb view over the Tuileries Gardens, which, unlike Monet and Renoir, he hadn’t painted until late in his career. His first series of eleven paintings was sold to Durand-Ruel in May for the sum of 27,000 Francs. The artist then returned to the same flat to paint a second series at the end of 1899.

These two versions of The Garden of the Tuileries on a Winter Afternoon (1899), above and below, are composed almost identically to Monet’s view from nearly 25 years earlier, with the dome of Les Invalides and the spires of the Church of Saint-Clotilde in the background. Pissarro was perhaps the first to capture the appearance of the gardens when busy, as they are during fine weather even in winter. His crowds of people are as varied and minimalist as those in his other series paintings of Paris.

Pissarro’s Garden of the Tuileries on a Spring Morning from the same year is a similar aerial view, this time well into springtime, with the trees in full leaf, in their brilliant fresh green foliage. Although there are fewer people now, Pissarro affords us some delicate detail, for instance in the pram just above the middle of the lower edge of the canvas.

There are subtle differences between these three canvases demonstrating that Pissarro’s painting was far from mechanical, and involved significant interpretation. The spring view has a lower skyline that cannot be accounted for by its being angled more to the left than the winter views, for example. However details of trees and even quite small features in the distance match well, supporting the view that he did remain faithful to the real world.

Judging by the brown foliage in the trees in The Tuileries Garden (1905), Pierre Bonnard painted this view in the autumn. The rich array of statuary stands out well.

The Tuileries Gardens (1910) is one of Jean-François Raffaëlli’s colour engravings of the gardens, in a formal view. It’s easy to see how Degas’ enthusiasm for Raffaëlli’s work to be included in Impressionist exhibitions was so divisive. Although popular at the time, it wasn’t in the least Impressionist, and now seems perhaps a little anachronistic.

Finally, Pierre Thévenet’s The Tuileries Gardens in Autumn from 1922 is unique among these paintings in being completely unpopulated, and shows some of the trees during leaf-fall, with their rich colours, and the Louvre in the background. Thévenet was a Belgian Post-Impressionist who lived and worked in Paris from 1919, painting many views of the city.

If you have ever visited Paris, you will surely have walked in the Tuileries Gardens stretching from the Louvre to the Place de la Concorde and the Arc de Triomphe, on the bank of the River Seine, in the heart of the city, and where we visit this weekend.

With its origin as an ornamental Florentine garden for Catherine de Medicis’ Tuileries Palace in 1564, it has been open to the public for nearly 450 years. Over those centuries it has changed size and content. When the French Revolution started in 1789, it saw its fair share of bloodshed, and Jacques-Louis David the artist started to redevelop the gardens to his design.

By 1800, when Napoleon moved into the palace, it was used for an incongruous mixture of public promenade and relaxation, and military parades. On 23 May 1871 the palace buildings were burned by Communards in revolt; when the Tuileries Palace was finally demolished in 1883, the space that it had occupied was taken over as an extension to the gardens.

Today it retains two substantial buildings: the Jeu de Paume and Musée de l’Orangerie, both at the Place de la Concorde end and almost surrounded by terraces. Its broad Grande Allée joins the massive Arc de Triomphe with its smaller sister, the Arc de Triomphe de Carrousel, by the Louvre. Depending on the season, the gardens may be busy with runners, noisy with childrens’ amusements, or a well of relative calm amid the rumbling rush of Paris and its traffic.

The Rococo painter Jean-Antoine Watteau doesn’t appear to have painted the gardens themselves, but in Les Champs Élysées (c 1719) may show the gardens on the other side of what is now the Place de la Concorde.

The group of aristocrats feasting and cavorting in a luxuriant autumn landscape is typical of the sub-genre known as fête galante, showing the aristocracy outdoors at play, usually in mythological settings. These works were intended to circumvent the traditional order of merit of painting genres, which rated mythological and historical scenes highly, while allowing Watteau to paint images of the clients who paid for his paintings. It may have been that the title given to the painting was also a deliberate double entendre, covering both the earthly location and that in mythology: ‘the Elysian Fields’, the final resting place of the heroic and virtuous.

Jean-Baptiste Lallemand captured a defining moment at the start of the French Revolution in his Charge of the Prince of Lambesc in the Tuileries Gardens 12 July 1789, painted in 1789-90. His style and vocabulary owe much to Watteau and the earlier landscape masters such as Poussin, and show this bizarre combination of violence, panic, and normal routine, without so much as a drop of blood being spilled.

Jean-François Garneray’s watercolour showing The Duchesse de Berry and her children in their apartment at the Tuileries Palace was painted in 1822, and reveals the sumptuous interior of the palace before the Communards destroyed it.

Shortly before painting his most famous scene in the Tuileries, Édouard Manet completed a smaller and less ambitious work set in its trees, Children in the Tuileries Garden (c 1861-2).

Seen now as the work which gave him the idea for his second painting, this shows a small group of children apparently being directed by an older girl in black, with a blue bonnet. There’s an eery impersonality about the figures, though, as they’re either viewed from behind, or have little or no detail in their faces.

Manet’s Music in the Tuileries from 1862 is one of ten paintings shared between the National Gallery in London, and the Hugh Lane in Dublin, as part of the Hugh Lane bequest, and is currently in Dublin.

Packed into its rhythmic layout of trees are members of the fashionable Parisian crowd, who have come to listen to the music, socialise, and chat. Historians have identified many of Manet’s circle among them: the poet Baudelaire, novelist Gautier, composer Offenbach, Fantin-Latour the painter, and the artist’s brother Eugène, a painter who married Berthe Morisot, the Impressionist.

Adolph Menzel’s Afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens from 1867 is assumed to have been inspired by Manet’s Music in the Tuileries, and has compositional similarities. He includes some direct quotations of figures in homage to Manet’s work. However, Menzel remained a realist, as shown in finely detailed foliage, foreground shadows and the figures. He was known to have made several sketches in the Tuileries Gardens, but painted this work back in his Berlin studio. Conventionally this would have been based on those sketches, but when Menzel first showed the work he claimed it was executed from memory.

Stanislas Lépine’s Nuns and Schoolgirls in the Tuileries Gardens, Paris from 1871-3 is unusually dark and Barbizon School in style. The nuns and girls are shown emerging from the burnt-out shell of the Tuileries Palace, after the Paris Commune of 1871. The contrast between this sombre group of modestly-dressed figures and previous depictions of the gardens is interesting, and may reflect the spirit of the day in Paris, after the Commune was crushed but before Haussmann’s major reconstruction of the city. Lépine was a pupil of Corot who mostly painted views of Paris in Corot’s style.

Claude Monet painted the Tuileries in four works from about 1876.

Tuileries (study) (1876) is one of two studies that he subsequently signed and dated incorrectly to 1875. This and the finished work below were painted from the top of 198 Rue de Rivoli, where his friend Victor Choquet lived. In the background is the dome of Les Invalides and the spires of the Church of Saint-Clotilde.

Tuileries (1876), one of Monet’s two finished works, shows a different view from the same vantage point, for which no studies remain. Wildenstein tells us that this painting was used by Émile Zola in his novel l’Œuvre, as a painting by the hero Claude Lantier of a corner of the Place du Carousel. As is often the case with Monet’s paintings, what appears to be a brisk and spontaneous plein air has many brushstrokes that were applied wet on dry, indicating he worked on this painting in the studio over a period of several days or more. Although figures are gestural, they and the foliage include fine marks and subtle details.

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