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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

博主对书本《Co-Active Coaching: The proven framework for tran […]

博主对书本《Crush the Composition》的推荐指数：四星 ★★★★ 继上周的《The iPho […]

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

Alphabetical

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

By class

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

Location
Japan
le Midi

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

博主对书本《The iPhone Photography Book: How to Get Professio […]

If you have any interest in rural history, you may have noticed how few of its accounts are illustrated. There are extensive quotations from written accounts of life in the country, farming practice, and figures gleaned from the analysis of surveys and wills, but no pictures. Yet in the centuries before photography came into widespread use, artists recorded landscapes and life in the countryside in paint. This article introduces a new series in which I’m going to look at the reality of life and work in the country using some of its finest depictions.

In 1500, the countries in Europe were overwhelmingly rural, with about 80% of their people living in the countryside and engaged almost entirely in agricultural work. By the end of the nineteenth century that had reversed, with 80% living and working in cities and towns. Working the land was physically arduous with only the aid of manual tools, oxen and horses. Injuries were common and seldom received any medical attention, and for most life was brief.

The first agricultural revolution brought the transition from hunting for and gathering food to cultivating crops and raising livestock. This brought annual events such as the grain harvest, shown above in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Harvesters (1565), which forms a complete visual reference to all the work involved in creating flour from a ripe cereal crop.

While men wielded large scythes to mow some crops, others were cut with the sickle shown in Jules Breton’s Song of the Lark (1884). This young woman is walking barefoot through the fields on her way to start another day harvesting the grain she and her village relied on to keep them from starvation.

Old Testament accounts of the underprivileged surviving by gleaning what’s left after the landowner had brought in their harvest continued well into the twentieth century. This is Léon Augustin Lhermitte’s account from 1887. In many areas, though, gleaning was a common essential for everyone.

Crop yields in the past were far lower than they are today. There was no understanding of soil fertility, crop rotations led to poor soil quality, and most land was too wet for the primitive ploughs in use. It was often necessary to plough the same land five or more times in a year to eradicate weeds and achieve worthwhile crop yields. In Jean-François Millet’s Angelus, completed around 1857-59, a destitute couple are seen praying over their small basket of potatoes, as they try to eke a living from that pitifully poor soil.

Some problems remain the same, although their solutions are now quite different.

George Morland’s Ratcatchers from 1793 shows a couple of itinerant workers with the dogs they used to catch vermin such as rats, the man on the left holding up one of their successful catches.

Our ancestors determined the landscapes we see today. In much of England, this has been attributed to the appropriation of what had been common land, for large farms operated by the land-owning classes, in what’s known as enclosure.

The whole countryside changed, as previously open land used for communal grazing was enclosed and turned into farmland. John Crome captures this in this painting of Mousehold Heath, Norwich (c 1818-20), showing the low rolling land to the north-east of the city, which had been open heath and common land until the late eighteenth century. By 1810, much of it had been enclosed, and ploughed up for agriculture.

Crome opposed the enclosure of common land, and here shows the rich flora, free grazing, and, for the plains of East Anglia, rolling countryside. In the right distance some of the newly created farmland is visible as a contrast. Fortunately, almost two hundred acres (74 hectares) of this heath have been preserved, but it had been considerably more extensive until 1790.

Agricultural practices have left other marks in our landscapes. In parts of England and Wales, there are two types of countryside, those drawn with straight lines and others featuring curves. These are even seen in roads, which follow old field boundaries. In some areas the roads are generally straight, but in others they wiggle all over the place, like a drunken man.

Sir William Nicholson’s view from The Hill above Harlech, painted in about 1917, looks across the broad sweep of sand in Tremadoc Bay towards the distant Lleyn Peninsula, in North Wales. Much of the land seen here is divided up into small fields by well-maintained hedges, and there’s hardly a straight line to be seen until you get down to the coastal plane.

One of the major reasons for all these curves is ploughing.

Robert Bevan’s The Turn Rice-Plough, Sussex from about 1909 shows two ploughmen turning a plough in a field in the south-east of England. Its title is probably a simple error for turnwrest, a dialect name used in Kent and Sussex to describe any type of one-way plough which needed to be turned at the end of a furrow as shown here. Because of this need to turn, the ploughman’s course was far from straight, but usually traced a gentle reversed S. To enable this team of horses to turn at the top of the furrow, they steered to the left before swinging to the right in the arc that would bring them on course for the furrow heading back down the slope.

When those ploughed strips were enclosed by hedges, their edges were curved with their furrows. In time, tracks ran along those hedges, and in the nineteenth century they were turned into roads, which now twist and turn as they run past those old furrows.

In the nineteenth century, the first signs of mechanisation arrived, using either horses or steam for power.

Albert Rigolot’s painting of The Threshing Machine, Loiret from 1893, shows a fine example of horses being used to thresh the grain from freshly cut cereal. One of the early uses for steam engines was to power similar machines, and the next step was to make those engines mobile under their own power, as traction engines and eventually tractors.

When heavy steam traction engines were replaced by tractors with internal combustion engines, teams of oxen and horses were replaced by these new-fangled vehicles. Heinrich Vogeler’s Farmer Ploughing from the period 1930-42 shows a tractor with its own tracks towing a heavy plough. I doubt whether even the most visionary farmworker of the sixteenth century imagined what was to come.

I hope that you will join me in this series over the coming weeks.

The first of these two articles on the short life of Richard Parkes Bonington (1802-1828) left him at the end of 1825, established as a successful painter of watercolour landscapes, many of which were turned into prints, and of acclaimed oil paintings.

Early in 1826, Eugène Delacroix invited Bonington to share his Paris studio. Although there doesn’t appear to be a detailed study of Bonington’s influence over Delacroix, perhaps the best summary is in Delacroix’s words:
“I never tired of watching his marvellous grasp of effects and the facility of his execution; not that he was readily satisfied. On the contrary, he frequently redid completely finished passages which had appeared wonderful to us; but his talent was such that he instantly recovered with his brush new effects as charming as the first.”
(Delacroix, Correspondence 4:287, letter of 30 November 1862, quoted in Noon p 41.)

Bonington continued to paint coastal views. Noon argues that his Les Salinières near Trouville (1826) was painted from memory in the autumn of 1826, recalling his tour with Huet the previous year, and after Bonington’s return from Italy to his own studio in Paris. The repoussoir trees at the left are wonderfully painterly.

The Abbey St-Amand, Rouen (c 1827-8) is a rare late watercolour showing this dilapidated monastery near Rouen Cathedral. Noon suggests that Bonington may have painted it when he passed through Rouen on his way to London in 1827, or later from his memory and sketches.

From 1825, Bonington had also started painting in earnest figurative works of history painting. Although it would turn out that he had little time to develop in this genre, he demonstrated that he was as technically competent with figures as he was with nature.

Noon reveals that Portia and Bassanio (c 1826) shows a scene from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (Act 3, scene 2), in which Bassanio has come to Portia’s palace at Belmont, to win her hand in marriage. To do this, he must choose the correct casket out of three containing gold, silver, and lead, of which the last contained the winning portrait of Portia. Here Portia’s maid Nerissa stands aside, and Bassanio, recognising his successful choice, seals the betrothal contract with a kiss.

The sentimental melancholy of The Use of Tears (1827) is tragically appropriate if not prescient. It shows a young woman in her sickbed, if not deathbed, a popular and commonly experienced scene at the time.

It was Noon who proposed that this painting, Knight and Page (Goetz von Berlichingen) (c 1826), showed Goetz von Berlichingen from Goethe’s Sturm and Drang tragedy of that name. He was a German warlord who struggled irrationally to defend his feudal lifestyle in the face of modern reform. Bonington probably painted this when he was sharing Delacroix’s studio in early 1826, and left it incomplete with Delacroix when he moved out.

In April 1826, Bonington left Paris with Charles Rivet and crossed the Alps via the Simplon Pass to Italy. After a few days rest in Milan, they pressed on to arrive in Venice later that month. Once there Bonington produced many sketches and studies, some watercolours painted in front of the motif, and a few oil sketches on millboard that were at least started en plein air.

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

The Grand Canal Looking Toward the Rialto (1826), also on millboard, may have been started en plein air, but appears to have been completed later in the studio, when back in Paris, which may account for the difference in hues in the sky.

Bonington and Rivet left Venice on 18 May, visited Padua, Florence, and Pisa, and Bonington then returned alone via Switzerland in June. Once back in Paris, he moved to his own studio, while remaining on good terms with Delacroix, who considered that the visit to Italy had changed Bonington’s style.

In the late Spring and early summer of 1827, Bonington went to London to develop his links with the art trade there. The later months of the year were extremely busy for him, preparing for a much-delayed Salon and other exhibitions. He was again highly successful at the Salon, eventually held in two parts during November 1827 and from February 1828, when Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus was first shown. Sadly Bonington’s paintings from the second part of the Salon have either vanished or become badly damaged, with a single exception.

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

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

The Piazzetta, Venice (1827) shows the smaller Piazzetta passing out from the Piazza San Marco. This too was painted in the studio from graphite sketches made during his 1826 visit, and again takes liberties with reality.

In February 1828, Bonington visited London again in time to see the two views of Venice above exhibited at the British Institution, then returned to Paris to recuperate from the hectic work of the winter, resuming his printmaking projects. In May he sent three oil paintings for the Royal Academy exhibition, encompassing his coastal views, Venice, and history.

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

Bonington’s health was deteriorating during the early summer, and by the beginning of July he was physically incapacitated. He continued to sketch and paint from the back of cabs in Paris, but in September his parents had him moved to London for medical attention. He died there as a result of pulmonary tuberculosis – ‘King Death’ – on 23 September 1828, a month before he would have turned 26.

Although painted on millboard suggesting that it may have at least started as a plein air sketch, his Corso Sant’Anastasia, Verona (1828) contains a lot of painterly detail that couldn’t have been completed in a single session. It’s also likely that the religious procession was a late addition, influenced by a Le Nain painting in the Louvre. Noon considers this was “almost certainly the last picture Bonington painted before his final illness in July 1828.”

In less than a decade of painting professionally, Bonington was amazingly prolific: Noon’s catalogue includes 400 watercolours and oil paintings, and there are undoubtedly many others still unknown or lost. He had a direct influence on Delacroix, and thereby indirectly on the Impressionists and the major changes of the latter half of the nineteenth century. His use of colour and light, his painterly brushwork, his development of coastal landscapes in Normandy, and of riverbank scenes in the Île de Paris, were important groundwork for the Impressionists. Bonington’s scenes of the traditional fishing industry operating on beaches may even have influenced Eugène Boudin in his paintings on the Channel coast of France, and perhaps the much later watercolours of Winslow Homer at Cullercoats in England.

References

Biography by Bruce MacEvoy
Wikipedia’s short article

Noon P (2008) Richard Parkes Bonington, The Complete Paintings, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 13421 6. Note that numbers given after the year of each painting in the captions refer to Noon’s catalogue.

In the first half of the nineteenth century Britain had three landscape painters of international repute: John Constable (1776–1837), whose work sold better in France than in England, JMW Turner (1775–1851), whose later works anticipated Impressionism, and Richard Parkes Bonington (1802-1828), who was establishing his international reputation when he died of pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of only twenty-five. In this and tomorrow’s article I celebrate the brief and brilliant art of the last of those, Richard Parkes Bonington.

Bonington was born near Nottingham, England. His father had inherited the post of Nottinghamshire jailer in 1789, but before his son was born, father had abandoned that to be a drawing instructor and portrait painter, and had become a reasonably successful provincial artist. The early years of the nineteenth century were financially difficult, and father and mother saw their income falling, so decided to move to France. His father set up a lace factory in Calais in 1817, then moved to Paris the following year to establish a lace shop.

Bonington (the son) was first taught painting by his father, but was rescued from that by Louis Francia, who had recently returned from England. He also copied in the Louvre, and in 1819 enrolled in the atelier of Baron Gros at the Institut de France, the most prestigious in France at the time. Among his fellow students were Paul Delaroche, Robert-Fleury, and Charlet. At first, Bonington and Gros didn’t get on well, but became reconciled over time.

Among Bonington’s favourite views for watercolours were those of the Hôtel des Invalides, Paris from the Père-Lachaise Cemetery, and this View of the Pont des Arts from the Quai du Louvre from about 1819-20 when he wasn’t quite eighteen.

With these watercolour views of Paris selling well, Bonington toured Normandy in the autumn of 1821, returning via Rouen. During that he started developing his interest in coastal landscapes, which were to remain central for the rest of his career. He began to exhibit in the Salon from 1822, and to produce illustrations for travel books published by his father and Ostervald, who also dealt in British paintings.

By 1823, Bonington’s watercolours had become popular, with many being turned into prints, and were generating a healthy income for him and his parents. That year he toured north from Rouen along the coast to Calais and Flanders, then back to Paris via Amiens. Typical of the views which he painted then is this watercolour Near Honfleur (c 1823), although this doesn’t appear to have been turned into a print.

In early 1824, Bonington, in company with his colleague Colin, sketched and painted in Dunkerque and along the north coast again; although Colin returned earlier, Bonington didn’t get back to Paris until the early summer. Among the watercolour views he painted around this time was Fishing Boats Aground (c 1823-4).

He was then working successfully in oils as well as watercolours, and in the summer of 1824 had two oils and a watercolour accepted for the Salon and sold in advance for 500 francs each. He was also awarded a gold medal at that Salon, alongside Constable and Copley Fielding, and Sir Thomas Lawrence was awarded the Legion of Honour. Bonington returned to Dunkerque and continued to paint.

It has been suggested that Bonington’s A Fishmarket near Boulogne (1824) was one of his paintings exhibited in the Salon in 1824, but Noon points out that this canvas was larger than any of his listed for that Salon. It is, without doubt, one of his most significant early paintings, and one of the best of his brief career.

This detail view shows how loosely he handled many of the figures and objects, and the exaggerated aerial perspective giving it such depth.

Another early and successful oil painting, his Near Quillebeuf (c 1824-5) may have a little of Constable’s influence in its foreground, but otherwise shows similar style to A Fishmarket near Boulogne.

Fishing Vessels in a Choppy Sea (1825) was probably a watercolour copy of his A Sea Piece (c 1824), which may have been inspired by Turner’s marines. It was probably painted at Cap Blanc Nez off Wissant.

In May 1825, Bonington and Colin visited London, where they met up with Eugène Delacroix. There they studied public and private collections, and enjoyed many visits to the theatre.

Bonington’s Beached Vessels and a Wagon near Trouville (c 1825) may have been painted when he visited Trouville with Eugène Isabey after their return from England in the summer of 1825. Some have suggested the wagon is another touch of Constable, but Noon points out that such vehicles were commonly used around the coast, and appear in other paintings by Bonington.

In the Forest at Fontainebleau (c 1825) was probably painted after his visit to London, and together with a related graphite sketch, is the only evidence for Bonington having visited Fontainebleau. The rocks are shown in a particularly painterly style, suggesting that it may have been started if not completed en plein air.

On the Coast of Picardy (c 1825-6) shows the Channel coast, probably just north of Le Havre, an area that was to prove popular later with JMW Turner and later still the Impressionists.

Bonington doesn’t appear to have painted many woodland landscapes, but his A Wooded Lane (c 1825) was probably influenced by Paul Huet, with whom Bonington travelled around Rouen and Mantes in the autumn of 1825, rather than Constable.

Bonington’s finest painting of woodland is undoubtedly his Near Rouen from that same campaign with Huet in 1825. Showing Rouen in the distance, it appears to have been a plein air oil sketch, with particular emphasis on development of the trees, which pop out in their detail from its roughed-in sky.

Barges on a River (c 1825-6) was probably painted during that trip too, in the vicinity of Mantes. The windmill seen behind the trees is reminiscent of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting.

Tomorrow’s article will cover the last three years of Bonington’s paintings.

References

Biography by Bruce MacEvoy
Wikipedia’s short article

Noon P (2008) Richard Parkes Bonington, The Complete Paintings, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 13421 6. Note that numbers given after the year of each painting in the captions refer to Noon’s catalogue.

For z, the last letter in this alphabet of landscape painting, I offer a small selection of the very finest works that form the zeitgeist of the genre in Western art.

Landscape of the Danube near Regensburg is one of Albrecht Altdorfer’s five known pure landscape paintings, and was made between about 1528-30. This develops repoussoir, following the foreground – middle distance – far distance convention, with a low horizon to accommodate the framing trees and allow a dramatic cloudscape, laying the foundation for so many landscapes of the future.

Landscape with a Calm from about 1651 is one of Nicolas Poussin’s late pure landscape paintings, of a view that never existed except in the artist’s imagination, although there’s something familiar about each of the elements within it. Like an Advent calendar, it contains scattered scenes which the viewer is tempted to try to construct into a coherent narrative, but are probably all part of the painting’s mode.

In the foreground is a herdsman with his dog, tending to a small flock of goats, which are grazing erratically at the borders of a track meandering down to the lake. The only distinctive feature of the man, indeed of this whole passage, is how non-descript he is. He has nothing that could be interpreted as an attribute, and gives no clue as to his identity. The most prominent feature of the painting is its large Italianate villa. In front of its outermost earthworks, two herdsmen tend a flock of sheep and cattle. The man on the left is playing bagpipes. There are figures scattered just outside and within the grounds of the villa, and two visible at its ground floor windows. There is nothing which appears to be out of the ordinary here either.

All the clues given by the artist point towards the mode of calm and peace in this landscape. Its one small burst of activity is a galloping horse. The air is so calm that the lake reflects like a mirror, and one tiny patch of broken water stands out.

An Autumn Landscape with a View of Het Steen in the Early Morning (c 1636) is one of Peter Paul Rubens larger landscapes from the end of his career. As the sun is rising off to the right, a man drives a cart, on top of which a woman is perched precariously, away from Ruben’s castellated mansion. Beside that stream, a hunter is stalking game with his gun and dog.

A small group of people are on the grass in front of the house: a woman is seated, perhaps nursing an infant; next to her is another woman, and a man. Another man is fishing in the moat, from the bridge which connects its main entrance with the outside world. At the far right, a milkmaid walks out to a small herd of cows. There are birds in the sky, and some small tits and others on the scrub in the foreground. Beyond, a great plain of meadows and woods sweeps far to the horizon. The day has begun.

The similarities in his composition with those of nearly twenty years earlier are remarkable. However, there’s one big difference: while undoubtedly idealised, this painting is based on a real and known geographical location just outside the city of Antwerp.

Some landscape painters, including Jacob van Ruisdael, turned their canvases to make 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 – is 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.

Before Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes sketched in oils in front of his motifs in the Roman Campagna, in around 1782, very few landscape paintings were made in front of the motif. Valenciennes not only assembled himself a library of sketches such as this magnificent View of Rome, but wrote an influential treatise advocating this as a technique. This paved the way for greater fidelity in views and ultimately Impressionism.

JMW Turner’s Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino from 1839 anticipates Impressionist style. It retains several conventional features, though, using repoussoir at the right, and a parade of buildings to lead the eye past the mass of the Colosseum into the distant mist. He uses staffage extensively in the foreground, with a group of three goats at the right and sundry figures at the left. As this is a view from elevation looking down, the horizon is for once well above its midline.

Claude Monet’s masterwork Autumn on the Seine, Argenteuil from 1873 is a textbook example of a river landscape in autumn painted in high Impressionist style, with high chroma and loose brushstrokes.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s The Wave, painted on the Normandy coast in the summer of 1882, is inspired by the ukiyo-e print of Hokusai’s Great Wave, and takes Impressionism to its limits in the dissolution of form.

In the late nineteenth century, landscape painters including Camille Pissarro transferred their attention to cities like Paris, in his case primarily because of eye problems. In January 1897, Pissarro painted from a hotel room overlooking the Rue Saint-Lazare, then in February transferred to a room with a view over the Boulevard Montmartre, where he painted some of his finest cityscapes. His Boulevard Montmartre, Spring Morning (1897) is composed primarily of buildings and streets, a plethora of figures, and countless carriages to move those people around.

Ferdinand Hodler’s view of Lake Geneva with Mont Blanc in the (Red) Dawn Light, painted a few months before he died in 1918, completed his reduction of this view into bands consisting of water coloured by the sky, a zone of blue reflections of the far bank, the merged distant shore and mountains, and the sky.

Paul Nash’s Eclipse of the Sunflower (1945) was inspired by William Blake’s poem Ah! Sunflower, from his Songs of Experience (1794):

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the travellers journey is done.

Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow:
Arise from their graves and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

Nash shows a sunflower undergoing an eclipse, as if a celestial body. Below is a windswept sea and the coast of Dorset, as he had painted below the ‘flying boat’ in his Defence of Albion in 1942. Just above that coast are more peculiar botanical structures relating to the sunflower, and behind is the threatening sky of an imminent storm.

I hope you have enjoyed this series celebrating different aspects of landscape painting.

If paintings of swimmers have been rare in narrative, they have been landmarks elsewhere, where some of the most significant paintings in the Impressionist canon are those painted by Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir of a popular swimming resort near Paris.

In the summer of 1869, Renoir lived at his parents house in Louveciennes, where the Pissarros were also renting a house. He visited the Monets, who were living near Bougival, and often painted alongside Claude Monet. Some of the formative moments in Impressionism if not European art occurred when Monet and Renoir visited the popular bathing houses on the Seine known as La Grenouillère. Here Monet gave an early statement of his Impressionist agenda, a plein air oil sketch originally intended to be turned into a finished painting for submission to the Salon the following year. The pair then realised that Impressionism was about these sketched instants.

Monet’s Bathers at la Grenouillère (1869) is one of the most significant paintings now in London’s National Gallery, and features rows of swimmers in the river beyond the wooden pier crossing the middle of its canvas.

Renoir painted at least three different views of La Grenouillère that summer: that above is now in Stockholm, and that below, most similar to Monet’s, is in the Oskar Reinhart Collection in Switzerland; the third (not shown) is in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

That same summer, Frédéric Bazille started painting a smaller group of young men swimming.

Bazille began this Summer Scene, also known as Bathers, when he was on holiday in Montpellier during the summer of 1869. He had already made a series of compositional studies, from as early as February that year, but when he was working on the canvas, he didn’t find it easy going.

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

On the other side of the Atlantic, swimmers also earned their place in the history of art.

In 1885, Thomas Eakins painted Swimming (The Swimming Hole), appreciated today as one of the most important paintings in American art, and a masterpiece in the depiction of human form. There’s a deep irony in his choice of subject, that Eakins undoubtedly recognised. The same public who were shocked at a painting of naked people, or painting nude models in an art class, were quite used to seeing naked men swimming, even in public places. That was an accepted norm, so long as you didn’t take it into the studio or art class. This work was commissioned, and perhaps inevitably was refused, although the artist was still paid in full.

George Bellows’ Forty-two Kids from 1907 shows unruly youths at play by the water, in apparent homage to Eakins’ Swimming, restaged in this urban setting.

Several of the French artists who had moved to the Midi (the south of France) were experimenting with the use of photography, and this appears to have influenced Henri-Edmond Cross in his Bathers or Happy Bathing, which he started painting in 1899 and completed in 1902. Despite his chroma nearing Fauvist levels, Cross has retained his subtlety in the gradation and transition of colour.

Also in 1902, Lovis Corinth visited the south coast of the Baltic, where he painted Swimming in Horst – Ostsee, now the Polish resort of Niechorze.

Back in warmer waters, Joaquín Sorolla’s The White Boat, Jávea, was painted during his summer campaign on the coast to the south of Valencia in 1905.

Among the few paintings of Maurice Denis featuring nudes is Wave from 1916, with their forced classical poses.

Finally, one of Aksel Waldemar Johannessen’s earliest surviving paintings is a startling view of two swimmers.

Man on a Diving Board from 1912 shows a well-muscled man in bathing trunks bending forward as he sits on the end of a diving board. Below him, just under the surface of the water, is a young woman wearing a bright red costume, including a hat.

As we near the end of this alphabet of landscape painting, this week we reach the letter y, standing for yellow, one of the most important and versatile colours in the artist’s palette. It’s most strongly associated with late summer, when much of the countryside has become dry and turned from the green of Spring to the yellows of ripened grain, ready for harvest.

Perhaps the earliest complete visual reference to the grain harvest is Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Harvesters from 1565. This shows each step in the traditional and labour-intensive processes of cutting the ripe crop, gathering it into stooks, transporting it by cart for threshing, and onward transfer of grain to the waiting ships in the far distance.

In 1826, the young British painter Samuel Palmer moved to the rural village of Shoreham in Kent, in the valley of the River Darent to the north of Sevenoaks, where he spent much of the next decade producing some of his most distinctive work. For Palmer, the village and its environs became his ‘land of milk and honey’, in a Biblical vision of Beulah. His finely-detailed Oak Trees, Lullingstone Park was painted two years later, in 1828. This shows ancient oaks in the deer park of Lullingstone Castle, in the Darent Valley of Kent, between Eynsford and Shoreham, with their leaves turned yellow in the early autumn.

Towards the end of his time in Shoreham, Palmer’s views started to open out into more conventional landscapes, such as The Golden Valley (c 1833-34), caught here at the end of the harvest.

Painted three centuries after Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s encyclopaedic account, Charles-François Daubigny’s Harvest from 1851 is remarkably similar, although its yellows are more muted.

Further afield, in the vast cereal-growing lands of Ukraine, Volodymyr Orlovsky’s Harvest in Ukraine (1880) shows laborious hand-cutting of grain on the steppe, and demonstrates the origin of the Ukrainian flag of blue and yellow.

Mykola Pymonenko’s classic view of Harvest in Ukraine from 1896 follows a compositional formula developed by Jules Bastien-Lepage for Naturalist paintings. Its horizon is high, about three-quarters of the way up the canvas. The women in the foreground and the child’s cradle are painted in fine detail, and their edges are so crisp that they pop out. As the figures and fields recede into the background, they rapidly lose detail and their edges blur. The effect is of a vivid reality at the focus of the image, with deep recession to the distant horizon.

Camille Pissarro started work on his intensely sensory and idyllic painting The Gleaners in early 1888, using a squared-up study in gouache to finalise his composition. He found the Divisionist technique hard, and wrote that he needed models so that he could complete its detail, which he did later the following year.

British painter Adrian Stokes travelled to Romania in eastern Europe for this golden view of Harvest Time in Transylvania (c 1909), one of many paintings he and his wife Marianne made of their protracted visits.

Grant Wood’s Fall Plowing from 1931 is set in the prairie of Iowa, where it shows ripe and harvested cereals, and a recently developed walking plough with a steel ploughshare, an important advance in cultivating the prairie.

Henry Herbert La Thangue painted In the Orchard in 1893, presumably in Sussex, England, using a profusion of fine marks more typical of Impressionism. Although the figures and baskets of fruit are quite tightly detailed, much of the rest of his canvas is more painterly and atmospheric.

Yellow has also been used in combination with blues and greens to create colours closer to those in nature. In some cases, even into the twentieth century, the yellow used hasn’t proved lightfast, and has faded to leave foliage appearing blue.

This is all too sadly evident in Adriaen van de Velde’s otherwise superb Vertumnus and Pomona from 1670.

Carl Blechen used lightfast chrome yellow extensively in his imposing View of Assisi, painted in 1832-35. By this time, the mixture of chrome yellow with Prussian blue had become known as green cinnabar or chrome green, although the chromium salt used was yellow in colour, not green.

Chrome yellow was widely used by the Impressionists and shown at the Salon, and is demonstrated well in Paul Cézanne’s famous painting of The Railway Cutting (c 1870). Most if not all of the greens seen here most probably rely on chrome yellow mixed with blue.

If you’ve never visited a remote Scottish beach, now is the time to do so. To give you a taste of those in Kintyre, on the west coast, this article shows a small selection of the paintings of William McTaggart (1835–1910). I’m sure if you looked hard enough around his favourite haunts there, you’ll still find him painting briskly on another canvas.

He was born into a Scottish Gaelic-speaking family of crofters, in the tiny village of Aros, on the western side of the Kintyre peninsula. Like many of the best Scottish artists of the day, he studied at the Trustees’ Academy in Edinburgh, now the Edinburgh College of Art. He was very successful there, winning prizes, and started his career in figurative painting. After he was admitted as a full member of the Royal Scottish Academy (the Scottish sister organisation to the Royal Academy in London) in 1870, he turned to concentrate on painting the rugged west coast.

Machrihanish Bay (1878) shows one of his favourite locations near his childhood home, on the west coast of Kintyre where it’s exposed to the full might of the North Atlantic Ocean. This bay is noted for its long unbroken stretch of sand, here being pounded by a moderate sea. His brushwork is far looser than in his earlier figurative paintings, and captures the variety of surfaces and textures.

During the summer, McTaggart stayed in the tiny fishing village of Machrihanish to capture its fleeting light conditions, as in his Summer Sundown – Tir-nan-og (1880). The name Tir-nan-og in its title refers to the legendary Celtic paradise in the west. McTaggart would almost certainly have been aware of the French Impressionists at this time, but probably didn’t see any of their paintings for another three years. Instead, it’s usually considered that he was influenced more by Whistler, the Hague School, and Joseph Israels in particular.

Sun on the Waters, Fishing from the Rocks at Carradale (1882) shows fine weather on the east coast of Kintyre, opposite the western coast of the Isle of Arran, which is just visible at the left edge. McTaggart often hired local children to model for his paintings, and these three appear to be taking great pleasure in their activity.

Even on the more sheltered side of Kintyre, squally showers can be frequent, as shown in Wind and Rain, Carradale from 1883.

The Storm (1890) shows the same area at the height of a severe gale, figures clad in sou’westers and clinging to the rocks as land, sea and air merge into one continuum. This painting was first purchased by the Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie.

Most of his larger paintings including this were made in his studio from smaller oil sketches made in front of the motif, following the classic process for landscape painting. Sometimes he and other Scottish landscape artists worked directly en plein air on large canvases, and there are photographs showing them doggedly painting the coast with their canvases lashed to the ground to prevent them from blowing away.

Noontide, Jovie’s Neuk (1894) is a more peaceful scene at the northern end of Aberlady Bay, a picturesque section of coastline to the east of Edinburgh, on the east coast of Scotland.

McTaggart also set historical scenes into his coastal landscapes, here The Coming of Saint Columba from 1895. This Irish abbot and missionary is generally believed to have brought Christianity to Scotland around 563 CE. Although most strongly associated with the first abbey on the remote island of Iona, Columba initially crossed to Kintyre before travelling north. The artist chose The Gauldrons, a rocky bay west of Machrihanish, as the scene, and is believed to have painted the landscape en plein air, later completing the figures and boats back in the studio.

During the middle and latter part of the nineteenth century, large numbers of Scots from the Hebridean islands emigrated, many under duress, to America and Canada, in the hope that they would prosper there rather than starving on their crofts. McTaggart was deeply moved by these events, and his own sister and her husband were among those to emigrate. He painted three major works, and numerous copies and variants, marking the emigrations.

The Emigrants Leaving the Hebrides was started in 1883, when McTaggart painted the headland from which the emigrants left at Carradale, on the east side of Kintyre, but he didn’t complete its details until 1889. This shows migrants loading their few possessions into rowing boats in the foreground, then being rowed out to the waiting ship in the distance. He shows several influences here, particularly that of Constable in the sky and his scattered highlights. By this time he’s likely to have seen Impressionist paintings when they were exhibited in London in 1883, although this work shows little influence from the likes of Monet.

The Sailing of the Emigrant Ship (1895) shows a later stage in the process, with the emigrants all aboard the ship which is now sailing off to cross the Atlantic. Left behind on the rocky coast are those who were too old and infirm to travel, and are now left without the support of their younger family members. McTaggart’s handling of the sky in particular is here much rougher and more vigorous, with just a glimpse of a fragment of a rainbow, symbolising the hopes of the emigrants.

A Westerly Gale, Machrahanish (1897) is another superb rendering of rough conditions in this bay on the west coast of Kintyre.

Scotland’s beaches are many and varied, and wonderfully depicted by William McTaggart.

On all good maps of buried treasure, X marks the spot, so for the letter x in this alphabet of landscape painting, I’ll consider some fine paintings of the Palace of Westminster (better known as the Houses of Parliament) on the River Thames in London. For each of them we can determine within a few yards where the artist placed their easel.

Location

The present Houses of Parliament in London, so famous for their pinnacled roof and adjacent Big Ben, are less than 200 years old. A popular motif for painters from overseas, it is well situated on the ‘north’ bank (here, actually the west bank) of the River Thames, upstream from the City itself.

The original Palace of Westminster was a royal palace for Edward the Confessor, just before the Norman Conquest. He also built the adjacent Westminster Abbey (the ‘West Minster’, giving the name), the higher and dominant building until the new Palace was built in the middle of the nineteenth century.

This early royal palace was destroyed by fire in 1512, and soon became the home of the two Houses of Parliament, but was inadequate for that purpose, lacking proper chambers for them. The site gradually expanded, but there was no planning to provide suitable accommodation. It was extensively remodelled between 1824-7, then an overheated stove being used to burn the Exchequer’s store of wooden tally sticks set the buildings alight on 16 October 1834, and they quickly burnt to the ground.

While the Houses of Commons and Lords met in temporary accommodation, the current buildings were constructed to the designs of Charles Barry, in Perpendicular Gothic style. Most of the building work was completed by 1860. Although the site suffered bomb damage during the Second World War, the main buildings remain much as originally constructed.

Challenge

The most famous views of the current Palace of Westminster are of course from the river, with its distinctive Elizabeth Tower housing Big Ben, at the right. At the opposite end, to the south-west of the site, is the larger and higher Victoria Tower, and the middle of the waterfront has the smallest spire-like Central Tower.

The River Thames is an invaluable compositional aid when painting the Palace, but being quite broad at this point puts considerable distance between the painter and the buildings. This is exaggerated when the view is made over a diagonal across the river, such as from Lambeth Palace.

The river also brings its own lighting effects, particularly fog. Until the use of coal fires died out in London during the 1950s and 1960s, smoke and fog often combined to produce smog; when thin, its colour could enhance views, although smogs were also responsible for disease and many deaths.

Today this section of the River Thames has very little goods traffic, London’s upper docks having closed between 1960-90. The nineteenth century was a period of particularly heavy trade, though. The major enclosed basins were all situated downstream of Waterloo Bridge, and well away from Westminster, with smaller vessels plying their trade along the section in front of the Palace. Now most of the vessels are carrying passengers, either using the river as a rapid means of crossing the city, or as tourists.

Paintings

Samuel Scott’s Westminster from Lambeth, with the Ceremonial Barge of the Ironmongers’ Company (c 1745) shows this section of the River Thames on a windy day, with showers not far away. Teams of rowers pull their boats out to attend to the ceremonial barges in the foreground, reminiscent of Venetian boat ceremonies. The opposite bank shows, from the left, the imposing twin towers of Westminster Abbey, the old Palace almost hidden behind trees, and Westminster Bridge.

This was painted from Lambeth Palace (marked ① on the map). At this time, this stretch of the Thames was shown in plenty of topographical views, many of which were then engraved and printed. Scott’s view has more to it than those, with the action on the river, and its wonderful sky.

Taken from a similar location on the ‘south’ bank of the river as Scott’s painting, Canaletto’s The River Thames looking towards Westminster from Lambeth (1747) had the benefit of height, probably being painted from one of the towers of Lambeth Palace (① on the map), seen in the right foreground.

Although Canaletto, probably as a reflection of his Venetian works, captures the bustle of the multitude of vessels on the river, even the massive form of Westminster Abbey appears so far distant that it loses grandeur. The tiny old Palace to the right of it, although close to the centre of the painting, all but disappears. Westminster Bridge is brilliant white in the sunlight, and steals the centre of attention. Standing proud of the skyline at the far right is the dome of Saint Paul’s Cathedral to the north-east.

Paul Sandby’s View of the south end of the old House of Commons (1794) presents another solution to the relative insignificance of the Houses of Parliament: to ignore the river and paint up close against the building. This rapidly executed watercolour sketch of the old Palace gives a clear impression of the building long since lost to fire. It was painted from what is now the northern end of the Victoria Tower Gardens, a public park (②).

When the old Palace caught fire in 1834, most of London turned out to watch the flames. John Constable was in a cab, stuck in the jam on Westminster Bridge (③), where he painted this Fire Sketch (1834), showing the north end of the building ablaze. He did not, apparently, try to develop it into anything more substantial.

With Constable, his arch-rival, stuck in a cab on Westminster Bridge, JMW Turner was still on the ‘south’ bank, at the far end of the bridge (④). From there, or rather later, he painted one version of The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October, 1834 (1834-5) in oils, now in Philadelphia. The two prominent towers behind the fire are those of Westminster Abbey.

His other canvas shows a view from near what is now Hungerford Bridge, on the ‘south’ bank still (⑤). At that time there was no Hungerford Bridge: the first bridge built at that point was a suspension footbridge designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, in 1845, and in 1864 was replaced with a more massive structure to carry trains to Charing Cross Station. In this view, Westminster Bridge is silhouetted against the flames, instead of being lit by them, and the massive towers of Westminster Abbey appear ghostly in the distance. This version is also in the USA, in Cleveland.

Turner capitalised successfully on this spectacle, although these paintings were not the atmospheric sketches that they might appear to be. A lot of the oil paint has been applied wet on dry, showing that Turner must have worked on each in the studio for several weeks at least.

David Roberts’ The Houses of Parliament from Millbank (1861) shows the new Palace of Westminster during final completion work. In order to show the new buildings to best effect, Roberts positioned himself to the south, probably at the west end of Lambeth Bridge at Millbank (⑥). In doing so he lost the symmetry and regular structure of the building, its towers here looking almost haphazard. From the left and front they are the Victoria, Central, and Elizabeth, the latter just showing the southern clock face. The vessels shown are typical of the type known as Thames Barges, and were probably engaged in bringing materials to the site during construction.

Just a decade after Roberts’ conventional treatment of the motif, Claude Monet’s The Thames below Westminster (1871) is a radical departure. Painted from the Embankment to the north of Westminster Bridge, near what is now Whitehall (⑦), the three towers to the south are almost superimposed, and aerial perspective is exaggerated by the mist. The river is now bustling with small paddleboat steamers. In the foreground a pier under construction is shown almost in silhouette. The small waves and reflections on the river are indicated with coarse brushstrokes, adding to the impression that this is a rapid and spontaneous work.

Monet started painting formal series during the 1880s, when he was enjoying commercial success at last. From about 1896, almost all his works were part of a series. He started to travel through Europe in search of suitable motifs for these, visiting Norway in 1895, and later Venice. When he returned to London in 1899, and in the following two years, Monet chose a very different view of the Palace, from a location at the opposite end of Westminster Bridge, for his series of 19 paintings. These were all started from the second floor of the Administrative Block at the northern end of the old Saint Thomas’s Hospital on the ‘south’ bank (④), and completed over the following three or four years.

His The Houses of Parliament, Sunlight Effect (1903) is even more radical than the painting of thirty years before, showing little more than the Palace in silhouette, the sun low in the sky, and its broken reflections in the water.

The Houses of Parliament, Sunset (1903) shows the same view in better visibility, but with the sun setting and a small boat on the move in front of the Palace.

In The Houses of Parliament, Stormy Sky (1904) the sun is higher and further to the south, allowing Monet to balance the silhouette of the Palace with its shadow cast on the water, and the brightness in the sky with its fragmented reflections.

The Houses of Parliament (1881) is Winslow Homer’s faithful representation of the Palace when viewed from the opposite bank of the Thames, to the north (downstream) of the end of Westminster Bridge (⑧). The tide is high under the arches of Westminster Bridge, and small boats are on the river. This classic watercolour makes an interesting contrast with Monet’s later oil paintings: Homer provides little more detail, the Palace being shown largely in silhouette, but works with the texture of the paper and careful choice of pigment to give granularity. He provides just sufficient visual cues to fine detail, in the lamps and people on Westminster Bridge, and in the boats, to make this a fine example of masterful watercolour.

Tom Roberts’ Fog, Thames Embankment (1884) is painted from a similar location to Monet’s early The Thames below Westminster (1871), on the Embankment to the north of Westminster Bridge (⑦), but is cropped much more tightly, cutting off the tops of the Victoria and Elizabeth Towers. The Palace and first couple of arches of Westminster Bridge appear in misty silhouette, with moored barges and buildings on a pier shown closer and crisper. He renders the ruffled surface of the river with coarse brushstrokes, but differently from those of Monet.

In Childe Hassam’s Houses of Parliament, Early Evening (1898), the sun has already set, and he is viewing the Palace in the gathering dusk from a point on the opposite (‘south’) bank, perhaps not as far south as Lambeth Palace (⑨). The Victoria Tower is prominent in the left of the painting, the Central Tower is in the centre, and the most distant Elizabeth Tower is distinctive with its illuminated clock face. Moored boats in the foreground provide the only other detail. His rough facture gives a textured surface to the water.

Emile Claus’s Sunset over Waterloo Bridge (1916) probably doesn’t quite include the Palace, because of its northerly viewpoint; it was painted from a location on the north bank of the Thames slightly to the east of Waterloo Bridge (⑩), the north end of which is prominent, and looks south-west into the setting sun, up river. Claus painted several views of Waterloo Bridge while he was in London, but doesn’t appear to have attempted any formal series, such as Monet’s, which also included a series of Waterloo Bridge.

Claus isn’t formulaic in his treatment. He uses billowing clouds of steam and smoke to great effect, and his inclusion of the road, trees and terraces in the foreground, on the Embankment, provides useful contrast with the crisp arches of the bridge, and the vaguer silhouettes in the distance. Like Monet’s series, this is likely to have been painted from a temporary studio inside a building.

Rain (2006) is one of two views of the Palace painted en plein air that year by Simon Kozhin; the other shows Elizabeth Tower and the Palace from the north, the viewpoint being on the Embankment just to the north of the end of Westminster Bridge. This view is less conventional, though, in showing the north end of the Palace on a dull, wet day, a tourist kiosk in the centre foreground, and the contorted branches of leafless trees beside it. The two prominent towers shown are the Central (mid left) and Victoria (centre) Towers, with their decoration delicately hinted in colour. Although quite detailed and thoroughly realist, reflections of the kiosk lighting on the wet road surface are painterly. This was painted from the pavement outside Portcullis House, close to the entrance to Westminster Underground Station (⑪).

The last of these artists who were influenced by the German Romantic painters, notably Caspar David Friedrich and J C Dahl, is the Norwegian Hans Gude (1825–1903).

Born and initially educated in Christiania (now Oslo, Norway), Gude started his studies at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1842. There he joined a recently formed landscape class taught by Johann Wilhelm Schirmer. Gude rejected the conventional teaching that landscape paintings should be composed according to classical or aesthetic principles, preferring instead to paint thoroughly realistically, and true to nature. On completion of his studies, probably in about 1846, he returned to Norway.

Landscape Study from Vågå (1846) is an excellent 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.

Winter Afternoon from 1847 is a studio painting that wouldn’t look out of place on a greetings card, and a stark contrast.

Tessefossen in Vågå at Midday (1848) is a relatively large studio painting that seems 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 Adolph Tidemand to paint those in for him.

Among the results of this collaboration are some of his most spectacular works, such as Bridal Journey in Hardanger from 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.

Although not a particularly large canvas, it’s as meticulously detailed as might have been expected from a Pre-Raphaelite or German Romantic artist, although its colours aren’t as brash. Gude became particularly interested in reflections on water later in his career.

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 highly 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, who may be Betsy Anker, whom Gude married in the summer of that year.

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

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

Although painted in the studio, his Norwegian Highlands from 1857 appears based on studies made in front of the motif, and retains traditional earth-based colours typical of Friedrich or Dahl.

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 made in the previous autumn.

He also painted some grander landscapes of The Lledr Valley in Wales (1864), where he stayed during this campaign.

Gude continued to work by painting studies en plein air, which he took back to the studio and worked up into finished paintings. In contrast, local British painters at the time tended to complete their finished works in front of the motif, and seldom painted landscapes in the studio. When his 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, including Kitty Kielland, Eilif Peterssen, Christian Krohg, 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 in 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.

He painted Oban Bay in 1889 following another visit to Scotland, showing 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.

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 that leads 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.

Reference

Wikipedia.

In the first of these two collections of paintings of the city of Istanbul and its surroundings, I looked a little at its history, then views painted by European visitors during the nineteenth century, reaching the work of the Italian artist Alberto Pasini and his signature green melons.

In 1882, Pasini painted this view By the Fountain, Constantinople combining a small market, with its melon seller of course, and three horses sheltering as well as they can from the blazing midday sun.

Seven years later, Pasini painted A Market Scene showing an eclectic mixture of produce, ranging from live chickens to pots and the ever-present melons. To the left of centre is a ramshackle horse-drawn carriage.

A Mosque (1886) is the second of Pasini’s two paintings in the Met, and a marked contrast from the earlier one. There are no smart carriages here, and most of the exterior of the building is in need of decoration if not repair. But there’s a small market running, and you can still get melons too, as shown in the detail below.

The great Swedish artist Anders Zorn visited Turkey in 1886.

One portrait he completed before leaving the country is this Bedouin Girl (1886) he saw in Constantinople.

Although little-known outside Turkey, one of its pioneering artists was Osman Hamdi Bey, a senior administrator in the late years of the Ottoman Empire, and its first modern archaeologist. The son of a Grand Vizier, he travelled to Paris in 1860 to study law but changed to become a pupil of Jean-Léon Gérôme and Gustave Boulanger.

The wonderful assortment of characters in Osman Hamdi’s panoramic view of a Persian Carpet Dealer on the Street (1888) reflects the cosmopolitan population of Istanbul, sitting at the gateway between Europe and Asia Minor.

Another familiar street scene of the day, Osman Hamdi’s Public Scribe (1910) may have been part of a campaign to improve education and literacy, particularly among women.

Osman Hamdi’s magnificent Tortoise Trainer from 1906 is by far his best-known painting, and set the record for the highest price paid for a Turkish painting when it was sold in 2004 for $3.5 million.

Its ingenious allegory can be read in at least two ways. The artist may have been self-critical of his painstakingly slow work; tortoises are not only inherently slow, but in the early eighteenth century had been used in Istanbul to bear lit candles for evening outings. This painting also had a greater political meaning, as the tortoise trainer wears traditional Ottoman religious costume from before the middle of the nineteenth century, and is training the tortoises with a traditional Turkish ney flute.

In that sense, it’s a satire on the slow, faltering, and often ineffective reforms made to the Ottoman Empire during the late nineteenth century, an issue with which Osman Hamdi had much personal experience. This resulted in a time of increasing social and political upheaval, preceding the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 which changed the basis of rule in the empire, followed by the breakup of the empire after the First World War.

Michael Zeno Diemer’s brilliant painting of The Ahırkapı Lighthouse (1906-07) shows one of the oldest tower lighthouses at one of the most notable coastal landmarks: the southern entrance to the Straits of Bosporus, to the south of Istanbul. This lighthouse is on the European side; its opposite number is the Kadıköy İnciburnu lighthouse to the east, which would be off the right edge of this painting.

In late March 1907 Paul Signac travelled with the painter Henri Person (1876-1926) to Constantinople, where they painted for six weeks before returning to France. This is the only accessible finished painting from Signac’s visit to what’s known in French as La Corne d’Or, or The Golden Horn, (1907). Using the same compositional technique that had proved so successful in his views of Venice, this shows the Süleymaniye Mosque on the Third Hill from the north-west, on the western (European) side of the Bosporus Strait.

In the foreground are brightly coloured rowing boats taking part in what looks like a regatta, and a row of sailing ships on moorings, all in the waters of the Golden Horn. The mosque is relatively desaturated as it dissolves into the distant pink and gold sky. This mosque was built between 1550-57 for Suleiman the Magnificent, and encloses the mausoleums of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and his wife. It’s one of the best-known sights in the city of Istanbul, and an ideal view for Signac’s treatment.

At that point, bathed in Signac’s colour and light, I’m afraid it’s time to cross the Bosporus and return to Europe.

There can be few cities in the world as exciting as Istanbul, as it straddles the Bosporus Strait joining Europe to Asia, and connecting the Black Sea with the Mediterranean. This weekend I invite you to join me in seeing that city, and a little of the country around it, in the paintings of great artists.

Founded as the Greek city of Byzantium at around the time of Homer, it grew into the capital of Constantine the Great’s Roman Empire in 330 CE, and was soon renamed Constantinople. It then served as the capital of a succession of Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, and was finally renamed Istanbul in 1930.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1885 painting of The Great Bath of Bursa is an intricate orientalist fantasy set in this large city in north-western Turkey, which for a period during the fourteenth century was the country’s capital. This is to the south of Istanbul, close to the Sea of Marmara.

Legends about Charlemagne and his travels are often colourful, but usually unsupported by evidence. This miniature showing Charlemagne in Constantinople from about 1450 appears entirely fictitious, and another fantasy.

Eugène Delacroix’s major entry for the Salon of 1841 was The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople (1840), destined for display in the Salle de Croisades in Versailles. This shows an episode from the fourth crusade in 1204, in which the crusaders took Constantinople. French forces were under the command of Baldwin, Count of Flanders, and had attacked from the land, while Venetians attacked the port from the sea. Its reception was as muted as its colours.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, European artists started travelling to Turkey to paint its exotic sights.

Richard Dadd’s Caravanserai at Mylasa in Asia Minor (1845) is a fairly conventional ‘orientalist’ view of a group of travellers at what had been the ancient Greek city of Mylasa, now Milas in south-western Turkey, well to the south of Istanbul and on the Mediterranean coast.

View of Constantinople and the Bosphorus (1856) is one of many views that Ivan Aivazovsky made of this great city, which he visited on many occasions. The artist kept his studio in Crimea, on the northern shore of the Black Sea.

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Italian painter Alberto Pasini lived in Constantinople for periods of up to nine months, and painted the city and its surroundings frequently.

Pasini’s great forte, if his surviving paintings are anything to go by, was the marketplace. He became very familiar with the often ad hoc markets set up wherever trading vessels came alongside. Market in Istanbul (Constantinople) from 1868 captures the cosmopolitan nature of these markets, and the whole city, mixing cultures, beliefs, eras, and technologies so gloriously.

Despite their apparent detail, Pasini’s paintings are relatively small, none here exceeding 90 cm (36 inches) in either dimension. The Met’s painting of A Mosque from 1872 is one of his larger works, and appears a more formal composition. A high-ranking person has just arrived in their decorated carriage to attend this mosque (see detail below), where they are greeted by a very casually turned-out guard, at the left. In the right foreground is one of Pasini’s signature melon sellers, who appear in so many of his paintings.

At The Golden Horn from about 1876 shows a dockside not far from the bustling city of Istanbul. The Golden Horn (in Modern Turkish, Haliç) is a horn-shaped estuary emptying into the Bosporus Strait at ‘Old Istanbul’. As a stretch of sheltered water so close to the city, it had long been a popular port for smaller traders, such as the mixed steam and sailing ship seen shrouded in coal smoke.

Market Day in Constantinople (1877) is one of Pasini’s finest paintings of the city’s waterfront, and one of several which have made their way to the US. Although its cultural fusion is less overt than his earlier painting of a market there, this is another ‘big’ view as its quay sweeps gently away into the distance. The detail below shows how meticulous Pasini is in his closer figures and produce, including the inevitable melon sellers with their great green globes glistening in the sunshine.

In this alphabet of landscape painting, we’ve covered two of the four ancient elements, in earth and various bodies of water, but not yet touched on air. Therefore the letter w is for wind, a real challenge to paint.

The most florid paintings of wind are in seascapes, where its effects are most immediate.

JMW Turner was one of the great masters of the shipwreck/storm maritime scene. My favourite example is this Snow Storm, Steam Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842). This was the work for which it was claimed that Turner had himself lashed to the mast so that he could observe the storm properly, almost certainly false and quite unnecessary anyway: as a seasoned Channel traveller, Turner would have had ample previous experience. This also shows one of Turner’s most distinctive features in painting storms, the vortex, with his subject seen in its central eye. Although not exactly natural, it has proved atmospheric.

Peder Balke takes advantage of the rich clues provided in The Harbor at Skjervøy (c 1844-46). In this small fishing port in Troms, in the far north of Norway, the wind fills the sky with wheeling seabirds, heels the yachts, turns the sea white from breaking waves, and drives distant smoke almost horizontally.

Clarkson Frederick Stanfield made his reputation from marine paintings showing the effects of wind and waves. In the summer of 1843, he toured the Netherlands, finding fresh motifs for his oil paintings, including Oude Scheld – Texel Island, Looking towards Nieuwe Diep and the Zuider Zee, completed in his studio the following year. Its fragmented clouds are paralleled by the frequent small waves, together building the effect of a brisk offshore breeze. The critics loved it.

Late in his career, Gustave Courbet’s coastal paintings came to concentrate on waves breaking on the beach, as in his Autumn Sea from 1867, where two sailing boats are the only forms to punctuate its horizon. They are heeling in the wind, which is also starting to blow the tops off the waves, as those dirty clouds scud rapidly across the sky.

On land, though, the painter has to work harder to convince the viewer, enlisting the help of trees and their foliage, and even washing hung out to dry.

Thomas Gainsborough’s sketchy Landscape with Cottage and Church (1771-72) is one of the first works to use angled highlights over the foliage of trees to make them appear as if they’re moving in the wind, and its style was far ahead of its time.

Although trees are a help when depicting wind, Daubigny’s undated October manages very well with the tell-tale smoke rising from burning stubble.

Gustave Courbet shows how a ‘leaning’ sky can amplify the windswept branches, in The Gust of Wind from about 1865.

Although it depicts more extreme conditions, Jean-François Millet’s Gust of Wind from 1871-73 must be the canonical painting of a storm. Its lone and distant figure is being blown almost double, as he’s nearly struck by a large branch torn from the tree to the left. Indeed, that tree is being uprooted, and its leaves pepper the storm sky at dawn.

Antônio Parreiras’ wonderful Ventania (The Windstorm) (1888) is not as extreme, but just as eloquent, again using a leaning sky to accentuate the arcs formed by the trees.

With the Impressionist emphasis on transient effects of light rather than weather, their paintings tend to be more subtle again, as shown in Claude Monet’s Poplars (Wind Effect) from 1891.

Some of the most effective aids for the depiction of wind are flags and drying washing. While Sisley used the former, Gustave Caillebotte painted two views in which a washing line gives the strongest clue as to the wind. This is his Laundry Drying, Petit Gennevilliers (1892), the windier of the two.

Following his time at Cullercoats in England painting fisherfolk there, Winslow Homer’s simple and effective watercolour of Hurricane, Bahamas (1898) should come as no surprise.

Although not famous as a landscape painter, Franz von Stuck’s Storm Landscape (c 1920) leaves the viewer in no doubt.

In this alphabet of landscape painting there are several strong contenders for the letter v. Volcanoes make for thrilling views, but are unusual apart from those of Vesuvius. Views of Venice, or vedute, have become a specialist sub-genre in their own right. I have therefore chosen the more general theme of valleys instead.

Two approaches have been popular to make the valley the theme of a landscape painting, depending on the viewpoint chosen. If the artist decides to paint from within the valley, then they will de-emphasise its surrounding uplands. If the chosen viewpoint is above the valley, then any surrounding hills will naturally appear distant and subsidiary.

JC Dahl’s Landscape in Kaupanger with a Stave Church from 1847 opts for the former technique, its hills made vague and shrouded in low cloud, and the valley in the foreground painted in higher chroma and greater detail. Dahl had to employ a little deception as this church had been modified structurally and looked quite different at the time, so substituted the stave church at Vang, which was demolished shortly afterwards. Dahl stepped in and had it rebuilt in the Silesian Mountains for the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV.

Frederic Edwin Church’s huge masterpiece The Heart of the Andes from 1859 adopts a similar strategy, with its brightly-coloured birds and rich plant life in the foreground valley. At its heart is a cross, with two figures by it (detail below). Dressed as locals, one sits, facing the cross, while the other stands just behind the seated figure, looking in the same direction. The cross is made simply of wood, and appears to have been decorated with a floral garland. It’s partly obscured by the luxuriant wayside plants.

Just four years later, Albert Bierstadt’s The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak (1863) focussed attention on the Shoshone in the foreground, while the rugged mountain of the title is faded into the far distance.

Although the staffage in the foreground of Sidney Richard Percy’s On the Road to Loch Turret, Crieff (1868) appears routine, he has put similar emphasis on this valley near the market town of Crieff, on the busy road between Perth and Crianlarich. Percy’s track is more remote, and probably used by Highland drovers to take their cattle to market in Crieff, then a major outlet for livestock from further north in Scotland.

Benjamin Williams Leader’s In a Welsh Valley from 1909 dissolves the peaks of Snowdonia, North Wales, in vagueness, while its green valley is supersaturated.

The alternative approach of looking down on the valley is compositionally simpler, but requires careful attention to depth and perspective to avoid the valley appearing flat.

Samuel Palmer painted this view of The Golden Valley when he was living in Shoreham between about 1833-34. This looks down from the Weald of Kent just as the harvest is being brought down to the valley below.

In the summer of 1853, the Pre-Raphaelite landscape artist Thomas Seddon visited Brittany, where he painted his first masterpiece of Léhon, from Mont Parnasse, Brittany. This shows the ruins of the monastery there, and has the distinctive look of Pre-Raphaelite landscape paintings in combining fine detail with an air of unreality.

This look is in part the result of the prolonged painting time to achieve the fine detail expected. Early plein air painters quickly learned that capturing a view so that it appeared natural required fast work for short periods, only an hour or two at most, in consistent lighting conditions over one or a very few sessions at the same time each day. To accomplish that, they sketched, and omitted detail. By setting himself the requirement of capturing such great detail, true to nature, Seddon made the painting process so protracted as to lose the coherent details of light, shadow, and surface effects that make a realist painting appear real.

A November Rainbow – Dolwyddelan Valley, November 11, 1866, 1 p.m. (1866) is one of Alfred William Hunt’s most celebrated paintings, with its elaborate composition and rich colours. It shows the valley of the River Lledr near the hamlet of Bertheos, on the eastern side of the Snowdon range in North Wales. He too de-emphasises the distant hills and floods the valley with light and detail.

In 1885, Charles Blomfield painted the active geothermal area of Orakei Korako on the Waikato, with its geysers and hot springs. This is on the bank of New Zealand’s longest river, in the North Island, and views the valley from above.

My final example is this View from the Dürnstein Ruins over the Danube Valley painted from above by Emilie Mediz-Pelikan in about 1900. In the foreground are the ruins of Dürnstein Castle, near Krems, with the River Danube below, meandering tightly from the top. She has cropped out the hills that might have distracted from her superb view of the Danube Valley.

Iceland is like no other place on earth. Sat astride the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, its landscape is dominated by active volcanoes, glaciers, waterfalls, and steppe. With its small population and their long struggle to survive against the elements, local painting was limited until the early twentieth century. Then several Icelandic painters founded what has rapidly grown into one of the most active arts for its size.

Þórarinn Benedikt Þorláksson (1867-1924) was one of the founding fathers of modern painting in Iceland, the first Icelander to exhibit in Iceland, and painted superb landscapes portraying the beauty of the land. He died at the age of only 57 a century ago, on 10 July 1924.

He initially trained and worked as a bookbinder, but in the late nineteenth century became a pupil of Þóra Thoroddsen, an Icelandic woman who had trained in Copenhagen, Denmark. Þórarinn was awarded the first public grant to support his studies, and from 1895-99 he too studied in Copenhagen. On his return in 1900, he held his first exhibition in its capital Reykjavík, the first exhibition of paintings by an Icelander to be held in Iceland.

He taught drawing, and was the principal of the Reykjavík Technical College from 1916-22. He not only inspired and taught other artists, but even supplied them with materials and books from his art shop in the city. By any standards, he was a superb landscape painter who deserves international recognition.

For much of its history, Iceland was a colony, of either Norway or Denmark. Through the nineteenth century, there was a growing independence movement, but it didn’t become a sovereign state until 1918, even then remaining in union with Denmark. This undated painting shows King Fredrik VIII of Denmark and Hannes Hafstein Governor of Iceland ride to Þingvellir in 1908, a time when the country was still a Danish colony.

Until relatively recently, Icelandic society was very traditional, and even homes in the city were decorated in more traditional style. Þórarinn’s glimpse into The Artist’s Home (1924) shows this well.

Iceland has a strong and deep attachment to the sea, and it’s appropriate that Þórarinn’s Summer Evening in Reykjavík (1904) shows a view from its rocky coast, rather than the city’s buildings.

One of the central motifs in Þórarinn’s paintings is Þingvellir (1900), the site of Iceland’s original parliament in 930 CE, about thirty miles east of the capital. This is a unique site, which I found haunting for both its history – the last parliament sat here in 1798, almost 900 years after the first – and its location. It’s in a rift valley forming the boundary between the tectonic plates of North America and Eurasia, and is now a World Heritage Site.

Þórarinn painted fine views from this location, including From Þingvellir (1914), above, and From Þingvellir II (1905), below. These show Þingvallavatn, the largest natural lake in Iceland (above), and the river Öxará winding around Þingvellir (below).

Another view epitomising Iceland is that of the huge active volcano Hekla from Laugardalur (1922). Known to visitors as the Gateway to Hell, it last erupted in early 2000. Þórarinn captures it bathed in the low, warm light of sunset, seen from a park on the outskirts of Reykjavík. If this looks praeternatural, it’s because it is.

Stórisjór and Vatnajökull (1921) shows this barren hilly area with its lakes, and the vast dome of the Vatnajökull glacier in the far distance. Vatnajökull is the largest in Iceland, and one of the largest in Europe, with an average ice depth of 380 metres (1,250 feet).

During the summer, the countryside of Iceland is carpeted with flowers and rich vegetation, shown well in Repose (1910).

Þórarinn’s Waterfall (1909) is small by comparison with Iceland’s famous falls, but shows his distinctive style.

Þórarinn B. Þorláksson continued to paint the landscape of Iceland until he died at his summerhouse on 10 July 1924.

(I apologise for the limited quality of some of these images, but they are the best that are available.)

When landscape artists take to the hills, they often head for rocky peaks and miss the undulating uplands of the foothills. So u in this alphabet of landscapes stands for those undulating uplands that roll rather than precipitate. In English they’re often referred to as downs, which might appear contradictory, although the word has common origins with dunes, which makes more sense, perhaps.

Samuel Palmer’s view of The Weald of Kent from about 1833-34 is typical of what you see looking down from a ridge at the valley below. This is an area of low hills between the main South and North Downs in the south-east of England.

Although a bit more rugged than the Downs of England, Arnold Böcklin’s view In the Alban Hills from 1851 shows these hills about 20 km (12 miles) south-east of the city of Rome. These have long been a popular escape from the city during the hot months of summer.

Jean-François Millet returned to the rolling Normandy countryside of his birth in The Hamlet of Cousin near Gréville (1855). This shows the rough lane leading to another nearby hamlet, Cousin, amid rolling countryside with hedgerows enclosing tiny fields.

Benjamin Williams Leader found A Welsh Cornfield in 1862 with its cereal crop cut by hand into stooks ready for threshing. One of the women is using a ladder stile to traverse the field’s dry stone wall. There’s fine attention to detail, including appropriate native plants, in accordance with the principles of Pre-Raphaelite landscape painting.

Camille Pissarro’s Côte de Jalais, Pontoise (1867) shows the hill of Les Jalais at l’Hermitage, where Pissarro lived, viewed from the Chemin des Mathurins in Pontoise, north of Paris.

When Ivan Pokhitonov was living in Belgium in 1912, he painted this view of The Walloon Village of Jupille, catching its fruit trees in blossom.

In 1915 Eugène Burnand painted his last major work, Ploughing in the Jorat, but his first version was destroyed by fire. He completed this second version the following year. This wide-screen pastoral landscape contains a patchwork of villages and farmland between forested hills, near where the artist lived, to the north of Lausanne in Switzerland.

Paul Nash’s view of the Cotswold Hills, from about 1920, shows the rolling countryside near his family home in Buckinghamshire, England. These hills sprawl across a large tract of central western England, to the west of Oxford.

Grant Wood’s Spring Turning from 1936 is a high aerial view of rolling countryside in the American rural Midwest, being ploughed using a pair of horses, during the Spring. Its bright green fields seem almost endless.

Around 1939, shortly before the start of the Second World War, Eric Ravilious visited the famous White Horse cut in the chalk downs at Uffington in Berkshire, England. The Vale of the White Horse (c 1939) shows the view from an unconventionally low angle, in pouring rain. This hill figure is thought to date from the late Bronze or early Iron Age, around three millennia ago.

Percy Shakespeare’s painting of December on the Downs, Wartime, made during the Second World War, shows one of the rolling chalk downs in the south of England, with both tractors and teams of horses working the land.

By the late nineteenth century, paintings of trees continued to be based largely on the anatomical method where trunk, branches and foliage were assembled in accordance with long-established teaching. Signs of change appeared in the radical landscapes of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne.

It was van Gogh’s Blossoming Chestnut Tree from 1887 that marks this departure, together with Paul Cézanne’s foliage built using constructive strokes. Although there are a couple of glimpses of the underlying trunk and branch structure, this chestnut in full leaf and flower has a more solid canopy built from visible and organised brushstrokes. These marks are starting to forms whorls and swirls in places, including the background vegetation. The tree is only demarcated from that background, the grass below, and trees behind, by discontinuity in the structure and orientation of the marks.

Van Gogh’s series of Cypresses (1889) are some of the best-remembered of all. As he moved style on beyond Impressionism, his swirling brushstrokes form solid but thoroughly living trees.

In his Olive Grove from the same year, those swirling strokes of foliage complement the tortuous curves of the branches and blue trunks.

It’s worth comparing William Merritt Chase’s later treatment of Olive Trees, Florence from 1911, with van Gogh’s above. Highlights among the leaves, in particular, are highly gestural, in places resembling the drips and runs that might be more characteristic of the later twentieth century.

In 1891, Claude Monet painted series of poplar trees not far from his studio and home at Giverny. With their simpler anatomy, The Three Trees, Autumn is an example.

Throughout his long and productive career, Camille Pissarro’s landscapes are rich with trees, and his trees are richly worked. This view into the low sun of Saint-Charles, Éragny from 1891 is as saturated in colour as that of Inness (in the previous article), but bears spots of colour marking his Divisionist style and its stippled detail.

A few years later and that texture has changed in Pissarro’s Autumn, Poplars, Éragny from 1894, which captures their dry leaves so well that you can almost hear them rustling in the breeze.

Paul Cézanne’s abundant oil paintings of trees show his emphasis on patterned brushstrokes, in his ‘constructive stroke’. This isn’t true of his watercolours, as shown in Almond Trees in Provence (1900), where each tree rises in a flare of bright colours.

Théo van Rysselberghe’s Pine by the Mediterranean Sea (1916) appears almost as substantial as the bleached rocks below it. Contrast between the lit segments and those in cast shadow behind is very wide, as is experienced on the shores of the Mediterranean.

Finally, Egon Schiele’s Four Trees is an Expressionist work based on views in Austria, showing four stark chestnut trees in the setting sun of the autumn. Although modern, it still relies on the anatomical method of painting trees.

In every continent except Antarctica, the letter t in this alphabet of landscape painting can only stand for trees, whether in distant forests, framing the painting in repoussoir, or the subject of a portrait. Because of their frequency and importance, this week’s subject extends to two articles.

The depiction of trees has long been a popular subject for instructional texts about painting. Without exception, at least until the twentieth century, these have taught an anatomical method, where the structure of the tree is built up from its trunk and branches before applying foliage. This is best learned by painting studies of trees in front of the motif, before transferring those to finished paintings in the studio.

Like many artists since, Peter Paul Rubens made studies of trees to support his studio paintings in oils. This, known simply as Landscape (c 1635-40), is a careful and detailed sketch in gouache of a group of trees on the bank of a small river. The evidence, from the tree in the mid-right, is that he constructed them anatomically, putting in the structural curves and lines of the branches, then laying down areas of foliage.

Back in the studio, Rubens used those studies to assemble larger paintings in oils, such as Evening Landscape with Timber Wagon (c 1630-40). They are still constructed using the anatomical method, and in some sections of foliage the underlying branches can be seen. Although they’re backlit and shown in the gathering dusk, he places gestural highlights on some trunks, and uses tonal range to give the foliage depth.

Many of Nicolas Poussin’s paintings employ foreground trees to frame the view in repoussoir, enhancing the sense of depth. His Landscape with Two Nymphs and a Snake from about 1659 is unusual in that the trees on the right are more than a framing device, and are established as an important part of the whole view.

Seen in this detail view, Poussin has varied the amount of detail shown in the foliage, as well as its tone and colour, to ensure that the trees don’t appear flat like a proscenium arch. Fine detail on the lower trunks gives them realistic texture, as an alternative to the highlights that would have been shown had they been in different light. This also shows evidence of Poussin’s use of the anatomical method.

Thomas Gainsborough was arguably more accomplished in his depictions of trees than he was of the portraits that earned him his living. His Wooded Landscape with a Cottage and Shepherd (1748-50) is dominated by a single tree, whose wonderfully gnarled and lichen-encrusted bark threatens to subsume the shepherd at its foot. Sadly, the tree’s rather thin foliage appears to have become more transparent over time. However, this does reveal the whole of its tortuous branch system, and demonstrates clearly his use of the anatomical method: each branch could have come from a textbook on the painting of trees.

John Constable was a great fan of Gainsborough’s trees and landscapes, and an avid plein air sketcher using both watercolours and oils. This Landscape at East Bergholt (c 1805) is a quick watercolour sketch, but he still took time and care to ensure that its trees, particularly the dominant one filling the right half of the paper, are carefully constructed on anatomical lines.

Constable’s finished studio paintings are inevitably richer in fine detail. The Vale of Dedham (1828) employs a similar compositional form to his East Bergholt sketch, although the trees and distant setting are different. Textural detail in the bark of the lower trunks is meticulous rather than gestural, and unlike Poussin, the level of detail in the foliage varies little. Constable’s more painterly style is seen in his oil studies, particularly the final full-size studies for his ‘six footers’, where it often appears more effective than his finished works.

As Constable was painting his later works, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was starting his career by becoming the most skilled plein air painter of his generation. Although his Ville-d’Avray: Entrance to the Wood (c 1825) was clearly painted at speed, and lacks Constable’s detail, it’s unlikely to have been completed in a single sitting.

Most of Corot’s landscapes feature trees, and his approach to them varies considerably. In this painting there’s an intermediate level of detail, sufficient for him to structure marks forming the leaves of the smaller tree in the right foreground, but the central and dominant tree has its foliage shown en masse.

A few years later, Samuel Palmer’s The Weald of Kent (c 1833-4) uses a tree to construct deep repoussoir, where the motif forms but a small area in the very centre of the painting. Palmer’s billowing foliage looks more solid and less leafy, and glows rich gold in the autumn sun.

The brilliant colours of autumn gave George Inness inspiration for Across the Hudson Valley in the Foothills of the Catskills (1868). Here the contrasting gold, red, and green trees are so marked as to appear almost unreal. He also provides good visual evidence of his use of the anatomical method in their construction.