Trees are prominent features of every continent apart from Antarctica, and even our more densely urban areas find room for a few of them. From our origins in East Africa to the city parks of New York, London and Tokyo, humans and trees have lived together. As a result, trees feature in a great many paintings. This series explores how they have been depicted in European and North American art from before the Renaissance to the early twentieth century.

Like many artists since, Peter Paul Rubens made studies of trees to support his studio paintings in oils. This one, known simply as Landscape, is a careful and quite detailed sketch in gouache (opaque watercolour) of a group of trees on the bank of a small river, painted during the last five years of his life. The evidence from the tree in the mid-right is that he constructed them anatomically, by putting in the structural curves and lines of the branches, then laying down areas of foliage, a method developed during the Renaissance and still widespread today.

This practice of painting studies from life was recommended by the great landscape artist and teacher Pierre Henri Valenciennes (1750-1819), who wrote in his book Elements of Practical Perspective for the Use of Artists:
“Be sure to make several painted studies of beautiful trees, whether standing alone or in groups. Pay close attention to every detail of the bark, moss, roots, branches, and the ivy that surrounds and clings to them; above all, make good choices and study the variety of wood, bark, and foliage, which is of the utmost importance.” (Second edition, 1820.)

Landscape specialists like John Constable painted studies of trees throughout their career, to inform finished works.

He learned to create plein air sketches in oils, which he used extensively for ‘skying’ particularly around Hampstead Heath near London, and for remarkable studies of trees, such as this ash, seen in its autumn colours. Here he too has taken the time to construct the tree anatomically, and to detail its foliage.

This continued through the middle of the nineteenth century, when landscape painting was evolving towards Impressionism.

Camille Corot’s The Toutain Farm, Honfleur from about 1845 appears to be a finished studio painting, perhaps intended for the Salon. Its trees are marvellous and all but obscure and upstage the farmhouse beyond. Their sinuous limbs reflect his structured approach to painting their canopies with a catalogue of ways the trunk can give rise to branches. The canopy itself is shown in careful detail, although at the upper left it seems more vague and sketchy.

Europe has a rich and varied flora of tree species, and one of the challenges in painting its landscapes has been to capture their distinctive characteristics.

Jacob van Ruisdael gave insight into the stages in the life and looks of oak trees. In Road through an Oak Forest (c 1646-7) he captures the later life of a stag-headed oak on the left, which lost its crown long ago, a flush of new growth on a fallen trunk, and another still clinging onto life despite a great split at its base. Judging by the girth of their trunks, the oaks shown here are around 400 years old, making it likely they were saplings in the thirteenth century, possibly even earlier. They form a remarkable window in time back to the late Middle Ages.

Camille Pissarro’s Big Walnut Tree in Spring, Éragny from 1894 celebrates a species that is a source of binder in oil paint, in walnut oil, although it’s used far less frequently than linseed. Its wood is also sought after, making this tree a long-term investment for the landowner’s heirs.

Vincent van Gogh’s 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. These are most probably Italian cypresses, which are characteristic of the landscape around the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum where he was living at that time, and throughout Provence.

In his Olive Grove (1889), those swirling strokes of foliage complement the tortuous curves of the branches and gnarled blue-grey trunks.

Paul Cézanne’s oil paintings of trees, although abundant, show his emphasis on patterned brushstrokes in what is known as 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 brilliant colours.

Cézanne’s constructive stroke became more prominent and started to dominate the structure of his oil paintings after 1890. In Large Pine and Red Earth (1890–5) it’s used throughout the foreground foliage and vegetation, and has even started to appear in some patches on the trunk.

Finally, 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 wide, as is seen on the shores of the Mediterranean.

I hope you will join me in exploring these and many other fine portraits of trees over the coming weeks.

This series looks at two contrasting groups of paintings featuring reflections: those of figures seen mostly in planar mirrors arranged vertically, such as that mounted on a dressing table, and those of landscapes seen reflected by a horizontal water surface like a lake. When intended to be faithful to nature, these should all adhere to the same optical principles.

Introduction

Optical effects as a theme in the Northern Renaissance, as seen in Jan van Eyck’s most famous painting The Arnolfini Wedding, completed in 1434 (above), and in the landscape behind his Madonna of Chancellor Rolin, probably painted the following year (below).

Optics

Any faithful depiction of reflections on water should show the following:

1. a line joining any point on the original with its equivalent on the reflection will be vertical;
2. an object behind another object in the original will also remain behind that object in the reflection, as reflections preserve depth order;
3. the further back that an original object is from the water’s edge, the more its reflection will be cropped vertically;
4. vertical cropping loses the lower section of the original from the reflection, and the upper section remains in the reflection;
5. the view of each part of the original seen in the reflection will be that as seen from the points of reflection, those being lower than the observer and closer to the original;
6. what is seen on the (observer’s) left of the original appears on the left of the reflection, and what is seen on the right remains on the right of the reflection;
7. because the reflection is vertically inverted, what is seen at the top of the original appears at the bottom of the reflection.

Analogous principles apply to reflections in a vertical mirror.

Reflection in a vertical mirror

Selfies

Self-portraits almost invariably rely on painting the reflection seen in a plane mirror.

The Venus Effect

Defined by Marco Bertamini, Richard Latto and Alice Spooner as occurring “every time the observer sees both an actor (eg Venus) and a mirror, not placed along the observer’s line of sight, and concludes that Venus is seeing her reflection at the same location in the mirror that the observer is seeing.” They were intrigued by “the situations in which we as observers read the scene in a certain way, but the mirror itself is used (deliberately or not) to lead us down the wrong path. More specifically, the mirror shows us something that we accept as the view available to the actor in the scene. However, the actor has a different vantage point from us and therefore the laws of optics imply that he/she cannot be seeing what we see in the mirror.”

Mirror Play

Where the artist manipulates a reflected image for an effect, whether or not that image remains faithful to optical principles.

Pierre Bonnard 1899-1908

Early mirror play by Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947).

Pierre Bonnard 1909-1946

Later mirror play by Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947).

Extending the image

Where the artist uses a reflection to show more of the motif than can be seen directly, often to add information when developing a story.

Reflection on a horizontal water surface

Northern landscapes

Paintings by:
Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528)
Aelbert Cuyp (1620–1691)
Nicolas Poussin (1694-1665), Landscape with a Calm (c 1651)
Claude Lorrain (1604/5–1682)
Canaletto (1697–1768)
Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714–1789)

Constable and Turner

Paintings by:
John Constable (1776–1837)
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851)

Realism in the late 19th century

Paintings by:
Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894)
Martín Rico y Ortega (1833–1908)
Eilert Adelsteen Normann (1848–1918)
Laurits Andersen Ring (1854–1933)
Frits Thaulow (1847–1906)
Kazimierz Sichulski (1879–1942)

Impressionism

Paintings by:
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875)
Claude Monet (1840–1926)
Alfred Sisley (1839–1899)

Divisionism

Paintings by:
Georges Seurat (1859–1891)
Camille Pissarro (1830-1903)
Paul Signac (1863-1935)
Théo van Rysselberghe (1862-1926)

Cézanne

Paintings by Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)

Hodler and Klimt

Paintings by:
Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918)
Gustav Klimt (1862–1918)

References

Brook Taylor (1719) New Principles of Linear Perspective, or the Art of Designing on a Plane the Representations of All Sorts of Objects, in a more General and Simple Method than has been done before, London. (Not available online, and later editions omit much of the material on reflections.)
Cole, Rex Vicat (1921) Perspective, Seeley, Service and Co, London. (Available in various reprints, and Archive.org.)
de Piles, Roger (1708) Cours de Peinture par Principes, Paris. (Available at Archive.org.)
de Valenciennes P-H (1820) Élémens de Perspective Pratique à l’usage des artistes, 2nd edn., Paris.

Shortly after Edward Lear had returned from India, and at the end of Vasily Vereshchagin’s visit, the prolific traveller and botanical artist Marianne North (1830–1890) visited in 1877-79, as she was returning from a trip to south-east Asia and the Indonesian Archipelago.

When North visited India, she stayed for a while in the west coastal resort of Beypore, India (c 1877-79), in the state of Kerala. She rented a large room over the railway station, just a hundred yards from the water of the Indian Ocean. It appears idyllic.

In the north-west, she visited the city of Chittaurgarh in Rajasthan, where she painted Water Palace – Chitore. India in December 1878. This city is centred on its major fort, which dates back to the seventh century CE, and has two major palaces, Rana Kumbha’s and Rani Padmini’s, the latter being shown here. Padmini was a legendary queen of the 13th to 14th centuries.

North’s breathtaking mountain view From Nahl Dehra near Simla (Shimla), Himachal Pradesh, India (1878) shows the rugged hills near the capital city of Himachal Pradesh, in the Western Himalaya. From 1864, that city was the summer capital of British India because of its far more equitable climate.

Mount Everest or Deodunga from Sundukpho, North India (c 1878) is another impressive view of the Himalaya. Deodunga has been used by several of the British in India as the name of the world’s highest mountain before it was renamed.

Valentine Cameron Prinsep (1838–1904) was born in Kolkata (then Calcutta), India, to a British colonial family. One of his aunts was Julia Margaret Cameron, the pioneer photographer who lived near Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s home on the Isle of Wight. Another was the grandmother of Virginia Woolf, the novelist, and Vanessa Bell, the Bloomsbury painter. The family home back in England was Little Holland House, the dower house to Holland House, in Kensington, London, and the focal point of a lively artistic social group.

In 1876 or 1877, Prinsep returned to India to research what was to become a huge painting of the Delhi Durbar, completed in 1880. The Durbar of 1877 was an official event marking the proclamation of Queen Victoria as Empress of India, although she didn’t attend in person, but was represented by her Viceroy. Unfortunately it coincided with the Great Famine, and came to mark the beginning of the campaign for a free India.

Among the other paintings he completed during that visit is Martaba, a Kashmiree Nautch Girl (c 1878), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1878. Queen Victoria and her court had a particular fondness for portraits of ‘loyal subjects’ of the empire, and many are still on show at her former palace of Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, where she died.

Prinsep’s View of the Lal Darwaza on the Matwa Road, between the Purana Qila and Old City, Delhi around 1878, is a remarkably loose oil sketch, probably completed en plein air.

He eventually presented his huge painting of the Delhi Durbar to Queen Victoria, and it was hung in Buckingham Palace.

In 1913, the year before the start of the First World War, the American painter of skyscrapers Colin Campbell Cooper (1856–1937) and his artist wife Emma Lampert Cooper (1855–1920) travelled to India, apparently on a commission for an affluent woman patron in the USA. They visited, and painted in, what are now India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar.

Taj Mahal, Afternoon (c 1913) is probably his best-known painting resulting from that trip, and on their return it was exhibited in Rochester, NY, in 1915. Shown here in warm low-angle light, Cooper deftly avoided the more usual perfectly symmetric view.

The last of my visitors also stayed the longest of them all. The Russian-American artist Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947) first took his family to Darjeeling in 1923 to start exploring the Himalaya. He met members of the 1924 British Everest Expedition there, before returning to the US later that year.

His first proper expedition to the Himalaya left New York in 1925 for Sikkim and Asia. Over the next 4-5 years, he, his family and six friends travelled through Punjab, Sikkim, the Karakoram Mountains, the Altai Mountains, Mongolia and Tibet. Their official mission was to act as the embassy of Western Buddhism to Tibet, but they also had scientific and artistic purposes. For a year, between 1927-28, the expedition was believed to have been lost, after it had been attacked in Tibet and detained there by the local government. They were confined for months in extreme conditions and with minimal rations, during which five members of his team died.

Himalayas, Sikkim (c 1928-29) appears to be a ‘tempera’ sketch made on canvas in the Himalaya. This is now an Indian state bordering on Tibet and Nepal, and includes Kangchenjunga.

Roerich painted several series using mountain scenes which he may have derived from the many views he sketched during his expeditions. Arjuna, from his Kulu series, was painted in 1929-30, and shows the main protagonist from the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata with a bolt of lightning among Himalayan peaks.

Mount of Five Treasures (Two Worlds), from his Holy Mountains series, was painted in 1933, and probably shows Kanchenjunga again.

Roerich painted this superb view of the distant mountain Kanchenjunga in 1944, when he was living in India. This view may have been painted in Darjeeling, and shows the mountain in the rich light of dusk.

Roerich died in Kullu, Himachal Pradesh, India, in 1947.

Of course the Indian sub-continent has a long and rich painting tradition of its own. To end with, here are two classical works to enjoy.

This is a miniature from the Hamzanama Manuscript dated to about 1567-72, and shows The Prophet Ilyas Rescues a Prince.

This watercolour by Farrukh Beg shows Ibrahim Adil Shah Hawking, and was painted in about 1590-95.

Trade between Europe and India had been established by the time of the Roman Empire, but it wasn’t until European trading companies, including the English East India Company, established outposts on the Indian coast in the early eighteenth century that many Europeans visited the sub-continent. Colonisation by Britain developed from the 1820s until the East India Company was disbanded in favour of direct colonial administration in 1858. From then until independence was achieved in 1947, a succession of predominantly British painters visited. This weekend I show a small selection of their work.

In 1778, William Hodges (1744–1797) travelled to India, where he painted under the patronage of the British statesman Warren Hastings. He stayed in the country for six years, visiting many locations ideal for landscape views. A selection were engraved for his book about his travels in India, published in 1793.

The Marmalong Bridge, with a Sepoy and Natives in the Foreground (c 1783) shows the oldest bridge across the Adyar River in Chennai (formerly Madras), Tamil Nadu, now known as the Maraimalai Adigal Bridge. This was originally constructed by an Armenian merchant in 1728, and wasn’t replaced until 1966.

Several years after his return to Britain, in about 1788, Hodges painted this curious view of the world-famous white marble mausoleum, The Taj Mahal. I suspect this image is slightly on the incline, and the artist set its horizontals more level. But most views of the Taj Mahal show its impressive formal garden; Hodges instead painted it from the opposite bank of the River Yamuna. The mausoleum had only been completed just over a century earlier, in 1648.

Hodges painted this Storm on the Ganges, with Mrs. Hastings near the Col-gon Rocks in about 1790. The Mrs. Hastings of the title was his patron’s wife. She was formerly Mary Buchanan, the widow of one of the victims of the ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’ incident in 1756.

In 1872, the intrepid natural history painter Edward Lear (1812–1888) set off for India, but only got as far as Suez, where the canal had only been officially opened three years previously. He eventually undertook his tour of India and Sri Lanka in 1873-75, after which he returned to Britain. Although now known almost exclusively for his ‘nonsense’ poetry, Lear was an outstanding artist who survived a troubled childhood and overcame the combination of grand mal epilepsy, asthma, bronchitis, bouts of depression and failing eyesight.

This View of Gwalior, India is allegedly dated 1840, although Lear did not visit India until 1873. It is also painted in oils, which in any case makes it later than about 1852. Gwalior is a major city in northern central India, about 200 miles to the south of Delhi, with a particularly rich range of historic buildings, seen to the left of the large plateau.

Lear’s watercolour of Benares (1873) shows another city in northern central India, to the east of Gwalior, on the banks of the River Ganges. Now better known as Varanasi, it is a religious centre, being the holiest of seven sacred cities of the Hindu and Jain faiths, and an important location in the history of Buddhism as well.

Although undated, I suspect that Lear’s watercolour of Coolies on the Road near Kalicut, Malabar was painted at around this time. Calicut or Kozhikode is a city in the state of Kerala, on the Malibar coast of south-west India, nearly two hundred miles to the west of Bangalore. The city is a major trade centre for locally-produced commodities like pepper, coconut, coffee, and rubber, and the labourers shown here were probably engaged in the production and transport of those products.

My final selection from Lear’s extensive landscape paintings is among his most spectacular, showing the great mountain Kangchenjunga from Darjeeling (1879).

Darjeeling is high in the Lesser Himalaya, at an elevation of just over two thousand metres (over 6,500 feet), in the far north of West Bengal. Famed for its tea plantations, it became a ‘hill station’ for British residents of India in the early nineteenth century, and just a couple of years after Lear painted this view, it was connected by the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway to New Jalpaiguri.

Kangchenjunga is now, and was then, ranked the third highest mountain in the world, with an elevation of 8,586 metres (28,169 feet). Its first successful ascent wasn’t made until 1955; because it is a sacred mountain, teams who attain the summit stop short to avoid its violation. The Kangchenjunga massif is best viewed from Darjeeling, which is about eighty miles away. Kangchenjunga itself is the obviously highest peak, to the left of the centre of the ice-covered massif seen here.

Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin (1842–1904) was another seasoned traveller who was also an accomplished war artist for the Russian Empire. In late 1874 he started an extensive tour of the Himalaya and the Indian sub-continent.

Rajnagar. Marble Embankment Decorated with Bas-Reliefs on a Lake in Udaipur (1874) shows one of the palaces in Udaipur, in Rajasthan. This city is surrounded by seven lakes, several of which have palaces on the shore.

Taj Mahal Mausoleum, Agra (1874-76) is another view of this white marble mausoleum in the city of Agra, built to house the tomb of the Mughal emperor’s favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, between 1632-1653. It’s probably the most painted and photographed building in the whole of the sub-continent.

Vereshchagin returned to Europe in late 1876, where he turned some of his studies into more substantial finished paintings.

Many of his travel paintings are surprisingly small, either completed in front of the motif or in an improvised local studio. This huge painting of the Pearl Mosque, Delhi must have been made entirely in his studio in Paris in 1876-79. The Moti Masjid is built from white marble, and is inside the Red Fort complex in Delhi. It was constructed by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb for his second wife and the ladies of the household, in 1659-60.

Two centuries ago today, on 4 May 1826, Frederic Edwin Church was born in Hartford, CT. As one of the founding American masters, he has a pivotal place in the history of painting in North America, and is one of the great nineteenth century landscape painters. Inspired by Alexander von Humboldt’s account of central America, Church travelled to Columbia and Ecuador in 1853, and returned to depict their ‘physiognomy’ in grand landscape paintings. He went back to central America in 1857 to build on his earlier success.

Church painted this oil sketch of the cathedral in Chillo, Ecuador, on 24 June 1857. As with most of his oil sketches, it’s small and made on cardboard, which was cheap and portable but not intended to last the years.

His larger oil sketch of Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador is rich in painstaking detail for a study never intended to be viewed by others. In comparison to his studio works, though, it’s full of fine gestural marks with some quite painterly passages.

He may have painted this atmospheric view of mountains in the moonlight during either of his visits to Colombia and Ecuador.

On 29 April 1859, the first of more than twelve thousand people walked into the Studio Building on West 10th Street in New York City, to stand in awe and amazement in front of Church’s huge Heart of the Andes (1859). For many, its dramatic view of a densely-vegetated plain with its backdrop of snow-capped mountains wasn’t its most impressive feature: it was the painting’s meticulous, almost overwhelming detail.

Tucked away among the brightly-coloured birds and rich plant life, at the very heart of The Heart of the Andes, is a cross, with two figures by it. Dressed as locals, one sits, facing the cross, while the other stands just behind the seated figure and 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.

Over its five square metres of canvas, these are the only visible humans.

They’re part of a complex passage. The cross stands just off a path winding its way past a dead tree-trunk, seen at the left here, on which the artist has ‘carved’ the year and his name. The path then curves to the left, along the bottom of a small gully, where it disappears into the trees and undergrowth.

On the other side of the river, to the right, is a small mission-like settlement. Facing the viewer is the tower and broad frontage of a church, with its large double wooden doors. Beyond and around is the enormity of nature: open plain with scattered trees, then rising ground to the first hills, and many miles distant the soaring white peaks of the Andes proper.

Viewers were recommended to bring opera glasses in order to see these details through the crowd. Jennifer Raab argues this is a different way of seeing, as demanded by the painting, and it evoked literary responses from the likes of Mark Twain and critics.

Church was friends with Isaac Israel Hayes, a noted Arctic explorer, and once the artist had enjoyed the success of The Heart of the Andes he travelled with another friend, Louis Legrand Noble, to Newfoundland and Labrador to build himself a library of drawings and sketches for his next spectacular painting.

Church’s The Icebergs (1861) was ill-fated, though. Its solo exhibition opened just twelve days after the start of the Civil War. Then titled The North, it lacks the human glimpses and intricate details of nature that made The Heart of the Andes such a success. The broken mast now seen in the foreground was a later addition made by Church in an attempt to improve its popular appeal.

With the Civil War in progress, Church’s more successful response was Our Banner in the Sky (1861), which was turned into a lithograph, with prints being sold to benefit the families of Union soldiers.

Church continued to paint finished works based on his earlier studies in front of the motif. Rainy Season in the Tropics from 1866 features a faithful depiction of a double rainbow, and again added human interest. Splashing through a rocky stream is a small train of pack animals with two drivers, who have paused for a moment to adjust a load, as shown in the detail below.

Spanning much of the foreground of Church’s Pichincha (1867) is a suspended bridge, one end glowing in the early morning light. Just over half way across, a woman wearing a brilliant red blouse is riding side-saddle on a mule, which is picking its way slowly across the thin logs forming the walkway. At the left end is another mounted figure, who has just completed that terrifying crossing.

Late that year, Church and his family set off on his longest journey, although much of it was undertaken in less arduous conditions than he had experienced in Ecuador. They travelled to Europe, then on to Egypt, Jaffa and to stay in Beirut. In February 1868, Church visited Jerusalem and from there travelled to the city of Petra by camel. In the Spring they returned across the Aegean Sea, and spent the remainder of the year in Rome. They finally returned across the Atlantic in June 1869.

In Church’s studio painting of Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives (1870), the Holy City is reminiscent of John Brett’s Florence from Bellosguardo (1863) in its projection and detail. But Church’s lower vantage point allowed him ample foreground, where there are four people and two camels making their way along the dry, stony track skirting the ancient olive trees and crossing the valley to the city. Although not as brightly lit by the late afternoon sun as the Dome of the Rock in the distance, Church draws attention to the figures in the foreground by silhouetting them against the light on the track.

Church provided a detailed key to the salient features, which was engraved and printed for the edification of the viewer. It was hailed a triumph when first displayed to the public in Goupil’s New York gallery in 1871, and at the end of the century Peter Bergheim made a photo-montage showing the same view.

Church’s most famous studio painting of Petra, El Khasné, Petra from 1874, is an oddity in showing an unusual view lacking sky, and frames its strongly vertical format. It’s also short on detail, and what can be discerned from the murky depths of its framing appears mysterious and unresolved.

This painting was featured as the centrepiece of the Church family sitting room in his self-designed estate at Olana. He had started work on the design of his mansion there in 1870, engaging Calvert Vaux, co-designer of New York’s Central Park, to assist. They assembled a pastiche of forms and styles into what Church termed a “Feudal Castle”.

By 1876, Church was finding painting increasingly difficult due to his advancing rheumatoid arthritis. This late studio work showing The Aegean Sea was completed in about 1877, following which he became almost unable to paint. He wintered in Mexico to alleviate his problems, and died in 1900, at the age of 73. By that time, Church’s finely detailed realist paintings had become reviled, and it wasn’t until the 1960s before his art was taken seriously again.

You can see more about exhibitions and publications to celebrate Church’s bicentenary on Olana’s site.

Reference

Raab, Jennifer (2015) Frederic Church, The Art and Science of Detail, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 20837 5.

After yesterday’s visits to some of the city parks of London and Paris, today we resume our tour in the grounds of the Villa Borghese, in central Rome. This covers an area of just under 200 acres (80 hectares) that was originally landscaped in ‘English style’ from a former vineyard. It was bought by the city and made properly public in 1903, and has since hosted many events, including part of the 1960 Olympic Games.

In 1823, when public access to the park was still informal, the German painter Carl Eduard Ferdinand Blechen sketched this view In the Park of the Villa Borghese, showing one of its small fountains in an avenue of trees.

Hans Andersen Brendekilde painted this Summer Day in Villa Borghese in Rome late in his career, in 1922, after it had been made a public park and was being well used by groups of children.

The Leopoldstadt district of Vienna is famous for the Prater, a huge park of about 1,500 acres (600 hectares), a favourite of the Austrian painter Tina Blau.

During the early 1880s, she concentrated on painting in the Prater. This area of meadows and woods had been given to the public by Emperor Joseph II in 1766. In 1873 it was used for the Vienna World Fair, but hunting continued in the area until 1920. Spring Day in the Prater (c 1881-2) is one of her studio paintings from this period, with its detailed realist style. It shows the unusual combination of a flock of sheep and the promenade of the fashionably dressed.

In her undated Prater Gardens, its trees are just starting to change colour one autumn probably around 1890.

We end the weekend on the other shore of the North Atlantic, in New York, where we first visit Central Park in Manhattan. Designed by landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, parts were first opened to the public in 1858, although it wasn’t fully completed until 1876. It now occupies a rectangular swathe of 843 acres (341 hectares) between Upper West Side and Upper East Side neighbourhoods.

William Merritt Chase’s View from Central Park shows the park in 1889, and relegates the large buildings of Manhattan to its distant skyline.

Maurice Brazil Prendergast’s view of carriages in Central Park, 1900 (1900) shows how crowded it could become in fine weather.

George Bellows painted Bethesda Fountain (Fountain in Central Park) in 1905, when still a student in New York. It shows, in rather sombre earth colours, this central feature of Bethesda Terrace in Central Park. This bronze statue was designed by Emma Stebbins, and in those days was still relatively new, having been unveiled in 1873. Its proper name is “The Angel of the Waters Fountain”, with the reference being made not to Bethesda, Maryland, but to the biblical location.

With Central Park under way, Olmsted and Vaux moved on to lay out what’s now an area of 526 acres (200 hectares) in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. This first opened in part in 1867, but wasn’t complete until 1873. In the late 1880s it was a favourite haunt and source of motifs for William Merritt Chase when he lived in Brooklyn.

Chase’s Terrace, Prospect Park from about 1886 captures the fresh colours of early summer in pastels.

The following year, his Park in Brooklyn shows housing at the park’s edge, beyond a section of informal garden.

Chase’s Boat House, Prospect Park (1887) shows the park’s original and fairly spartan wooden boathouse. In 1905-07 it was supplanted by a far grander building on the Lullwater of the lake, which is now better known.

This weekend, as the season moves steadily towards summer, we’re on a whistle-stop tour of six famous parks in five great cities, that for many are the closest they’ll get to real countryside.

As cities grew during the nineteenth century, what had been countryside in and around them was swallowed up by housing and factories. In the first couple of decades, livestock grazed and cows were milked within a couple of miles of the centre of London.

The American history painter Benjamin West painted this view of Milkmaids in St. James’s Park, Westminster Abbey beyond in about 1801. Two cows and attendant milkmaids are providing a supply of fresh milk for the crowds in this royal park with Buckingham Palace on its edge. This remains 57 acres (23 hectares) of grass, trees and lakes in central London.

John Linnell’s Evening, Bayswater from 1818, only two centuries ago, shows what was then a rural part of London, out to the west of what’s now Paddington Station, in more peaceful times before this area was assimilated into the growing city. Although it has retained some garden squares, this became a densely populated area during the nineteenth century.

The lake shown in Giuseppe De Nittis’ view of The Serpentine, Hyde Park, London from 1878 is the eastern section of a single body of water marking the boundary between Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. Once fed from a small river, that became so polluted it has long been supplied by water from three boreholes. It hosts a swimming club, rowing boats, and a solar-powered ferry.

Alice Maud Fanner painted this view of the edge of Hyde Park, London, in about 1900. The London plane trees are leafless, indicating this is a fine day in the winter, although the figures look lightly dressed for that time of year. The view looks north-east towards the road encircling the park and mansions in Park Lane beyond. This park is, at 350 acres (140 hectares), the largest of a chain of Royal Parks running from Kensington Gardens in the west, past Buckingham Palace to St James’s Park to the southeast.

Kensington Gardens: Vicinity of the Pond, painted by Paul Fordyce Maitland in about 1907, shows the Oval Pond in the middle of these gardens, another of the Royal Parks in London, to the west of the Serpentine Lake in the adjacent Hyde Park.

Over the same period, central Paris was extensively rebuilt, but preserved some of its green spaces, including the gardens of the Tuileries Palace.

The Tuileries Garden in central Paris is the city’s best-known open space. It runs between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde with its iconic Arc de Triomphe, an area of 63 acres (25.5 hectares). Shortly before painting his most famous scene in the Tuileries, Édouard Manet completed a smaller and less ambitious work set among its trees, Children in the Tuileries Garden (c 1861-2).

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

Manet’s Music in the Tuileries from 1862 is one of ten paintings shared between the National Gallery in London, and the Hugh Lane in Dublin, as part of the Hugh Lane bequest. Packed into its rhythmic layout of trees are members of the fashionable Parisian crowd, who have come to listen to the music, socialise, and chat. Historians have identified many of Manet’s circle among them: the poet Baudelaire, novelist Gautier, composer Offenbach, Fantin-Latour the painter, and the artist’s brother Eugène, a painter who married Berthe Morisot, the Impressionist.

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

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

Pissarro’s Garden of the Tuileries on a Spring Morning from the same year is an aerial view of the gardens when they’re well into Spring, with the trees in full leaf, in their brilliant fresh green foliage.

Tomorrow we’ll resume in the city of Rome.

Frederic Edwin Church, who was born two centuries ago on 4 May 1826, is one of the founding American masters, and one of the world’s great nineteenth century landscape painters. As the only pupil of Thomas Cole, who founded the Hudson River School, Church has a pivotal place in the history of American painting.

His career started at the time of the Barbizon School, and continued into the height of Impressionism in France, and its arrival in North America. Unlike those, and subsequent US landscape painters, Church was a devout realist who produced huge canvases with meticulous, almost obsessive, detail. He was thus a rival to his contemporary, Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), who worked largely within his unchallenged territory to the west of the Mississippi.

Church was a precocious artist, and by the time he started his training with Cole in 1844 he seems to have been a fine draftsman and a competent landscape painter. During his two years with Cole, the pair travelled around New England and New York State. Church sold his first painting to his neighbour Daniel Wadsworth, who founded the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, CT.

From these early days Church’s working methods were traditional, and similar to those of John Constable. He drew in pencil and sketched in oils in front of his motif, then assembled those into highly detailed and finished oil paintings in his studio. Church was an obsessive sketcher in oils, and thousands of his drawings and oil sketches survive in collections such as those of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York.

Church’s early landscape painting of West Rock, New Haven (1849) is a good example of his attention to detail in finished paintings. As shown in the detail below, its foreground features three figures making hay, which they’re stacking onto carts drawn by oxen. Down at the river bank, a dog is enjoying a paddle. Just peeking proud of the distant treetops is the white tip of a church spire.

He had settled in New York by 1850, and from then went on trips most summers to the wilds of Maine to paint en plein air in oils. He made this rather sparse view of Mt. Desert Island, Maine Coast in oils on paper in 1850.

The following year Church painted this rich twilight seascape of a Beacon, off Mount Desert Island (1851). Judging from its size and canvas support, this was intended as a finished work rather than a study.

Schoodic Peninsula from Mount Desert at Sunrise (1850–55) is one of many oil sketches which he made during a summer visit to Maine during this period.

Eagle Lake Viewed from Cadillac Mountain, Mount Desert Island, Maine (1850–60) is another oil sketch featuring a considerably more complex motif. Cadillac Mountain is relatively low at 466 metres (1,530 feet), but the highest point of Mount Desert Island, so affords such spectacular views.

In 1852, Church read Alexander von Humboldt’s account of his travels in central America, and decided to rise to Humboldt’s challenge to depict the ‘physiognomy’ of the Andes mountains. The following year he travelled to Columbia and Ecuador with the businessman Cyrus West Field, who bankrolled their trip in the hope that he could use Church’s paintings to promote his own local business ventures. They based themselves in Quito, travelling from there to awe-inspiring views of mountains and volcanoes.

Church painted this view of what’s thought to be Cayambe in Ecuador in August or September 1853. This isn’t an oil sketch, though, but was made in pencil and gouache.

On his return to his studio in New York, Church turned those hundreds of sketches and drawings into larger finished paintings, in this case one of his many views of Cotopaxi (1855) in Ecuador. As was conventional at the time, these are highly finished, with no evidence of brushwork and a smooth paint surface.

His other versions of this motif weren’t as peaceful: that of 1862, commissioned by James Lenox, shows rugged waterfalls in the foreground, a barren rocky plain, and the volcano itself ejecting a high plume of smoke and ash. All this is lit by a blood-red sun, sitting low in the sky. This was to enable Church’s painting to serve as a pendant to one of Lenox’s other paintings, Turner’s dramatic Staffa, Fingal’s Cave (1832).

Church was among the many landscape painters who visited Niagara (1857). Jennifer Raab has set this painting in its historical context, at a time when secession of Southern states seemed imminent. The Niagara Falls became associated with union and the unity of its details.

He returned to central America in 1857 with the artist Louis Rémy Mignot and added hundreds more drawings and sketches to his collection.

Cross in the Wilderness, painted later that year, is one of the earlier works to result from his second visit. This wilderness is unpopulated, devoid of figures or other signs of human presence. It was another two years before Church painted his masterpiece that drew the crowds and established his popularity.

Reference

Raab, Jennifer (2015) Frederic Church, The Art and Science of Detail, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 20837 5.

Landscape painting of the early twentieth century included individualists whose approach to the depiction of reflections on water departed from those of the past. This article looks at two very different artists from central Europe: Ferdinand Hodler with his Parallelism, and Gustav Klimt who mainly painted landscapes during his summer holidays.

Hodler often painted the same landscapes repeatedly, although not in the same way as Claude Monet’s formal series. His view At the Foot of Petit Salève from about 1893 breaks up the reflections of the golden trees with bands of black and purple that don’t appear to be correlated with those of the original image above.

In contrast, this view of Lake Thun with Symmetrical Reflection Before Sunrise from 1904 appears to be meticulously faithful to optical principles.

However, in 1908 when he was in pursuit of Parallelist ideals, he painted this Rhythmic Landscape on Lake Geneva. This was a second version of a view he had previously painted three years earlier, when he wrote “This is perhaps the landscape in which I applied my compositional principles most felicitously.” Most of his symmetry and rhythm is obvious; what may not be so apparent are the idiosyncratic reflections seen on the lake’s surface. The gaps in the train of cumulus clouds here become optically impossible dark blue pillars, responsible for much of the rhythm in the lower half of the painting.

In the last few months of his life, Hodler simplified reflections into bands of colour. Lake Geneva with Mont Blanc in the Morning Light (1918) has a much simpler structure, with the water, a band of reflections, the mass of the far shore and mountains merged, and the dawn sky. The dominant colour is the yellow to pale red of the sky and its reflection.

Lake Geneva with Mont Blanc in the (Red) Dawn Light (1918) is simplified further to the water coloured by the sky, a zone of blue reflections of the far bank, the merged distant shore and mountains, and the sky.

Gustav Klimt developed his approach to reflections during the summers he spent with his partner’s family on Lake Attersee, when he painted extensively using a telescope.

Schloß Kammer at Attersee (1910) is Klimt’s view across the lake of this manor house, with contrasting textures in foliage, walls and roofs. The reflections have lost the granular texture of the original image, giving them a glassy appearance, and appear optically faithful.

Castle with a Moat shows Unterach Manor on the Attersee Lake, and was probably painted in 1908 or 1909. It incorporates his almost Divisionist dotted foliage with contrasting smooth-textured walls of buildings, again softened in the reflected image. However, there’s some mismatch apparent in the hut on the water’s edge. Given the water between the motif and the artist, this must have been painted through a telescope, or possibly from a boat on the lake.

The same flattening is seen in his view of Malcesine on Lake Garda from 1913. The terraced properties running to the left of the centre of the painting are shown in a parallel projection, without any nearby vanishing point, which is again characteristic of a view through a telescope or similar optical instrument. However, the reflections owe more to Hodler’s Parallelism than they do to optics.

Following their popularisation in the nineteenth century, paintings of Spring blossom continued to flourish, reinforced perhaps by increasing urbanisation.

Helen Allingham’s Buckinghamshire house at Penstreet (c 1900) shows a house in the hamlet of Penn Street, near the village of Penn, in Buckinghamshire, England. This remains a relatively unspoilt part of the Chilterns to the north-west of London.

For Willard Metcalf, Dogwood Blossoms (1906) also provide the opportunity to explore the shimmering effects of dappled light, and how it can break the forms of large boulders.

Pierre Bonnard painted Early Spring in 1908, shortly after his return to France from a visit to North Africa. The children are probably the artist’s friends from the Terrasse family, enjoying their garden as it comes into bloom in the improving weather.

The Small House, Spring Evening is an unusual landscape painted by Bonnard in 1909. It offsets the rich blossom on the trees at the left against the plain wall of a house, seen in failing light.

József Rippl-Rónai was the founding father of modern painting in Hungary, and in 1909 painted this Sour Cherry Tree in Blossom, in which the flowers overwhelm the whole painting, just as they had for Samuel Palmer nearly eighty years earlier.

One of the eclectic Georges Clairin’s later paintings from about 1910 brings an elegant group out among lush blossoms On the Balcony.

John William Waterhouse’s A Song of Springtime from 1913 has lost much of the narrative from more classical accounts of Flora and the Spring, but still features plenty of cherry blossom. Flora appears with her breasts bared, and a skirtful of daffodils or narcissi, perhaps a cross-reference to Poussin’s figure of Narcissus in his Empire of Flora, and the Graces have been replaced by young children.

By the First World War, Western artists weren’t just collecting and studying the art of south-east Asia, but some went to live in countries such as Japan. Among these was the American printmaker Helen Hyde, who demonstrates her mastery of colour woodcut prints in her Blossom Time in Tokyo, from 1914. This shows the tea ceremony taking place during the Spring viewing of blossom.

By the end of the war, Théo van Rysselberghe’s colours had become as strong as those of the Fauves. In Almond Trees in Blossom (Morning) the more delicate pinks of the flowers pale in comparison with his full reds and blues, even down to the blue horse pulling a plough.

The Ukrainian artist Mykhaylo Berkos painted this classic Impressionist motif of an Apple Tree in Blossom in 1919. But this was to be his last Spring, as he died of typhus just before Christmas that year, at the age of only 58.

In the far north of Europe, the Norwegian Nikolai Astrup included blossom in many of his paintings of Spring and early summer in the fjords, as in his Apple Trees in Bloom, painted after 1920.

In about 1927, Astrup painted Apple Tree in Bloom showing the trees in full blossom and marsh marigolds in flower.

In Pierre Bonnard’s Open Door from about 1937, we look out through the frame of French windows to a table that has escaped into the landscape, and dazzles against brilliant blossom beyond.

I wish you a happy blossom festival, and above all peace.

We still haven’t got New Year right, have we? Rather than putting it in the middle of winter, it should surely coincide with the arrival of Spring and blossom on trees. If you’re in a northern temperate latitude, now’s the time that you should be watching for the full flush of cherry and other flowering trees. In Washington DC its blossom festival extends a month from mid-March, in Japan rather later, and it’s even celebrated in Perth, in Western Australia, during the austral Spring.

This weekend I celebrate the end of the winter with two days of paintings of blossom on trees, today’s from the nineteenth century, and tomorrow from the twentieth.

Early in Samuel Palmer’s career, when he was living in Shoreham in Kent, he painted this watercolour of exuberant blossom In a Shoreham Garden, in about 1830.

The Pre-Raphaelite movement emphasised painting from life; when John Everett Millais came to paint Flora and her Spring, in 1856-59, he added subtle allusions to Botticelli’s famous Primavera and classical myth. The blossom here is on apple trees, which are probably second only to May or Hawthorn in the English countryside at this time of year.

In the year that Charles-François Daubigny moved to Auvers-sur-Oise and founded the artists’ colony there, he painted this blossom-rich view of the Spring Landscape (1862). Vincent van Gogh was later to spend his final two months of painting near here.

In the closing years of Jean-François Millet’s life, he painted a commissioned series including this startling study of light, Spring (1868-73). This features a double rainbow at the upper left, with fleeting sunshine flooding the centre and dazzling on the abundant blossom. From the crops and seasonal flowers in the foreground to the inky black shower-clouds in the sky, this is a perfect summary of Spring in the countryside, and April showers.

My favourite Impressionist painting of blossom has to be Alfred Sisley’s panorama of The Terrace at Saint-Germain, Spring, painted soon after he had moved to Marly-le-Roi in 1875.

Alice Havers’ Washerwomen, which given her tragically brief life must have been painted around 1880, shows a large orchard of fruit trees in blossom on the far side of the river.

By any measure, the nineteenth century master of blossom was Vincent van Gogh. Like several of his contemporaries, he had become a collector of Japanese woodcut prints, and was fascinated by one of their dominant themes, cherry blossom.

Before he went to Arles, Vincent van Gogh had copied Utagawa Hiroshige’s woodblock print The Plum Orchard in Kameido. Shortly after his arrival there in 1888, the fruit trees came into flower, and he painted a triptych for his brother Theo’s apartment, including The Pink Orchard above, and The Pink Peach Tree below.

Van Gogh’s approach to painting blossoming fruit trees is completely different from that of the Japanese prints. His trees are built anatomically, with trunk and branches drawn in outline, often using contrasting colour. Flowers are applied using impasto; sadly some of these have faded since, and some paint that now appears white or off-white was originally pinker.

Van Gogh’s View of Arles, Flowering Orchards (1889) is a complex composition, with trunks in the foreground, fruit trees in flower in the middle distance, and the town of Arles behind, integrating his previous explorations of each element.

Among Carl Larsson’s many intimate views of life at home is this watercolour of his daughter under the Apple Blossom from 1894. He uses his favourite colour contrast between the earth red of the barns behind with the pink of the girl’s bonnet, against the rich green vegetation around her.

Some sixty-five years after Palmer’s exuberant clouds of blossom, Paul Sérusier employed a similar technique in The White Cow, from about 1895.

Laurits Andersen Ring’s finely detailed double portrait of Spring. Ebba and Sigrid Kähler from 1895 appears to show a mother and her daughter talking in their garden, but the two are actually sisters. At the right is Sigrid, the year before her wedding, at the left is her sister Ebba, who was fifteen at the time. Ring uses a light touch with the blossom and Spring flowers to avoid overwhelming the figures.

Given the technical challenge of painting optically faithful reflections on water, the painstaking and protracted work required for Divisionist techniques resulted in the omission of reflections, or only notional depictions. This article gathers some examples of Divisionist paintings that were taken the extra mile, and tried to do better.

Seurat’s first and greatest masterpiece, generally known as La Grande Jatte, uses the technique of optical mixing of colour. Rather than blending pigments on the canvas, it’s constructed of tiny high chroma dots to allow for optical mixing. Recognising the difficulty of recreating reflections when he was laboriously applying those dots to the large canvas for his finished painting, Seurat developed them in smaller studies such as that above.

Those are seen quoted in the finished work, which took him almost eighteen months to paint in three stages between 1884-86.

The Seine at Rouen, the Île Lacroix, Effect of Fog from 1888 is one of Camille Pissarro’s best-known Divisionist paintings, and one of the few to depict reflections in detail. This was based on studies he had made during a visit to the city back in 1883, five years before he started work on this finished painting.

Paul Signac also made use of sketches made in front of the motif, such as this of Les Andelys. Le Quai from 1886, which contains extensive passages of reflections.

His finished view of Les Andelys. Côte d’aval, completed the same year, completely omits reflections, though.

A different view of the same village, Les Andelys. La Berge, from the same year, includes extensive reflections that appear fairly accurate.

Signac’s Sunset, Herblay, painted in September 1889, is a good attempt but has small disparities. For example, reflected images of the trees seen on the bank at the left don’t tally with their originals in either vertical or horizontal dimension.

Evening Calm, Concarneau, Opus 220 (Allegro Maestoso) from 1891 must have been a major challenge that Signac carries off with aplomb. Again there are some small discrepancies: the most prominent boat in the foreground is heeling slightly to the left, but the left side of its reflection if anything leans slightly to the right.

Reflections are even more complex in Signac’s Tartanes pavoisées, or Fishing Boats Dressed Overall, from 1893. To get its triangular composition right, and inform his rendering of the reflections, he painted three studies for this. Despite that, two years later he traded this painting for a bicycle, but in 1910 it became his first painting to enter a public collection, in Wuppertal, Germany.

Another challenging view of The Port of Saint-Tropez from 1901-2 is less precise, but uses reflections to great effect.

Signac’s later Giudecca Anchorage from 1904 uses coarser tiles of colour, giving him more leeway.

Of all the Neo-Impressionist and Divisionist paintings of reflections, the undisputed champion must be Théo van Rysselberghe’s Canal in Flanders from 1894. This too was preceded by a study, but that almost completely excluded any reflections. The artist then moved his viewpoint to the right, and must have spent months getting its reflections right.

This uniquely combines radical perspective projection, intense rhythm and meticulous reflections. The artist painted few further views with reflections afterwards.

One hundred years ago today, on 8 April 1926, the American painter, sculptor and educator John Ferguson Weir died. This article briefly summarises his career, his importance in American art, and shows a selection of his paintings.

John Ferguson Weir came from an illustrious artistic family. His father Robert Walter Weir (1803-1889) was a professor of drawing at West Point, New York, and his younger half-brother Julian Alden Weir (1852-1919) was a notable American Impressionist painter.

John trained at West Point, New York, and at the National Academy. This was briefly interrupted in 1861 when he served in the US Civil War. He received his first commission in 1862, when he was only 21, and set up his studio in the Tenth Street Studio, New York.

After that commission, his first major work was An Artist’s Studio from 1864, in which the artist in question is his father, not himself. To his delight it was exhibited, sold, and resulted in his election as an associate of the National Academy.

He next took his dark realism before an unusual motif for American painting at that time, in the hot, harsh, and dangerous world of the West Point Iron and Cannon Factory, in his The Gun Foundry (1866). The moment shown is the casting of a Parrott Gun, in the foundry responsible for making most of the large guns used by Union forces during the Civil War.

This is similar to the earlier works of Joseph Wright of Derby, de Loutherbourg and others who had painted the Industrial Revolution in Europe during the late eighteenth century, and led to his election as a full Academician.

His Forging the Shaft is a replica he painted in 1874-7, after the original of 1868 was destroyed in a fire at a New York gallery. It shows the same foundry, this time working the massive propellor shaft for an ocean liner, more a symbol of peace and trade than past conflict. The success of the original painting led to the offer to become Professor and the first Director of the School of Fine Arts at Yale University, which he accepted.

Seizing the opportunity before he started at Yale, in late 1868 Weir set out for Europe, where he travelled from Paris to Italy, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium. He produced a remarkable series of landscapes showing many of the places he visited, a series that compares with any of JMW Turner’s, although Weir generally kept to his detailed realism.

Lago Maggiore, Italy (1869) appears to have been painted en plein air on 31 May 1869, during his return journey from Italy towards Switzerland.

Despite its finish, his Lake Leman (Lake Geneva), Switzerland (1869) may have been painted en plein air, on 11 June 1869.

Although his Cadenabbia on Lake Como has been dated to 1869, it’s larger, and was almost certainly the result of more prolonged work in the studio. Its dramatic use of light on the town and the hills above is remarkable.

The Grand Canal, Venice (1869) is a much larger canvas that was clearly painted in the studio, probably after his return home to the USA in the autumn of 1869.

Weir then started work at the School of Fine Arts at Yale University, where he remained until his retirement in 1913, forty-four years later. With the advice of his younger half-brother, then studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and becoming steadily more Impressionist, John Ferguson Weir modelled Yale’s programme on European methods. Both brothers were also pioneers in the education of women artists.

Beach at Easthampton (c 1875) shows this Long Island beach, now more usually referred to as East Hampton, with its almost military encampment of huts, shades, and tents.

Weir retained his detailed realism until late in the century, as shown in his impressive depiction of A Rocky Mountain Peak, Idaho Territory from 1882.

However, from the early 1880s, Weir painted several still lifes, including Roses (1898), in which his brushstrokes became increasingly painterly.

He also maintained close contact with his half-brother Julian Alden Weir, visiting his farm in Connecticut to paint with him. This led to experiments with more ‘modern’ styles, such as The Farm, Branchville, Connecticut (around 1890-1900) in which his facture has changed completely.

These were followed by an increase in his chroma, as shown in this vibrant painting of East Rock, New Haven (c 1901), which was close to his home and work at Yale.

New Haven from East Rock (1900-1) shows almost the reversed view, looking down on the smoking chimneys of the town.

Although his teaching was a heavy commitment, Weir still found time to travel, and returned to Europe several times. The Alhambra, Granada, Spain (c 1901) is one of the finest of his late paintings, and shows how far he had come from his early works.

But of all his late paintings, I think his Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi, Italy from 1902 is his most accomplished, and, in his quietly academic way, the most radical in style.

Forest of Fontainebleau (c 1902) shows his versatility in responding to a very different motif, with its tiny and solitary figure against the fallen trunk.

On his retirement from Yale in 1913, he and his wife moved to Providence, RI. Although he rented a studio and became involved in local art, his eyesight and health imposed increasing limits. He died in 1926.

John Ferguson Weir was much more than Julian’s half-brother, or even the founding father of fine arts at Yale. He was an innovative painter, who pioneered the depiction of heavy industry in the US, made an exquisitely beautiful series of works showing scenes in Europe, and developed his style through his long career. He was one of America’s master painters.

Reference

Wikipedia.

One hundred years ago today, on 1 April 1926, Charles Angrand, a leading member of arts circles in Paris in the late nineteenth century and a well-known painter, died. Although his paintings have today almost lapsed into obscurity, his work is represented in many of the world’s leading collections. This article gives an all too brief summary of his career with some of the few of his paintings that remain accessible.

Angrand was born in Normandy, France, in 1854 and went on to train at the provincial academy in Rouen. He was unsuccessful in gaining admission to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, but moved to the city in 1882 to teach mathematics. At that time he was living close to the Café Guerbois and other places frequented by artists, and joined their circles.

His early paintings, such as Interior of the Rouen Museum in 1880, appear to have been realist. This shows copyists at work in the Rouen Art Museum. The bored painter in the foreground is his friend Léon-Jules Lemaître (1849-1905), who later painted Angrand’s portrait in looser style.

The following year, Angrand caught this Painter en plein air (1881) strangely separated from his palette and brushes in a field of green. His style steadily changed, as reflected in the brushstrokes visible in the green field. This painting is currently for sale from Leighton Fine Art Ltd. for £79,500.

In May 1884, he joined with Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Henri Edmond Cross and others to form the Société des Artistes Indépendents, the core of the new Neo-Impressionist movement. The following year, Camille Pissarro joined them.

Angrand’s landscapes became more experimental. He painted this unusual view of The Seine, Morning (Saint-Ouen) in 1886, with its thin strip of bank in the distance, and most of the canvas filled by the river. Saint-Ouen is a suburb to the north of Paris.

The Western Railway at its Exit from Paris, from the same year, shows the railway marshalling yards on the outskirts of the city.

In 1887, Angrand changed from a late Impressionist style to early Divisionism, as seen in this Man and Woman in the Street (1887). His coarse dots are almost monochrome, with just a faint hint of colour.

In 1891 he exhibited alongside Les XX in Brussels.

Angrand’s best-known painting today is The Harvesters from 1892, one of a series of rural scenes he appears to have painted in the countryside of Normandy. This is similar to those painted by Pissarro during his Divisionist period.

In the 1890s Angrand painted less and preferred using conté crayons and pastels. In 1896 he moved to Normandy, and became progressively more reclusive.

He painted Thatched Cottage in an Orchard in 1903. His swirling brushstrokes are reminiscent of Vincent van Gogh’s late paintings, but his strokes here are more broken.

In his later years, Angrand appears to have painted less, and he died in Rouen on 1 April 1926. Although his work was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendents the following year, and he had a solo retrospective at Musée Tavet-Delacour in Pontoise in 2006, I’m disappointed that none appears to have been organised to mark this centenary.

Reference

Wikipedia

After Alexandre Calame’s views of Lake Geneva painted in the middle of the nineteenth century, the next great artist to devote as much attention to the lake was Ferdinand Hodler, a native of Bern, Switzerland. At the age of eighteen, Hodler had walked across the country to attend the Collège de Genève there, and train as a painter, initially by copying Calame’s paintings.

Hodler started painting a series of views from the north-eastern shore of Lake Geneva looking south, across to the major peaks of the Chablais Alps. He was to continue this series until his death twenty years later. Lake Geneva from Chexbres from about 1898 shows one of the first of these, painted near the village of Chexbres, between Lausanne and Montreux, in early winter.

Lake Geneva from Saint-Prex (1901) is another view across the lake, from a town to the west of Lausanne, looking south with a closer view of the peaks of the Chablais Alps. This appears to have been painted in the summer, with the trees in full leaf and a rich range of flowers. The clouds over the mountains are starting to become more organised in a regular rhythm, a trend that resulted in some of his most distinctive later landscapes.

The Grammont (1905) shows this mountain in the Chablais Alps, to the south of the eastern end of Lake Geneva, towards which many of Hodler’s favourite views over that lake were aimed. Again he uses a limited palette; the lake itself reminds me of Gustav Klimt’s wonderful paintings of Attersee from a few years earlier, although Hodler’s darker blue ripples quickly vanish as the lake recedes from the viewer.

The following year, he painted Landscape at Lake Geneva.

One of the clearest examples of Hodler’s distinctive Parallelist landscapes is his Rhythmic Landscape on Lake Geneva from 1908. This was a second version of a view he had previously painted in 1905, when he wrote “This is perhaps the landscape in which I applied my compositional principles most felicitously.”

Most of his symmetry and rhythm is obvious; what may not be so apparent are the idiosyncratic reflections seen on the lake’s surface. The gaps in the train of cumulus clouds here become dark blue pillars, which are optically impossible, but are responsible for much of the rhythm in the lower half of the painting.

In the final years of Hodler’s life he painted some of the most sublime landscapes of his career. During the winter of 1917-18, his health deteriorated, but he continued to paint from the window of his room in Geneva, completing more than eighteen views during those final months. Here are three examples.

In Lake Geneva with Mont Blanc by Morning Light (1918), one of the more complex paintings of this series, bands represent the lake shore, four different zones of the surface of the lake, the lowlands of the opposite bank, the mountain chains, and two zones of colour in the dawn sky. The lower section of the sky and the foreground shore echo in colour, and contrast in their pale lemon-orange with the blues of the other bands.

Lake Geneva with Mont Blanc in the Morning Light (1918) has a simpler structure, with the water, a band of reflections, the mass of the far shore and mountains merged, and the dawn sky. The dominant colour is the yellow to pale red of the dawn sky and its reflection.

Lake Geneva with Mont Blanc in the (Red) Dawn Light (1918) is also simpler in its structure, with the water coloured by the sky, a zone of blue reflections of the far bank, the merged distant shore and mountains, and the sky.

In Hodler’s ultimate and most sublime landscapes, he eliminated the unnecessary detail, stating just the elements of water, earth, air, and the fire of the rising sun, in their natural rhythm. On 19 May 1918, Hodler died in Geneva, at the age of 65.

This weekend we’re off to visit Lake Geneva, also known by its French name of Lac Léman, the largest in Switzerland. It’s located in the far south-west of the country, where it forms much of its border with France. It makes a broad arc running north-east from the capital city of Geneva, with some of the highest peaks of the Alps to its south.

Today I start with a selection of paintings almost exclusively from the nineteenth century, when Switzerland was on the itinerary of the Grand Tour undertaken by aspiring young men of the upper class in both Europe and the Americas.

The city of Geneva has long attracted artists, and it was here the eccentric pastellist Jean-Étienne Liotard was born and later kept his studio, and where he eventually retired. His View of the Mont Blanc Massif from the Artist’s Studio from 1765-70 reveals only a little of the southern extreme of the lake, with a cameo self-portrait.

JMW Turner was by no means the first to paint the lake, but his watercolour of Lake Geneva and Mount Blanc from 1802-05 is one of its earliest depictions by a major artist. This view looks south-east over the city of Geneva towards the Mont Blanc massif in the far distance.

Alexandre Calame’s View of Bouveret from 1833 shows a grey heron fishing on the shore at the southern end of the lake, close to the border with France.

While Turner had toured the Alps once travel from England had become possible again in the early nineteenth century, Calame pioneered the painting of views like this of the lake, completed in his studio in 1849. It includes some of the distinctive sailing boats of the Swiss lakes, and a small bird in the shallows, but not a heron here.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, several major American artists visited Switzerland to develop their skills painting mountain views. Despite its finish, John Ferguson Weir’s Lake Leman (Lake Geneva), Switzerland may have been painted in front of the motif, on 11 June 1869.

Following Gustave Courbet’s release from prison for his involvement in the Paris Commune and destruction of the Vendôme Column in 1871, he was forced to flee to the safety of Switzerland, where he lived his remaining years there, unable to return to France.

Courbet painted some of the finest landscapes of his career during his exile in Switzerland, like this Sunset over Lac Léman from 1874, the year of the First Impressionist Exhibition in Paris.

He became particularly obsessed with the island château at the extreme eastern end of Lake Geneva, Chillon Castle, here in 1875. This picturesque château dates back to a Roman outpost, and for much of its recorded history from about 1050 has controlled the road from Burgundy to the Great Saint Bernard Pass, a point of strategic significance. It has since been extensively restored, and is now one of the most visited mediaeval castles in Europe.

Chillon Castle from 1874-77 is another of the views he painted of the castle on the lake.

Sunset on Lake Geneva from about 1876 is reminiscent of Courbet’s earlier seascapes with breaking waves, but now the water is calm once more.

In May 1877, the French government informed Courbet that the cost of rebuilding the Vendôme Column would be over 300,000 Francs, which he could pay in instalments of 10,000 Francs each year, starting on 1 January 1878. Courbet died in Switzerland the day before, on 31 December 1877, at the age of only 58.

In the late nineteenth century, Realist landscape painters challenged themselves with increasingly difficult reflections, where the water surface isn’t mirror-like, but broken.

Gustave Caillebotte’s Rain on the Yerres (1875) is an innovative study of a reflective water surface disrupted by circles projected by raindrops.

The broken reflections in Martín Rico’s A Canal in Venice from about the same time may have been painted mostly en plein air, despite their fine detail.

Rico’s Canal in Venice uses more painterly marks in its reflections.

At the same time, Eilert Adelsteen Normann was painting the grander effects seen in the fjords of Norway.

Normann’s From Romsdal Fjord, also from 1875, shows the ninth longest fjord in Norway as it carves its way through this huge mountain gorge. Although much of the water surface is glassy calm, there’s a slight blur of fine ripples, and patches where it’s more disrupted by gentle breeze.

The unidentified fjord in Normann’s undated The Steamship shows a similar repertoire of subtle optical effects.

Alder Trunks from 1893 is one of Laurits Andersen Ring’s finest landscapes, and has earned its place in the Danish Royal Collection. He shows these old coppiced alders mainly in reflection. Although their details are quite painterly, the overall effect is that of meticulous realism.

The specialist of this period is the Norwegian Frits Thaulow.

Thaulow seems to have discovered what was going to be his recurrent theme for much of his career by 1883, when he painted this scene of Winter at the River Simoa. A lone woman, dressed quite lightly for the conditions, is rowing her tiny boat over the quietly flowing river, towards the tumbledowns on the other side. The surface of the river shows the glassy ripples so common on semi-turbulent water, and the effect on reflections is visibly complex. The distant side of the river is also partly frozen, breaking the reflections further.

Thaulow later returned to his studies of flowing rivers, for example in The Mills at Montreuil-sur-Mer, Normandy. This painting has been claimed to date from 1891, before the artist moved to Montreuil, but I think that its date reads 1894.

In 1894, Thaulow travelled across northern Italy to Venice, stopping off to paint The Adige River at Verona. This shows the five arches of the Ponte della Pietra, with wonderfully disrupted reflections describing the river’s turbulent flow.

Soon after Thaulow had settled at Beaulieu in central France, he found form with the magnificent river surface and lighting of La Dordogne (1903), whose precise detail in the foreground quickly yields to a more sketchy background.

A few artists rose to the challenge of combined reflected and refracted images, among them Kazimierz Sichulski.

Sichulski’s Fish (1908) is a startlingly unusual pastel painting, a virtuoso combination of reflections from and views through this water surface. It’s an essay in practical optics.

As landscape painters increasingly came to rely on studies made in front of the motif, and their views came closer to reality, faithful depictions of reflections on water increased. But the fundamental challenges of painting accurate reflections remained. Both John Constable and JMW Turner started their careers drawing, trained in the Royal Academy Schools, and should have had a thorough grounding in 3D projection and reflections, as well as ample experience recording what they saw.

Several of Constable’s major works include reflected passages, painted slowly in the studio following extensive studies made of the motif.

Constable’s commissioned painting of the house and estate at Wivenhoe Park, Essex from 1816 is an oddly distant view of Major-General Francis Slater-Rebow’s country seat. Given the expanse of mirror-like lake, he might have been expected to include meticulous reflections. There are obvious anomalies, such as the brick-red reflection of the modest section of the house visible through a break in the trees in the centre of the canvas. The house is sufficiently distant that little or none of it would have been visible in reflection, let alone the two large areas of brick red stretching well over half way across the water. That was in all probability painted for effect.

Reflections of the pair of swans and boatmen are also out of kilter. Constable may well have neither seen nor sketched them from life, and then struggled to envision their reflections in the studio.

Four years later, this painting of Dedham Lock and Mill (1820) is more familiar territory from the artist’s home ground. His family owned this lock on the River Stour, and he would have worshipped in the village church of Dedham seen in the distance. His reflections here appear accurate throughout.

Turner’s approach to reflections changed over the course of his career. In Pope’s Villa, at Twickenham from 1808, he depicted complex and intricate reflections in careful detail.

I’ve previously considered the relatively small anomalies in another of his early oil paintings, Crossing the Brook from 1815.

These could be accounted for by the figures being staffage added in the studio without the benefit of plein air studies.

Some of his later watercolours, such as Norham Castle, on the River Tweed (1823), have obvious quirks in their reflections: here the reflection appears to show another high point at the left edge of the castle that isn’t matched by an equivalent high point in the real castle.

Some of his paintings show other optical oddities. His Bridge of Sighs, Ducal Palace and Custom-House, Venice: Canaletti Painting (1833), his first oil painting of Venice, places all the buildings leaning to the left, with their reflections leaning in the opposite direction. Had this painting been on a canvas support, there might have been distortion applied by its stretching or subsequent treatment, but unusually Turner painted this on a mahogany panel. I have checked this image matches those from other sources, to ensure this isn’t a photographic artefact.

Turner’s famous Fighting Temeraire from 1839 breaks most of the optical rules of reflections, most obviously in the extraordinary reflected image of the tug’s prow. The tip of the bowsprit isn’t vertically aligned between original and reflection, and there’s gross vertical exaggeration, as there is in the ghostly reflection of the Temeraire under tow.

Several of Turner’s later paintings appear founded in sound optical principles, then exaggerated for artistic effect. While many of the reflections in his Campo Santo, Venice from 1842 appear faithful, he has grossly exaggerated the vertical axis of the reflections of the white sails to the left of centre. But the effect is wonderful.

The Dogano, San Giorgio, Citella, from the Steps of the Europa, from the same year, takes a few gentle liberties with optics without becoming too obviously inaccurate. Again this is mainly in vertical scaling, and Turner has been careful to ensure good vertical alignment throughout.

I have already pointed out some of the apparently deliberate optical anomalies seen in the reflections in Turner’s late oil painting War. The Exile and the Rock Limpet (1842).

Given Turner’s experience and record, I don’t think those discrepancies are errors, but are devices he has successfully used for their effect.