Following the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, the Pissarros fled first to friends in Montfoucault, then in early December travelled on to England, where they settled in Norwood, at that time an outer suburb to the south of London. Camille and Julie, with their two children, stayed first in Lower Norwood, which is slightly closer to the city of London, before they joined Camille’s mother, brother and brother-in-law in Upper Norwood.

Although Pissarro is known to have painted only fourteen oils before returning to France, they mark an early peak in his art.

Fox Hill, Upper Norwood, Effect of Snow from December 1870 appears a sequel to his winter road scenes from Louveciennes, with its gentle staffage. Strangely it didn’t sell in Pissarro’s lifetime, but is now in the National Gallery in London, a few miles to the north.

For Pissarro, this superb view of The Avenue, Sydenham painted in 1871 was a landmark: it was the first painting which he sold to the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, another refugee from the war whom he met in London. Durand-Ruel didn’t sell this painting, and it wasn’t until a sale at Christie’s in 1984 that it was purchased for a public collection, again that of the National Gallery in London.

Unusually, Pissarro painted a preparatory gouache of this view, which looks along what is now known as Lawrie Park Avenue towards Saint Bartholomew’s Church, which had been built in 1832.

Durand-Ruel was also important in securing both Pissarro and Monet admission to the International Exhibition of art in South Kensington, London, after their paintings had been rejected by the Royal Academy. Pissarro had two paintings exhibited there, and some favourable criticism, but little came as a result.

On 14 June 1871, Camille and Julie married in nearby Croydon. The artist’s present to his wife was this delicate View of Alleyn Park, West Dulwich which he had painted earlier that year. Taking Sydenham Hill as his vantage point, Pissarro here looks down over Alleyn Park towards the white chapel of West Norwood cemetery.

This part of what is now South London was becoming rapidly urbanised when Pissarro lived there. This had been accelerated by the opening of the Crystal Palace in 1854, and the expansion of the railways to encourage the more affluent to move out to these leafy suburbs and commute into the city each day. In 1870, a large college was opened to provide private education for the children of those richer families, and the following year Pissarro painted it in this view of Dulwich College, London.

With the Paris Commune crushed, and order being restored to France under the new Republic, the Pissarros returned to live a more settled life in Louveciennes again, after the shock of discovering that most of his 1500 or so paintings had been damaged or destroyed by occupying Prussian soldiers. There Pissarro lived close to Alfred Sisley, and the two often painted in company. Renoir’s mother also lived in the village, which enabled the three painters to meet quite frequently.

Among Pissarro’s favourite motifs in this post-war period were numerous views of the Route de Saint-Germain and other roads around Louveciennes, and the River Seine at Bougival.

Less well known are his watercolours, such as this view of Louveciennes, Route de Saint-Germain from 1871, which are reminiscent of the paintings of Johan Jongkind.

This is a wintry scene of The Post-House, the Route de Versailles, Louveciennes, Effect of Snow from 1872. This looks from the ‘Royal Gate’ of the Château de Marly towards the post-house, a landmark which features in several of Pissarro’s works from this period. This painting was bought that Spring by Durand-Ruel, who sold it a year later to Jean-Baptiste Faure, the opera singer and Pissarro’s first collector.

At this stage of his career, there’s no evidence that Pissarro set out to paint formal series in the way that he did later. The compilation above shows some examples drawn from his ‘road’ paintings during the period prior to and immediately after the Franco-Prussian War.

Pissarro painted this woodland view of an Avenue in the Parc de Marly in the autumn of 1871. It looks towards the village of Marly-le-Roi from the Port du Phare, inside the grounds of the Château de Marly. His skilful use of staffage draws the eye towards the far end of the avenue. The artist seems to have sold this painting quite quickly to an unknown buyer, from whom Durand-Ruel bought it in early 1873.

Pissarro must have taken delight in the weird forms of the trees in this Chestnut Grove at Louveciennes, which he painted in 1872. In the far distance is the massive warm cream stone of Marly Aqueduct.

Although the Pissarros were able to live on the money generated by Camille’s painting, they must have got by in relative poverty. However, in 1872, he sold four stretched canvas overdoor panels depicting the seasons to the banker Achille Arosa for 100 Francs each. Pissarro tried to buy them back when they came up for auction in 1891, but despite appealling to Vincent van Gogh’s brother Theo, they were sold for just over a thousand Francs to the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery, and have remained in private collections since.

In April 1872, the Pissarros moved from Louveciennes to Pontoise, where they rented a house and Camille established his studio.

In 1873, Pissarro was one of the prime movers of the French Impressionists. It was he who first suggested that they should set up their own alternative to the Salon, and he was one of the those who established their official Société Anonyme collective, and wrote their charter. Pissarro was in effect the father of the Impressionists, both in age and role. In the summer, he started renting a studio in Montmartre.

Pissarro’s output while he lived in Louveciennes and Pontoise was prodigious and of very high quality. One painting which stands out, though, is Hoar Frost at Ennery from 1873, which was exhibited at the First Impressionist Exhibition the following year, bought that autumn by Faure, and now graces the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

Some of the critics of the day praised it, comparing it to some of Millet’s best paintings, but the influential Castagnary was acid in his comments, and another described its frost on deeply-ploughed furrows as “palette scrapings placed uniformly on a dirty canvas.”

One interesting observation about this work is Pissarro’s overt use of colour in its shadows, a controversial issue at the time. The rhythmic cast shadows of trees are here dark brown where they fall on the ploughed area, and blue-green further back where they fall on frost-covered grass.

Chestnut Trees at Osny from about 1873 was another of Pissarro’s paintings exhibited at the First Impressionist Exhibition, which also gained some praise, in this case from the critic writing for L’Artiste. It was exhibited in 1883 at the Durand-Ruel Gallery, where it was much better appreciated, but remained in the artist’s own collection until his death.

Pissarro had painted a few family portraits and even some still lifes over these years, and in about 1874 painted his famous heart-felt portrait of Paul Cézanne, who had been a close friend since they first met in 1861.

This image of Pissarro’s painting of the Farm at Montfoucault from 1874 is valuable for its lightly raking light, which reveals the texture of the paint surface. It also demonstrates how Pissarro could use lower chroma when the lighting conditions dictated. This painting was made while the Pissarros spent the winter with their friends in Montfoucault, and exhibited at the Second Impressionist Exhibition. Like so many of his paintings it remained unsold when the artist died in 1903.

Tomorrow I’ll look at the landscape paintings of Alfred Sisley over the same period.

References

Wikipedia

Brettell RR (1990) Pissarro and Pontoise, Yale UP and Guild. ISBN 978 0 300 04336 5.
Pissarro J (1993) Pissarro, Pavilion Books and Harry N Abrams. ISBN 1 85793 124 6.
Pissarro J and Snollaerts CD-R (2005) Pissarro. Critical Catalogue of Paintings, 3 vols, Wildenstein Institute and Skira. ISBN 88 7624 525 1.
Rothkopf K ed (2006) Pissarro. Creating the Impressionist Landscape, Philip Wilson, London. ISBN 0 85667 630 6.

The Franco-Prussian War was much harder for the Sisleys. With the Prussian occupation of Bougival, close to Pissarro’s house in Louveciennes, they fled to Paris. Although Sisley himself had British nationality, he was in no financial position and probably too late to escape over the Channel to England. The family business collapsed too, and the mental health of his father must have made it impossible for him to abandon his parents. The Sisleys thus had to remain in the city, Alfred unable to serve because of his nationality, and the family half-starved through the siege.

Like Pissarro, Sisley lost everything that had been in his studio and house in Bougival, including much of his previous work.

Sisley must have been one of the most prolific painters of bridges outside the centre of Paris. In his River Steamboat and Bridge from 1871 he captures the very modern sight of a small paddle steamer approaching the arches of a bridge most probably on the River Seine. For its time, Sisley’s facture is exceedingly rough, particularly in the water surface and sky.

Sisley’s later view of The Canal Saint-Martin, Paris from 1872 shows a placid and almost disused stretch of canal slightly further out of town from his first painting of the canal in 1870. Originally intended to supply Paris with healthy drinking water from the River Ourcq to the north-east, by this time it was largely used to bring supplies of grain and building materials into the heart of the city.

In 1872, shortly after Monet and his family returned to France, the Sisleys moved in with the Monets in Argenteuil. This marked the start of a highly productive period for Sisley, and, in conjunction with Monet and Renoir, changes in his art. The three concentrated their efforts on the recording of transient effects of light using colour, removal of black from their palettes, and abandoning the traditional ‘finish’ of a painting.

Footbridge at Argenteuil from 1872 is dominated by the perspective projection of the bridge itself, almost to the exclusion of the river below. Sisley’s figures are very gestural but here look more natural in their forms.

The Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne (1872) shows a more modern suspension bridge in this small town to the north of Paris, with quite generous staffage. This was presumably painted while he was staying with Monet.

From Argenteuil, the Sisleys moved to live in Voisins-Louveciennes, where they lived in a rented house not far from where Pissarro had lived before the war.

Many of Sisley’s landscapes appear to have been painted en plein air in a single session, and their roughness is a mark of the lack of time to render detail. The Seine at Bougival from 1872 appears to have been less rushed, and may have been the result of two or more sessions in front of the motif, as was often practised by Pissarro, for instance. Its water surface is mirror-smooth, and Sisley has been careful to paint the reflection of the buildings with optical precision.

The Aqueduct at Marly (1874) shows the massive form of this aqueduct which appeared in the distance in Pissarro’s Chestnut Grove at Louveciennes from 1872, which I showed yesterday. This and the nearby Machine de Marly, which Sisley also painted, were part of a monumental hydraulic network built in the 1680s for Louis XIV, to supply water to the Château de Marly and the royal gardens of the Palace at Versailles. The stone tower at the right end of the aqueduct is the Tour de Levant, which was used by Prussian troops as a vantage point for observing the beseiged city of Paris, a point which won’t have escaped Sisley’s attention.

This painting was bought from the artist by Paul Durand-Ruel, but not until 1876.

Sisley’s Fog, Voisins from 1874 is perhaps his equivalent of Pissarro’s Hoar Frost at Ennery (1873). This radical painting shows a fog-cloaked flowerbed in the foreground, the small patch of colour in this garden. The woman working away is not tending her nasturtiums, but toiling away at what will, in a few months time, be carefully prepared and cooked in her kitchen.

Sisley was never as enthralled as Pissarro was in painting either ‘road’ or snow scenes. His Snow on the Road, Louveciennes (1874) clearly comes from the same school, but his trees and buildings remain distinctive.

He was closely involved with the formation of the Impressionist movement, and exhibited six works in the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874.

In the summer of that year, Sisley accompanied his patron Jean-Baptiste Faure, a celebrated opera singer, on a visit to London. Sisley paid for this trip in kind, providing Faure with six paintings. The two stayed initially in South Kensington before moving out to the Castle Inn near Hampton Court, which provided Sisley with the best opportunities to paint.

Hampton Court had long been a major manor house, which was extended to become a royal palace for King Henry VIII. Despite its fine position on the River Thames, it was then largely abandoned until Queen Victoria opened it and its gardens to the public.

A decade before Sisley’s visit, an iron toll bridge had been placed over the River Thames nearby. Sisley seized the moment and painted one of his most unusual views of a bridge, in his Under Hampton Court Bridge from 1874. This carefully aligned projection of the bridge is symmetrical about the centreline of the painting, and the composition is carefully balanced with trees at the left and a building at the right.

The two racing boats seen on the left of that bridge reflected the growing interest in watersports, which Sisley revisited in the most famous of his paintings from this trip to England: Regatta at Molesey (1874), one of the gems of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. This small competitive event had only been established in 1867, and still takes place on the same stretch of the River Thames not far from Hampton Court. This painting was bought by Gustave Caillebotte for his collection of Impressionist works.

Molesey Weir, Hampton Court (1874) shows the weir on the River Thames near the location of that regatta, and presents an excellent collection of different surface effects of water accomplished by the combination of colour and brushwork.

Sisley enjoyed his four months away, and returned to France in time for the winter, at the end of which he and his family moved again to nearby Marly-le-Roi. In just a few paintings over that period he had demonstrated his versatility across a wide range of motifs, and above all his eloquence in using the new Impressionist techniques.

References

Wikipedia
Richard Nathanson

Shone R (1992, revisions 2008) Sisley, Phaidon. ISBN 978 0 7148 3892 2.
Stevens MA (1992) Alfred Sisley, Yale UP. ISBN 0 300 05244 8.
Stevens MA (2017) Alfred Sisley, Impressionist Master, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 21557 1.

Many paintings rely on quite subtle clues as to their reading. Is that figure simply a portrait, or are they intended to tell us more, even refer to a narrative? What’s going on in this group of people, general hubbub or is there something more? In this article I’m going to look at the direction of gaze, and tomorrow at hands and gestures such as pointing.

Being visual art, paintings often are at least partly about, or refer to, the act of looking. For most painters, this is a central concern in their figurative works. A single figure shown looking straight at the viewer, or (in more recent paintings in particular) with a fixed gaze at an object outside the picture, is most likely to have been posed for a straight portrait. Once their gaze is directed at an object or another figure, there’s likely to be something else going on.

The gaze of a single figure can carry important meaning, as in Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s Life Study of Lady Hamilton as the Cumaean Sybil from 1792. Coupled with her ‘eastern’ headdress, distinctive robes and scroll, her heavenly gaze tells us that she is under divine inspiration.

Mothers and their children are another good example, whether in religious paintings of the Virgin Mary and infant Christ, or Elizabeth Nourse’s superb Motherhood from 1897. Closer reading reveals that the mother here isn’t a conventional subject either: her face is tanned from outdoor work, and her hands have clearly toiled long and hard in the soil.

One of the most intense painted gazes is that between Gustave Moreau’s Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864), which stands in stark contrast to that of mother and infant. These two are right in one another’s face, staring one another out. The Sphinx is already latched onto what she assumes will be her next and delectable young meal, and promises to be femme fatale for the young man.

Oedipus knows that he cannot falter. A false guess in his answer to the Sphinx’s riddle, even a slight quaver in his voice, and this beautiful but lethal beast will be at his throat. His left hand clenches his javelin, knowing that what he is about to say should save his life, and spare the Thebans. He will then no longer be pinned with his back to the rock, and the threat of the Sphinx will be gone.

With larger groups, it’s worth taking the time to consciously examine the gaze of each face you can see in the painting.

If it’s just a group portrait, as in Henri Fantin-Latour’s Homage to Delacroix from 1864, then it’s down to identifying the individuals and their setting. Without interactions between the figures, this is a collection of eleven individual portraits.

In Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Phryné before the Areopagus from 1861, the elders of the court are, almost without exception, staring at the naked body of the highly successful and very rich courtesan (hetaira) who has been brought to trial before them for the serious crime of impiety. Their faces (below) respond with emotions ranging from pure fright, to anguish, grief, or disbelief – but they can’t take their eyes off her. She has responded by turning away from them and covering her eyes.

When it seemed inevitable that Phryné would be found guilty, one of her lovers, the orator Hypereides, took on her defence. A key part of that was to unveil her naked in front of the court, in an attempt to surprise its members, impress them with the beauty of her body, and arouse a sense of pity. The legend claims that this ploy worked perfectly, and with his skill in using gaze, Gérôme’s painting makes that crystal clear.

Sometimes the importance of gaze lies in what the figures are not looking at.

In Paul Delaroche’s account of The Assassination of the Duke of Guise in the Château de Blois in 1588, painted in 1834, the artist has divided his canvas in two. On the right, the Duke of Guise lies, dead, in a melodramatic posture with his arms outstretched, at the foot of a bed. At the left, a group of men are talking with one another, most clutching their swords, but none paying the slightest attention to Guise’s body, as if it was not there.

This assassination, and that of Guise’s brother, the Cardinal of Guise, the following day resulted in such outrage among the Guise family that Henry III, who was largely responsible, had to flee and take refuge with Henry of Navarre. The following year Henry III was assassinated by an agent of the Catholic League.

Some of the most fascinating paintings feature complex chains of gaze which need more careful study.

One my favourites among these is Lovis Corinth’s second and more finished version of Salome from 1900.

Salome is staring intently at the lower abdomen of the executioner. Her right hand is stretching open the left eye of the severed head of John the Baptist, which appears to be staring up at her. The executioner and the young woman at the top right are laughing at one another, but a third woman beside her has a serious, almost sad expression, as she stands holding a very large peacock fan.

The chain of gaze here is central to the painting’s narrative: John’s eye stares at Salome, who stares at the executioner’s crotch, who laughs at the young woman at the top right, who laughs back at him. Watching sombre and detached from behind is the figure of death.

I end this article with three paintings in which gaze is complex. Two probably don’t contain any particular meaning, but the third is one of the greatest masterpieces in the history of painting in Europe.

Benjamin West’s The Treaty of Penn with the Indians or William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1772. This shows the founder of the state of Pennsylvania purchasing land for his colony from the Lenape people, with a treaty of peace between the colonists and the ‘Indians’, in 1682. Looking at the directions of gaze of its figures suggests that the artist had no consistent idea of where they should be looking, and the viewer is even hard-put to identify its central figure William Penn.

The sixth and last of Henri Fantin-Latour’s group portraits, Around the Piano from 1885, shows members of a Wagner fan club in Paris at the time. They are each gazing at something different and not interacting in the least. Emmanuel Chabrier is playing the piano without looking at its keyboard or the music, and its other figures (bar one) appear distracted.

Not so for the members of the Spanish royal court in Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas from about 1656-57.

There has been dispute over whether the reflection shows the royal couple stood where the viewer is, or the mirror is reflecting their painted images on Velázquez’s canvas. How their images were generated is probably of secondary importance, as either way the gaze of most of the other figures is clearly directed not at the viewer, but at the King and Queen, who may be getting up to leave after sitting for Velázquez to paint them.

Tomorrow I look at hands, pointing, and other gestures we can make with them.

Due to a very high volume of comment spam, I’m afraid that I have had to temporarily suspend adding comments to older articles on this blog. You can still add comments to articles which have been posted here in the last 40 days: please feel very welcome to do so.

I intend returning this setting to normal, allowing comments on all articles no matter how old they are, on Monday, in the hope that the spammers will have gone away by then.

I apologise for having to do this, and for their unacceptable behaviour.

In yesterday’s article, I showed examples of paintings in which reading the gaze of figures is important. Today I look at something which may appear even more obvious, but can be missed altogether: hands and their gestures, most notably pointing.

Conventional wisdom about telling stories in images holds that body language is of great importance. In the late twentieth century, sociobiologists like Desmond Morris wrote popular accounts of human non-verbal communication and behaviour. Although it may seem strange that people have to learn how to interpret what we apparently do naturally, it relies on close observation and understanding which seems to be diminishing with increasing reliance on technology.

In painting his account of the myth of Diana and Actaeon in 1836, Camille Corot decided to revive one of the great narrative techniques of the Renaissance: what I term multiplex narrative, which shows a composite of several moments in a single image. Recognising that this might cause problems for contemporary viewers, he went out of his way to provide strong visual cues to help navigate its story.

The viewer’s eye is first drawn to the naked women cavorting in a small pool. Here is Diana and her entourage, and above and to the right is the approaching figure of Actaeon with his dog, who is just about to stumble across the goddess by accident. The tragic conclusion of the myth, in which Actaeon is transformed into a stag and ripped apart by his own hounds, is shown in the distance at the left edge of the canvas. To see him there you only have to follow Diana’s pointing.

In Jean-Joseph Weerts’ painting of The Assassination of Marat from 1880, arms and hands are so strongly accusative that they look almost operatic in their theatricality. Among the crowd pointing and waving are Simonne Evrard (Marat’s fiancée), a distributor of Marat’s newspaper, two neighbours (a military surgeon and a dentist), and Republican troops. Charlotte Corday is still clutching the knife which she plunged into the body of Marat in his bath, and she shrinks back against the wall, transfixed.

With only a still image in which to convey the sensory intensity of the Furies, painters have used strong body language as a substitute for motion and sound. In William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Orestes Pursued by the Furies (also known as The Remorse of Orestes) from 1862, three Gorgonic Furies are wailing and screaming at Orestes, and carry the murdered corpse of Clytemnestra, Orestes’ dagger still buried deep into her. The artist here shows the Furies pointing at the dagger buried in his mother’s chest, while directing their gaze violently at his head.

Many religious paintings use a combination of pointing, hand position and gaze to tell their stories. Leonardo da Vinci’s first version of the Virgin of the Rocks, now in the Louvre, is an excellent and complex example. The central figure is the Virgin Mary, whose right hand clasps the back of the infant Saint John the Baptist. With her is an angel, whose left hand supports the lower back of the younger baby Jesus.

Hand positions, including most prominently the right hand of the angel, direct towards the clasped hands of John. As is traditional, the Madonna’s eyes are cast down, but the angel is looking towards the lower right corner of the painting. Christ is distinguished by his right hand held in blessing, and his evident youth compared with the larger John who is praying for him.

Another Biblical narrative which has often relied on hands for its telling is The Judgment of Solomon, as painted here by Nicolas Poussin in 1649. Solomon’s hands indicate his role as the arbiter, pointing out the fair balance between the two sides.

The true mother, on the left, holds her left hand up to tell the soldier to stop following the King’s instructions and spare the infant who is the subject of the dispute. Her right hand is extended towards the false mother, indicating that she has asked for the baby to go to her rather than die. The false mother points accusingly at the child, her expression full of hatred. Hands are also raised in the group at the right, perhaps indicating their reactions to Solomon’s judgement.

Sometimes, even in relatively small groups of figures, hands are shown prominently but are far harder to read.

In Henri Fantin-Latour’s group portrait of his in-laws, The Dubourg Family from 1878, his wife Victoria is standing at the left, her hands pointing down to her father (I presume) who is gazing distantly as if he was somewhere else. Close to the centre of the canvas are no less than six hands, which stand out against the dark and drab clothing, but what is to be made of them?

A total of seven hands stand out in Félix Vallotton’s group portrait of Nabis, Five Painters, from 1902-03. Most form a diagonal cutting down from the standing figure at the left (the artist’s self-portrait), to that resting on Charles Cottet’s left thigh. They remain a mystery.

Hands, their fingers in particular, do much more than point, and have a rich range of gestures which have featured in paintings.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Pollice Verso, painted over the period from before 1869 to 1872, looks at the power of expression – here, a small gesture of the hand – in his favourite context, the Roman gladiatorial arena, which he had fallen in love with when he was first in Rome almost thirty years earlier.

The victorious gladiator stands with his right foot on the throat of the loser. He looks up at the crowd, to see whether he should kill that loser, indicated by thumbs pointing downward, or should spare his life, shown by thumbs pointing up. The title confirms what we can see: thumbs are down, and the gladiator on the ground is about to be brutally killed as the result of a small gesture of the hands.

The Furies return for my last example, one of the large murals painted by John Singer Sargent in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Among his magnificent wall paintings, Sargent started Orestes Pursued by the Furies in 1922, and completed it in 1925, just prior to his death. Over its 100 square feet of canvas, it shows a young and naked Orestes cowering under the attacks of the Furies, as he tries to run from them. The swarm of no less than a dozen fearsome Furies have daemonic mask-like faces all staring wildly at Orestes, blond hair swept back, and hold out burning brands and fistfuls of snakes.

Sargent has gilded the flames on the brands, which makes them shine proud, just like fire. The isolated woman who stands in Orestes’ way is no Fury, though: she wears a gilded crown, and with the clean incision of a stab wound above her left breast can only be his mother, Clytemnestra.

Sargent’s profusion of eight arms, with their hands clutching snakes, reaches fever pitch.

I have now enabled commenting on older articles again. Please feel free to do so.

Let’s hope the comment spammers have gone away again.

From the shell containing the planet Venus, Dante and Beatrice pass from the shadow of the earth into the full light of the Sun, which occupies the next shell in their outward and upward journey through heavenly Paradise. Beatrice prompts Dante to thank God in prayer, following which they are surrounded by a wheel of sparkling souls, representing the wise.

From among them, Saint Thomas Aquinas introduces himself, and his eleven companions ranging from his spiritual mentor Albert the Great, through King Solomon and Boethius, to one of his theological opponents.

Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican, and next outlines the life of Saint Francis of Assisi. Another wheel of spirits appears and encircles them, from which Bonaventure comes to them and outlines the life and achievements of Saint Dominic. He has eleven companions too.

Just as a third wheel of spirits starts to form in the early evening sky, Dante and Beatrice move upward to the next shell, containing the planet Mars. Here Dante sees a cross formed from the souls of holy warriors, as two shafts of light.

Dante is greeted at the foot of the cross by his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida, a pious and righteous man who died ‘fighting for God’ in the Second Crusade.

Cacciaguida foresees that Dante will be caught between the politics of Florence and the Pope, and gives him advice as to how to cope with his future exile from the city of Florence. Finally, Cacciaguida identifies to Dante various holy warriors including Joshua, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon, then believed to have been responsible for the (re)capture of Jerusalem at the end of the First Crusade.

The artists

Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia (c 1403-1482) was a prolific Italian painter who worked primarily in Siena, and was one of the more important members of the early Sienese School. He started work painting miniatures, later making some important altarpieces as well. He created sixty-one images of Paradise for the “Yates Thompson” Dante commissioned by King Alfonso V, and now in the British Museum in London.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, which were first published in 1857 and continue to be used. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

Johann Friedrich Overbeck (1789-1869) was a German painter who, like Philipp Veit, joined the Nazarenes. By coincidence, over the same period that Veit was painting his ceiling in the Casa Massimo in Rome, Overbeck was busy on a magnificent fresco telling the story of Torquato Tasso’s epic of Jerusalem Delivered in another room there. The detail shown above is of the thanksgiving made by the crusaders after they had recaptured the city of Jerusalem. Peter the Hermit stands holding the crucifix, as Godfrey of Bouillon, still wearing his armour, sinks on bended knee.

Philipp Veit (1793–1877) was a German Romantic painter who was partly responsible for the revival of fresco techniques in the early nineteenth century. He was a pupil of Caspar David Friedrich in Dresden, and later trained in Vienna. A prodigious draftsman, he preferred watercolours to oils. He went to Rome where he joined the Nazarenes, later returning to Frankfurt, where he became professor.

Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) was one of the great Spanish Masters, whose life and career I have detailed recently. The painting above shows a popular legendary episode in the life of Thomas Aquinas. According to contemporary accounts, the saint’s family wanted him to withdraw from the Dominican Order, so he was abducted and brought home, where his brothers sent a woman to his room in a bid to tempt him to break his vow of chastity. Thomas responded by taking a burning log from the fire, drawing the sign of the cross with it, and chasing the woman away. He then fell into a deep sleep, during which two angels visited him and secured a belt around his waist as a sign of his chastity.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

Understanding how the French Impressionists created their masterpieces is one of the great problems in the history of painting. They were assiduously careful to reveal as little as necessary, and as a result their working methods have often been assumed to be simple: set up in front of the motif, paint briskly what the artist ‘senses’ in order to capture fleeting and momentary effects, resulting in an oil sketch completed over no more than a couple of hours, and that’s it, done.

The evidence from looking carefully at major Impressionist paintings is that, while that may have been true for some painters and certain of their paintings, many were created more deliberately over a longer period, much of which was in the studio and not in front of the motif at all. This article considers a series of some of the most Impressionist paintings of them all, Claude Monet’s Grainstacks, which he painted in a field next to his home at Giverny in 1890-91.

My evidence is drawn from the detailed and authoritative account of their creation in Daniel Wildenstein’s four-volume catalogue raisoné (Taschen and the Wildenstein Institute, 1996), and the paintings themselves. The narrative is in volume 1, pp 274-279, and the individual paintings are illustrated and detailed in volume 2 from p 482 onwards.

The French word in each of their titles is meules, which here means a stack of cut cereal with the grain still attached, a grainstack rather than haystack (which contains hay, the threshed cereal). In the late nineteenth century in northern France, it was standard practice to cut cereal crops when they were ready at the end of the summer, then to stack the intact stalks and heads until an itinerant threshing machine visited the area, and the grain could be separated from the hay.

Claude Monet first painted a series of canvases depicting grainstacks at Giverny – literally outside his back yard – in 1889. In the early autumn of 1890, Monet started a fresh series consisting of two grainstacks, now accorded Wildenstein numbers of W1266 to W1279. During that winter, the farmer was able to start threshing, and one of the grainstacks was consumed.

Apparently Monet paid the farmer to retain the single remaining grainstack so that he could continue the series, allowing him to paint W1280 to W1290, each showing that single grainstack. After various delays during which Monet apparently made further adjustments to the paintings in the series, the first fifteen canvases were shown at an exhibition at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in Paris, which opened on 4 May 1891. They all sold, for sums of up to 1,000 francs, and provided Monet with an excellent return for the winter’s work.

The remaining ten paintings in the series were sold to Durand-Ruel and other dealers by the end of 1891, and all have now been dispersed into art galleries and private collections around the world. Wikipedia’s article on the series here gives further details. However the last time that most of the works in this series were shown together was in May 1891. The following year Monet started his still more famous series of Rouen Cathedral, which he completed in 1894.

By the 1890s, three Impressionists had painted substantial series: Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley. Looking through their work, this did not happen out of the blue, nor did two copy the idea from the third (as has been suggested). Prior to their first formal series, each had painted very similar views of the same motif on more than one occasion, and sometimes painted two or three almost identical views of the same motif.

However, these had changed from being short informal series, which might just have ‘happened’ that way, into formal exercises in which the painter deliberately returned to the same viewpoint and painted the same motif under a range of different weather conditions, at different times of day, and under different lighting conditions.

The myth about the Grainstacks is that they depict transient effects of season, weather, and light, as they were painted plein air over the course of the winter. Looking at all twenty-five, I have long had my doubts, and suspected that Monet spent a lot of the time prior to their exhibition making further changes to them, which could not therefore have been en plein air nor even faithful accounts of each motif at the moment they depict. This in no way lessens Monet’s sublime achievement, nor their art in any way. It’s just that they aren’t quite the paintings described by the myth which has grown around them.

Looking at Grainstacks, End of Summer, considered to be one of the earliest in the series and numbered 1266, the trees behind the two grainstacks are still in full summer leaf, with no indication of the advent of autumn. Yet Monet’s signature gives the year as 1891. Looking at its paint surface in detail (below), some has been applied wet-in-wet and blended with underlying and adjacent paint, but many other brushstrokes have clearly been applied over dry underlayers.

The blue-grey shadow of this grainstack was applied with relatively dilute paint wet-on-dry over thicker off-white paint which has marked surface texture. However, that off-white paint has itself been applied wet-on-dry over a pale green layer. This couldn’t have been achieved in the same day, even when the ambient temperature was warmer during the early autumn, but probably reflects at least three sessions with drying time in between them.

Looking later in the series, at paintings which were most probably started in early 1891, when there was still snow on the ground, there is strong evidence of similar methods, with layers applied wet-on-dry and pentimenti to adjust the composition. Drying of oil paint during the winter is prolonged, and it may have been weeks before underlayers were sufficiently dry for overpainting in this way.

Grainstack, Sun in the Mist, numbered 1286, is thought to be one of the later paintings in the series, apparently showing the sole remaining grainstack in the Spring of 1891. It too has multiple layers applied wet-on-dry, with many hatched brushstrokes in shades of orange and pink apparently applied over a well-dried surface. These are again shown well in the detail (below) of the grainstack itself.

At the right side of the foot of the grainstack, the lowest layer of paint consists of dull blue and green which appear to have been applied at about the same time and have blended in places. When that layer had dried, infrequent and relatively thick streaks of white were added wet-on-dry. When that had dried, brown-orange was applied to form the uppermost layer. That uppermost layer has also been used to remodel the form of the grainstack using thickly-applied flesh, pale yellow and orange paint.

The evidence points to Monet starting each of this series with a sketch using more dilute paint in front of the motif in the circumstances described in the title. He then brought each canvas into his studio, where he continued to work on it, making further adjustments, adding partial layers of paint, and tweaking each work in comparison to the others in the series. This would have taken place over a period of several weeks: in the case of the canvases which he started at the end of the summer of 1890, such as W1266 above, that period could have amounted to six months.

At this time, Monet painted almost entirely using tubed oil paint purchased from some of the hundreds of colourmen in Paris. He had a definite preference for more modern high-chroma pigments, and was an early adopter of cadmium yellows to reds, for example.

Even if these conjectures about Monet’s working methods are correct, they raise further questions about the role of memory and aesthetics during the continuing work on a painting, right up to one of the most difficult decisions of all, determining when to stop.

By the early 1880s, many painters had made narrative paintings which didn’t resolve, and those works were starting to attract a following at exhibitions. This article looks at some examples which were shown to the public during the decade prior to the coining of the phrase ‘problem picture’, 1885-94.

Marie Spartali Stillman was one of the last of the Pre-Raphaelites, who continued to develop Pre-Raphaelite narrative painting long after the movement had ceased to exist, in her extensively worked watercolours. In 1885, she took a break from her favourite themes of Dante and the early Renaissance. In Love’s Messenger, the finest of her single-figure paintings and one of her most successful, she invites the viewer to speculate about a previously untold and open story.

The woman stands by her embroidery at an outside window. On her right hand is a messenger dove/pigeon, to which a letter is attached. She clutches that letter to her breast with her left hand, implying that its contents relate to matters of the heart. The dove is being fed corn, which could either be its reward for having reached its destination (thus the woman is the recipient of the message), or preparation for its departure (she is the sender).

On balance, the presence of corn on the windowsill implies that it is more likely that the dove has just arrived, and the woman is the recipient. These clues are accompanied by alternative interpretations of the other objects and symbols, such as the embroidery.

Another of the leading women painters of the day, Henrietta Rae, tested the water with some unresolved narrative about the same theme, relationships between men and women.

Rae’s Doubts from 1886 may additionally have been incisive social comment.

A young woman sits on a garden bench, clearly in a quandary. Behind her, forcing his attentions on her, is an older man who is dressed as a tasteless fop. Around her are the signs of his attempts to charm her, with baskets of flowers. The ring finger on his left hand is already occupied, suggesting that he may even be proposing an adulterous relationship, and perhaps referring to the ‘kept woman’, as depicted in William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (1851-53).

William Quiller Orchardson painted a series of three works about unhappy marriage, a highly topical subject at the time. The last of these, The First Cloud from 1887, continues its thread of a young, pretty bride who marries an older man for his wealth. With their faces largely concealed, the narrative relies on their body language and physical distance. When it was first exhibited, the following lines from Tennyson were quoted:
It is the little rift within the lute
That by-and-by will make the music mute.

Unresolved narrative was also become prevalent in the Nordic countries. The first of two examples by Hans Andersen Brendekilde from Denmark tackles contemporary social issues which were common across Europe.

Like many of the very best of these unresolved narratives, Brendekilde’s Cowed from 1887 requires careful reading which would have been considerably easier for the viewers of the time. Superficially, it shows gleaners at work in a field after the harvest, but there’s much more to its story than that.

Being gleaners, the figures seen are among the poorest of the poor. The owner of the large farm in the left distance has gathered in their grain, and their harvesters have been paid off for their effort. Then out come the losers, to scavenge what they can from the barren fields.

The family group in front of us consists of three generations: mother is still bent over, hard at work gleaning her handful of corn. Her husband is taking a short break, sitting on the sack in his large blue wooden clogs. Stood looking at him is their daughter, engaged in a serious conversation with her father, as her young child plays on the ground.

The daughter is finely dressed under her coarse gleaning apron, and wears a hat more appropriate to someone ‘in service’ as a maid, or similar, in a rich household in the nearby town. She looks anxious and flushed. She is almost certainly an unmarried mother, abandoned by her young child’s father, and it is surely she who is oppressed or ‘cowed’. Their difficult family discussion is being watched by another young woman at the far left, who might be a younger sister, perhaps.

In 1892, Millais returned to the sub-genre with his Blow Blow Thou Winter Wind. It is a bitter day in the British winter, snow already on the ground and more snow on its way. An icy wind is blowing, and there is little shelter. In the foreground, a destitute mother sits, cradling her young baby inside an inadequate shawl, her few worldly possessions in a small bundle beside her. Behind a dog bays into the air, and a man walks into the distance.

The viewer is invited to speculate on the relationship, if any, between the man and the woman, and the circumstances by which she and her baby find themselves in such straits. At the time it would inevitably have evoked the theme of the ‘fallen woman’ in its variations.

My last painting in this installment is the second by Brendekilde, one of his road paintings which were his last social realist works. People by a Road, from 1893, shows a young carpenter (with references to Jesus Christ) preaching to a family of itinerant stone-breakers.

The group at the left are old road-workers, breaking larger rocks into coarse gravel. They may well have lived out under the wooden shelter behind them, as they slowly made their way along the road. Standing and apparently preaching to them is a cleanly-dressed carpenter, his saw held in his left hand. The building behind them, on the opposite side of the road, is a church, from which a large congregation has just emerged.

Now the ‘problem picture’ had fully emerged, and was ready to puzzle the masses, and spill over into the newspapers.

During the mid 1870s, Camille Pissarro often painted in company with Paul Cézanne, who credited Pissarro with being his major mentor during his Impressionist period in northern France. The late 1870s were a period of intensely productive painting for both artists, and many of Pissarro’s finest Impressionist landscapes were created then.

The year 1875 didn’t start well. Pissarro spent the winter with their friends at Montfoucault, where the calm he so badly needed after the First Impressionist Exhibition was broken by the news that their new Impressionist society was in debt to the tune of over three thousand Francs, and had to be liquidated. Durand-Ruel was also suffering financially: he closed his London gallery and stopped buying Pissarro’s paintings.

In February, with snow still falling, the Pissarros returned to their house in Pontoise, for Camille to paint there again. Effect of Snow at L’Hermitage, Pontoise (1875) strikes a good balance between an impression captured in haste, and sufficient detail to make it more than just a passing moment.

In 1875, a few of Pissarro’s paintings seem to have been influenced by Cézanne. Perhaps the best example is The Small Bridge, Pontoise, which could easily be mistaken for one of Cézanne’s views in the woods of northern France.

View of the Côte des Gratte-Coqs, Pontoise from the same year is also less distinctively one of Pissarro’s works.

Over the summer of 1875, the Pissarros sank more deeply into debt. By the autumn they had no choice but to join their friends the Piettes at Montfoucault until the New Year.

In the autumn of 1875, Pissarro painted this large plein air oil sketch of Cows Watering in The Pond at Montfoucault, from which he made an even larger finished version in his studio. The second painting was bought almost immediately by his cousin Alfred Nunès, and this initial study was sold rather later to Durand-Ruel.

The following year, Pissarro painted another large view, this time of one of the gardens in Pontoise which features in many of his works of this time: The Garden of Les Mathurins at Pontoise, belonging to the Deraismes Sisters (1876). In fact, the sisters were only renting this large and impressive property, which was just down the road from where the Pissarros lived, in the Hermitage district of Pontoise. It had formerly been a convent until the French Revolution.

One of the two sisters, Maria Deraismes, is seen standing in front of an ornamental burnished sphere (detail below). She was a famous figure of the day, an early feminist who founded her own newspaper and more.

Pissarro’s painting of this garden is unusually large, and possibly his first work in which he achieves finely textured colour as a precursor to his later Neo-Impressionist style. This was exhibited at the Third Impressionist Exhibition in 1877.

In complete contrast, the same year (1876), Pissarro painted some views of the commercial barges trading on the River Oise, including this of Barges at Pontoise, the only canvas in which the boats dominate his composition. This painting remained unsold at the time of the artist’s death, and wasn’t even exhibited until 1936.

The Oise near Pontoise in Grey Weather is another of his views of the River Oise from 1876.

Still in severe financial distress, despite the Second Impressionist Exhibition in April 1876, in the autumn the Pissarros returned to Montfoucault for some peace.

Cézanne and Pissarro continued to paint together, as is demonstrated from this view of the Côte des Bœufs, Pontoise in 1877, for which Cézanne painted a matching view from the same location. The barren trees break up the red-roofed houses of the town beyond, superimposing their diruptive rhythm.

This painting was exhibited at the Third Impressionist Exhibition in April, but remarkably remained unsold at the time of the artist’s death.

Pissarro also painted the same view in landscape orientation, in The Red Roofs, Côte Saint-Denis at Pontoise, Winter Effect. This was exhibited at the Third Impressionist Exhibition, and was bought by Gustave Caillebotte, who provided the Pissarros with some invaluable financial support.

In the Spring of 1877, Pissarro painted another of his favourite garden views, The Jardin de Maubuisson, Pontoise, Spring, which was bought nearly a year later by Gustave Caillebotte.

The Rainbow, Pontoise, which Pissarro painted in 1877, was shown at the Third Impressionist Exhibition too. It’s a panoramic view of the fields around the neighbouring area of Épluches viewed from Pontoise.

The autumn of that year saw the Pissarros on their way to Montfoucault for the fourth year in succession. However, their friend Ludovic Piette, on whose hospitality they had relied, died of cancer the following April.

Côte des Grouettes, near Pontoise was probably painted in 1878, and given the patch of purple flowers is presumed to have been made in the Spring. This painting was bought by Durand-Ruel in 1888 for 440 Francs.

Edgar Degas encouraged Pissarro to paint fans, and for the Impressionist Exhibition of 1879, proposed a whole room devoted to these delicate works made in gouache on silk. Nothing more became of it, but Pissarro’s surviving painted fans are simply stunning, and still little known.

The Cabbage Gatherers is thought to have been painted between 1878-79, and shows countrywomen harvesting cabbages in the fields near Pontoise. Although not given its own room at the Impressionist Exhibition, this was probably exhibited there, and appears to have been commercially successful: this was bought fairly quickly by one of Pissarro’s first American collectors, Louisine Elder, who was to become Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer. It appears that Mary Cassatt may have arranged the purchase and acted as Elder’s agent.

In November 1878, Julie Pissarro and their children moved into a rented apartment in Paris, for her to give birth to their next child; Camille remained painting in Pontoise. In April, the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition opened in Paris, where at last Pissarro’s paintings started receiving more favourable critical recognition.

The last painting from this period is something of a puzzle: The Hay Cart, Montfoucault was made in 1879, and is to all intents and purposes an oil sketch painted there during the harvest en plein air. The only snag with that is that Pissarro’s last visit to their friends in Montfoucault had been in 1877. It’s therefore presumed to have been painted in the studio.

Tomorrow I’ll show a selection of Alfred Sisley’s paintings from the same period.

References

Wikipedia

Brettell RR (1990) Pissarro and Pontoise, Yale UP and Guild. ISBN 978 0 300 04336 5.
Pissarro J (1993) Pissarro, Pavilion Books and Harry N Abrams. ISBN 1 85793 124 6.
Pissarro J and Snollaerts CD-R (2005) Pissarro. Critical Catalogue of Paintings, 3 vols, Wildenstein Institute and Skira. ISBN 88 7624 525 1.
Rothkopf K ed (2006) Pissarro. Creating the Impressionist Landscape, Philip Wilson, London. ISBN 0 85667 630 6.

At some time during the winter of 1874-75, the Sisleys moved from Louveciennes to nearby Marly-le-Roi. With his experience painting in England fresh in his memory, it was here that Sisley reached his mature style, and started to paint some of the greatest Impressionist landscapes.

Sisley must have painted The Terrace at Saint-Germain, Spring soon after he had moved to Marly-le-Roi in 1875. It’s one of the grandest panoramic views in the Impressionist canon, caught at the perfect moment with blossom on so many of the trees. Although the artist must by this stage have adopted Pissarro’s technique of painting in front of the same motif for several sessions, the image he has recorded retains an atmosphere of the instantaneous.

The detail below shows the careful balance Sisley has struck between detail and a painterly facture: you can count the windows on the large house, but the boats on the river are wonderfully gestural, and the far distance a blur.

Although there are several well-known Impressionist paintings of factories belching smoke into the countryside, the French Impressionists showed little interest in either heavy industrial processes or their workers, at a time when Naturalist and other artists were painting influential industrial motifs. One of the few convincing examples is Sisley’s Forge at Marly-le-Roi (1875), which shows a smaller-scale and more traditional sight.

Sisley’s paintings of trees in the 1870s show the beginning of a style of his own, as seen in The Road from Versailles to Saint-Germain from 1875, which is quite unlike earlier ‘road’ paintings by Pissarro and Sisley. There is still some anatomical structure, but the canopies are now exuberant and more substantial. The range of greens used for foliage is quite limited, although covering a wide range of tones.

Following the financial failure of the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874 and Durand-Ruel’s cessation of purchases from the Impressionists, some of the group took part in an auction of their work at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris in 1875. Sisley was among them, but Pissarro avoided participating. The plan proved misguided and helped them little: Sisley sold twenty paintings in total, all for derisory prices, and twelve of them to Durand-Ruel, who in the long run must have profited most from the sale.

Sisley was more fortunate in other events: in March 1876 (and again in the autumn of that year) the River Seine burst its banks and there was widespread flooding, which is depicted in some of his best known paintings.

Flood at Port-Marly (1876) is perhaps the most famous of these works, and was among Sisley’s paintings which he exhibited at the Second Impressionist Exhibition, held at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in April 1876. Although the sky is broken, it still looks like rain, as local residents take to their boats on what should have been dry land.

In another view of the same building from a different angle, in Boat in the Flood at Port-Marly (1876), Sisley captures the complex rhythm of the leafless pollards standing proud of the water.

A few of Sisley’s paintings of this period are more experimental. The First Hoarfrost (1876), for instance, with its bright colours and high chroma, might appear more typical of later works by Pissarro.

During the winter of 1877-78, the Sisleys were on the move again, a little closer to the centre of Paris, to Sèvres, the town dominated by one of the most famous porcelain factories in Europe.

This oil sketch of the famous Sèvres Bridge is clearly dated 1877, but the trees are still in full leaf and there are no signs of autumn colours, so perhaps it was painted before Sisley’s move to the town.

Rest along the Stream, Edge of the Wood (1878) must be one of Sisley’s finest paintings, and one of the great landscapes of the century. It features multiple stands of trees, each of a different species, and each depicted with remarkable skill. The line of birch trees in the foreground is detailed anatomically, with most branches shown reaching out into the canopy. Trunks are delicately coloured, textured, and shown with dappled shadows. Their foliage consists of carefully graded brushstrokes to give detail of their individual leaves, gradually merging in the distance.

On the opposite bank five pollards are flush with fresh growth, and behind them the sunlight brings out the high canopies of more distant trees. To the right (and in front) of the cottage are lower trees with near-white lush foliage. Behind them all stands a high wood, great branches and leaves lit by the sun.

The lines of the trees, stream, and the gash of sky all lead the eye to the distant bridge, and the figure of a woman, her back against the foot of one of the birches in the foreground.

In the Spring of 1879, the Sisleys moved within Sèvres, and their financial crisis deepened. Alfred borrowed from Georges Charpentier, a publisher and patron, and Eugène Murer, a restaurateur and collector.

The Road from Versailles to Louveciennes probably from 1879 is an example of his more sketchy plein air paintings from his time at Sèvres, and a more traditional perspective view of a road of the time. This section of the road is close to Louveciennes, and was the main route between Versailles and Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

In this period, Sisley also painted some more urban landscapes, such as this View of Sèvres (1879) with its significantly higher chroma. This might compare with the more ‘finished’ views of the Côtes of Pontoise painted by Pissarro around this time.

Sisley also experimented with introducing more figures into the foreground of his landscapes, as in this riverside view of Washerwomen near Champagne from 1879.

But he remained most at home in the wooded countryside shown in The Road in the Woods (1879) with its less prominent staffage and rich variety of trees and foliage. Alas, this was another of his many landscapes which was sold for the first time in 1916, well after his death, and was first exhibited the following year at Galeries Georges Petit in Paris.

In 1880, the Sisleys were on the move again, to Moret-Sur-Loing, on the eastern edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau and the banks of the rivers Loing and Seine, which was to be the centre for Alfred’s paintings for most of the rest of his life.

References

Wikipedia
Richard Nathanson

Shone R (1992, revisions 2008) Sisley, Phaidon. ISBN 978 0 7148 3892 2.
Stevens MA (1992) Alfred Sisley, Yale UP. ISBN 0 300 05244 8.
Stevens MA (2017) Alfred Sisley, Impressionist Master, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 21557 1.

This weekend’s pair of articles looks at a form of painting which rose from almost nothing in Europe to being popular among the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists during the 1880s, but which has now largely been forgotten: fine art – rather than purely decorative – painting on fans, something practised by Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro and, most of all, by Paul Gauguin. Although examples of these beautiful paintings are hard to come by, and good images of them even rarer, I’ll try to tell their story here, and in the sequel tomorrow.

Hand fans, which could be held and wafted to force convective cooling in hot conditions, didn’t appear spontaneously in Europe, but seem to have been brought from the Middle East at the time of the Crusades. Following the Renaissance they became more elaborate, a fashion accessory which could be used for surreptitious communication between lovers when in company.

They have much richer history in East Asia, where they became canvases for fine art painting well before 1600.

This exquisite painting of a View of Kyoto by Kanō Munehide was made on gold paper during the Momoyama period, most probably in the early 1580s.

Wang Shimin’s 王時敏 untitled folding fan was painted in 1677.

Although a very few European artists do seem to have painted the occasional fan, by and large those made in Europe were decorated by illustrators rather than established fine art painters. Many of the fan-makers in France were Huguenot craftsmen, Protestants in a Catholic state who suffered repeated oppression, and most were forced to leave before they gained equal rights with the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century.

When trade between Japan and Europe started to re-open in the middle of the nineteenth century, this was a more typical example of the type of decorated fan which appeared in Europe, a Performance Fan with Design of Fans on Water.

When France and most of the rest of Western Europe was swept by enthusiasm for everything Japanese, during the latter half of the nineteenth century, some of the painted fans coming from East Asia were very different, clearly the work of artists like Ren Yi 任頤 (Ren Bonian) whose Scholar on a Rock from about 1880 is quite different.

Several of the French Impressionists were enthusiastic collectors of Japanese art, and their own work fell under the spell of Japonisme. I’ve been unable to discover which of them first explored the potential of the fan as a form of painting, but it seems to have happened in the five years after the First Impressionist Exhibition of 1874.

The two who were early enthusiastic painters of fans were Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro. At the time, both were broke and desperately seeking means of increasing the meagre income they made from painting. Decorated fans may have seemed a good little earner at a time when the more affluent were looking for novelties, particularly those which could be given discreetly to a mistress.

It appears that it was Degas who encouraged Pissarro to paint fans, in the hope that the Impressionist Exhibition of 1879 would have a whole room devoted to these works. Although that didn’t happen, a few examples of painted fans have survived from this period.

Pissarro’s The Cabbage Gatherers is thought to have been painted between 1878-79, and shows countrywomen harvesting cabbages in the fields near Pontoise. This was most probably shown at the Impressionist Exhibition, although not in its own room as Degas had hoped.

This was bought fairly quickly by one of Pissarro’s first American collectors, Louisine Elder, who was to become Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, thus a major patron of the arts in general and Impressionism in particular. Thanks to the mediation of Mary Cassatt who acted as Elder’s agent, Pissarro sold his first fan, and it was shipped to his first American collector.

The only painted fan that I can find by Degas is his Dancers on the Stage from about 1879. Whereas Pissarro had worked in gouache on silk, Degas used pastel with ink and wash on paper, which could have been cut out and mounted in the fan mechanism itself.

Over the next decade, Pissarro painted more fans too, including this view of The Railway Bridge at Pontoise from about 1882-83, again using gouache and watercolour on silk. His motif here is reminiscent of Monet’s paintings of a similar bridge at Argenteuil almost a decade earlier.

Pissarro used the same media for his Shepherds in the Fields with a Rainbow from 1885, but then seems to have stopped painting fans.

In tomorrow’s article I’ll take this brief history on into the later 1880s, when they became something of an obsession for Paul Gauguin.

In the first of these two articles about European fine art painting on fans, I showed how, between 1874 and 1879, Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro had started making these unusual works, and met with success when one was Pissarro’s first painting to be sold to an American collector.

At that time, the struggling Swedish painter and illustrator Carl Larsson was in Paris. He must have seen some of Pissarro’s painted fans, and as he was switching to his mature medium of watercolour, painted this superb Rococo Idyll, in 1884. At the left, an elegant Rococo gentleman – a recurrent figure in Larson’s paintings at this time, and shown in the detail below – is sat at a table under a chestnut tree by a lake. It’s autumn and the leaves in the foreground have already changed colour. In the misty distance is a couple in a rowing boat.

Paul Gauguin also started painting fans. The earliest of these works that I’ve been able to find is this French Landscape after Cézanne from 1885, apparently painted in gouache on canvas. He has written a dedication to a friend, which was signed in Copenhagen. This dates the painting to the first half of that year, as in the June he moved back to Paris following an unsuccessful attempt to work as a tarpaulin salesman in Denmark. It’s also unclear why he painted this landscape, which is far from being Danish, in the style of Cézanne.

In the same year, Gauguin painted this fan with a far more conventional French Landscape. Whether this was intended as a contrast to that in the style of Cézanne isn’t clear.

The following year, probably after Gauguin had gone to live in Pont-Aven in Brittany, he painted this Basket of Flowers and Fruits (1886), returning to a more modern style which may again have been intended to recall that of Cézanne.

Gauguin’s Little Cat at a Bowl from 1888 shows a kitten who has half-climbed into a bowl on a table, which is covered with a squared cloth. Next to it is a pile of dark green fruit, and below those what could be the rear end of a mouse, or another item of fruit.

Gauguin continued to paint fans well into the 1890s, it appears. His Ondine III from 1889 was painted between his break-up with Vincent van Gogh in Arles and preparations for his trip to Tahiti. It bears a dedication to a Doctor Paulin, and is the third in his series of paintings of this water nymph frolicking in the waves.

The last of Gauguin’s painted fans which I have been able to locate was made following his return from Tahiti, when he continued to paint Tahitian motifs. Arearea (Joyfulness) II dates from 1894, two years after his original Arearea, and is an adaptation of its motif to the fan format.

A few other artists continued to paint fans too. The Swedish painter Anders Zorn perhaps inevitably chose this pair of Bathers in 1889, the year of his great success at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. This is one of the few fan paintings by major artists which bears the marks for folding and mounting in the slats of a real fan.

In about 1890, when he was studying in Europe, the Australian Impressionist Charles Conder painted this unusual fan in sanguine, a red hard pastel stick used to model tone in studies for finished works. This is pictured in an early biography of Conder, but I’ve been unable to discover anything more about it.

By the end of the nineteenth century, fan painting seems to have died out among major artists. My last example, though, comes from the little-known Anglo-French Symbolist painter Louis Welden Hawkins.

Like Degas and Pissarro before him, at the start of the twentieth century Hawkins turned to making masks and fans in a bid to augment his family’s income. These proved most popular at the World Exhibition of 1900, and is exemplified in this non-folding Fan from 1905. His art nouveau style was seen as very fashionable at the time.

Sadly, painted fans never seem to have regained the popularity which they enjoyed during the 1880s. For a brief period then, several major artists created some wonderful examples of this unusual type of painting.

As they journey through heavenly Paradise, Dante and Beatrice move upwards from the shell containing Mars to the next containing Jupiter.

Here they are greeted by a pure white heaven, where spirits arrange themselves to form the sequence of letters spelling out a Latin direction to rulers to cherish justice: diligite iustitiam qui iudicatis terram, ‘cherish justice you who judge the earth’.

The last letter M then transforms into a huge eagle.

Dante then prays for unjust rulers, particularly those of the church, to be punished. The eagle responds by listing some of the sins of Christian rules, spelling the Latin word for ‘plague’. Some of the best examples of just rulers are gathered in the eye of the eagle.

These include King David, King Hezekiah, the emperor Constantine, William II “the Good” of Sicily, and (surprisingly) two pagans, the Roman emperor Trajan and Ripheus, a minor Trojan praised by Virgil in the Aeneid.

The couple ascend further from Jupiter to the shell containing Saturn, where Beatrice’s beauty has become so radiant that she has to avoid smiling for fear of turning Dante into ash. Within this shell of heaven is a golden ladder of contemplation which reaches high up into the Empyrean, the highest heaven above.

One of the spirits descending down to this level is Peter Damian (1007-1072), who explains that there is no music here, in order not to overwhelm Dante’s hearing with its intensity. Peter had been a monk at a Benedictine monastery south of Florence, and had lived a deeply contemplative life, rising to become Abbot there, then a Cardinal.

He condemns many of the contemporary clergy for their lives of gluttony and promiscuity, rather than the simplicity and purity of the apostles. The spirits shout in support of this point, almost deafening Dante. He then meets Saint Benedict (c 480-547), founder of the order and author of the rules governing monastic life, hence of monasticism in Europe more generally. After hearing about the saint’s life, and being told that the golden ladder is the same as that seen by Jacob in his dream, the spirits are swept up in a whirlwind, and they, Dante and Beatrice ascend the ladder.

The artists

Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia (c 1403-1482) was a prolific Italian painter who worked primarily in Siena, and was one of the more important members of the early Sienese School. He started work painting miniatures, later making some important altarpieces as well. He created sixty-one images of Paradise for the “Yates Thompson” Dante commissioned by King Alfonso V, and now in the British Museum in London.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, which were first published in 1857 and continue to be used. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

Francesco Scaramuzza (1803–1886) was an Italian painter who specialised in mythological and historical narratives. He became quite obsessed with Dante’s Divine Comedy, and for much of his career worked on producing paintings and drawings of its scenes. He worked mainly in Parma, in Italy.

Philipp Veit (1793–1877) was a German Romantic painter who was partly responsible for the revival of fresco techniques in the early nineteenth century. He was a pupil of Caspar David Friedrich in Dresden, and later trained in Vienna. A prodigious draftsman, he preferred watercolours to oils. He went to Rome where he joined the Nazarenes, later returning to Frankfurt, where he became professor.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

In the early nineteenth century, Britain was blessed with two major landscape painters, John Constable and JMW Turner. Not only were they contrasting personalities, but their painting methods were very different too. Constable made extensive plein air oil and watercolour sketches and progressively worked up large finished works through a series of increasingly detailed oil studies. This article looks briefly at Turner’s methods.

In his early career, Turner had been a topographic painter, working largely in watercolours, and had learned to produce pencil and watercolour sketches before he was particularly proficient with oil. He did make some oil sketches, though.

This oil sketch of Guildford from the Banks of the Wey was painted in about 1805, when he took a trip along the River Thames. Although thoroughly competent, he chose for most of his career to work very differently, even when the finished painting was going to be in oils.

Turner visited France, including its Channel coast, on many occasions, both when on passage to Italy and other more distant countries, and as a destination in itself. In 1824, he visited the bustling port of Dieppe during a tour of the Rivers Meuse and Moselle, and kept a record of the views he saw there in one of his small notebooks.

This pencil sketch of Houses Surrounding Harbour at Dieppe (1824, above) and that below of Shipping at Dieppe Harbour (1824) show how quickly he made these. Some bear his colour notes and other remarks, intended to remind him of details of the scene when he came to paint it later.

He also made some hurried watercolour sketches in front of the motif, and others when he was back in his studio and working up ideas for a painting.

This view of Dieppe Harbour is thought to have been painted in 1826, a couple of years later, and shows a very different scene.

Sometimes these led to a small and detailed watercolour study, which might then be progressed into a larger work intended for exhibition and sale. This view is a slightly later watercolour of the city of Rouen.

In this case, Turner turned those rough pencil sketches and notes, and his amazing visual memory, into this finished oil painting of The Harbour of Dieppe in about 1826.

Although Turner paid great attention to painting reality in its detail, he was also not averse to altering a view if he felt it might enhance its aesthetics.

His early success of Fishermen at Sea from 1796 shows small fishing boats working in heavy swell off The Needles, on the Isle of Wight, and was his first oil painting to be exhibited at the Royal Academy.

Close examination of the painting reveals that, even at this early stage in his career, Turner was not painting motifs as they were in nature: from the position of The Needles, this view would look to the south-west from Totland Bay.

Yet he shows the distant promontories of the south-west coast of the Island, as if the view was made round the other side of The Needles in Freshwater Bay looking south-east instead. Another group of chalk sea-stacks was located there, with some common appearances to those at The Needles, and it is probable that Turner merged them and added the background from the south-west coast.

When it came to his painting materials and their preparation, until his father died in 1829, the older Mr Turner worked as his studio assistant, stretching and priming his canvases in particular. Thereafter, following his father’s death, Turner had to rely on the primed panels and canvases which he could purchase from colourmen. His techniques also became increasingly radical, and some of his choices of materials were not as wise as they could have been. As a result, increasing proportions of his paintings have suffered problems.

Turner knew full well how to make oil paintings which would last for centuries, but he was driven throughout his career by the need to experiment, in order to express the unique light and colour effects which he wanted.

For example, in his Seapiece with fishing boats off a wooden pier, a gale coming in, possibly from as early as 1801, Turner made extensive use of sgraffito, which may have been made using a knife, brush handle, or even his fingernails.

Where this became more hazardous was in his control of the thickness of his paint and the resulting paint layer.

The results of this are shown in one of his most famous paintings on canvas, The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up from 1839.

Turner applied high chroma paint quite thickly on top of already thick and layered paint. Although this produces breathtaking effects, as shown in this detail, it will result in problems with cracking unless those superficial layers dry more slowly than layers underneath, a phenomenon embodied in the well-known ‘fat over lean’ rule. Here they have clearly not done so, and patchy areas of cracking are the result.

Some areas are worse affected, with apparent wrinkling probably resulting from the slumping of impasto, and undried paint exuding. This is most probably the result of Turner’s use here of bitumen or asphalt, which inhibits the oxidative ‘drying’ of linseed oil, and commonly leads to problems in the paint layer. Sadly bitumen was a popular pigment in the 1800s, despite its adverse effects being well known.

Hellen and Townsend also attribute this to Turner’s extensive use of Megilp, here a product sold by his colourman containing leaded drying oil and mastic varnish. Used sparingly and with great caution, such medium modifiers do not necessarily cause serious ill-effects. But Turner sometimes used Megilp to excess, to produce a soft impasto in particular.

Turner’s Approach to Venice (1844) was painted with very thin transparent glazes over thick white impasto, which creates a distinctive flickering effect in highlights.

Despite the artist’s efforts to get the white impasto to dry more quickly, the glazes dried first, and cracked as they became stressed over the white which was still wet. This has not been helped by the later conservation process of lining, which places an additional layer on the back of the canvas to help the support do its job.

Turner was also one of the first painters to make use of ‘modern’ pigments, including chrome yellow, which he purchased in tubes rather than bladders. It was John Goffe Rand who patented what he termed “metal rolls for paint” in 1841. At first, these were seen not so much as a means of increasing the portability of oil paints, but for their cleanliness and lack of odour.

As you’d expect from such an experienced master landscape artist, Turner painted quickly, and often seems to have worked on groups of three or four paintings at same time, using the same brush and colours as he switched from one to another. Here is true genius at work.

By 1895, paintings with unresolved narrative had become popular and widely discussed. Themes for these included relationships between men and women, the ‘fallen woman’, the ‘kept woman’, unhappy marriage, and redemption of the ‘fallen’. This was a time of great expansion in the sales and readership of newspapers, and the press weren’t slow to exploit this phenomenon. Over the next 10-15 years, discussion of these paintings was often featured in the more popular newspapers.

One of Millais’ last paintings, before his death from throat cancer the following year, was Speak! Speak! (1895), which is also one of his most enigmatic. At this stage of his life, he spent much of his time in Scotland, either in his home near Bowerswell where this was painted, or in the castle and estate at Murthly in Perthshire, where he went shooting and fishing. He bought this huge four-poster bed from Perth for this painting, and had the lamp copied from one he had seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Millais’ son reported that this scene was intended to be in ancient Rome. The young man had spent much of the night reading through the letters of his lost love. At dawn, the curtains were parted to reveal her, dressed for her bridal night, gazing upon him with sad but loving eyes. The title of the painting is therefore the words that he said to her spectre, and must at the time, given the artist’s own terminal illness, have had personal relevance too. The woman’s figure is intentionally ambiguous, Millais himself being unsure as to whether she was real, or just a spectre.

Yeames’ Defendant and Counsel, also from 1895, was exhibited in London, illustrated as an engraving in newspapers, and so became the first mass-market painting of this kind.

It shows an affluent married woman wearing an expensive fur coat, sat with a popular ‘tabloid’ newspaper open in front of her, as a team of three barristers and their clerk look at her intensely, presumably waiting for her to speak.

As she is the defendant, the viewer is encouraged to speculate what she is defending: a divorce claim, or a criminal charge? This also opens the thorny issue of counsel who discover that a defendant is lying, but still mount their defence in court, and may succeed in persuading the court to believe what they consider to be false. Like And when did you last see your Father? this may be an exploration of truth and the problems posed by it.

The press quickly seized on the ambiguities and oddities in Yeames’ canvas. A critic in the upper-class newspaper The Times claimed that the painting was mistitled, and should have referred to the woman not as defendant, but as the respondent in a divorce case. They also questioned why the lawyers were still wigged and gowned when so obviously outside the courtroom, an issue which the artist was forced to explain.

Yeames was besieged with inquiries from people who claimed they were unable to sleep because they couldn’t resolve the painting’s narrative. The following year, he agreed to judge the best explanation for his painting for The Golden Penny, a popular journal mainly about football, and had to wade through about seventy entries. It became clear that Yeames himself had little idea of the resolution of the story which he’d painted, and awarded the prize to an account which didn’t actually resolve the story at all.

While the chattering classes in Britain were puzzling over those paintings, Spanish viewers were trying to resolve José Uría y Uría’s After a Strike, again from 1895. This story revolves around a strike and its violent consequence, and I have no supporting information about the artist’s intent.

The scene is a large forge which is apparently standing idle because of a strike. At the far right is a row of mounted police (or military), and what may be lifeless bodies laid out on the ground. Inside the factory a woman, presumably a wife, kneels and embraces her child, beside what is presumably the dead body of her husband, who was a worker there. Close to his body is a large hammer, which was presumably the instrument of his death. In the distance, one of two policemen comfort another younger woman.

This appears to show the tragic consequence of the violence resulting from a strike. Was the deceased trying to work on when his colleagues had withdrawn their labour in a dispute, then came to blows with one of them, in which he was struck and killed? Although in a sense the story has a form of resolution, it’s unclear how it got there, and open to speculation on the part of the viewer.

Meanwhile in Norway, also in 1895, Christian Krohg painted one of his more enigmatic works: Eyewitnesses.

It is nighttime in a living room. Two fishermen stand in front of a door. Still wearing their soaked and soiled oilskins, they appear to have entered the room straight after coming ashore from the sea. One stares in shock towards the viewer, the other looks down and away. Both appear full of unease, silent and immobile.

At the right, a young woman is standing, leaning forward towards the men, as if listening to them. She looks anxious, with her hands clasped in front of her chest. Behind her an oil lamp burns brightly, there are the leaves of a large potted plant, and a couple of paintings on the wall behind a large blue settee.

One possible reading is that the men have brought news of the loss at sea of the woman’s husband, an event of which they were eyewitnesses.

The late 1890s also marks the period in which one of the best-known painters of unresolved narrative entered the field: John Collier, who was a renowned portraitist and history painter. I’ve been unable to find an image of his first ‘problem picture’ Troubled (1898), but the following year he painted a stranger work, The Garden of Armida (1899).

This was an early attempt to show a traditional historical subject, that of Rinaldo in Armida’s garden from Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (see this article) in a contemporary setting and dress. In doing so, he posed the problem as to whether the viewer was to see some more modern narrative beyond Tasso’s original. It was not well received, and Collier decided to try more direct problem pictures instead, as I’ll show in the next article in this series.

Reference

Fletcher PM (2003) Narrating Modernity, the British Problem Picture 1895-1914, Ashgate. ISBN 978 0 754 63568 0.

During the winter of 1879-80, Camille Pissarro was improving his printmaking skills in company with Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt, in the hope that he might break into this potentially lucrative market.

The French Impressionists were starting to fragment, and Pissarro, along with Degas, Guillaumin and Rouart, was one of the few who had taken part in their first exhibition in 1874 to exhibit in the fifth Impressionist Exhibition in April 1880. That month Edmond Duranty, one of the few critics who had voiced support for the Impressionists, died at the age of only 47.

Pissarro’s finished oil landscapes were now losing their conventional Impressionist facture, as he adopted smaller, staccato brushstrokes and his style became more ‘pointillist’. Landscape at Le Valhermeil, Auvers-sur-Oise from 1880 is a good example where his leaves are starting to shimmer against the sky.

He also started to transfer his attention from the land to its inhabitants, here the rural poor of these Cottages at Le Valhermeil, Auvers-sur-Oise (1880).

This powerful portrait of Mère Larchevêque from 1880 not only reflects his inability to pay models, but his interest in local characters. Often assumed to be just a ‘washerwoman’, she has been identified as a near-neighbour who seems to have been close to the Pissarro family. She has clearly worked hard through her life; this portrait of her drew favourable critical response when it was exhibited at the seventh Impressionist Exhibition in 1882, but it remained unsold at the time of the artist’s death.

At the end of 1880, when he was in Paris, Pissarro started to develop first symptoms of the eye problems which were to limit his painting so sadly later in his life.

Next year, 1881, saw thirty artists take part in the sixth Impressionist Exhibition, among them the loyal Pissarro who showed 28 oil paintings and fifteen watercolours. In August, the Pissarros’ seventh child was born. It was just as well that Durand-Ruel started buying paintings from Pissarro again later that year!

Peasant Woman Digging, the Jardin de Maubuisson, Pontoise (1881) shows a younger woman working in the vegetable garden of this large house in the village of Pontoise. This painting was bought by Durand-Ruel from the artist, and the following year was lent for inclusion in his work at the seventh Impressionist Exhibition.

The Harvest, Pontoise, from 1881, is one of several paintings which Pissarro made focussing more closely on agricultural activities, and which is becoming overtly ‘pointillist’. He couldn’t have painted this in front of the motif, and it turns out to be a second copy of an earlier and apparently identical painting.

This increasingly human content, in paintings such as his Peasant Woman and Child Returning from the Fields, Auvers-sur-Oise from 1881, drew comparisons with Millet, from whom Pissarro sought to distance himself in terms of modernity. This painting was bought by Durand-Ruel later that year, and shown at the seventh Impressionist Exhibition.

Despite all the strains and disputes among the Impressionists, in March 1882 the seventh Impressionist Exhibition was held in Paris. Pissarro was again a major participant, with 36 paintings on show. He at last was enjoying a much better critical reception too.

The Garden at Maubuisson, Pontoise, Mère Bellette from 1882 shows an older woman bent over her work in a more open view of the vegetable garden of this house.

Pissarro’s love of road paintings had faded more with the smaller tracks and more open countryside in this locality, which is shown more typically in The Hills at Le Choux, Pontoise from 1882.

The artist had a particular liking for markets and fairs, which may seem strange for a landscape painter. He painted this scene from The Poultry Market, Pontoise (1882) twice: once using (glue?) distemper, and here in oils, where his use of tiny marks has evolved even further, particularly in the fabrics.

Pissarro didn’t abandon the painting of fans in gouache either. The Railway Bridge at Pontoise from about 1882-83 is reminiscent of Claude Monet’s paintings of a similar bridge at Argenteuil almost a decade earlier.

In December 1882, Pissarro decided to move to Osny, a village to the north of Pontoise, where he spent part of the winter. This was further from the river, and he felt that the dry air there would help him cope better – presumably with his eye condition.

Banks of the Viosne at Osny, Overcast Sky, Winter (1883) is one of the paintings which he appears to have made during his stay there.

In October and November 1883, Pissarro visited the city of Rouen in search of new motifs.

On his way back from this stay, he took the opportunity to spend a few days with Claude Monet’s brother Léon on the Channel coast near Fécamp. Sadly the weather there was grim, with driving rain for much of the time, but he managed to complete two plein air oil sketches including the Cliffs at Les Petites-Dalles (1883). Compare this with the increasingly pointillist facture of his studio paintings at the time.

In the spring of 1884, after careful searching for the right property, the Pissarros moved to the village of Éragny on the bank of the River Epte, where they were to settle, and he was to paint many of his most remarkable landscapes.

Soon after arriving at Éragny, Pissarro painted this View of Bazincourt, Clear Sky (1884). Its gnarled and twisted trees in the foreground appear in many of his subsequent paintings. This was bought from him by Durand-Ruel that summer, and quickly sold on to Mary Cassatt.

Even more familiar over the coming years was the fine spire of the Church and Manor-House at Éragny (1884). This painting too was sold that summer to Durand-Ruel and sold on quickly to Mary Cassatt.

In January 1885, when he was visiting Guillaumin in his studio, Pissarro met the young painter Paul Signac for the first time.

Tomorrow I’ll show a selection of Alfred Sisley’s landscapes from the same period.

References

Wikipedia

Brettell RR (1990) Pissarro and Pontoise, Yale UP and Guild. ISBN 978 0 300 04336 5.
Pissarro J (1993) Pissarro, Pavilion Books and Harry N Abrams. ISBN 1 85793 124 6.
Pissarro J and Snollaerts CD-R (2005) Pissarro. Critical Catalogue of Paintings, 3 vols, Wildenstein Institute and Skira. ISBN 88 7624 525 1.
Rothkopf K ed (2006) Pissarro. Creating the Impressionist Landscape, Philip Wilson, London. ISBN 0 85667 630 6.

Because of ongoing high-volume attacks on this blog by comment spam, I regret that I have had to disable commenting on older articles for this weekend.

I apologise for this, but I’m currently having to deal with hundreds of spam comments every day, which is taking up a lot of my time.

You are still very welcome to add your comments to articles which have been published more recently – that still works normally.

I hope to remove this restriction in a few days.

In 1880, Alfred Sisley and his family were on the move again, to the area of Moret-Sur-Loing, on the eastern edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau and the banks of the rivers Loing and Seine, which was to be the centre for his painting for much of the rest of his life. Their first house there was in Veneux-Nadon (now Veneux-Les Sablons), on the road to the village of By.

Moret had good rail connections with central Paris, although in 1881 Sisley wrote that the journey took two hours, sufficiently long for him to excuse himself from visiting the city. He lived there in quiet isolation with his family; a few visitors such as Berthe Morisot and Stéphane Mallarmé made their way out to see him. But the nineteen years that he lived in or near Moret were highly productive: a total of 550 oil paintings, some sketchbooks, and a few pastels.

Sisley also experimented with his facture and style a little at this time. On the Hills of Moret in the Spring – Morning from 1880 looks down from one of those low hills towards the town. The brushwork in the foreground is composed of short strokes of colour and of near-white, giving the hillside a distinctive texture.

Painted in the same year, presumably well into the summer, Sisley’sWalnut Tree in a Thomery Field (1880) has its subject carefully constructed on anatomical principles. The paint has again been applied in finer strokes of contrasting colours and tones, giving an overall effect of shimmer, particularly in the river. This gives a rougher texture to the bark of the trunk, and a granularity throughout the canopy of the walnut tree, against which the two women in white really pop out.

In case you’re wondering, Thomery is another village near Moret-sur-Loing, on the west bank of the River Seine, and due east of Fontainebleau.

This was his response to the challenge made by Émile Zola that year, claiming that the Impressionists had failed to create masterpieces which would stand the test of time – perhaps the greatest critical error that Zola ever made. Unlike the others, Sisley remained committed to painting in front of the motif, rather than retreating into the studio as Pissarro and Monet did. He changed his compositions, use of colour, and technique, but stayed the Impressionist course.

Painted in the early spring of 1881 near the village of By, Small Meadows in Spring – By shows younger trees, their branches just starting to show the first leaves as they emerge from bud. The paint surface is similarly textured with slightly larger strokes of contrasting colour.

Slightly later in the same spring, near the same village, the emergence of leaves in Orchard in Spring – By is further advanced, and depicted in a similar style. Although some of the marks used for vegetation, in the grass, for example, are orientated, there seems little tendency for the swirls and whorls seen in Vincent van Gogh’s landscapes.

By the end of 1881, the Sisley family had moved into the town of Moret-sur-Loing itself. This move was apparently financed in part by a loan from Durand-Ruel. About a year later, Alfred Sisley decided that the air in Moret didn’t suit him (or possibly he needed to keep on the move from those that he owed money to), and they moved to live in Les Sablons until 1886.

Depicting the wind is a remarkably tough challenge for the pure landscape artist. In Sisley’s Windy Day at Véneux (1882), he succeeds by means of orientation of coarser brushstrokes to impart the look of lateral movement in its foliage. The texture of those marks is coarser again, and more in keeping with classical Impressionism.

Willows on the Banks of the Orvanne (1883) is another challenging motif which Sisley paints convincingly. An irregular row of pollarded willows, with well-developed heads, crosses the foreground, behind which there is the river Orvanne, reeds, and a tall stand of poplars. Behind this dense succession of trees is a fence, field, and distant buildings, at the midpoint of the painting.

The colours used actually reverse the transition normally seen in aerial perspective, and despite the dense branches, the painting maintains those planes and does not dissolve into confusion. Its single figure, leaning at the base of the nearest willow to the right, is staffage to break the rhythm of the reeds, rather than any hint at social comment.

Rich in autumnal reds, A Corner of the Wood at Les Sablons (1883) is a simpler motif which is dominated by the framing and leading trees, painted in Sisley’s mature style. Les Sablons is a small town close to Saint-Mammès.

During Sisley’s time at Moret, he explored the banks of the rivers and canal there, producing some of his best-known paintings. The Banks of the Loing towards Moret from 1883 is one his earlier riverside views, showing the unusual combinations of reflections of tall trees, working craft and small industry, and distant chalk cliffs.

This view of The Loing Canal from 1884 is another fine example from near Saint-Mammès. This waterway runs parallel to the River Loing, connecting the Briare Canal to the River Seine, and is one of the series of waterways which join Paris to Lyon, known as the Bourbonnais Route. These were constructed in the early eighteenth century, and still carry barges of grain from the farms in central France.

As with many of his waterside paintings, much of the canvas is occupied by the sky, which Sisley wrote that he always painted first so as to set the scene and mood for the whole painting.

Finally, here is Sisley’s June Morning in Saint-Mammès from 1884, showing this small freshwater port and some of its residents out on their business, as another boat makes it way up the River Seine.

Each of these locations was within easy walking distance of the Sisleys’ succession of houses.

References

Wikipedia
Richard Nathanson

Shone R (1992, revisions 2008) Sisley, Phaidon. ISBN 978 0 7148 3892 2.
Stevens MA (1992) Alfred Sisley, Yale UP. ISBN 0 300 05244 8.
Stevens MA (2017) Alfred Sisley, Impressionist Master, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 21557 1.

There’s something very special about the realistic depiction of glassware in paintings. Not only is it one of the great technical challenges, but it’s also an excellent demonstration of an artist’s ability to paint what they see, not what they think. If you’re a young realist painter keen to demonstrate your skills, adding some glasses and decanters should do the trick, as it has done for so many in the past.

For the still life specialist, and artists like Janet Fish, the ability to paint fiendishly difficult glassware is part of the appeal of their paintings. In continuing this exploration of optical effects initiated by the van Eycks and other masters of the Northern Renaissance, their paintings can still make viewers gasp in awe at their vivid reality.

This weekend, I’m going to look at a selection of representational if not meticulously realist paintings of glass from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century. I hope that you gaze as wondrously at them as I do.

Glass is a surprisingly ancient material, but it wasn’t until Venetians on the island of Murano discovered how to make clear glass in quantity in the thirteenth century that its optical characteristics could have been of special interest to painters. It then took the development of the realist depiction of objects during the Renaissance to pose the challenges.

One of the earliest realist depictions of glassware which is truly virtuoso was not among the great artists in the north of Europe, but in the first masterly exponent of oil painting in Italy, Antonello da Messina. Among the surviving fragments of his San Cassiano Altarpiece from 1475-76 are the test pieces of a glass of water and fine glass rods, which Antonello paints impeccably (detail below).

It wasn’t until about 1512-14 that Lucas Cranach the Elder in Germany amazed his viewers with his finely rendered glassy substitute for the golden apple in The Judgment of Paris (detail below).

Glassware quickly established itself as one of the constituents of many of the great still lifes painted during the Dutch Golden Age. I could fill a whole series of articles with images of these spectacular works, but here will confine myself to a couple of those with more interesting backgrounds.

Venetian Glass, Roemer and a Candlestick (1607) is one of Clara Peeters’ earliest known works, which shows an extraordinary skill in rendering varied surfaces and their optical properties. It is also one of the first still lifes in which the artist has included their own image reflected in the motif, here the base of the candlestick holder.

As in many still lifes of this period, its contents have interesting symbolic meaning. The confectionery shown is sweet and ephemeral, the ring a sign of earthly riches and temporal relationships, the fly an indicator of earthly decay, and the burning candle combines remembrance with the strict limits on lifespan in this world. This is not a mere still life, but an expression of vanitas, the futility and limits of our earthly existence.

When the young Diego Velázquez was trying to earn himself a place at the royal court in Madrid, he transformed the Spanish sub-genre of the bodegón and painted virtuoso demonstrations of his exceptional skill.

The bright reflections of light on the flask of wine, the cooking pot for the eggs, and the mortar and pestle, are almost perfect, and his handling of shadows of these objects is impressive. Even at this early stage, his brushwork in fine detail is quite painterly, a trait which was to develop and attract criticism later in his career.

David Bailly’s Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols (1651) is a complex ‘vanitas’ painting containing multiple portraits which refer to the past. The artist’s real self-portrait at the time is in the painting which he holds with his left hand. Next to that is a painting of his wife, who had already died, and behind the perfectly-painted wine glass is a ghostly image of her projected onto the wall.

This painting is also unusual for its innovative use of colour and monochrome passages to distinguish its features from their ground.

If you’ve ever painted with soft pastels, you’ll be aware of their versatility and limitations. The next painting is the most awesome depiction of glassware that I have ever seen in this medium, and takes my breath away.

Applying his pastels to a parchment ground and support rather than paper, Jean-Etienne Liotard painted painstakingly detailed works including The Chocolate Girl from about 1744-45. The detail below shows the fine texture of the ground does nothing to disrupt the illusion of the glass of water she is carrying.

In tomorrow’s concluding article, I’ll show a selection of paintings of glassware from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.