In the first of these two articles on paintings of wetlands, I showed a selection from before 1890, a period in which most of those wilderness areas were left to nature to manage. Today I progress through the final decade of the nineteenth century, and complete with some outstanding depictions from the early twentieth century, when many of those wetlands came under threat from man.
There’s a fascinating story behind Mykola Bodarevskyi’s painting of a ‘goose girl’ in Ukraine. A Girl with Geese from 1892. More generally known as the ‘Russian’ painter Nikolai Bodarevsky, he was born and initially trained in Odesa, Ukraine. The title usually given for this painting refers to Little Russia, a disparaging colonialist term for Ukraine. While Bodarevskyi worked for much of his career in Russia, he returned to live in Odesa after the October Revolution of 1917. Lastly, his paintings were included among those removed in Stalin’s purge of the ‘cosmopolitan’ in 1953. Like so many others, he’s not as Russian as some like to claim.
Alder Trunks from 1893 is one of Laurits Andersen Ring’s most accomplished landscapes, and now part of the Danish Royal Collection. In common with other innovative landscape artists of the time, including Gustav Klimt, Ring shows these old coppiced alders mainly in reflection.
Mykhaylo Berkos’ Bog. Blagodatne Village from 1895 shows the wetlands near a small village perhaps close to the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. While his lily pads are painterly, they remain more distinct and detailed than those of Claude Monet, for instance.
French artists’ colonies like Pont Aven are well known; one of Germany’s more successful colonies was that at Worpswede, in an area of boggy moorland known as Teufelsmoor (“devil’s moor”), to the north of Bremen, in Lower Saxony. Among those who went there were writers and poets including Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke. In 1894, the young Fritz Overbeck joined the colony in its small village on the side of a low hill overlooking Teufelsmoor.
Overbeck’s Evening on the Moor (1896) is now one of his best-known paintings, with the intense blue of its sky, although the fields and trees have the more muted colours of twilight.
His On the Moor from about 1904 is another view of Teufelsmoor under an intense sky, following rain.
Serhii Svitoslavskyi’s Landscape with Storks, from about 1905, shows a group of white storks returning to their wetland breeding grounds in Ukraine in the early Spring.
I’ve already shown one of Adrian Stokes’ paintings from his summer in Skagen. In the early years of the twentieth century he travelled extensively in Hungary, where he painted On the Waste Lands Near Kalocsa in about 1909. This is in Bács-Kiskun county, about 90 miles (150 km) south of Budapest, and is a marshy but highly productive district near the left bank of the River Danube.
My last wetland artist is probably the first major and dedicated wildlife artist, Bruno Liljefors.
Some of his finest paintings from his early career are almost pure landscapes, such as his Hunting Geese (1896) with its superb mackerel sky.
After the First World War, Liljefors concentrated on the wildlife of Sweden’s coastal wetlands, including Bean Geese Landing above, and Geese in Wetlands below.
All I need now is the final movement of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus.