Winslow Homer's Studio at Prout Neck

This is a slideshow of photos of Winslow Homer's Studio at Prout Neck in Maine - plus a Vanity fair article on the studio and his painting habits  It would seem Winslow Homer was pretty smart as to the timing of paintings to satisfy the seasonality of people's interests

West Point, Prout's Neck (1910) by Winslow Homer [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

It looks as if tours of the studio where he settled in 1883 are about to start.  This is an extract from the Portland Museum of Art's website relating to The Year of Winslow Homer

Walk in Winslow Homer's footsteps.
The Portland Museum of Art is pleased to offer tours to this National Historic Landmark beginning on September 25.
Reservation details »

In addition, the Museum is having an exhibition Homer's Prouts Neck Home (22 September - 30 December 2012)

To celebrate the opening of the newly renovated Winslow Homer Studio at Prouts Neck, the Portland Museum of Art presents Weatherbeaten: Winslow Homer and Maine. This extraordinary exhibition showcases 38 masterpieces that the great American artist Winslow Homer (1836-1910) created during the final decades of his life, when he lived and worked in Maine.

For more about Winslow Homer see my website - About Winslow Homer - American Artist

A review of Thomas Moran

An art blog - Poul Webb Art Blog - has recently posted a series of five posts about the great landscape painter Thomas Moran (1837-1926).  These highlight his watercolour sketches and oil paintings of the American West.

Born in Bolton in Lancashire, Moran became one of the renowned painters of the Hudson River School.  He's best known for his panoramic paintings of the American West and the Rocky Mountains.  He's also known as: "Father of the National Parks" and "the Dean of American Painters".

Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (1904) by Thomas Moran
30 x 60 1/2 in. (76.2 x 153.7 cm), oil on canvas painting
Collection: Honolulu Museum of Art
Thomas Moran [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

He's been on my list of painters to find out more about for some time.

So here's an introduction for me as well as any of you who haven't studied his work before.  I'm not quite sure where the images come from - but there's an excellent selection of images of Moran's paintings in the following posts.  If you click them and open in a new tab you can see larger versions.

I'm particularly impressed with his plein air watercolour sketches done on the spot.

Here are the links to

• Thomas Moran - part 1 - an introduction and overview of Moran's life and important works
• Thomas Moran - part 2 - Watercolour and gouache paintings on paper made during the Yellowstone Expedition and subsequently (early 1870s)
• Thomas Moran - part 3 - Oil paintings on canvas, board and paper plus watercolours of Yellowstone and Yosemite - plus Nevada, Florida and other parts of Wyoming -- and Lower Manhattan
• Thomas Moran - part 4 - Watercolour and oil paintings of landscapes in : USA: New Jersey, Florida, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Denver, Yellowstone Plus Scotland and Venice
• Thomas Moran - part 5 - Oil paintings of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Tetons.  Plus waterfalls and geysers everywhere

If you want to get a mental fix on Moran, note that his dates are virtually identifical to those of Claude Monet (1840-1926) - although their painting styles were very different over time.

I've set up a "resources for art lovers" website on Squidoo - About Thomas Moran - American Landscape Painter.  It's got the basics in it - but I'll be continuing to develop it over time.  If you know of any excellent online references re Moran I'd be glad to hear about them

You can see more of my "resources for art lovers" websites about individual artists in About Artists

Paintings of water in March by Willard Metcalf

I've not come across Willard Metcalf (1858-1925) before.  He's an American artist who became renowned as a landscape painter.  Here are two landscapes by Metcalf for the Spring Landscape series.  They both include water and neatly demonstrate the contrasts in landscape scenes which occur in March in the USA.

The Frozen Pool, March (1909) by Willard Metcalf
66.04 x 73.66 cm

Brook in March (1923) by Willard Metcalf

Facts about Willard Metcalf

• Willard Metcalf studied art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Académie Julian, Paris.
• Metcalf was the first American painter to visit and paint at Giverny
• He's regarded as a painter within the American Impressionism movement
• He was one of the Ten American Painters who in 1897 seceded from the Society of American Artists - known as "The Ten"
• In 1893 he became a member of the American Watercolor Society, New York.
• He taught at the Art Students League, New York.
• He was involved with the artists' colony at Old Lyme, Connecticut.

The Spring Landscape series will continue next week with paintings of April.  Do send your recommendations to me by leaving a comment on this blog.

The MAM Award for Best Picture (Place) on an Art Blog 2011

Pacific Passage
© Robin Purcell (Robin Purcell - Watercolours in the Plein Air Tradition)
14" x 14", watercolour

I'm pleased to announce that Robin Purcell (Robin Purcell - Watercolours in the Plein Air Tradition) won The Making A Mark Award for Best Picture of a Place - on an Art Blog in 2011.  This prize aims to celebrate and highlight excellence in creating pictures about places in our environment

I nominated her for the award as part of my Annual Making A Mark Awards - and was very pleased to see that she won.  I think her watercolour paintings are fantastic.   Do take a look at her blog post about her Point Lobos series

Also take a look at the other artists who made the short list in VOTE for the Best Artwork on an Art Blog in 2011

Links:

• Nominate the Best Artwork (Place/Landscape) on a blog in 2011
• MAM Awards 2011: Landscape Nominations for Best Artwork

Wolf Kahn - on painting and being a landscape painter

"A painting with content" (Video 2)

"I was trying even then to do something I'm still trying to do - to get away from description and at the same time still be a landscape painter"

Wolf Kahn

This a two part interview with Wolf Kahn - the renowned landscape painter who works in both oil and pastels.

The two videos from 2008 are from New Art TV

In the first he talks about the earlier part of his life and how his artwork developed and was influenced by the philosophies and contemporary art movements of the fifties.



This is the second part of the interview with Wolf Kahn in which he describes how he got launched and started to sell seriously

"I'm constantly trying to get away from the deliberate...and intentionality"

Wolf Kahn

Thanks to Debora L. Stewart (Contemporary Asbtract Pastels) for alerting me to the videos

Links:

• Wolf Kahn website - pastels and paintings 
• These are links to the original pages on New Art TV
• Wolf Kahn Part 1 of 2
• Wolf Kahn Part 2 of 2

Small but Sublime Landscapes at the Frick Art Museum

I'm not going to be able to get to see this but I think it's definitely worth highlighting the Frick Art Museum's exhibition Small but Sublime - Intimate Nineteenth Century Landscapes in Pittsburgh.


This is the Museum's summary of the exhibition.

Nearly 20 American artists spanning the Hudson River School to American Impressionism are represented in these small-scale paintings from the superb collection of the Newark Museum.

Beginning with the Hudson River School in the 1820s, landscape served as a vehicle for expressing national identity and pride in the wonders of the land. Artists such as Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), Asher B. Durand (1796-1886), and Jasper Cropsey (1823-1900) were intent on creating distinctly American scenes.

Later, during the Civil War and in the years following, this ardent nationalism waned as French landscape painting and the Barbizon school influenced a younger generation of painters including George Inness (1825-1894), John Pope (1820-1881), and Mary Moran (1842-1899).

By the 1890s, Impressionism, with its broken brushstrokes and brilliant hues, became the avant-garde style in America.

Together, these small but sublime canvases provide an overview of the approaches to landscape in the second half of the 19th century and illustrate shifts in broader social attitudes towards nature and American identity.

I've reproduced the press release below as it provides an insight into the development of small scale landscape painting in nineteenth century America.  I've highlighted the names of all the American artists in bold.

On May 14, 2010, Small but Sublime: Intimate 19th-Century American Landscapes opens at the Frick Art & Historical Center. The exhibition features 22 small-scale paintings and drawings by 18 American artists, which range from the realistic style of Hudson River School to the brilliantly colored canvases of the American Impressionists.

The works, selected from the superb collection of the Newark Museum, provide an overview of the varied approaches to landscape in the 19th century and illustrate shifts in broader social attitudes towards nature and American identity. Small but Sublime: Intimate 19th-Century American Landscapes will remain on view at The Frick Art Museum through September 5, 2010. Admission is free.

Beginning with the Hudson River School in the 1820s, landscape painting served as a vehicle for expressing national identity and pride in the wonders of the New World. Artists such as Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902), Asher B. Durand (1796–1886) and Jasper Cropsey (1823–1900) were intent on creating distinctly American scenes. The term “sublime”—when used to describe art and literature—has been freighted with many associations since the 18th century.

Its earliest associations (as found in works of Romantic painters like Caspar David Friedrich and Joseph Mallord William Turner) were often linked to works that emphasized the insignificance of man, mortality and the terrifying grandeur of nature. For 19th-century American landscape artists the sublime had somewhat different associations, the awe-inspiring grandeur of the natural world was seen as evidence of the presence of God, and landscapes that attempted to capture this grandeur conveyed sacred and religious sentiments. In relation to the natural world, this resulted in large-scale, operatic views of untamed nature—often of the American West or South America. Hudson River School artists, such as Albert Bierstadt, also painted smaller, more salable works that reflected a 19th-century philosophy of the sublime that was distinctly American. Many of the works in this exhibition portray quiet and tranquil views that were wild—yet familiar—to American viewers. Bierstadt’s Lake at Franconia Notch, White Mountains, c.1860s, depicts a popular tourist spot. Bierstadt’s painting is a closely observed rendering on paper, indicating that he probably painted a considerable portion of the work on the spot.

In their desire to create memorable and marketable works, painters frequently traveled to destinations renowned for their beauty and sublimity. The Catskills, Adirondacks, Niagara Falls, and Natural Bridge in Virginia all were popular sites. They camped in the wilderness and used portable materials such as small wood panels, paper sheets or sketchbooks to record their observations. Two small albums of sketches in the exhibition by Asher B. Durand and Frederic F. Durand (1837–1905) document excursions from 1854 to 1877.

Asher B. Durand was a leading artist of the Hudson River School whose essays titled “Letters on Landscape Painting” were published in 1855 in Crayon, a leading art journal of the time. Frederick, Durand’s second son, took his father’s advice to heart. Frederick’s sketches reveal his working process as recommended by his father, “to take pencil and paper, not palette and brushes, and draw with scrupulous fidelity the outline or contour of such objects as you shall select, and . . . choose the most beautiful or characteristic of its kind.”



In Jasper Cropsey’s Greenwood Lake, 1871, the artist’s fluid and free treatment of the foreground trees and foliage is similar in style to a spontaneous outdoor sketch, but the detailed handling of the distant shore, as well as the artist’s fully realized composition, reinforces a contradictory reading that it is, in fact, a finished, studio piece. Greenwood Lake was Cropsey’s favorite subject. In this fresh and brilliantly colored view, he combines two signature motifs: the topography of the lake’s shoreline and autumnal foliage of dazzling reds, oranges and yellows. Cropsey’s infatuation with fall colors made him the premier painter of this season, which is the time of year when intense colors brand the scenery as distinctly American.

In the years following the Civil War, this ardent nationalism waned as French landscape painting and the Barbizon school influenced a younger generation of painters, including George Inness (1825–1894), John Pope (1820–1881) and Mary Moran (1842–1899). George Inness resoundingly rejected what he viewed as the scientific realism of the Hudson River School in his search to create pictures that create a poetic mood. In his Delaware Valley before the Storm, ca. 1865, Inness uses compositional elements, such as contrast between light and dark, muted colors, and an active paint surface, to suggest a mood of mystery in the civilized New Jersey landscape. Inness was the most well known of a group of artists, also including Ralph Blakelock (1847–1919) and Alexander Wyant (1836–1892), whose work evoked the spirituality of nature.

As American artists became increasingly cosmopolitan after the Civil War and traveled to Europe, sometimes spending years abroad, French art continued to provide inspiration. The Barbizon style was replaced by a strong involvement with Impressionism. Artists such as Theodore Robinson (1852–1896) were among the earliest American practitioners of this new approach to the painting of light and color. His Moonrise of 1892 was produced in Giverny, the home of Claude Monet, a leading French Impressionist painter, who was Robinson’s friend and mentor. This small, intimate scene conveys the artist’s personal reaction to and interpretation of nature.

These small but sublime works were meant to be lived with, seen at close quarters, and enjoyed on a daily basis. For example, at Clayton, Henry Clay Frick’s taste encompassed and progressed from pictures by regional western Pennsylvania artists, to works of the Barbizon school; later he purchased paintings by American Impressionists. The painting collection on view at Clayton reflects a wonderful contrast, as well as synergy, between trends in American and European painting. Between 1882 when Frick purchased Pennsylvania artist George Hetzel’s Woodland Stream and 1908 when he purchased June Idyll by Chylde Hassam, Frick’s taste parallels larger trends in collecting.

The Frick Art Museum provides a warm and personal venue for these works, which were meant to be displayed in domestic spaces. This intimacy reflects the belief of Helen Clay Frick, the museum’s founder, that works of art are best displayed in surroundings that evoke a comfortable and well-appointed home. The viewer will be able to take their own journey through the development of American landscape painting from the Hudson River School artists to the American Impressionists and forerunners of modernism, such as George Inness. While the paintings and drawings in this exhibition are small, their detail and skill reward close inspection.

The exhibition opened yesterday and continues until 5th September 2010.   There are a number of talks and events in connection with the exhibition.  The website has details for visitors.

Small but Sublime: Intimate 19th-Century American Landscapes was organized by the Newark Museum and is drawn from its permanent collection. The American Art collection at the Newark Museum surveys four centuries and includes over 12,000 paintings, sculptures, works on paper and multimedia art. The exhibition has received funding for conservation support from the Henry Luce Foundation and from the Newark Museum Volunteer Organization and from Barbara and Bill Weldon.

Framing the West

Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O'Sullivan is an exhibition which opened yesterday at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC.

Timothy H. O'Sullivan (1840–1882) was a photographer for two of the most ambitious geographical surveys of the nineteenth century. He traversed the mountain and desert regions of the western United States under the command of Clarence King and Lt. George M. Wheeler for six seasons between 1867 and 1874. O'Sullivan developed a forthright and rigorous style in response to the landscapes of the American West, and returned to Washington, D.C. with hundreds of photographs that revealed an artist whose reach far surpassed the demands of practical documentation. He created a body of work that was without precedent in its visual and emotional complexity, while simultaneously meeting the needs of scientific investigation and western expansion.

This is O'Sullivan's biography on the Smithsonian website. He became an official civil war photographer at the age of 21. Subsequently he joined Clarence King's geological survey of the fortieth parallel—the first federal expedition in the West after the Civil War.

Interestingly King was very interested in the arts and I speculate that it well be this influence which helped O'Sullivan create photographs which were artistic as well as scientifically useful.

Ancient Ruins in the Cañon de Chelle, N.M.
(No. 11, Geographical Explorations and Surveys West of the 100th Meridian) 1873
Timothy H. O'Sullivan(1840- 1882 )
albumen print on paper mounted on paperboardimage and sheet: 10 3/4 x 7 7/8 in. (27.3 x 20.0 cm.)
Smithsonian American Art Museum

I'm very much minded to let this blog cover landscape photography as well as drawing and painting - in part to highlight what photography does well - as well as what drawing and painting do well.