The Luminous Point: Corot

Among the many charms of Camille Corot's (French, 1796-1875) work is the way tone (what we would call dark-light value) balances so harmoniously (even across its wide range of dark to light). At the same time, his colors, like his soft, painterly touch, remain mild and delicate. I love how he combines feathery edges with a few big lights, a few very dark darks, and an infinity of mid-tones.

Recently I stumbled on the following (collected in Painters on Painting, one of my new favorite books):

The Luminous Point

"In a painting there is always a luminous point; but this point must be unique. You may place it where you wish; in a cloud, in the reflection of the water, on in a bonnet. However, there must only be a single tone of this value."

This sent me back to the paintings and, sure enough, I saw it. In this painting, it's the bending man's shirt:

Here, I think it's the light reflected off the woman's hair ribbons (although this is not the brightest, highest-key value, which is probably the woman's white sleeve, the "point" of light on the ribbons glows up against the darker tones he places around it, in this case the young woman's hair):

I thought about titling this post "Corot's Secret." The tabloid headline style would be in keeping with my last post on the man, Corot's Palette Revealed (also posted in spring, not incidentally).

But if Corot had a "secret" it was simply this: he knew and painted from himself. He was so intimately in touch with his own genuine love of nature, that it was said that when he posed his models he instinctively "made them equal, but not superior to, the trees and water he loved so well, an equation of man and nature." (Joseph C. Sloane)

In the painting below, though it's hard to see, there's a spot in the yellow clouds near the overhanging branch in the middle of the picture that is slightly brighter than the surrounding tones:

And in this next one, the "luminous point" is the little rectangular patch of light nestled in the grass in front of the cow:

Detail of above painting showing "the luminous point" .

Knowing himself also helped Corot know what "effect" he was going for when he painted. Like Cezanne, he covered his whole canvas as soon as possible and worked on all parts of the painting at once, "improving it very gently until I find that the effect is complete."

If there's any other "secret" to how he worked, it's that he saw and painted primarily in values rather than in colors. "That which I look for while I paint is the form, the harmony, the value of the tones," he wrote. "Color comes afterwards for me because above all I like the harmony in the tones."

All of this helps to lend Corot's paintings their marvelous unity of effect - what many have called their "poetry" - the way, wordlessly and all at once, they convey such feeling.

Maria A'Becket Branches Out in Florida

Monarch of the Glen by Maria A'Becket

A large painting by 19th century Maine painter Maria A'Becket has been discovered rolled up with 125-year-old blueprints, naturalist drawings, and other documents stowed in a corner of the boiler-room of a Gilded Age hotel in St. Augustine, Florida. 

As readers of this blog may be aware, I've been researching and writing about this once-forgotten painter extensively - I've written about her here as well. The Flagler Museum in Florida has posted an article by a local newspaper about the find. 

At approx. 24" x 45," the A'Becket painting, titled "Monarch of the Glen," which is on display at the Flagler Museum, is an important one if only for its size; Maria painted en plain air quite a bit, and she seems to have favored smaller-format artist board. It's a prime example of A'Becket's distinctive Americanized Barbizon-Impressionist landscape style. 

The Ponce de Leon under construction in St. Augustine

A'Becket was one of a select group of leading landscapists of the day, including Martin Johnson Heade, who were given studios in the Ponce de Leon hotel during the 1890s. On Friday evenings guests of the Gilded Age hotel would wander among the studios, where A'Becket is said to have been the center of the conversation.

About her own Diaz-inspired landscapes she wrote:

“There is a peculiar sadness about many of her pictures, where noble, old trees bear the marks of long, hard struggles with the elements; twisted and wind tossed, rugged, gnarled, burying their great muscular roots in the earth or clinging to the rocks. These are what she best likes to paint.”

As it happens, I'm in Orlando this week, so if I can, perhaps I'll slip away for a tryst with Maria.

Maria J.C. a'Becket - Rediscovering an American Original

A wild, expressionistic seascape by 19th century Maine landscapist Maria a'Becket. In the 1890s, very few American artists (and even fewer "women painters") dared to wield such thick, gestural chunks of paint. 

On a breezy spring day in 2006, I was poking around among contemporary and 19th century landscape paintings at the Banks Gallery in Portsmouth, NH, when the above painting slapped me to attention.

Had to be contemporary, at least mid 20th century, with abstract-expressionist paint-handling like that, right? Stunned, I learned that not only was the painting created by a forgotten 19th century artist, but that the artist was a woman, someone born in Maine who called herself Maria J. C. a'Becket, a nom de plume absent from the recent scholarship on the history of women in the arts, and of course missing from standard art history textbooks, even those mentioning female contemporaries like Gertrude Fiske, Cecilia Beaux, or Maria Cassatt.

It turns out that, despite an apparently prolific output, a bit more than two dozen of a'Becket's paintings are accounted for. One is in the possession of the Portland Museum of Art, and two are held by the Maine Historical Society. Other than a few more in storage at a number of small museums, the rest reside in private collections, periodically popping up to change hands at auction. How could this be?

A river landscape with overhanging trees by Maria J. C. a'Becket, c. 1890

My encounter with the mystery of Maria a'Becket began a semi-obsessed four-year investigation to recover the life and work of an unjustly forgotten 19th century painter. The trail led from Portland and Bar Harbor, Maine to Boston, New York, and St. Augustine, Florida, where I dug through yellowed newspaper articles and exhibition catalogues, microfilmed letters, diaries, and periodicals, searched the correspondence of millionaire art collectors, and combed out-of-print memoirs, histories, and long-defunct art magazines. The existence, as I learned more, of a celebrated and spirited, female avant-garde artist contradicted a lot of what I'd been taught about the official "story" of American art history!

Every few months I'd uncover another long-buried reference to “Maria J.C. a’ Becket,” and it was often something larger than life: wild flights at the easel with a visionary’s fervor outside during a thunderstorm, shooting off hunting rifles or starting an artist's colony in the Wild West, sketching among moonlit pines in Florida or in fishing villages in Normandy and meeting millionaires in mountain crags in North Carolina, obtaining a private audience with the Pope in Rome, having solo shows in Boston and on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, holding forth with Vanderbilt and other financial barons, navigating rapids in a birchbark canoe. How could such an interesting, successful artist have completely vanished from history? I put together what pieces of the puzzle I could find in an article published in the current issue of the scholarly journal Maine History. At least a semblance of her remarkable life and work are back on record!

C. 1879, signed "M. Becket"

So who was Maria a'Becket?
A'Becket was the daughter of a Portland drug store owner and amateur landscapist Charles E. Beckett who died as a result of a fire that devastated the city in 1866. She was born Maria Graves Beckett in Portland, Maine, on July 7, 1839. A'Becket established a highly successful professional career painting landscapes in a Barbizon-Impressionist variant all her own. She died of heart disease in New York on September 7, 1904. Lacking any heirs or living relatives to champion her memory, her name dropped out of currency (but she was once so well-known that the New York Times included her in a special New Year’s Day feature on “Famous Women Whose Careers Ended in 1904”).

It seems she blazed her own trail at a time when women who wanted to be artists faced a major uphill climb. From Who Was Who in American Art, I learned early on that A'Becket had studied with heavyweights Homer Dodge Martin, William Morris Hunt, and in France with pre-Impressionist innovator Charles Daubigny. From biographical clips in a Florida newspaper, I learned that during the 1880s she shared a small cabin in rural Virginia with a younger female athlete-turned-artist named Bertha Von Hillern, whom she'd met in Hunt's classes in Boston. The two lived and painted in this rural "American Barbizon" setting for nearly a decade, until a'Becket took a studio in the famous Tenth Street studio building in New York.

Landscape by Maria a'Becket in the collection of Maine's Portland Museum of Art.

The caliber of her growing exhibition opportunities and the positive news articles I was finding argued that by then she'd established herself as a successful landscape artist with a popular, distinctive style. Society writers noted her brilliant conversation, unusual independence, and quirky and original painting style. A new digitization that appeared on Google Books revealed that the avant-garde American art critic Sadikichi Hartmann had recognized A'Becket as “a peculiar phenomenon in our art” with a “frail build” and “the vigorous touch of a man." Hartmann wrote that she had “rendered some of the wildest and grandest scenes of the ocean," and described her thus:

"in moods of religious ecstasy, with so intense an energy as to raise blisters at her finger‑tips, [she] paints impressionistic sketches which would have gained her a reputation in Europe long ago.  After having associated with men like Homer Martin, W.M. Hunt, and Daubigny, she invented a pallet‑knife style of her own, in which she slaps on pure colours in a wild improvisatore fashion....She seldom exhibits, but various art lovers and critics have been attracted by her work." (A History of American Art, vol. 1, Boston, L.C. Page & Co., 1909, p. 105). 

A call to the Flagler Art Museum in St. Augustine, Florida, which holds one of her paintings in its collection, revealed that during the 1890s, A'Becket became a sought-after artist-in-residence at St. Augustine's Flagler Hotel (alongside Martin Johnson Heade) and summered in high-society resort spots in Bar Harbor and Newport, RI. Ship manifests prove that she revisited Europe. Her work is listed in exhibit catalogs for most of the major venues for professional American painters of the time, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the American Art Union, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the National Academy of Design. New York Times articles tracked her appearances in exhibitions that also included George Inness, Ralph Albert Blakelock, Homer Dodge Martin, Frederick William, Dwight Tryon, Alexander Wyant, Francis W. Kost, Abbot Thayer, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and John Francis Murphy at venues like the woman‑ and Tonalist‑friendly Lotos Club of New York.
 
It took me a while to pin down, but I think her mature work absorbs and personalizes the Barbizon style, infusing it with a rapid, sketch-like line, an exuberant individual sense of color, and vigorous paint-handling inspired by French Impressionism.  

A colorful marsh sunset by Maria a'Becket

A'Becket’s “shimmery” semi‑abstract marine works in particular prefigure abstract expressionism in their decentralized “all‑over” broken‑color composition, their engagement with the active gesture, and their foregrounding of the medium itself through unblended color and surface impasto.

A seascape by a'Becket employing impasto and broken color to achieve a scintillating, jewel-like surface. Few painters of the time so successfully set the surface of their works in motion.

But what now seems most “peculiar” in considering Beckett’s achievement is not so much her work but how early she created it, how successful she became, and against what odds. During the 1860s, '70s and '80s, few women ventured outside of the accepted genres and mainstream styles of the day. 

Gloucester marine by a'Becket

She was an original. Seeking out the most radical masters, living three‑quarters of the year for nearly a decade in nature, she rejected her peers’ prevalent aesthetic theories and artistic trends, and became one of the first American painters to wholeheartedly adopt the entire raft of what were then quite radical techniques associated with the European avant‑garde And for all this she was rewarded with fame during her lifetime and, unfortunately, obscurity after her death.  


Two great books that have done much to reconstruct the lives and careers of other nineteenth-century women who were artists are Kirstin Swinth's Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870-1930 (University of North Carolina Press, 2001) and Erica Hirschler's A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston 1870-1940 (MFA Publications, August 15, 2001).

Orpheus: The Artist as Poet

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld, 1861

At first glance, Corot's light-infused Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld (1861) immortalizes the joyful emergence of Orpheus and Eurydice from the Underworld and their return to the breezy trees and light of living nature, which at this moment has never seemed so beautiful and precious. But wait - according to the Orpheus myth, they never made it back!

And sure enough, when we look again, we see the figures emerging from the mist in the background, their shadowy forms reflected in the quiet pool in the painting's mid-ground. These are surely shades, spirits of the dead. Orpheus and Eurydice, then, are still in Hades, just beginning their long (and doomed) journey back toward the land of the living, a journey that will end in ruin - though you'd never know it looking at Corot's lush, illuminated foliage, water, and hills.

Artists and poets have long used the Greek myth of Orpheus as a metaphor for aspects of the artist's life and creative processes.

In the classical myth as the Roman poet Ovid told it, Orpheus, the archetypal singer/poet, descended into the Underworld to rescue his bride, Eurydice, whom the Lord of the Underworld, Hades, had snatched away from the land of the living on their wedding day. Hermes told Orpheus he could go down to get her back but that he mustn't turn around to look at her until they were all the way out.

George Frederic Watts, Orpheus and Eurydice, c. 1870

Unfortunately, Orpheus turns to make sure she's still behind him, only to see her already insubstantial shade receding forever into the darkness below. Having now lost Eurydice twice, Orpheus concedes in despair that death has won. George Frederic Watts painted several different versions, both horizontal and vertical, of the relatively melodramatic moment when Orpheus understands his fate and desperately clings to the drooping, pallid corpse of his bride.

George Frederic Watts, Orpheus and Eurydice, c. 1873

Around the same time, the world's last great sculptor (ahem) Auguste Rodin, sculpted Orpheus and Eurydice half-emerging from the raw stone of his chunk of marble. The two figures seem at once to swoon with desire, lassitude, and inertia, as the cthonic forces of Hades impede their full ascent into airy daylight.

Auguste Rodin, Orpheus and Eurydice, 1877-98

Although here, because of the myth's outcome, it seems especially appropriate, Rodin often left ragged stone around his figures. It's part of the Modern, expressive character of his art, and it causes the figures to emerge from the stone (rather than being "carved from" it). It's also a metaphor for the Michaelangeloesque idea of the artist as creator-god who, through supreme spiritual (and physical!) effort, wrests beauty from primal chaos.

And the Orpheus myth echoes the same idea: The poet's song subdues nature. "Such was the grove of trees the poet gathered round him, and he sat in the midst of a crowd, of animals and birds," Ovid says. And when he mourns, so does the world itself. Ovid again: "the poet of Thrace, with [mournful] songs like these, drew to himself the trees, the souls of wild beasts, and the very stones that followed him."

So Orpheus spends the rest of his grief-stricken days singing about Eurydice and her loss, until a group of women intoxicated by their ecstatic worship of Dionysus come upon him and tear him apart in their frenzy. The last time we see him in in Ovid, some nymphs have discovered his decapitated head floating down their river, still singing in the melancholy tones that made him famous.

John William Waterhouse, Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus, 1900

Our favorite French Symbolists, Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau, both envisioned Orpheus's head placed upon the symbol of his musical power - his lyre.

Gustave Moreau, Thracian Girl Carrying the Head of Orpheus on a Lyre, 1865

For Redon, the singer's disembodied head may serve as a symbolic embodiment of the painter himself. If so, in Redon's pastel, the figure emerges from a timeless, semi-abstract setting that we can see as both matter and spirit at once: clouds, mountain, river, flowers, stars, and mysterious light. Orpheus has become a stand-in for the otherworldly, mystical nature of the act of artistic creation.

Odilon Redon, Orpheus, c. 1903

With this in mind, recall Corot: his Orpheus lives at the moment when he still believes he will triumphantly lead the girl into broad daylight. Head intact, he lifts his lyre in victory, albeit premature. His body language says, "Onward and upward!" It's significant that, unlike the front-and-center characters in Watts, Redon, and Moreau, Corot's Orpheus and Eurydice are relatively small figures integrated into the overall landscape that makes up the true subject of the picture. Corot's depiction of the mythic symbol of art leads inexorably to a gorgeous landscape. After all, for Corot painting landscapes and happiness were one and the same.

I like to read Corot's version of the myth, devoid of any hint of a dark side, as a declaration of his creed: the modern artist must reinvent art as a celebration of this life, of the world as it appeals to our senses, seeking out the beautiful moments, however brief, that life interposes between the inevitable tragedies and disasters.

Constable: Head in the Clouds

Here is an oil sketch (painted as a study, thus not intended as a finished work) by the 18th/19th century English landscapist John Constable. It’s not a masterpiece of Western art, but it’s a lovely thing, and it’s a chance for us to consider what painting is all about in the first place.

Our last painter, Corot (“ka-ROH”), was among a group of artists who were the first to regularly go outside and pitch their easels in front of nature. Like Constable, they used the oil sketches they made outdoors to paint larger works in the studio, and it wasn’t until the impressionists who followed them a little later in the nineteenth century (just when an abundance of synthetic pre-mixed colors was becoming available in portable tubes) that oil paintings executed on the spot were valued and exhibited as finished paintings in their own right.

The earlier Old Master painters usually minimized their personal presence in the work by erasing their brushstrokes and finishing their paintings with a seamless, sometimes enamel-like surface. For these traditional landscape artists, it was important to be more classical and fanciful than realistic. They often incorporated highly structured compositions, clearly defined details, and “grand” and elevating subject matter referring to stories from Greek and Roman mythology or the Bible.

All that changed with the Barbizon painters and the Impressionists who followed them. Impressionists like Monet, Renoir, and Sisely applied to the festive, modern life of Paris Barbizon’s spontaneity and fidelity to nature, its rapid, rough-and-ready brushstrokes, and its embrace of "everyday” subject matter. But some definite first steps in this direction were taken by our Englishman.

At the same time that Corot was making oil sketches en plein air (in the outdoors) in the French Barbizon countryside, English painter John Constable (1776-1837) was doing the same thing in England, but it wasn’t only the momentary effects of light on water or wind in the trees he was after (though he loved everything rural, from weathered brickwork to old rotten posts). What really mattered to Constable was the clouds.

Constable so loved the clouds that he executed dozens (if not hundreds?) of these meticulously observed and accurately rendered cloud studies. The finished landscapes his clouds adorned forever changed the course of art, but because the sketches are so fresh, so full of varied light, texture, and motion, not to mention so freely painted, they hold for us moderns a special charm. Constable devoured the work of pioneering meteorologist Luke Howard, the first to classify the various types of clouds, and his cloud paintings today would sell for tens (and possibly hundreds) of thousands of dollars. Per the usual cliches, Constable's parents opposed his career choice, the public didn't buy his pictures, and the artist remained a pauper all his life, however professedly happily so (he turned down a chance to promote his work in France saying he’d rather remain “a poor man [in England] than a rich man abroad”).

But hey, who wouldn’t be happy spending a life painting clouds!?

Paintings, then, are supposed to “ennoble our sensibilities” (Old Master), quicken our sense of the true (Barbizon), ground us in the beauty of the simple (Constable), awaken us to the life and color of the ordinary (Impressionism) …. So what’s the purpose of painting? What a silly question!

We'll surely revisit Constable's sketches and his famous finished paintings again. There's a great Web exhibit on the Australian National Gallery's Website, which is where I found the images and some of the information for this post.

Oh, and did you know there is an official "Cloud Appreciation Society" that you can join? Check out their fun (if you read it carefully) website for some really awesome images.