Corot's palette revealed! & notes on the ethereal colors of spring

I’ve written before (and here too) about the shimmery grays in Corot’s landscapes, which I find so utterly charming and bewitching. His gauzy, atmospheric veils shimmer with pearlescent grays composed of carefully toned neutral blues, ochres, greens, and violets ... his foliage trails into sky-brightness like forgotten music …  

But it’s only recently that I came across a write-up by the National Gallery summarizing the results of an analysis of Corot’s pigments during what they term his most representative period (the 1860s and 1870s). 

It’s his most muted, pearlescent period as well, and the report is both revealing and surprising. 

From the site:

The ground is composed of lead white, over which a brown translucent undercolour has been painted which can be seen through the top paint^.. Corot has used cobalt blue in the sky and in the greyish mauve of the middle distance. The mid-green foreground is created from blue and yellow, made up of a transparent yellow (possibly chrome) and a fine blue (possibly Prussian blue) mixture with white, red and black in small amounts (my emphasis).

Much has been written, from Robaut onwards, on how Corot preferred to mix his greens, rather than use ready-made ones but in actual fact he used both, as is evidenced by other paintings in the collection. The very bright orange streaks in the boat and on the woman’s cap have been identified as cadmium orange, a pigment which came into use in the latter half of the 19th century. It has also been identified in Corot’s Les Evaux, near Château Thierry, dated by Robaut to 1855 to 1865 (R1292, private collection).

Cadmiums? Corot? But it’s the admixture of white, red, and (shock! horror!) black to his green mixture that sent off the “ah-ha” moment for me. Between the complementary red and the black, that green is well on its way to a neutral hue, and the white just levels the value as well. 

Creating a similar mauve mixture for the background and taking these as the painting’s predominant tones, one can really control the painting's overall color and value, modulating these with just the slightest variations in the various proportions of light and dark paint.

I found this information while preparing to paint the old apple orchard across the street here in Hollis, New Hampshire. I wanted to do justice to the ethereal, tentative quality of the colors that emerge at the outset of these northern springs, so I decided to experiment a little with my own (cheerier and somewhat more saturated) version of Corot’s methods. 

Hollis Orchard, Early Spring 10 x 20

I completed the sketch for this painting on location in the orchard, staying until I thought I had most of the values right. I used burnt sienna thinned with mineral spirits. Then I took the canvas inside and mixed up a mess of murky, Corot-esque green-blue-gray using Prussian blue, gold ochre, alizarin crimson, ivory black, and Titanium white. It felt great breaking the rule against mixing colors with more than three hues, not to mention using the black! I recommend everybody try it asap.

I’ve generally mixed my own greens, detouring to try out tubes of sap green, permanent green, viridian (a staple anyway, for other reasons), terre vert (does anybody use this? If so, what for?), and olive green (the juicy one ground with walnut oil- can’t think of the brand). What are others doing?

Check out the National Gallery page on The Leaning Tree Trunk if you're as interested in Corot as I am - you can zoom in very close to the painting to check out Corot's every stroke. It was the first time I'd understood how he painted his tree branches and foliage, too (in darks first, then laying in sky over that, and then extending the branches out into the air using - yes, neutral gray, of course, in numerous little dabs of shimmering paint).

What Is "Pure Painting?"

George Nick, Indian Memories

Part of what draws anyone to a fascination with painting is how artists can imbue their work with a powerful, expressive reality quite apart from the representation of subject matter. I'd like to think the essence of “pure painting” is the exuberant exploration of color and form.

Forget about how realistically someone can paint; pure painting involves giving form to an inner life and communicating emotion directly, as in music, with varying degrees - or without any - reference to an intermediary subject. To art lovers, paintings are magnifcent things, primarily, before they are representations of things. Who cares, at first, which objects occupy the amazingly complex yet harmonious space of George Nick's Indian Memories? The painting announces its own beautiful, stunning existence before we even begin to parse its content!

(Esoterica: While this has always been an aspect of painting,only the 20th century modernism of Kandinsky and the Fauvists, Futurists, Orphists, and others made it possible to understand this aspect of the past. Look closely at the details in Rubens, Rembrandt, Velasquez, or Vermeer and you'll be amazed at how abstract and impressionistic the old masters could be. The paintings didn't change, but thanks to modernism and Impressionism, our actual perception has - think art doesn't change the world? Think again. It changes what humanity can see and understand).

According to independent curator Karin Wilkin, “On a visit to Venice, exasperated by the endless allegorical pictures and scenes from Gerusalemma Liberata and Orlando Furioso and “all that rubbish," Edouard Manet is supposed to have told an artist friend that “a painter can say all he wants to with fruit or flowers or even clouds.” That's perhaps the first verbal definition of "pure painting" on record.

However, the first to create purely abstract paintings, Russian modernist Wassily Kandinsky, coined the term. Pure painting, he said, is “ … a mingling of color and form each with its separate existence, but each blended into a common life which is called a picture by the force of inner necessity.” Kandinsky theorized about the psychological effects of color tones and their relationships and the expressive qualities of organic and geometric forms.

Improvisation 28, Wassily Kandinsky

But does it really matter how abstract the work is? You can see a painter's exuberance in the properties of color, abstract design, and the expressive qualities of paint in all kinds of paintings. Take the early 20th century landscapes of Aldro Hibbard - here's his 1943 Rushing Stream as a case in point:

Rushing Stream, Aldro Hibbard

Here's a closeup showing just how infectiously taken with the paint itself he is (and this is a huge part of what people love about Hibbard).

Rushing Stream, Aldro Hibbard (detail)

Yet, below is a far less impressionistic painting that I'd argue also has these qualities of "pure painting." The artist is clearly just in love with light and form and using paint to express his joy, which has led him to pursue a vision of correspondence between the scattered puffs of flowers on the ground and the exploding puffs of clouds in the sky above. The result is not primarily an "accurate" landscape - this is any location, and we don't care where - the point is the "pure" expression of joy in light, form, and color.

Field of Daisies, William Henry Holmes

This kind of joy and exuberance needs no apology. At any rate, I've been seeing "pure painting" all over the place, ever since reading John Updike's tribute to the work of plein-air painter George Nick, In Praise of George Nick.

Updike feels the need to buoy his critique with a moral subtext, extrapolated from a remark by Rilke, concerning the “good conscience” and “simple truthfulness” of color in Cezanne. Perhaps it's the word “pure” that misleads him into disparaging, on one hand mural paining, on the other photo-realism, with "theatricality" caught in the middle (Caravaggio anyone?) Still, I like his insight that, for some paintings (including "pure paintings"), “any subject will do" because they're built on “a faith that a painting does not have to be forced upon reality, through some trick or exaggeration or other, but can be drawn forth by a simple attentiveness, a patient scanning of what lies beyond the edge of the canvas.”

Schooner Bay, Desert Isle, George Nick

The Phenomenology of Twilight

A twilight landscape by 19th century Tonalist Alexander Wyant

Nebulous and uncharted, twilight is the interposition of the veil, a fluid borderland between light and darkness.

Twilight bears the same relation to daylight as poetry to prose. Its visual mode is indeterminacy, the elusive: objects softened to indistinct outlines, things half on their way to becoming thoughts.

Like all cosmic transitions, its realm is that of liminal experience, partaking of the timeless suspension between waking and sleep, the realm of daydream, reverie, and the lucid dreamer.

George Inness, Home of the Heron, 1890

Psychologically, the analogy is to the dissolution of concrete knowledge into emotion, but also speculation, uncertainty, intuition, the life of the unconscious. Twilight's ground isn't the "enlightenment" of rational, logical argument but the associative cognition of dreams.

I think that in historical Tonalism (American landscape painting from c. 1880 to c. 1920s) the twilight mood often corresponds (as in much of Innes's work) to a spiritual transformation of the visual world.

An Inness dusk, c. 1885

Certainly the attraction of these paintings has something to do with individuals' experience of these moods. The natural world found in Tonalist paintings exists within a settled and "cleared," fully "civilized" America such as we ourselves inhabit.

That is to say, the Tonalist twilight is a "mood" of the natural that remains available to us as direct experience-in-the-world, in contrast to the vanished views of unspoiled, majestic or pastoral wildernesses of the pre-Tonalist, pre-Inness, 19th century Hudson River School (c. 1830-1865).

Personally, I've spent uncounted hours since my teenage years gazing at the looming shadows of twilit trees and branches. I respond to these scenes on some kind of unconscious, symbolic/arhcetypal level charged with thought and emotion yet inaccessible to analysis.

Spring Dusk, Hollis, NH, 8 x 10, 2011

Even rural environments offer handholds for a similar psychological/emotional response. It isn't just vertical elements like buildings or trees, either, as proved out in contemporary painter Susan Holcomb's urban-cosmic "Nightscapes."

Astrum by Susan Holcomb

Among Trees: Tonalist Backlighting

George Inness, Early Autumn, Montclair, 1891

In "pure" landscapes - those with minimal, or no human figures - trees as often as not become the principal actors, or "characters," of the picture.

No wonder - they do resemble us in odd ways; their rooted trunks and outstretched, straining branches suggest the human condition as well as any other "objective correlative" (in early American landscapist Washington Allston's phrase).

They aspire to light, yet they're wholly of earth.

Of course they're bigger than we are, invariably healthier, and if left to themselves, generally outlive us. Among old trees one may often sense something essential about the nature of being human. Surely, when we look at them, they're looking back at us.

From the painter's perspective, whether after midnight or in broad daylight, most of the trees we see are at least partially silhouetted by light coming from behind them. Hence, a variable balance of shadow and highlight is required to render them in proper visual harmony in keeping with a definite space and a particular time of day.

The earliest landscape painters clearly appreciated this. Even in the idealized landscapes of 17th century French painters Claude (Lorraine) and Poussin, the trees are often dramatically back-lit, not without the the effect of emphasizing evening's effusive, honeyed glow.

Claude Lorraine, Landscape with Merchants, c. 1650

In the 18th and 19th centuries, Romantic landscapists like American Frederick Church and German Casper David Friedrich pushed this idea to extremes for emotive effect. Truth be told, we're still under their spell. As one of my art history students last week remarked, Friedrich's Abbey in an Oak Forest looks as though it was painted last year.

Casper David Friedrich, Abbey in an Oak Forest, 1810

Abbey in an Oak Forest

In painterly terms, Friedrich's Abbey in an Oak Forest is a tonal study of twilight, and therefore, because this is early 1800s Romanticism par excellence, a visual meditation on mortality and time. It's a ruined abbey (read: Christianity), at sundown, during the waning of the year, with a funeral procession (barely visible in the foreground churchyard) evoking an overall feeling of mortality and evanescence.

But whether or not we look closely enough to appreciate the symbology, why does this painting "just work?"

In the words of Hermann Beenken, "Instead of many tones, he (Friedrich) sought the one; and so, in his landscape, he subordinated the composite chord into one single basic note." (1938)

Tonalist painters of the late 19th century heard the same single tone and tone-cluster music, and they incorporated the "one single basic note" into their renderings of settled, evening-darkened North American nature.

Charles Warren Eaton

It's subjective, but for me these paintings evoke a sense of being alive in time, of appreciating our predicament, and yet of wanting to stand tall against "the dying of the light."

Charles Warren Eaton

What is it about these shadowy images? Contemporary painter Dennis Sheehan keys into this feeling.

And here's another contemporary take on the same,. Note the kinship to Eaton - none of this is the province of one person. It's an ongoing project - artists mapping the periphery of subjective life.

Contemporary Landscape with tonal Eaton overtones. 

This is some of what drives my own desire to add my voice, such as it is, to the fray.

Christopher Volpe, Evening Hush, 12 x 16, oil on canvas, 2010

GoldFiske

Gertrude Horsford Fiske. Nude. 1922. Oil on canvas, 40 1/4 x 50 1/4 inches.

I came across a reproduction of this Gertrude Fiske painting while flipping through a slick sales catalogue that arrived in the mail today from Vose Galleries in Boston. The painting struck me first as startling, then intriguing, and finally, as quite possibly a great and enduring work of art.

Maybe I lead a very interior life, but "Nude" seems more powerful than anything I've seen by milquetoast figural Impressionist Mary Cassatt, the only other female American artist anyone can name (okay, except for Georgia O'Keefe, but she didn't paint the figure). Notwithstanding those who saw Fiske's painting exhibited in the 1920s or at Vose in 1987 (after its deaccession by the Carnegie Institute in Philadelphia), the painting remains in my opinion an unacknowledged masterpiece of American art.

The artist is Gertrude H. Fiske (1879-1961), a Bostonian who studied at the Boston Museum School during the first decade of the 20th century, when the first American women began receiving the kind of artistic training available to men for hundreds of years. She succeeded brilliantly as a portraitist and a serious artist during the 1920s and '30s before dropping off the art history map in the excitement over modernism, abstract expressionism, et al. She's never had a museum retrospective nor a book written about her or a catalogue raisonnee, and therefore her greatest works have rarely been seen.

It was the realistic, un-idealized treatment of the female body and the strangely vague yet alert expression on the face of the woman in Fiske's painting that stopped me. But it was the way the mirror reveals her true (and decidedly "darker," even despairing) self that intrigued me. Is this painting a nude or a deconstruction of the conventions of the nude? Unlike the hundreds of other artists who have painted women with mirrors, Fiske uses the mirror (traditionally a symbol of vanity in Western painting) not to signify obsession with the exterior but, on the contrary, to explore her figure's interiority. The reflection is a doppelganger, a darker double that harbors a deeper truth about the protagonist. The woman occupies an ambiguous relationship to it; it's as though she's drawn toward it yet unable or unwilling either to view it or to look away.

A New York Times reviewer perhaps sensed something of this when he saw it at the National Academy in 1922. The critic noted that "the contrast between the reflections in the mirror and the actual object reflected is handled with true painter's magic ....," but he failed to read the psychological and socio-critical overtones. In praising the "noble structure of the design," the reviewer made me realize that the mirror is not only enormous but that it takes up more than half of the composition, and that its curved top and reflected windows evoke the dignity and "nobility" associated with the Greco-Roman architectural settings of French neoclassical painting. By the same token, the eternal complexities and intrigue of mirrors becomes what the painting is "about."

An Unacknowledged Master

I assert that Fiske's serious studio work probed the psychological and social dimensions of female life with a power and depth that very few artists, male or female, had ever achieved. Her only rivals are Picasso during his blue period, Eduard Manet (absinthe drinker, Bar at Folie Bergeres) and John Singer Sargent, whose Daughters of Edward Boite, a veritable Ph.D thesis on prepubescent female psychology, is enough to admit him into the circle.

Clearly, Fiske is more than a "mere" Boston School painter (the metier of which seems to have been largely art for art's sake, in the form of exquisite impressionistic paintings of elegant haute-couteur women). Consider these two paintings of the same subject - women with bowls of goldfish - one by Fiske and one by a far more famous Boston School painter, Fiske's contemporary, Childe Hassam.

Gertrude Fiske. Goldfish.

Childe Hassam. Bowl of Goldfish. 1912.

Immediate observation: totally different moods. Hassam's impressionistic treatment is a technical tour-de-force of the painting of light, for which the subject is little more than a pretext. The woman could be standing next to a vase of daffodils and Hassam would have achieved the same effect. Not true of Fiske's treatment in the least.

Fiske's painting, also a masterful treatment of light, is a somber meditation on the place of women in society. While Hassam's goldfish bowl contains an apparently random number of fish, in Fiske there is one for each woman, stressing the parallel relationship between them. Whereas Hassam has turned his figure's face outward, toward the outdoors, lending it the warm glow of reflected light, Fiske turns her figures' faces down and, by implication, inward, draping them in a veil of shadow as they brood upon the fish. Note how she subtly distorts the expression on the elongated face of the woman in white, while the other she clearly fixes in a darkened pout. The latter's hands rest upward in an expression of listlessness akin to despair. Behind the figures, Fiske has added strict vertical slats of light and shadow that suggest the bars of a cage. Artists had painted women with goldfish in many ways, but incredibly, no one had ever thought of expressing Fiske's plain and devastating message.

Martin Johnson Heade & The Long View

Martin Johnson Heade, Sailing By Moonlight, c. 1860

Virtually unknown during his lifetime, Martin Johnson Heade is now recognized as one of the more innovative American landscape painters of the nineteenth century.

Martin Johnson Heade, Seascape, c. 1858

He's all about eerie color, contrast and mood. There's plenty that's unusual about Heade: he excelled both at emotive panoramic landscapes and precise renditions of exotic flora, despite being self-taught except for what he learned from primitive painter Ed Hicks.

Martin Johnson Heade, Blue Morpho Butterfly, 1864-5

As exotic as his subject matter could get, Heade painted hundreds of views of salt marshes, many in Newburyport, Massachusetts, which is not far from where I live.

Martin Johnson Heade, Salt Marsh, Newburyport, Mass. c. 1865

This is Lake George, a subject treated by dozens of artists, but Heade chose a little-known spot from which to paint it, and the tonal colors he used would be more at home in a desert.

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has this landscape on display in their new American wing:

Martin Johnson Heade, April Showers, 1868

They point out that it's really a study of the storm clouds moving in the background. "Heade's real subject here is the shifting character of light in the rain," reads the MFA placard. "The air is moist and heavy, and Heade indicates the rain that falls in spots over the hills with delicate, shadowy plumes that look almost like smoke." Here's a closer look at the clouds:

Detail: Martin Johnson Heade, April Showers, 1868

And here's the foreground and middlegrounds - just look at all that detail.

Detail: Martin Johnson Heade, April Showers, 1868

The delicate colors and the light and shadows in this thing are what blow me away. What I guess I love about Heade is how he gives a ton of compositional space to the sky and still goes crazy precise with the details of things on the ground - even when the ground is nearly a flat plain - sort of mixing both ends of his talent's spectrum, I guess.

I'm trying an adaptation of that style myself in a series of landscapes I'm working on. Usually I'm content with the suggestion of detail in the areas that aren't the main focus, but I'm suddenly really interested in trying to paint detail for its own sake. I like the idea of a "big sky" composition that's sort of a fake-out- in that, despite occupying two-thirds of the canvas, in terms of detail the sky's not the main attraction, the ground is.

Montauk- painting in progress

A Chance Meeting

Browsing through some upscale gallery websites recently, I started feeling like someone at a gourmet restaurant receiving course after course of delicious rarities. Inundated with a surfeit of gorgeous imagery, I was wondering how one proceeds as an artist beyond simply adding to the already immense smorgasbord of gorgeousness, when I stumbled on this work by minor 19th century German artist, Johann Jungblut.

Johan Jungblut, Gathering on a Frozen Waterway, 1890

Gathering on a Frozen Waterway stopped me, because the vision of humanity that it conveys is one that I myself feel deeply. It doesn't matter that Jungblut was and is obscure, nor that I've never been in Bruges in January hunkering down against the wind in a beaver-fur hat. I respond immediately to the tableaux, which places small anonymous figures (as I read them in this setting, representative of the human) between a larger expanse of reflective, impenetrable ice, under a wide, dense sky diffusing what light there is through a crystalline, icy atmosphere. This, Jungblut seems to imply, is the condition of humanity on this earth.

Jungblut seems to have painted practically the same painting over and over again: people gathering (often walking home) amid snow and frozen rivers beneath a low horizon with the orb of obscured sun or moon central to the composition.

I just want to say to him, "Yes, my friend, I know what you mean."

Johan Jungblut was a solitary figure who lived alone; he made frequent trips to Holland to paint, specialising in Winter scenes infused with tranquil light. Today the museums of Brooklyn and Mayence (in France) display his work. (bio from a gallery Website)