Vincent "The Man" van Gogh

Is it just me or do van Gogh's trees seem "haunted?" Maybe it's because of how the massive roots and trunks in this painting dwarf the parallel-leaning, doll-like figure!

Look how the trunks in this oddly aligned trio seem to want to lift themselves right out of the ground by their roots. To do what??

File these branches under "wildly gesticulating." One gets the impression of a clawing at the air, frantic branches twisting left, right, and above. These blossoming trees seem electric, too, full of the ungovernable energy of the universe. You can almost hear the synapses crackling in van Gogh's brain as he painted them ...

This, apparently, is the only painting he's believed to have sold in his lifetime.

Mystery Painting - Maine Coast

Mystery painting, signed "JTW 1870" lr 

(sorry I don't have a higher res pic)

Here's a painting that's a bit of mystery. It came up for auction last year and sold for around $1500, a decent sum for a painting of unknown origin. It's signed "JTW" and dated 1870 by the artist. Period paintings by shadowy or forgotten artists abound in small auctions all over the country (this one was from Julia). Sometimes they can be had for a few hundred bucks. Because I love the tradition of 19th century American landscape painting, I find these auctions a great source for inspiration for my own work.

Maybe someone knows who "JTW" was, but the auction house couldn't pin him down and neither could the dealer who bought this and then sold it to a patron out of his gallery. 

In the absence of the "brand value" attached to a "name" artist (i.e., a "listed" artist, whatever that's supposed to mean), a painting has to stand on its own merits. I believe this "mystery" painting fetched such a tidy sum because of sheer quality alone - the artist could lay claim to no marketing cache whatsoever. So in what does that vague word "quality" consist? Let's look at the painting.

First of all, it's a timeless subject - waves crashing into a rocky shore (it's clearly Maine - there's a market for "Maine paintings," which is part of the reason this particular dealer purchased and successfully resold it). It's not just waves on a shore, though. Not only does the ocean's force careen compellingly across the picture plane, but the wave itself is huge - or, rather, long - and it occupies an unusual quantity of real estate (for a wave) in the center of the forward picture plane. "JTW" adds to the drama with strong, balanced contrasts between light and dark. 

Along with the dramatic (Baroque) lighting, I think the wave's sheer bulk and its upward thrust contribute the most to the "feeling" that's evident in this painting, which has something to do with a recognition of the power and beauty of raw nature (which would be the painting's "true" subject - i.e., that which it makes one feel). 

There's plenty of detail in this painting, all executed with obvious skill. That's key. But the other thing it's got is "atmosphere." Look how the entire right-hand triangle of the diagonal composition is a swirl of nebulous mist and light! It looks like the primal creation of the world out of chaos in there! I'm a big fan of atmosphere in painting. 

Maybe this isn't a "great" painting, deserving of a place in the pantheon of the highest human creations of all time (if it had been signed "Bierstadt," though, or "Church," would it be a different story?). But I wanted to share it because I just really like it and wanted to write about it to discover why. 

My rather fanciful theory, it turns out, is that it delivers a poetic response to nature's power and beauty, marrying the clarity one expects with the mystery one wants to believe in.

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).

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