How do other artists catch that sunset light?
The Art of Color in Marine Sunsets
Eight by the Masters
Blackman, Homer, Hopper, Monet, Puigaudeau, Renoir, Signac, and Turner, all of these paintings were painted more than 110 years ago.
Gloucester Harbor
Winslow Homer (1836-1910), American
Oil on canvas, 22: x 16" (w x h), 1873
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri
Gallery note:
The colors in this painting are grounded in an eerie combination of pink and blue that glows with reflected light. The seagull in the distance contributes to the spatial depth of the design, which is carefully calibrated to create a rhythm between solid shapes and open spaces, light and shadow.
Boats on the Nile River at Sunset
Walter Blackman (1847-1928), American
22" x 16" (w x h)
Private Collection
Research note:
Walter Blackman, born in New York in 1847 received his formal training from Jean-Leon Gerome. He was drawn to Paris's three ateliers that were established at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1863, under the direction, respectively, of Gerome Cabanel and Isidore Pils (1813-1875). It was Gerome who was most popular among American painters. His consistency of rigorous academic style and durability as a teacher made him a significant resource for dozens of American students; Thomas Eakins, Fredric Arthur Bridgeman, Edwin Lord Weeks, Kenyon Cox, Julius L. Stewart, Mary Cassatt and Walter Blackman.
Étretat, Cliff of d'Aval, Sunset
Claude Monet (1840-1926), French
Oil on canvas, 1885
Private Collection
Research notes:
During the 1870s Monet was working from Argenteuil. 1875 was the year Renoir painted Monet's portrait. It was the year that Monet painted his notable painting, Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son. Between October and December 1885, Monet made nearly fifty paintings of the Normandy coast. This work shows the Porte d'Aval, a naturally formed arch, and a freestanding needle-like rock that attracted tourists and artists alike to the town of Étretat.
Pêcheurs À Pied Au Couchant /
Fishermen on Foot in the Sunset
Ferdinand du Puigaudeau (1864-1930) French
Oil on canvas, 20" x 26" (w x h), circa 1910
Sotheby's London Auction 2019 sold $101,760 USD
Catalogue note:
In this work, Puigaudeau uses his knowledge of Impressionism to benefit his love for light. He manipulates all the elements of his painting to accentuate the sun, a star that pulls all depicted elements towards it. Serving as the work's vanishing point, the sun exudes a Pointillist aura that captures the eye of the viewer through its brilliance. With this work, Puigaudeau contemplates the infinite possibilities of nature with the help of a sublime ocean and dazzling sun.
Ferdinand du Puigaudeau was born in Nantes, France in 1864. As a young boy, his uncle encouraged his artistic pursuits. His education was traditional and he studied at various boarding schools from Paris to Nice. In 1882, he travelled to Italy, then to Tunisia, and taught himself to paint.
In 1886 the year he visited Pont-Aven where he befriended Charles Laval and Paul Gauguin with whom he decided to travel to Panama and Martinique. But he was unable to do so as he was called up for military service.
In the beginning of 1907, Ferdinand de Puigaudeau moved to a new home in Kervaudu along the French peninsula of Guérande, where he painted the landscape before him until the end of his life: his garden, the marshes and mills, the sunsets over the sea, and the poppy fields.
Between 1910 and 1914, he devoted his work to the countryside, endlessly painting sunsets on the sea and windmills. And on Sundays, he welcomed local artists and intellectuals to his home. As the artist's daughter remembers, "There were meetings of educated people who tried to break the monotony of a small fishing harbor by creating the cultural diversions it did not offer.
Study of a Sunset
Edward Hopper (1882-1967), American
Wax crayon and graphite pencil on paper,
5" x 3" (w x h), 1895-1899
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Research note:
Hopper was a teenager, 13-17 years old, when he drew this study. By his teens, he was working in pen-and-ink, charcoal, watercolor, and oil. He drew nature as well as making political cartoons. In 1895, he created his first signed oil painting, Rowboat in Rocky Cove, which he copied from a reproduction in The Art Interchange, a popular journal for amateur artists. Hopper's other earliest oils such as Old Ice Pond at Nyack and his circa 1898 painting Ships have been identified as copies of paintings by artists including Bruce Crane and Edward Moran.
Sunset (?) off Margate Pier
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) British
Watercolor on paper, 14" x 10" (w x h), circa 1840-5
Margate Beach Scenes
Tate Britain, London, UK
Gallery note:
Throughout his life Turner peppered his sketchbooks with notes of striking sunrises and sunsets, generally in pencil rather than watercolor. Despite their apparent immediacy, many of his watercolors were actually painted in the studio. Turner is supposed to have preferred sunrises as they allowed him more time to observe a greater range of effects. However, the sunsets in several of his major paintings have encouraged us to think chiefly of Turner Sunsets.
Research note:
Margate is a seaside town on the southeast coast of England in Kent, 15 miles north-east of Canterbury.
Sunset
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), French
Oil on canvas, 24" x 18" (w x h), circa 1879-1881
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts
Gallery note:
Renoir would have called this work an impression, a finished painting of a dramatic atmospheric effect rather than a sketch of a specific site. The sea is heavily worked with layers of color, the sky is painted in broad, rapid brushstrokes. The elevated viewpoint looks out across the water, where a small boat suggests a sense of scale and an indication of human presence.
The Port of Saint-Tropez
Paul Signac (1863-1935), French
Oil on canvas, 64" x 52" (w x h), 1901-1902
National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, Japan
Gallery note:
Signac was greatly shocked by the death of Seurat who had joined him in defending and extolling the spread of Neo-impressionism. Thanks to the efforts of his friend the painter H. E. Cross, a year after the death of Seurat Signac left on a yacht voyage around the Mediterranean in 1892. He discovered the small fishing harbor of Saint-Tropez and for the next ten years he traveled between Saint-Tropez and Paris to paint. Over these ten years there was a softening of the linear rigor of his compositions, followed by an increase in size of the distinctive dots of pigment that characterize the Neo-impressionist style. In this later change, he strengthened the characteristics of the individual touches and the contrast between them, surpassing the optical mixture that had been the Pointillists' first objective. This work depicting the port of Saint-Tropez in its entirety is one of his most monumental works of this period, providing an expression of these formal changes.
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