Iceland's iconic waterfall painted from
photos and memory on January 30, 2021
22" x 15" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam,
and Winsor & Newton watercolors and permanent white
gouache, selected for light fastness and permanence, and
Uniball waterproof fade proof ink on 300 lb. Fabriano
Artistico cold press rough 100% cotton extra white
watercolor paper, framed, $900
Iceland Art Quiz
These paintings of Iceland were
all painted by artists from what country?
A) China
B) Denmark
C) France
D) Germany
E) Great Britain
F) Iceland
G) Italy
H) Japan
I) Norway
J) Sweden
K) United States
Is this a trick question? Yes or no?
About the Art after the Quiz Below
But first the art and location in Iceland...
These paintings of Iceland were all
painted by artists from what country?
E) Great Britain
Is this a trick question? Yes or no?
Yes and no.
No, because it was a straightforward question with a straightforward answer, no tricks. Yes, because by simply asking the question it likely made you pause, Iceland is on the list, are these paintings by an Icelandic artist or not?
About the Art
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1
Snow Drift, Clear Sky (polyptych, panel 4 of 4)
Keith Grant (1930- )
Oil on canvas, 36" x 84" (w x h), 1974
Touchstones Rochdale Collection,
Rochdale, Greater Manchester, England
Keith Grant was born in Liverpool. He attended Willesden Art School then went to the Royal College of Art. A trip to Iceland as a student began an ongoing devotion to landscape painting and a great love of the Arctic region: "It is in the North and only in the North, that I sense the value of my life." Attracted to isolated incidents of nature, a subject that was to inspire him for the majority of his career, Grant sees his work as similar to pages in a diary, documenting his journeys through painting to give the viewer an experience or sense of the untouched parts of the world. This particular work was purchased from a solo exhibition held at Rochdale Art Gallery in 1976 of more than 100 of Grant's works.
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2
Reykjavik from Main Quay,
Frosty Morning, Iceland
Thomas Hennell (1903-1945), English
Watercolor and pencil on paper, 25" x 19" (w x h), circa 1939-1945
Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, England
Watercolor painter, draughtsman, writer and poet, Thomas Hennell was born at Ridley, Kent He studied at Regent Street Polytechnic for several years in the early 1920s, then qualified as a teacher. He taught art for several years. He researched his first book, Change in the Farm, in Britain, and Ireland, mainly by bicycle, recording in words and pictures vanishing country crafts and ways.
In 1931 was friendly with artists based in Great Bardfield, Essex. From 1932-5 was treated for psychiatric illness, which he wrote about in The Witnesses. During World War II Hennell was an Official War Artist in Europe and the Far East, dying in mysterious circumstances in Java. The Imperial War Museum holds a large collection of his pictures, which are in many other public galleries. Hennell was a keen student of English watercolor painting and wrote well on it. Although not a great natural draughtsman, he improved his technique to become a fine atmospheric and distinctive watercolorist. Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, held a survey show in 1995.
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3
Breiðafjörður from Vaðsteinabjarg in Hergilsey
Magnus A. Arnson
Oil on canvas, 26" x 40" (w x h), circa 1937
Wardlaw Museum, University of St Andrews,
St. Andrews, Fife, Scotland
Hergilsey is a small Icelandic island on the north shore of Breiðafjörður. The island covers about 30 other islets.
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4
Fractured Landscape
Images of Iceland series
Roy Bizley (1930-1999), British
Acrylic on board, 30" x 23" (w x h), 1991
Gildings Auctioneers, Market Harborough, UK
2018 auction estimate £150 - £200, sold £320, $440 USD
Roy Bizley was an art teacher, teaching at the School of Art in Swindon. In 1964 Roy moved to Leicester for a teaching post at Leicester Polytechnic, which later became De Montfort University. In 1975, following a visit to Iceland, Roy made a large series of paintings, which followed the contemporary abstraction movement of the time, typically using nature derived blues and greens alongside more synthetic colors. He made many return visits to Iceland and undertook a residency in 1995, sponsored by the National Gallery of Iceland. This resulted in a major show of Icelandic landscapes at Leicester's City Gallery, in Granby Street in 1997. Leicester's New Walk Museum also has a large Icelandic painting in its collection. Roy died in 1999, very soon after his school retirement. A major retrospective of Roy's work, paintings, posters and prints, was held at the Trinity House Gallery at De Montfort University in 2000.
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5
Látraströnd, North Iceland
Rob Miller, British
Watercolor on paper, 6" x 7" (w x h), 2015
Látraströnd is on the coast of Eyjafjörður north of the village Grenivík, facing the island of Hrisey. It was named after the northernmost farm, Latrar, abandoned for decades like others in the area except for the southernmost one or two. There is very limited lowland along the coastline and it drops off steeply into the sea.
This was painted on a sailing tour. Rob Miller is the Resident Artist for the Lingholm Estate on the shores of Derwentwater in the Lakes district in northwest England in in the county of Cumbria, UK. He paints often in Spain and Portugal. His art has been featured in Spanish, Portuguese and British publications and he as the featured artist in the Art of England and in Art News. The artist's website is HERE.
Education: Bolton University, BA, a distinction in painting, MA, History of Art. Rob Miller, FRSA, has his studio, Falcon Mill Studios, in Bolton, Lancashire, UK. FRSA, Fellowship of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce is an award granted to individuals that the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) judges to have made outstanding achievements to social progress and development. As of 2020 there are 30,000 Fellows.
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6
Snæfellsjökull I
What you have stolen can never be yours
Patti Lean, Scottish
Mixed media on canvas, 67" x 75" (w x h), 2015
Patti Lean lives in the southwest of Scotland, a few miles north-west of Castle Douglas. Patti Lean: "My interest is in notions of northerliness, both real and imagined." The artist's website is HERE.
Education:
2002-05, M.A. in Contemporary Fine Art (part-time). College scholarship award.
1997 - 2001, Cumbria institute of the Arts B.A. (Hons.1st class) in Fine Art.
1994-97, Dumfries and Galloway College. H.N.C./ Foundation in Art and Design.
1982-83, University of Heriot Watt/ Edinburgh College of Art. Post-graduate Diploma.
1983, R.S.A. Preparatory Certificate in Teaching English as a Foreign Language.
1977-81, University of Edinburgh. B.S. with distinction, Social Sciences.
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7
Processing the Catch, Wharf Scene, Iceland
Alan Sorrell (1904-1974) British
Pencil, ink and gouache on paper, 22" x 15" (w x h), circa 1935
Sorrell made a trip to Iceland in 1934, and drawings inspired by this trip were exhibited at Walkers Gallery, Bond Street, London in 1935.
Alan Sorrell (1904-1974) attended the Royal College of Art in the mid-1920s. During his life Sorrell produced a vast cycle of murals (nearly 20 over a 30-year period). Sorrell is principally remembered today as an illustrator of articles on archaeology for The Illustrated London News and books ranging from Roman Britain to The Holy Bible, more than 15 books over a period of 40 years. Sorrell made numerous journeys to distant lands, painting in Iceland (1934), Greece and Turkey (1954), Egypt and the Sudan (1962).
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8
Hafnarfjörður
Keith Hornblower, British
Watercolor on paper,
limited palette of yellow ochre,
turquoise blue and black, October 2019
The artist's website is HERE and Instagram HERE.
Keith Hornblower conducts art workshops in Iceland. He's an architectural illustrator by profession, a Fellow of the Society of Architectural Illustration. But now he enjoys the freedom of painting fast and loose with a spontaneity out of bounds for an illustrator. His work has been exhibited in galleries and exhibitions. He's a frequent exhibitor at the Mall Galleries with the Royal Institution of Painters in Watercolour, where he was honored with the Schmincke award for an outstanding work.
painted January 21, 2021
7" x 5" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam,
and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness
and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink
on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100%
cotton extra white watercolor paper
NFS
at my home on Fort Ridge
in Shapleigh Maine in January 2021
painted January 20, 2021,
5" x 7" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam,
and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness
and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink
on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100%
cotton extra white watercolor paper
framed, $150
using self-shot reference photos
painted January 15, 2021
10" x 8" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam,
and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness
and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink
on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100%
cotton extra white watercolor paper
framed, $300
based on Louisa Matthíasdóttir's
Still Life with Grapefruit and Two Pears,
(below) painted by me on January 7, 2021
10" x 8" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam,
and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness
and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink
on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100%
cotton extra white watercolor paper
framed, $300
with a grapefruit (Citrus × paradisi) and
a pomelo (Citrus maximus) on snow in my yard
at Shapleigh, Maine on January 7, 2021,
painted January 8, 2021
10" x 8" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam,
and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness
and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink
on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100%
cotton extra white watercolor paper
framed, $300
a pomelo (Citrus maximus) on snow
in my yard at Shapleigh, Maine on January 7, 2021,
painted January 8, 2021
7" x 5" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam,
and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness
and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink
on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100%
cotton extra white watercolor paper
framed, $150
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Grapefruit in Art
by Noted Artists
Harry Brodsky, Paul Gauguin,
Doris Lee, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray,
Susan Jane Walp, Marie-Louise Von Motesiczky,
and Marguerite Thompson Zorach
(a gender balanced group)
Wiki:
Of her life in art, Marie-Louise once remarked, "If you could only paint a single good picture in your lifetime, your life would be worthwhile."
Tate Museum Note:
This was painted in a small hotel in Amsterdam. The artist had traveled there with her mother from their home in Vienna, immediately following the arrival of the Germans in Austria in 1938. In this still life, she posed the objects, including two eighteenth-century Chinese sheep ornaments and some fruit, on an ironing board in the hotel, with the ironing board dictating the unusual oblong shape of the painting. Aside from the sheep, objects whose reassuring familiarity reminded the artist of her Viennese surroundings, this unusual still life is characterized by the rich colors of the grapefruit and by the bunch of grapes.
Read the moving and uplifting notes about her and flight from the Nazis HERE in the "Catalogue Entry" and on Wiki HERE.
Also, Susan Abbott of Vermont, who I took two workshops years ago with, has a posting, Great Art, Lousy Times, that you might find of interest HERE.
Wiki edited:
Man Ray's birth name was Emmanuel Radnitzky. He was born in South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in1890. He was the eldest child of Russian Jewish immigrants Melach "Max" Radnitzky, a tailor, and Manya "Minnie" Radnitzky (nee Lourie or Luria). He had a brother, Sam, and two sisters, Dorothy "Dora" and Essie (or Elsie), the youngest born in 1897, shortly after they settled in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. In early 1912, the Radnitzky family changed their surname to Ray. Man Ray's brother chose the surname in reaction to the ethnic discrimination and antisemitism prevalent at the time. Emmanuel, who was called "Manny" as a nickname, changed his first name to Man and gradually began to use Man Ray as his name.
After living in Paris since 1921, Man Ray was forced to return to the United States due to the Second World War. He lived in Los Angeles from 1940 to 1951 where he focused his creative energy on painting. A few days after arriving in Los Angeles, Man Ray met Juliet Browner, a first-generation American of Romanian-Jewish lineage. She was a trained dancer, who studied dance with Martha Graham, and an experienced artists' model. The two married in 1946 in a double wedding with their friends Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. In 1948, the Year he painted Five Grapefruits, Man Ray had a solo exhibition at the Copley Galleries in Beverly Hills, which brought together a wide array of work. In 2013 his 1916 canvas Promenade sold for $5,877,000 at the Sotheby's New York Impressionist and Modern Art Sale.
Christie's notes edited:
By the time Apples, Grapes, Grapefruit was painted, Lichtenstein had firmly established himself as one of the leading figures of the Pop Art movement. With its bold palette, impeccable geometries and finely-calibrated composition, Roy Lichtenstein's Apples, Grapes, Grapefruit stems from the important series of still life paintings that the artist produced between 1972 and 1974. His still life paintings departed from the distinctive cartoon imagery that had brought about his rise to fame during the 1960s. Acquired by Lord and Lady Jacobs directly after its creation, it was held in their collection until this auction.
Lichtenstein's still life objects are reduced to a set of basic circular geometries, the components of Apples, Grapes, Grapefruit, signified purely through shape and color. The reductive, highly stylized appearance was the result of his labor-intensive method. The composition began life as a small-scale drawing, reworked several times before it was projected onto canvas. Here, a second stage of drawing and redrafting took place, always deferring to the original sketch, with colored paper taped into place for reference. It was through this method that stripes replaced his Ben Day dots. They were incorporated into finished canvases from 1969 onward. Ben Day himself had often used lines in his shading system, and Lichtenstein reveled in their disorientating optical quality, claiming that the stripes had the power to alter our perception of color.
Simple Pleasures publisher's book info edited:
Lee was one of the most recognized artists in America during the 1930s and 40s. She was a leading figure in the Woodstock Artist's Colony. Her art reveals an ability to merge the reduction of abstraction with the appeal of the everyday. In so doing, she offers a coherent visual identity that successfully bridges the various artistic camps that formed with the shift in the art world in the post-World War II era.
In 1935 her painting Thanksgiving was awarded the Art Institute of Chicago's Logan Prize and instigated the Sanity in Art movement in protest. Two years later, her painting Catastrophe was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Lee's commercial commissions for patrons such as American Tobacco Company, Life magazine, Abbott Laboratories, and Associated American Artists are compelling in both their populist accessibility and in their deceptively sophisticated abstraction.
Simple Pleasures presents Simple Pleasures: The Art of Doris Lee, September 2020, the first major assessment of works by Doris Lee is on amazon HERE. Her art from this book on exhibit at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania, September 26, 2021 - January 09, 2022 HERE.
Antrese Wood note:
Susan Jane Walp paints still lifes from her home in Vermont. Her compositions expertly balance silent spaces with a powerful geometry that pulls you in and holds you. Her influences range from Piero de la Francesca to Lennart Anderson whom she met and studied with at a summer program run by Boston University during her undergrad years.
Susan Jane Walp:
"In the late 1960s ... to make up credits ... I went to a program at Tanglewood, (Massachusetts) run by Boston University. Miraculously, Lennart Anderson was teaching there. The students from BU were very serious, and only because the beginner class was full, I was placed in Lennart's advanced class. That summer completely changed everything. I saw that my life was going to be devoted to becoming a painter.
Lennart painted in class; he didn't talk much. But I understood that he was teaching an approach to seeing tonal relationships. It was a very sensual, felt response to the motif. It was about discovering the beauty of these relationships and the thrill of translating them into paint. At the time, he was recommending a Dover book by Charles Hawthorne, Hawthorne on Painting, 1960 (on amazon HERE), which we all read and reread."
Born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, she received her BA from Mount Holyoke College, followed by studies at the New York Studio School and Brooklyn College. The artist's website is HERE.
Bruce note:
If this is a self-portrait with her daughter, and this would be when her daughter was that age, 10-years old, it's of Marguerite and her daughter, Dahlov. I had the good fortune to cross paths with Dahlov Zorach Ipcar as authors. Dahlov was a fine artist and illustrated thirty children's books. The first time we met was in an elevator at a children's book conference at the University in Gorham, Maine. The last time we met was in Boothbay Harbor, where she signed a copy of The Little Fisherman, by Margaret Wise Brown (Goodnight Moon), and illustrated by her. It was a gift going to Iceland for the boy who was the star in my book set in Iceland, Going Fishing.
Wiki notes edited:
Marguerite Thompson Zorach was one of a small group of women admitted to Stanford University in 1908. Rather than completing her degree, she traveled to France at the invitation of her aunt, Harriet Adelaide Harris. Marguerite visited the Salon d'Automne the very day that she arrived in Paris. It was the intention of her aunt that Thompson attend the École des Beaux-Arts, but Marguerite was turned away as she had never drawn a nude from life. Marguerite had no interest in the formulas of academic painting. She chose to attend the post-impressionist school Académie de La Palette, where she was encouraged her to pursue her own interests, to paint in a style that was uniquely her own. She exhibited at the 1910 Société des Artistes Indépendants, and the 1911 Salon d'Automne, both renowned for their modernist themes.
While in Paris, she socialized with Pablo Picasso, ex-patriot Gertrude Stein, Henri Rousseau, and Henri Matisse through her Aunt Addie's connections. At school, the Académie de La Palette, she first met her future husband and artistic collaborator, William Zorach. William admired her passionate individuality, and he said of her modernist Fauvist artwork "I just couldn't understand why such a nice girl would paint such wild pictures."
Back in California in 1912 she gave birth to a son, Tessim Zorach, in 1915, and a daughter, Dahlov Zorach, in 1917, eventually, settling in Greenwich Village. In 1922 they visited Gaston Lachaise at Georgetown, Maine, and later bought a house.
Terra Foundation edited:
Harry Brodsky, a painter, print maker, designer, and teacher, is best known for lithograph images of Philadelphia and the surrounding area made in the 1930s and 1940s. Brodsky made both color and monochrome lithographs of a variety of themes and in a wide range of styles reflecting current trends in American art in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Still lifes, landscapes, city scenes, and interiors showing ordinary Philadelphians comprise his subjects; he also created purely nonobjective compositions. A native of Newark, New Jersey, Brodsky graduated from the Philadelphia College of Art and also attended the University of Pennsylvania.
Foundation Notes edited:
It's believed that Gauguin painted Still Life with Grapefruits, which for many years was entitled Still life with Apples and Flowers, in 1901. Experts came to this conclusion based on the arrangement of objects on the leather trunk, bringing the composition close to other paintings in the same year, and on his confinement to the hospital and subsequently to his studio due to illness, when he had to paint without a model.
His main concern appears not just the arrangement of the objects but the layout of the colors and the creation of harmony. The classic elements of Western still life have been replaced by exotic flowers, peppers and grapefruits.
a D'Anjou pear (Pyrus communis) on
an American Beech tree (Fagus grandifolia)
with a sheet metal screw to hold it on this tree
by my house in Shapleigh, Maine on December 29, 2020,
painted January 8, 2021
10" x 8" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam,
and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness
and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink
on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100%
cotton extra white watercolor paper
framed, $300
The Art of the Pear
by Noted Artists
Paul Cézanne, Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth,
Gerald Murphy, Man Ray, William Scott,
Vincent van Gogh, and Andy Warhol
1
Untitled (Pear)
Stuart Davis (1892-1964), American
Watercolor and pencil on paper,
12" x 42" (w x h), circa 1921
Wiki edited:
Stuart Davis was an early American modernist painter. In the 1920s he developed his mature style, painting abstract still lifes and landscapes. His use of contemporary subject matter such as cigarette packages and spark plug advertisements suggested a proto-pop art element to his work. He painted series, works with similar structures, but with altered colors or added geometric embellishments, essentially creating variations on a theme. Some commentators suggest that this aspect of his work parallels his love of jazz in which a basic chord structure is improvised upon by the musicians.
He was well known for his jazz-influenced pre-popart paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, bold, brash, and colorful, as well as his Ashcan School pictures in the early years of the 20th century. With the belief that his work could influence the sociopolitical environment of America, Davis' political message was apparent in all of his pieces from the most abstract to the clearest.
Wiki edited:
Erik Satie (1866-1925) was a French composer and pianist. Satie, and eccentric, was an influential artist in the late 1800s to early 1900s Parisian avant-garde. His work was a precursor to later artistic movements such as minimalism, repetitive music, and the Theatre of the Absurd.
American Man Ray met the French native Erik Satie in 1921, shortly after the Man Ray arrived in Paris. The French composer was more than 20 years older than Man Ray. Despite Satie's crippling shyness and eccentricities, he was a key figure in French society. He was renowned not only for his musical works, but also for his writing and art pranks. He met with Man Ray in December 1921 on the eve of Man Ray's first French solo exhibition. The pair retired to a café for hours.
Man Ray, born Emmanuel Radnitzky, was an American visual artist who spent most of his career in Paris. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. He produced major works in a variety of media but considered himself a painter. He was best known for his photography, a renowned fashion and portrait photographer. Man Ray is also noted for his work with photograms, which he called "rayographs" in reference to himself.
Chloë Ashby, on ArtUK, (full article HERE)
Scott's heyday was in the 1950s. His exhibition at London's Hanover Gallery in 1953 was seen by directors at the Guggenheim and MoMA, who went on to sing his praises in the US. In 1958, he was the UK's chief representative at the Venice Biennale. In 1961, David Sylvester said that he had gained 'the soundest, all-roundest international reputation of any living British painter, Nicholson apart', and in 1973 Hilton Kramer called him 'the best painter of his generation in England'. But with the arrival of Pop Art, he fell from favour – until the 2000s, when twentieth-century British art began to gain in popularity.
And what a relief, because there's so much pleasure to be gained from looking at Scott's art, spartan as it is. He took the ordinary and made it extraordinary. Like any good designer, he understood the power of well-placed white space. It's there, as in a well-timed pause, that we have time and space to feel. And feel you will. Because empty as Scott's paintings may seem, each is invested with emotion. That, and a lingering human presence, in a snuffed candle, a simmering pan, a sliced lemon.
Note:
He was born at Greenock, Scotland, of Irish and Scottish parents and was brought up in Ulster. He studied at Belfast College of Art, 1928-31, and the Royal Academy, 1931-5. Known for still-life and abstract painting, William Scott is the most internationally celebrated of 20th-century Ulster painters.
Andy Warhol's Space Fruit: Still Lifes, the complete set of six screenprints in colors, edition XVIII / XXX, 18 / 30, sold at Christie's New York Auction, 2012, for $92,500 USD, sold to benefit the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
MoMA gallery note:
"If that's painting, that's what I want to do," Murphy remarked in 1922, upon discovering paintings by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris in a Paris gallery. Soon after, he ended his career as a landscape architect and turned to painting. In Wasp and Pear, he combined anatomically detailed and highly stylized depictions of his subjects—a wasp, pear, leaf, and honeycomb—with an abstract background of overlapping planes of color. As his inspiration, Murphy credited the "technically drawn and colored charts of fruits, vegetables . . . [and] insects" found in a classroom in which he studied during his military training.
Wiki edited:
Gerald only painted from 1921 until 1929. He's known for his hard-edged still life paintings in a Precisionist, Cubist style. During the 1920s Gerald Murphy, along with other American modernist painters in Europe, notably Charles Demuth and Stuart Davis, created paintings prefiguring the pop art movement. Gerald and his wife Sara were wealthy, expatriate Americans who'd moved to the French Riviera in the early 20th century and who, with their generous hospitality and flair for parties, created a vibrant social circle, particularly in the 1920s, that included a great number of noted artists and writers. Pablo Picasso, a friend of Sara, painted her in several of his 1923 works.
"Search the history of American art," wrote Ken Johnson in The New York Times, "and you will discover few watercolors more beautiful than those of Charles Demuth. Combining exacting botanical observation and loosely Cubist abstraction, his watercolors of flowers, fruit and vegetables have a magical liveliness and an almost shocking sensuousness."
Christie's Auction notes edited:
This was painted in a difficult period in Cézanne's personal life, as he shuttled between his family's estate at Aix and the apartment in Paris where he had installed his mistress, Hortense, and their young son, Paul, whose existence he hid from his authoritarian father. The deliberate and meditative work of still-life painting seems to have offered the artist a respite, as he strove to transform Impressionism into "something solid and durable like the art of the museums."
"He produced a few canvases representing only isolated fruit," Henri Loyrette wrote. "These can be viewed as studies in which the artist examined his subject from every angle, thoroughly perusing their globular forms, seemingly simple, in reality quite complex: in short, as visual exercises in which he practiced his tonal scales, carefully gauging the effect produced by juxtapositions of greens, yellows, and reds. Alternatively, they can be regarded as self-sufficient little pictures that, like Manet's Asparagus, deliberately reject the contrivances visible in the larger works to showcase motifs so simple as to border on abstraction."
Deux poires was featured in Cézanne's inaugural one-man show, held at Ambroise Vollard's gallery in 1895; it is one of only fourteen stilllifes that have been conclusively identified from this watershed exhibition, which catapulted Cézanne out of relative obscurity. At the Vollard show, Deux poires caught the eye of Nicolas-Auguste Hazard, a connoisseur of Daumier's work, who had never before owned a Cézanne; he purchased the canvas in February 1896 and retained it until his death. Deux poires later belonged to Baron Kojiro Matsukata, a Japanese businessman who lived in Paris during the 1920s and devoted his personal fortune to amassing a major collection of French painting and sculpture, a portion of which today forms the nucleus of the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo.
Vincent Van Gogh Museum and The Art Newspaper edited:
In 1960 Bruno and Sadie Adriani donated the painting to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. However, at that point it was assumed to have been done by Van Gogh in Nuenen in 1884 and the coloring appeared unusual for that period. This raised concerns and the painting was apparently not displayed.
Its authenticity in doubt in 2019 it was confirmed, based on information concerning style, technique and also provenance by the Vincent Van Gogh Museum. It is mentioned in the inventory list of Theo van Gogh's collection of 1890. Traditionally, it was assumed that this work was painted during Van Gogh's stay in Nuenen, and hence the doubts. One of the arguments for re-attribution the work to Vincent van Gogh was the fact that Still Life with Fruit and Chestnuts most closely resembles the Paris Autumn still life Prawns and mussels (September-November. 1886) from Van Gogh in terms of style, color scheme and subject matter.
Also, the small size of Prawns and mussels is very similar compared to the Still life with fruit and chestnuts, and the same brown background, but now with brightly colored seafood on top. One may consider them pendants, both paintings displaying a quick and steady hand, working wet in wet with the same buttery consistency of the paint and a similar size of brushstrokes.
as a still life with three D'Anjou pears on snow in late afternoon behind my home in Shapleigh, Maine, on January 8, 2021, painted January 8, 2021, 12" x 9" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam, and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100% cotton extra white watercolor paper framed.
$900
on my deck on a sunny day in
Shapleigh, Maine on December 26, 2020
painted the morning of January 6, 2021
7" x 5" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam,
and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness
and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink
on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100%
cotton extra white watercolor paper
framed, $150
the same view on the Maine Bicentennial Stamp, the scene
painted in 1914 Edward Hopper, the view from Narrow Cove
looking east at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art
in Ogunquit, Maine on May 1, 2014,
painted January 3, 2021
10" x 8" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam,
and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness
and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink
on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100%
cotton extra white watercolor paper
framed, $300
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Postage Stamp Art of Maine
Sea at Ogunquit
the Maine State Bicentennial Stamp
In late 1905 at the New York School of Art student Josephine Nivision met teacher Robert Henri, who asked her to pose for a portrait. In February 1906, Nivison began her career as public schoolteacher. During the next decade she earned her living by teaching, but never abandoned art and remained in touch with Henri and many other artists.
Museum notes:
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Robert Henri was among the most respected artists and instructors advancing modernism in the country, known for breaking ground with his gritty, urban landscapes and informal portraits. This portrait of art student Josephine Nivison aptly demonstrates Henri's rejection of conservative, academic standards through his emphasis on naturalism and spontaneity, as well as the sitter's informal dress and pose. Jo went on to have continued fame as a model if not artist: she posed for and is the subject of many of the paintings by her famous husband, the painter Edward Hopper.
