Corot was modest and chaste. He never married, in company was nearly always overlooked, the Salon ‘treated him rudely,’ and the only painting by him to enter the Luxembourg Museum was ‘bought almost accidentally by the state in 1851’.1Yet the great Charles Baudelaire was one of many who admired the qualities of simplicity and sureness in Corot’s art and personality – traits that were at the opposite extreme to Baudelaire’s flamboyance. Corot, he wrote, exerted complete control over his compositions, guaranteeing that every element would be well seen, well observed, well understood and well imagined.2 In Bridge on the Saône River at Mâcon the paint has been laid on directly and unaffectedly. This gives the small work a deceptive look of Impressionism. With their festive and casual appearance, Impressionist paintings were to make a holiday of looking. But Corot’s washerwomen on the river bank are not Monet’s or Manet’s holidaymakers lolling about and enjoying the sun. Likewise, Corot in front of nature seems a disciplinarian rather than a sensualist. The date 1834 is not at all early for an outdoor sketch – which this possibly is – yet it does seem early for such a masterly exercise in facing down nature for the sake of form. Nature has here been translated by rule and measure, scale and calculation. One takes pleasure in the composition of four symmetrical rectangles and repeated arcs, the enveloping, sand-coloured light and well-managed paint textures. Selective accents of shape, tone and texture stand out by virtue of their difference. Paint strokes that seem spontaneous are, in fact, controlled. The ground from mid-way has been fastened down in solid, creamy earth colours. Above and to the sides, the semi-transparent blues and greens of sky, foliage and water vaporise against the underlying earth colours. Rough against smooth, a small area of mottled dabs describes shallow water near the bank and, on the other side of the picture, striations of green paint across the grain of the support ruffle the foliage as if simulating a breeze. Visual sensation had a place when it suited Corot’s purpose. In memorable early paintings he downplayed the figurative subject through using lively visual effects. The light in a canvas featuring a woman prone on the grass goes past her to a glowing clay bank in the middle distance.3 The gleaming but otherwise meaningless lump of wet clay takes centre stage, successfully eclipsing the woman. In another work a man on horseback rides away from us; the eye is captured less by the figure, painted grey against grey, than by the sunlight jolting on the uneven bridle path this side of the figure.4 A remarkable landscape sketch is captured by a shapeless black shadow that leaps across the sunburnt fields.5 The irresolution between sketchiness and precise form in Bridge on the Saône River at Mâcon has the same liberating effect, what Corot’s detractors called lack of finish and Baudelaire his ‘awkwardness’. Where lesser artists finished off a work of art, the end for Corot was to open it. Mary Eagle 1 Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, Romanticism and Realism: the mythology of nineteenth century art, London: Faber, 1984, p. 230. 2 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Salon of 1845’, trans. Jonathan Mayne, Art in Paris 1845–1862: salons and other exhibitions reviewed by Charles Baudelaire, London: Phaidon, 1965, p. 24. 3 The Forest of Fontainebleau, 1834, National Gallery of Art, Washington – The Chester Dale Collection. 4 A View Near Volterra 1838, National Gallery of Art, Washington – The Chester Dale Collection. 5 Le Petit Chaville, near Ville-d’Avra c. 1823, The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology – Bequeathed by Frank Hindley Smith, 1939.

National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Turner to Monet: the triumph of landscape

Camille COROT, Bridge on the Saône River at Mâcon [also known as Village on the riverbank [Le Village au bord de la rivière]] 1834

painting, oil on canvas, 43.0 (h) x 53.0 (w) cm, Museum purchase, Grover A. Magnin Bequest Fund.

Jules BASTIEN-LEPAGE, Snow effect, Damvillers [Effet de neige, Damvillers] c.1882

By the early 1830s Turner was a regular visitor to the seaside town of Margate, on the eastern tip of the county of Kent, about seventy miles downriver from London. Turner’s first introduction to Margate came in the 1790s, when the place was essentially just a small fishing town, but it had since become a bustling resort that Londoners could reach effortlessly by steamboat in half a day. The geographic setting is remarkable, benefiting from a magnificently open prospect over the sea to the north and east, which allegedly induced Turner to claim that the skies in this area were among the loveliest in Europe. In addition to this natural prospect, the attractions of Margate were somewhat unorthodox for Turner, stemming from his clandestine relationship with Sophia Caroline Booth (1798–1875), a young widow, who was initially his landlady and subsequently his mistress and muse. From the windows of Mrs Booth’s lodging-house, near the harbour quay, Turner was able to watch the arrival and departure of the London steamers, a couple of which formed the subject of a painting he displayed at the Royal Academy in 1840 Rockets and blue lights (close at hand) to warn steamboats of shoal water.1 The basic composition of that work was anticipated by a study, Waves breaking on a lee shore c. 1840, which is a pair to the work exhibited here.2The studies focus on the shore on either side of Margate harbour; in this case looking back from the west to the light tower at the end of the protective outer wall, which is created as a dull silhouette by the later application of a lighter area of whitish grey paint around it. As in even his earliest depictions of the sea, Turner sought to give his painted representation dramatic textures that replicate, and seemingly act as a substitute for, the movement of water. Both of the Margate studies are painted with such expressive vigour that it has generally been assumed they may have been direct observations of the rolling sea, capturing the surge of the waves as they splay upwards into flying crests, before crashing on the beach. Though Turner evidently did make plein air studies in pencil and watercolour at Margate, the impracticalities of working in oils, while witnessing such fast-changing weather conditions, make it unlikely that this picture would have been painted in the same way. This makes the apparent spontaneity and directness of his images all the more impressive, especially his vivid attempts to provide an impression of the sea in motion, at a time before the introduction of photography enabled artists greater opportunity to dissect the underlying principles of movement more precisely.3] Ian Warrell 1 Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The paintings of J.M.W. Turner, rev. edn, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984, cat. 387; collection of Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown. 2 Butlin and Joll, cat. 458, collection of the Tate; Ian Warrell (ed.), J.M.W. Turner, Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2007, cat. 133, where re-dated from c. 1835 to c. 1840. 3 For a more qualified appraisal of Turner’s depictions of the sea, see Christiana Payne, Where the sea meets the land. Artists on the coast in nineteenth-century Britain, Bristol: Sansom & Co., 2007, p. 49, notes 31, 60.

J M W TURNER, Waves breaking against the wind c.1835

Here we see a field of lucerne, the green crop infiltrated by red poppies. Along the skyline is strung a series of pale sheds and outbuildings under a silvery sky. In the distance is Saint-Denis, a suburb ten kilometres north of central Paris, which was industrialising rapidly in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The painting has a very high horizon line: Seurat depicts the plants as eighty per cent of the canvas. On the right against the sky is a small tree, and in the foreground a darker mass results from the shadow cast by a large tree behind the artist and the viewer. The luscious intensity of Seurat’s paintings is achieved by pure colour and his application of paint in small, organised strokes. The colour wheel was first elaborated by the chemist Chevreul in 1839, with red, blue and yellow being primary, and the mixtures violet, green and orange secondary colours. Each resulting hue can be lightened or darkened by white or black. Colour theory is based on the spectator’s changing perceptions, each colour being affected by surrounding ones. Instead of pre-mixing paints, Divisionist or Neo-Impressionist artists like Seurat placed patches of pure colour alongside each other, so that the eye would blend them. In Lucerne, Saint-Denis the bright green of the lucerne is produced by Seurat’s short, straight strokes of blue and yellow, criss-crossed to produce the animated field. Joyous interruptions of red, white and pink occur when flowers emerge from the crop. The shade from the tree in the right front is produced by darker blue, with less yellow. Beyond the fence, paintstrokes become horizontal, calming the view and lightening in tone towards the distant horizon and sky. Seurat employs these radical strategies to produce an all-over effect, so characteristic of art after the first Impressionist experiments in the 1860s and 1870s. There is no story to tell here, no incident to draw conclusions from, only the reproduction of visual effects as perceived by the artist. The nature of beauty has changed, as the painter makes new and different choices of subject and technique, so that the content and meaning of art are transformed. Christine Dixon

Georges SEURAT, Lucerne, Saint-Denis [La Luzerne, Saint-Denis] 1885

A large, ambitious scene of arctic exploration, imagined fifty years after the event and half a world away, seems an unlikely Australian project. Jenner, a self-taught English immigrant painter, tried to establish a cultivated artistic climate in Queensland at the end of the nineteenth century. Such grand history paintings, employing all the stratagems of the Sublime, would make the artist’s reputation unassailable, he thought, as well as serving another purpose, that of elevating public taste. His subject was Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition of 1845, to find the fabled Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The venture fascinated the public, writers, and the press for decades; the British government, prodded by Lady Franklin, sent thirty-two expeditions to find the vanished explorers, Swinburne wrote a long poem in 1860, and Jules Verne published two novels inspired by the topic in the 1870s. Reports of cannibalism among survivors kept the story alive and scandalous. Jenner remembered arctic scenery and details from a journey taken in his youth. He sailed in the early 1850s, he said, on ‘a voyage to Lapland, Nova Zembla and Spitzbergen’.1At the age of eighteen in 1855, Jenner joined the Royal Navy for a decade, then retired to his birthplace, Brighton, to become an artist. Unhappy with his prospects as a marine and genre painter there, he emigrated with his large family to Brisbane in 1863. En route he witnessed the effects of Krakatoa’s eruption, another instance of Nature’s grand and sublime spectacles. For his modern history painting Cape Chudleigh, Coast of Labrador, Jenner painted icebergs in Labrador, populated by hundreds of great auks – large, penguin-like birds, hunted to extinction in the 1840s. The whole is lit by a full moon under a cloudy sky. Apart from icy white and blue for freezing water, sea and sky, atmosphere and rocks are rendered in smoky brown and grey, with red reflected from the ship on fire behind an iceberg.2 The ghostly theatre of Franklin’s fatal voyage is accentuated by Jenner’s spectral depiction of translucent ice, a disappearing mountain and bizarre spectating birds, scattered like the ill-fated crew through the sea and absent land. Jenner’s invisible hero, Franklin, was linked closely to colonial Australia’s brief history: he accompanied Matthew Flinders on the Investigator’s initial circumnavigation of the continent in 1801–04, and served as Governor of Tasmania from 1836 to 1843. Nonetheless, the artist’s extravagant vision of the voyage was profoundly unfashionable. The extremes of the Sublime, especially delight in terror and heightened emotions, had dissipated their effect by the end of the century, while unsuccessful English explorers no longer caught the imagination of poets and engravers. European aesthetic manners and themes were replaced in Australia by the local and immediate paintings of the Heidelberg school.3 Jenner was triply unfortunate, in that his subject and style were no longer appreciated, and any audience was sparse. Nonetheless, he ensured some posterity by reworking and donating this large canvas to the infant Queensland National Art Gallery upon its opening in 1895. Christine Dixon 1 Margaret Maynard, ‘Jenner, Isaac Walter (1837–1902)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, online edition, viewed November 2007, adb.online.anu.edu.au. 2 Gavin Fry, Bronwyn Mahoney, Bettina MacAulay, Isaac Walter Jenner, Sydney: Beagle Press, 1994, p. 34. 3 See Glen R. Cooke, Catalogue worksheet for Acc. number 1:0014, Queensland Art Galle

Isaac JENNER, Cape Chudleigh, Coast of Labrador 1893, reworked 1895

L’Estaque, a fishing village on the French coast of the Mediterranean, was a place that Cézanne visited often in the 1870s and 1880s. Why, amongst more picturesque features such as blue sea and a pretty village of ochre stone and red tiles, did the artist address such a difficult and unappealing prospect as this? A viaduct is only an overland passage between more dramatic features – under mountains or cliffs, through a valley or over a river far below – and this bridge for the railway track has none of the elegantly classical appeal of Corot’s Roman arches. Indeed, the viaduct is barely noticeable: it sits in the lowest band of the painting, the main horizontal of the composition. Perhaps it was, as always, simply because he could. The nature of beauty itself was changing as the century continued, from gentle to hard, from simple, lush and historic to complex, spare and modern. For Cézanne, eternal verities became mutable, and reality was filled with infinite possibilities. During February and March 1882 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, a much more luscious painter than the austere Cézanne, paid a visit to his contemporary at l’Estaque while en route from Italy to Paris. They painted the same scene, but the two resulting landscapes could not differ more, considering they were executed side by side.1 Johnson describes Cézanne’s strategies on the canvas: The flatness of the effect, accentuated by repetition of the receding and advancing color and tone values may, on first impression, bear some resemblance to tapestry design; but this quality is denied by the special depth and volume and solidity of the forms which Cézanne achieves … He has piled the planes up vertically and has silhouetted distant hills instead of allowing them to dissolve in air and space.2 The contest between fact and fiction, which underlies landscape painting in the nineteenth century, is seen plainly here, in the choices that Cézanne makes. He understands that the horizontal railway lines below the cliffs undermine the vertical and diagonal slopes of the mountains. The dizzying stacks of rock, made of parallel hatched strokes of paint, communicate insecurity rather than the permanence of stone and mountains. The close-up, frontal encounter reinforces the dominance of the artist’s view. It is the implied struggle between doubt and certainty that makes Cézanne so modern. Christine Dixon 1 John Rewald, The paintings of Paul Cézanne: a catalogue raisonné, vol. 1, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996, cat. 441, p. 297; the other canvas is Renoir’s Crags at l’Estaque, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 2 Ellen H. Johnson, ‘Cézanne and a pine tree: Viaduct at l’Estaque, a footnote’, Allen Memorial Art Museum Bulletin, vol. 21, no. 1, Fall, 1963, pp. 24–8, quoted in Rewald, p. 297.

Paul CÉZANNE, Viaduct at l'Estaque [Le viaduct à l'Estaque] 1882

This is a devotional image, paying homage to science, Nature and God. Huge in its pictorial implications, the painting is nonetheless modest in size. South American landscape is one of the ‘prototype’ South American subjects the thirty-year-old Church composed before embarking on his magisterial Heart of the Andes 1859, which lifted him to first place among American artists. In South American landscape Church responds to the renowned geographer Alexander Humboldt who identified the Andes as best portraying the separate ecologies that together made the global geography. Humboldt’s theory stemmed from an expedition to South America from 1799–1804, when he and his companions travelled from tropical jungle at sea level to mountains with permanent snow. Charles Darwin, travelling to South America thirty years later – with Humboldt’s writings in hand – found evidence that a parallel to Humboldt’s adaptive ecologies existed in biology. Church, visiting Colombia and Ecuador in 1853, deliberately set out to capture in art Humboldt’s geography of the cosmos. Looking at the painting, it soon becomes apparent that this is not a landscape taken from one place. Rather, it is an assemblage of unlikely points of view which combine to overwhelming effect. Judged by photographic realism, the scene is frankly impossible; yet it is precisely because the painting lacks a governing perspective that the artist is able to suggest a scale that is measureless. Church’s concept is therefore unlike the panoramic landscapes by von Guérard, Bierstadt and Daubigny, which show the scope of a scene from a single vantage point. Church painted for an audience whose aesthetic embraced the idea that the path to inspiration was through education. Within this approach, South American landscape expresses two types of ‘truth’. One is the truth of inspired imagination; another is the minutiae of description. Knowledgeable viewers in the mid-nineteenth century used opera glasses to study the details incorporated into the picture from Church’s many field drawings. Failing a handy magnifying glass, we still view the image as a composite of separate parts, each with its own scale and perspective. Multiple possibilities offer themselves. Following the path of light from a bridge and waterfall gleaming in the chasm on the left, the eye is led vertically to a church poised on the peak of a mountain. The dark, sheer rugged country between those signs of human habitation conveys a subliminal message that the eye may travel where a human body cannot. Another kind of separation is implied on the other side, where a figure strolls towards us along a sun-striped path. A giant in comparison to the trees flanking the path, the figure is likewise strangely dissociated from the scene by a nonchalant disregard for what it portends. Behind is a tumescent mountain capped with snow, hazed and ruddy-coloured below, where it rises from a labyrinth of impassable mountains and bottomless clefts. This scene cannot conform to practicable travel, even tourism to the exotic: it is visionary. The urgency of Church’s vision of natural ecology is relevant again in our time. The canvas suggests vast natural rhythms of an ongoing natural evolution on a scale that stretches human faith and imagination. Disjunctive landscape forms and abrupt conjunctions of tones and colours enforce incredible combinations, whereby a tropical palm is cheek-by-cheek with eternal snow. The idea of order seems interchangeable with cosmic disorder. Mary Eagle

Frederic Edwin CHURCH, South American landscape 1856

… this amazing mountain continues to exhibit such various scenes of sublimity and beauty at exactly the distance one would chuse to observe it from; a distance which almost admits examination, and certainly excludes immediate fear … columns of flame, high as the mountain’s self, shoot from its crater into the clear atmosphere with a loud and violent noise … a thick cloud, charged heavily with electric matter, passing over, met the fiery explosion … Hester Thrale, 17891 Mount Vesuvius was especially active in the late eighteenth and for most of the nineteenth century.2This fact, along with a growing awareness of the natural sciences in this period, meant the volcano attracted a great deal of interest. Indeed images of Vesuvius in various states of activity, as well as other scenes of uncontrollable nature – avalanches, storms, fires – became synonymous with the Sublime and with Romantic art. In the 1770s the English artist Joseph Wright of Derby, Frenchman Pierre-Jacques Volaire and German Jacob Philipp Hackert all produced views of Vesuvius, establishing the conventions for subsequent images. They presented the erupting volcano as a spectacle by moonlight, rivers of lava observed by tiny frock-coated gentlemen, juxtaposed against the built environment or surrounded by calm harbours. The paintings produced by later Romantic artists tended, on the other hand, to portray the volcano with as much precision and more emotion. In 1818, Dahl, Bergen-born and Copenhagen-trained, set out for an extensive study tour of the continent – although he didn’t make it very far. Travelling via Poland and then Berlin, he settled in Dresden where, apart from his 1820–21 sojourns to Italy and frequent trips back to Norway, he remained for the rest of his life. Dahl witnessed some of the 1820 eruptions while in Naples; he sketched Vesuvius on the spot, subsequently producing many paintings based on these experiences. Dahl shares this fantastic composition with his friend and compatriot, the Viennese painter Josef Rebell.3In both paintings, the profusion of colour, audacity of the scene and its sheer extremes – the gleam of the bright moonlit sky, the glow of molten lava tumbling into the sea, the treacherous waves set against perilous rocks – convey ‘not a sense of fear but a sort of ecstasy’.4 Much of the fascination of Eruption of Vesuvius is a result of the combination of the opposing elements of fire and water. Usually a stormy sea such as this would be enough in itself to engender a sense of awe. Here it is pitted against a volcano, which shoots flames into the sky, fills the sky with black smoke and scatters fiery girandoles far and wide. The debris even reaches a stone monument adorned with a cross, on the rocky shore opposite – dangerously close to where we are standing! On the right-hand side, soot merges with the silhouetted coast. The moon ventures through the darkened clouds, just enough to cast light on the foreboding scene below. This is Sublime Nature. We feel the power of Vesuvius and anticipate its destructive forces. Lucina Ward 1 Herbert Barrows (ed.), Observations and reflections: made in the course of a journey through France, Italy and Germany by Hester Lynch Piozzi, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1967, pp. 223–4. 2 There were six major eruptions in the 1700s and a further eight next century: in 1822, 1834 and 1839; two each in the 1850s and 1860s; and again in 1872. 3 It is not known if Dahl’s is a copy after Rebell, or whether the two artists worked together in Italy. Rebell’s The eruption of Vesuvius at night 1822 is in the Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna. 4 Johann Kräftner, Liechtenstein Museum Vienna: Neoclassicism and Biedermeier, Munich and New York: Prestel, Vienna: Liechtenstein Museum, 2004, p. 118.

Johan DAHL, Ausbruch des Vesuvs [Eruption of Vesuvius] 1823

Two men on a hillside, standing on a stony outcrop, look at the crescent moon shining in a luminous sky. Framed between a strong, sinuous oak and an angular, spiky pine, the younger man leans on his companion’s shoulder, as though overcome by beauty. These are not detached scientific observers scrutinising a lunar phenomenon, but witnesses of God’s ever-surprising Nature. Instead of that scientific examination of natural phenomena so characteristic of German learning at the time, Friedrich’s painting is a parable of Christianity and paganism. The oak, used for heathen rituals, is dying; the evergreen pine, a symbol of Christianity, lives. The men are protected underneath its branches. Friedrich painted several versions of this scene, similar in composition although varying in character. The earliest known dates from 1819, another of a man and woman was made c. 1824, and at least two more were painted about 1830.1Friedrich’s friend Dahl refers to later versions by the artist and others in a letter of 26 September 1840, at the time he donated the 1819 painting to the Dresden Gemäldegalerie in memory of Friedrich: This picture, full of sentiment and the quietness of nature, was painted by Friedrich in 1819 and he gave it to me in exchange for one of my own works. Friedrich had to copy it several times, but he did not approve of this, hence others copied it as well.2 While there is some disagreement about this version, close examination reveals Friedrich’s blue underdrawing, a generous execution, and liberal and unique application of colour.3The characteristic freedom of the artist’s hand can be seen here, with the silhouette of a dead branch on the right, jutting from a large rock – a pagan dolmen – which seems to buttress the old oak tree. A sawn stump on the left testifies to human life cut short while new vegetation, representing a growing Christianity, appears in a line of young pines on the right. Friedrich’s earlier works often show a lone hero in the landscape. A pair of figures now become part of the artist’s repertoire, to symbolise friendship. They wear German national dress; the cloak and hat signalled opposition to the French invasions under Napoleon, and they were still popular signs of dissent against later reactionary German governments under Metternich. The men have been identified as Friedrich, leaning on a walking stick, and his pupil, August Heinrich (1794–1822), who died of consumption. It is touching the way the younger leans upon the older man, rather than the conventional reverse. Friedrich captures the temporary and evanescent effects of this expedition to watch the moon and Venus, a strange phenomenon counterpoising the effects of light and darkness. The moon-filled sky is pale and glowing, denying blackness as the moon’s natural element. The material world is dark, outlined against the eerie heavens. Christine Dixon 1 The 1819 painting is in the Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden. A version made c. 1824, depicting the artist and his wife Caroline is in the National Galerie, Berlin. A c. 1830 version is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; this 1830s version is held in the Galerie Hans, Hamburg. 2 Letter to the Dresden Gemäldegalerie, Sächsische Hauptarchiv, cited in Helmut Börsch-Supan and Karl Wilhelm Jähnig, Caspar David Friedrich: Gemälde, Druckgraphik und bildmässige Zeichnungen, Munich: Prestel, 1973, p. 216, note 34. 3 Because of its spontaneity and breadth of handling, and original variations on the other versions, this painting is unlikely to be a copy by another artist. Copyists are notoriously careful in their imitation, and all too accurate in their replication. This version is attributed to Friedrich by Werner Sumowski 1969, 1971, 1975 and by Jens Christian Jensen 1999, refuting Helmut Börsch-Supan and Karl Wilhelm Jähnig 1973, who attribute it to a copyist, perhaps Julius Leypold.

Caspar FRIEDRICH, Zwei Männer in Betrachtung des Mondes [Two men looking at the moon] 1830s

Although a genius, Courbet was certainly a magnet for trouble. No other artist in nineteenth-century France so often found himself surrounded by controversy, apart from Edouard Manet – although Manet extricated himself, while Courbet seemed constantly enmeshed in scandal and uproar. But he was also firmly connected to the best artists working in the middle decades of the century, from Corot to Whistler, and Cézanne to Monet – he was even the witness at Monet’s wedding in 1870. Courbet remains the most radical painter of his time, while his work marks the rupture from Romanticism via Realism that produced modern art. A deep attachment to his native region inspired Courbet throughout his life, and is demonstrated in his art. He knew the farms near Ornans, the town and its people, and gloried in the rugged beauty of the Jura mountains in his eastern province of Franche-Comté. The rivers of the Jura, the Loue and the Lison, their limestone cliffs, grottoes, waterfalls and vegetation, provided a never-ending subject for the artist. In Paris, Courbet played the coarse peasant new to the city, but there was a serious purpose in his stout defence of regions against the centre. Throughout the century the French state tried to centralise all power to the capital and government institutions, artistically as well as politically, and Courbet was a rebel by conviction. Most of his landscapes of the 1860s – made after the scandals of the Salon and before the catastrophic defeat of the Paris Commune, his imprisonment, and self-exile – concentrate on a limited, almost claustrophobic vocabulary of motifs. As well as enclosed forest scenes with deer and views of hunting, there are Courbet’s Source paintings. Stone, water and darkness are enlivened by rushing currents, decorated with green moss, spring growth or autumn foliage. Apart from over-determined, psychoanalytic readings (grotto = wish for a return to the womb), the Jura works display broad and vigorous handling as well as local particularity based on plein-air observation. In Source of the Lison, as in his other Jura landscapes, Courbet cuts off the sky or any conventional vista, and medium or long views. We are forced close to the rocky cliffs and mysterious cave, confronted with cold, green–brown water pouring from its geological origin, the rising of the river. Paint is mainly brown, with white, bright green and orange highlights. It is applied thickly, pushed around with palette knife and spatula, to accentuate the materiality of the subject. The canvas is vertical, and Courbet accentuates the height of the cliffs by forcing movement down the cliff-face and over the splashing waterfall. Cézanne’s cubes, spheres and pyramids owe some of their genesis to Courbet’s admiring yet brusque painterly treatment of his native landscape. Christine Dixon

Gustav COURBET, Source of the Lison [La Source de la Lison] 1864

Russian painters invented a new, heroic art of landscape in the second half of the nineteenth century. Shishkin demonstrates some of its elements in A sandy coastline: the painting holds an implied moral narrative with nationalist overtones. A few giant but slender pines inhabit the shoreline, their roots gripping into uncertain soil. Waves lap up the beach, unceasing tides which will eventually undermine the trees. Darkest sky lurks behind them, threatening an impending storm and, perhaps, oncoming night. Other trees still stand upon firmer ground in the grass, although many have been felled, hauled away for timber. Bright, intense light glares onto the sand and off the silhouetted trunks. This is nature’s drama, which twists the largest tree away from the viewer, while it withstands the continuous assault of wind and water. Shishkin was a highly-accomplished painter, who trained in the Classical fine art academies of Moscow and St Petersburg from 1852 to 1860. He then studied in Munich, Prague and Düsseldorf from 1862 to 1865, absorbing naturalistic tenets from the German schools. He was a founding member of the famous artists’ group the Wanderers, who began to depict the vastness of Russia’s lands in the 1870s. These reformist painters rejected the artificiality of contemporary pictorial themes, instead commenting on contemporary social ills while developing the first Russian interest in their own surroundings, looking at the bleak beauty of their plains, steppes and mountains. In 1879 Shishkin travelled in the Crimea from May to September, so that he could ‘make plein-air studies in accordance with his fascination for working outdoors’.1 A sandy coastline was exhibited in the 7th Wanderers’ exhibition in St Petersburg in 1879, the year it was painted. Forests became Shishkin’s major subject. His compositions are based on direct observation instead of that compilation of elements that underpins Classical and Picturesque landscapes. His works are also marked by extraordinary attention to detail, seen here in such elements as a tangle of debris washed up on the sand. He combined such realistic renderings with larger poetic truths. A sandy coastline sets up many qualities for us to ponder: light and dark, sunshine and shadows, strength and fragility, enduring time and a fleeting moment. Christine Dixon 1 Notes on the painting by David Jackson, ms, French & Company.

Ivan SHISHKIN, A sandy coastline 1879

Rousseau began to paint Under the birches, evening in Berry in central France, at the lowest point of his official artistic career. After initial success at the Paris Salon from 1831 to 1835, all of his works were refused between 1836 and 1841. Discouraged, he then refrained from submitting works to the jury until after the 1848 Revolution, when the selection system was reformed. The artist then received an official commission, subsequent acceptance at the Salon, and honours from the state. In the early 1840s, however, when this painting was executed, Rousseau’s dreams of winning the Prix de Rome were over; nonetheless he continued to paint, in his own way. The atmosphere and charm of Under the birches, evening also characterise the artist’s better-known sojourns in the Forest of Barbizon, a place identified with Rousseau for three decades. In summer he worked outdoors in a little hut made for him, painting studies and sketches that were then finished in his studio in Paris.1 Most striking in the composition of Under the birches, evening is the theatrical presentation of a central clump of trees, birches bright with autumnal foliage and their unique black-and-white bark. The dark foreground is echoed by the steel blue–grey fading light of day, changing as night begins to fall. Light is concentrated upon a central oval, where a slight narrative interest is given by human presence in the form of the humble curé. No means of entry is provided to the viewer, however, no path, rising hill nor descent into a valley. The grove is presented as a visual fait accompli, a feature that struck the artist’s eye full-on. Rousseau’s debt to seventeenth-century Dutch landscape is obvious in his division of the canvas into three horizontal bands, concentrating on the middle ground, and his stubborn portrayal of the unexceptional, anti-Romantic theme. Contemporary English masters – Constable, Bonington, Turner – awoke painters in France to the importance of exact depictions of changing conditions: light, atmosphere, times of day. For Rousseau, the lessons of past Dutch and present English art meant a continuing attachment to his own country and its unique landscapes. There is nowhere more satisfying to be than here, under these trees at this moment, and no finer artist than Rousseau to describe the scene for us. Christine Dixon 1 Théodore Rousseau 1812–1867, Paris: Réunion des musée nationaux, 1967, cat. 22, p. 35.

Théodore ROUSSEAU, Under the birches, evening [Sous les hêtres le soir] 1842-43

Luce used landscape compositions such as Camaret, moonlight and fishing boats to explore formal issues of colour and light as well as his own political concerns. The painting depicts fishing boats at night in the protected harbour of Camaret, a small fishing village in Brittany on the Atlantic coast. It is executed in Luce’s characteristic divisionist style, distinguished by the building up of the painted surface using separate brushstrokes of colour. The artist employs varying shades of green and periwinkle blue, along with pink and yellow for the night sky. Violet, blue, turquoise and deep pink splotches, along with green and lemon-yellow strokes serve for the areas of shadowed and moonlit water. Deep blues, purples and near-blacks make up the silhouetted shapes of the fishing boats. By 1887 Luce had adopted the divisionist technique first developed by Seurat, a fellow French Neo-Impressionist artist. The technique was based on theories about colour and seeing, which asserted that the eye would blend colours juxtaposed on the canvas. The adjacency of complementary strokes of colour would produce a brilliant effect, closely approximating the appearance of natural light. This effect was well suited to Luce’s project here, of representing the luminosity of moonlight on calm water. Luce also began showing with other Neo-Impressionists in 1887, contributing to their third independent exhibition in Paris. In addition to a commitment to colour theory, Luce shared with some of these artists a dedication to the tenets of Anarchism. The form of Anarchism he endorsed was an idealistic socialism, involving precepts of social harmony and the absence of a centralised government.1His convictions included an abiding interest in the condition of the working class, whose members and places of employment occasionally appear in his paintings. Luce often portrayed modern industrial work sites as locations of strenuous labour or intrusion into the landscape.2In Camaret, moonlight and fishing boats, however, he depicts the boats as representatives of a more traditional livelihood. They are presented in a moment of quiet restfulness, fully integrated with the other elements in the scene. The repeated forms of hulls and bare masts become a decorative pattern against the variegated colours of the sea. Janeen Turk 1 Joachim Pissarro and Eliot W. Rowlands, Maximilien Luce, 1858–1941: the evolution of a Post-Impressionist, New York: Wildenstein, 1997, pp. 12–14, 20. 2 Anne-Claire Ducreux and Aline Dardel, Maximilien Luce: peindre la condition humaine, Paris: Somogy Editions d’Art 2000, pp. 72–87; Denise Bazetoux, Maximilien Luce: catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint, vol. 2, Paris: Editions JBL 1986, cats 799–951, 1046–65.

Maximilien LUCE, Camaret, moonlight and fishing boats [Camaret. Clair de lune et flotille péche] 1894

Turner looks to Claude Lorrain, the great artistic model of seventeenth-century Classical landscape painting, for his composition of Crossing the brook. Devices include framing trees to left and right, while Turner also uses light to lead the eye through a curving central valley until it meets a limpid white sky, which dissipates upwards into palest blue. Dark planes intersect in the foreground across the front of the water, down through the foliage and tunnel path on the right. A spotlight picks out three figures who ford the brook: one girl has waded across, then looks back to her dog in midstream. The animal helps by carrying her basket, while another young woman prepares on the far bank by removing her shoes and tucking up her dress. Further along the valley are an aqueduct and large waterwheel. We are not in the Roman campagna, however, but rather in an equivocal English Arcadia. The brook leads into the River Tamar, which divides Devon from Cornwall, while the arches belong to Calstock Bridge. The wheel drives water for a clay pit: this is modern Britain at the end of the Napoleonic wars. War with France has lasted more than twenty years; Britain is all but bankrupt, and appears to be on the verge of revolution. Turner, always a history painter, manages to meld a Classical manner with a contemporary subject. Rural England now includes industry and urbanisation, implying a new vision of beauty. Between 1811 and 1814 Turner made three journeys into the West Country. These were extended summer tours, primarily to make watercolours for an engraving commission, Picturesque views of the south coast of England, which was published in sixteen parts from 1814 to 1826. In his last trip in 1814 Turner ‘sketched around the River Tamar, making studies of the river valley at Gunnislake and Calstock’.1 The artist exhibited two large oils, Crossing the brook and Dido building Carthage, at the Royal Academy in 1815. Despite the different scale of ambition that seems to mark their titles and subjects, an idyllic English scene could also be a grand history painting, to be shown at the season which marked Britain’s final victory over Napoleon. The large vertical landscape was well received, and praised by most. Not everyone liked it, however: Sir George Beaumont, the artist’s enemy, characterised it as ‘weak and like the work of an Old man, one who had no longer saw or felt colour properly; it was all of peagreen insipidity’.2Contemporary viewers may disagree with his sour verdict. Crossing the brook is a masterpiece of nineteenth-century landscape, which encapsulates local and national views of ideal Classical painting. It presents these views in a grand yet succinct form. In 1815 Turner summed up the hopes of a war-weary Britain in this naturalised Claudean landscape of observed incident and eternal pleasure. Christine Dixon 1 James Hamilton, Turner: a life, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1997 p. 168. 2 Kathryn Cave (ed.), The diary of Joseph Farington: volume XIII – January 1814 – December 1815, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984, p. 4638, quoted in David Blayney Brown, The art of J. M. W. Turner, Secaucus: Wellfleet Press, 1990, p. 128.

J M W TURNER, Crossing the brook 1815

Van Gogh’s extraordinary and tragic life, his feelings and thoughts revealed in prolific correspondence, often overwrites the material reality of his paintings. He was a pioneer of modern art, using the genres of landscape, portraiture and still life to experiment with form and colour. Here, in an extraordinary close-up rendition of urban nature, Tree trunks in the grass, Van Gogh reinvigorates the landscape format by looking down into it instead of outwards, and thus eliminates both horizon and sky. He wrote about the painting in a letter to his brother Theo in early May 1890, in which he also details a planned journey from the asylum at Saint-Rémy to the care of Dr Gachet at Auvers-sur-Oise: … my work is going well, I have done two canvases of the fresh grass in the park, one of which is extremely simple, here is a hasty sketch of it. The trunk of a pine violet-pink and then the grass with white flowers and dandelions, a little rose tree and other tree trunks in the background right at the top of the canvas.1 By cropping the composition so radically, especially at the top and bottom, Van Gogh shows how well he absorbed the strategies of Japanese woodblock artists. He combines these with the exemplar of photography, focusing on one part of an object to stand in for the whole. Verticals and diagonals struggle for dominance, with the main tree trunks sloping slightly, boldly placed off-centre. Our eye is led back by white accents from the foreshortened ground in a zigzag, and through the central field into the dappled lawn under the far trees. It lingers briefly, returning by means of blue marks, to the central motif. In Tree trunks in the grass, the artist’s palette is reduced to light shades of green, white and yellow, highlighted by blue and a little red, allowing tones to accentuate the texture of the main trunk. Other trunks are blue-black, dark against bright spring vegetation. Van Gogh’s characteristically energetic paintstrokes, delicate in the flowers and thicker in the grass, become rugged in the bark of the trees. This landscape was observed close-to, painted on the spot in the asylum garden at the end of April 1890. Van Gogh is a specific, rather than a general, artist: that is, he uses the immediate to communicate larger themes. Looking at the painting, we feel the joy of being outdoors, where sunlight and flowered grass suffuse our senses. Christine Dixon 1 Letter 631, The complete letters of Vincent Van Gogh, 2nd edn, vol. 3, London: Thames & Hudson, 1959, pp. 265, 267.

Vincent VAN GOGH, Tree trunks in the grass [Boomstammen in het grass] 1890

Audio guide to thirty-two works from the Turner to Monet: triumph of Landscape exhibition shown at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 14 July – 16 October 2006.

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National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Turner to Monet...

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