Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Woman with a Parasol in a Garden, 1875
In Woman with a Parasol in a Garden, Renoir’s language is wholly impressionistic: in a setting lacking a visible horizon, the flowers and shrubs are created with tiny dabs of colour, providing a constant interweaving of textures around the two small figures.
The woman, whose parasol shades her from the sun, stands close to the man as he leans down, perhaps to pick a flower, hinting at an intimate relationship.
Contrary to what one may think, this canvas was not painted in the countryside but in the garden of Renoir’s new studio in Montmartre.
His friend George Rivière recalled: "As soon as Renoir entered the house, he was charmed by the view of this garden, which looked like a beautiful abandoned park".
Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Woman with a Parasol in a Garden, 1875 | Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
It was unclear until only recently where and when Auguste Renoir had painted Woman with a Parasol in a Garden.
Some authors hold that it was executed during summer 1873, when the painter was working with Monet at Giverny; others believe it was painted at the country house of his friend Charles Le Coeur in Fontenay-aux-Roses, in summer 1874, the year of the first Impressionist exhibition.
Colin Bailey has recently stated convincingly that the picture was executed at the new studio surrounded by a large garden, which the painter rented in Montmartre in 1875 or 1876.
The doubt between these two years stems from the discrepancy in the testimonies of Ambroise Vollard, who dated the rental of the new studio on the rue Cortot to 1875, and the painter’s friend George Rivière, who mentioned it being the following year. Rivière recalled that "as soon as Renoir entered the house, he was charmed by the view of this garden, which looked like a beautiful abandoned park".
Colin Bailey has proved that the painting in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza featured in the inventory compiled by Paul Durand-Ruel on 25 August 1891 with the title Garden and the date 1875, and we therefore consider this year most likely.
The same author mentions the possibility that the painting may have been shown with the title Garden and admired by critics at the Third Impressionist Exhibition of April 1877.
Renoir adopts a fully Impressionist language in this canvas and eschews the traditional structure in favour of a new arrangement of contrasting colours.
In addition to the omission of the horizon, his handling of surfaces and manner of painting the garden flowers and shrubs create a constant interplay of textures that envelop the two small figures in the composition.
As John House pointed out in his commentary on the painting, "every element in the scene is treated in a flexible and constantly varied touch, which evokes with great vividness the multiplicity of textures in this lavishly overgrown garden, but quite without focus on details".
In addition to the woman, who shields herself from the sun with a parasol, there is a male figure bending down, perhaps to pluck a flower.
Their closeness suggests to House that there is some kind of relationship between them, as can be appreciated in Picking Flowers in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, a very similar work in which the man clearly offers the flower to the girl, although the gardener’s attire and straw hat worn by the man in the latter differ from the bourgeois costume of the man in the painting in the collection. | Source: © Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Edward Henry Potthast | Along the Mystic River, 1925-1927
In a letter written shortly before his death the artist recalled that he spent most of his summers "along the New England coast-Annisquam, Gloucester and Provincetown. Of late years I have been going to the Maine coast".
To the list of places visited along the eastern coastline of the United States, Potthast might have added Noank, Connecticut, on the Mystic River, where he also sketched and is probably the subject of this painting.
Potthast's paintings along the northern shoreline of the United States are markedly different from his joyful scenes of New York City's beaches.
Often they are of the ocean breaking upon the rocky shore, reminiscent of Winslow Homer's titanic images of the forces of water against land.
Occasionally, they show isolated figures looking out to sea.
Edward Henry Potthast | Along the Mystic River, 1925-1927 | Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Along the Mystic River recalls several of the artist's views of Gloucester in which he uses a foreground ledge leading into the composition.
Boats or buildings usually frame the format.
The tonal mood of the distant boat and shore brings to mind Whistler's nocturnal views of the Thames.
A silhouetted foreground figure gazing across the water contributes to the haunting beauty of the painting which is boldly constructed, yet evokes the transient quality of human existence.
Although he fell under the influence of the French Impressionists while in Europe, the dazzling staccato effect of the reflection of the sunset breaking into a neo-Impressionist pattern upon the water is almost unique in Potthast's work.
Impasto strokes of white, yellow, and orange light contrast with the cool lavender tones of the water.
Along the Mystic River was included among the paintings shown at the Grand Central Galleries shortly before the artist's death.
Although the exhibition was widely advertised, it received little critical attention.
A day after the show had closed, the artist suffered a heart attack and was found dead in his studio.
"Surrounded by more than five hundred of his paintings", one newspaper reported, "he lay in front of his easel, as if he had been stricken while at work".
Another newspaper reported the following day that "shortly after artist friends in the building-the Gainsborough Studios-had taken charge, men from the Grand Central Galleries returned the thirty paintings the artist had had on exhibition during the last two weeks at that place".
If the artist's estate consisted of five hundred paintings, as several newspapers asserted, their value was placed from only seventy-five to eighty-five thousand dollars. | Source: © Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Jasper Francis Cropsey | Greenwood Lake, 1870
Greenwood Lake, a late work that Cropsey painted on returning from a stay of several years in London, depicts the explosion of colour that precedes the coming of winter, before the striking American vegetation loses all its colour.
The panoramic format, intentionally enlarged horizontally, that began to prevail in American painting towards the mid-twentieth century and, as Kenneth W. Maddox points out, had already been used by Cropsey in earlier works like Lake Ontario, gives greater prominence to the effects of the light and its reflection on the broad horizon and evidences the fresh importance the artist attaches to describing the atmospheric properties of the golden sunset, influenced by the poetics of the Luminist school.
Jasper F. Cropsey was an artist associated with the Hudson River School.
Jasper Francis Cropsey | Greenwood Lake, 1870 | Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
He embarked on his career as an artist in 1843 following his first visit to Lake Greenwood.
From then on Cropsey painted numerous views of this region near New York.
His works depict the natural world in a precise, accurate manner with the occasional addition of picturesque elements.
Cropsey’s works and his detailed style allowed Europeans to become familiar with the landscape of America, winning him success in Europe during the periods that he spent there.
This scene of Lake Greenwood reveals Cropsey’s interest during his mature phase in the effects of light and atmosphere on the landscape.
Seen from an elevated viewpoint, the view is framed by foreground trees whose leaves are changing colour with the onset of autumn.
In the background the mountains around the lake are depicted in warm, glowing tones that are further developed in the sky.
The grandeur of the natural world is emphasised by the presence of tiny figures that observe the landscape from a rocky ledge in the lower left-hand corner. | Source: © Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Henri Matisse | Canal du Midi, 1898
Canal du Midi belongs to a series of pictures painted by Matisse near Toulouse during the winter of 1898-1899.
Matisse, who left Moreau's studio in the autumn of 1897, married Amélie Parayre in January of the following year. After a brief honeymoon in London, the couple sojourned for six months in Ajaccio, Corsica.
Then, in August 1898, Matisse and his wife travelled to Toulouse, and stayed for six months with Amélie's parents.
This was the first time Matisse visited the South and he always remembered it as his first encounter with light and colour.
Many of the landscapes he painted during that period, including the one we are commenting on, were probably executed outdoors, directly from the model.
Yet the colour in them is not naturalistic.
The bright sunlight, as Schneider put it, "brings out the colour, and gradually takes it to a point of incandescence where a mutation takes place, and the local tone becomes subjective colour".
In fact, the pictures Matisse painted in that period are generally described as "proto-fauvist", inasmuch as they seem to anticipate the bright subjective chromatism that, five or six years later, would be the most outstanding mark of fauvism.
Henri Matisse | Canal du Midi, 1898 | Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
If we compare the pictures of Corsica with those of Toulouse, we can observe a shift from the thick impastos of the Corsican period and a brighter and lighter style, culminating in a composition which is practically neo-Impressionist, Sideboard and Table, 1899 (Switzerland, private collection), executed towards the end of his sojourn in Toulouse.
One of the reasons for this evolution might have been Signac's influence.
Matisse took a short break during his stay in Ajaccio and travelled to Paris, where he visited the Salon des Indépendants; there, a remarkable group of paintings by Signac stood out.
Besides, his book D'Eugène Delacroix Au néo-impressionnisme was published in instalments in La Revue Blanche between May and July of that same year.
Canal du Midi is a hasty work executed with fluid paint, but not with the broken stroke that is found in other pictures that Matisse did in that period.
Nevertheless, his desire not to superimpose colours and the fact that he left large areas of the background in a pale grey colour can be related to neo-Impressionism.
This grey serves as a neutral shade allowing the deep blues, carmine and oranges of the setting sun to breath.
Canal du Midi belonged for a long time to Leo Stein; he and his sister Gertrude had acquired it in the spring of 1906.
In the 1906 Salon des Indépendants (March-April) Matisse had only shown a large format painting, Le Bonheur de vivre, which was immediately acquired by Leo and Gertrude Stein.
At the same time, their brother Michael bought the sketch for Le Bonheur de vivre, which had been included in an exhibition at the Galerie Druet, as the same time as the Salon des Indépendants.
It was also in the exhibition at the Galerie Druet that Leo and Gertrude acquired Canal du Midi. | Source: © Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Frederick Carl Frieseke | Hollyhocks, 1912-1913
During the first two decades of the 20th century Frieseke isolated himself at Le Hameau, a house adjacent to Monet's at Giverny, and painted images of a garden world. Uninterested in urban life or modern art, he claimed that he rarely looked at a newspaper.
Instead Frieseke chose to perpetuate a late 19th-century Impressionist vision long after Monet himself had considerably modified his aims and means.
The theme of the monumental, graceful woman with a parasol appeared often in Monet's and Renoir's works of the 1870s and 1880s and in Frieseke's oeuvre between 1909 and 1915.
Though he spoke with disdain of convention, Frieseke's full-bodied female figures and nudes resembled those of Renoir-whom he considered the "head of the Impressionists"-and in his mind were also associated with those of other artist-celebrators of feminine grace, including Botticelli, Titian and Watteau.
In this composition the centrally-located figure of the woman, probably modelled on Frieseke's wife, is articulated in a smooth, unbroken mass.
Frieseke framed her curvilinear shape against a vertical and horizontal grid of flowers and pathways and played her solidity off against the decorative background of small, scintillating brushstrokes.
Frederick Carl Frieseke (1874-1939) | Hollyhocks, 1912-1913 | Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Considerations of design were foremost in the artist's method.
Through a symmetrical treatment of the square canvas, he emphasised the flat, decorative quality of the surface and floated the figure upon it.
Around her-the solid and centrally placed female figure-revolves the entire composition.
Frieseke frankly admitted that his approach to nature was selective.
Following the dictates of "pure Impressionism" established by Monet in the 1870s however, he also tried to record his feeling for nature as spontaneously as possible and attempted to observe the fleeting effects of light and colour in a scientific manner.
Relishing Impressionistic experimentation he painted out-of-doors in the presence of the motif and sought to capture new, accidental effects.
In Hollyhocks Frieseke conveyed the heat and light of a summer afternoon through strong contrasts of black, deeply saturated blue and green strokes with pure yellows and high-keyed pinks and mauves.
He achieved something of a technical tour de force in the effect of backlighted forms, which heighten the feeling of late afternoon light.
In sensitising the viewer to the strange effects of light, Frieseke thus signals his fascination with the transience of nature.
With the edges of the woman bathed in a soft glow and the light shining through the translucent fabrics of the Japanese parasol and the delicate tissues of petals, the painter's manipulation of light most of all serves his enduring fascination with the private mysteries of the feminine world. | Source: © Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
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