The Ideal Landscape of the Past and the Present

1. The Ideal Landscape of the Past and the Present

2. Claude Lorrain´s Landscape with Rock Arch and River. • What do you think is happening in the painting? • Where and when do you think this painting is set? • How does this painting make you feel? • Why do you think the artist created this work of art?

4. The French artist Claude Gellèe (also known as Claude Lorrain) is usually referred to only as Claude, a tribute to his fame as one of the finest landscape painters of all time. He was a star by age 30, prompting princes and nobles to frequent his studio. One collector at the time noted that Claude´s paintings were in such high demand that only royal visitors could acquire them. Claude traveled to Italy from his native France in the 1620s. He fell in love with the mild climate and beautiful scenery and settled there permanently. Many of his paintings, such as Landscape with a Rock Arch and River, were inspired by the Italian countryside, which he studied in great detail.Look at this painting. Describe the mood it conveys.

5. Thomas Cole, Indian Pass, 1847 • In Indian Pass, Thomas Cole creates a primeval American past. Deeply concerned about the political and economic turbulence of his time, Cole filled his landscapes with symbols and warnings, capturing a resplendent America that was ultimately fraught with moral and national urgency. • Scholars have long proclaimed Cole the “father” of the first native school of American painting. Dubbed the Hudson River School, the movement is perhaps more accurately described as the American branch of 19th-century Romantic landscape painting. A British-born American transplant, Cole created a distinct niche for American scenery by isolating its constituent parts: majestic mountains, brilliant skies, abundant wilderness, flowing rivers, and flaming autumn trees, all of which he celebrates in Indian Pass. • In this classic Hudson River School landscape, sunlight illuminates a glorious wilderness scene, filled with fallen branches, lichen-covered woods, and framing trees that give way to a towering mountain that pierces passing clouds. In the foreground, blasted trees suggest the inevitable passage of time while the Native American figure, bow in hand, introduces a nostalgic element; by 1847, when this work was painted, Native Americans no longer inhabited the scenic wilderness Cole depicts. By combining these elements with a lush, dramatic setting, Cole offered 19th-century viewers a marker by which to measure the nation’s past, present, and future.

6. Camille Corot, Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld, 1861 • Camille Corot was much beloved during his lifetime for his ethereal,dreamy landscapes that often combined scenes from mythology with avery personal interpretation of nature observed. Claude Monet himself said, "There is only one master here: Corot." In this painting, the fabled musician Orpheus--who beguiled the Greek gods to allow him to retrieve his beloved wife, who had been fatally bitten by a snake--leads her tenderly from the underworld. In ancient times, it was believed that the deceased continued to exist as spirits, seen here gathered in small groups beneath the delicate trees. Corot, a great music lover, has imbued this work with a sense of melancholy lyricism that hints at the tragic end of the story: Orpheus loses Eurydice forever when he turns to look at her before reaching the world of the living.The sense of filtered reality is enhanced by Corot's extraordinarily subtleuse of color. He strikes a wistfully sweet tonal chord, carefully modulatinga narrow range of grays, greens, and blues. Orpheus Leading Eurydicefrom the Underworld looks forward to the artist's signature paintings, the Souvenirs and Memoires, in which Corot removes all narrative elements and lets his landscapes stand as "pure" objects.

7. Theodore Rousseau, The Great Oaks of Old Bas-Breau, 1864

8. Gustave Courbet, The Gust of Wind, 1865 • The Gust of Wind—Gustave Courbet’s largest canvas devoted solely to landscape—was commissioned to decorate a room in the grand Parisian house of the Duke de Bojano. The artist was probably asked to paint a storm, and he approached the task with ferocious energy.  • Courbet displays his entire range of technical brilliance as well as his intense personal emotion in this vivid landscape. Dark clouds loom over a panoramic view of windswept oaks that lead the eye from the craggy rock formations and pool of the foreground to the still-sunlit mountain range in the far distance. Whereas the mountains are painted with small, delicate brushstrokes, Courbet made use of the palette knife as well as the brush to create the vibrant effects of the foreground. The rocks take on a sculptural, almost three-dimensional quality thanks to the thick buildup of paint with the knife; by contrast, the tree trunks and branches are created with oily drags of a soft brush, and the leaves are rendered through vague stipple marks. • The landscape is probably a site in the Forest of Fontainebleau, a vast expanse of virtually untouched forest a short distance from Paris. Courbet's inclusion of the mountain range, which does not exist in proximity to the forest, transforms this very realistic setting into a type of fantasy.

9. Willard Leroy Metcalf, Sunlight and Shadow, 1888

10. Claude Monet, Water Lilies, 1907 • Until 1907 Monet’s water landscapes were like fragments of the pool’s surface selected by the viewfinder of a camera. With a group of vertical canvases of 1907, depicting the narrow channel of reflected light between the reflections of the willows at the western end of the pool, Monet created an entirely new kind of space. The horizontal surface of the pool has disintegrated because the waterlily islands and the reflections of trees and sky — which one knows lie on the horizontal plane of the water — read as vertical. The vertical format is like that of hanging scrolls, but the construction of space may well have derived from the study of Japanese screens, as well as from intense observation. • The scales of lavenders and violets in Waterlilies suggest cool early morning light. Monet has created a wonderful decorative harmony between these colours, the varied greens of the lilypads, and the pinks and vermilions of the waterlilies accented by sharp yellow-green and white lilies. These closely related harmonies and delicately curved linear brushstrokes slow the movement of the eye as it glides into the silvery channel of water; sinks into the illusory depths of the dark reflections; or looks down onto the surface of the pool, as if from above.

11. Thomas Hart Benton, Haystack, 1938 • In Haystack, the rhythmic swirls of paint and lyrical movement of the workers make farm life appear pastoral. The theme—man working in harmony with nature, and the landscape as a source of bounty and sustenance—presents an ideal view of the hardships that farmers endured during the Great Depression of the 1930s.Referred to as a Regionalist, Thomas Hart Benton believed that the subjects of American artists should come from the nation’s heartland. After initially absorbing the lessons of Modernism and embracing an abstract, vivid style, Benton turned in the 1920s to developing what he considered an “authentic American art,” an art that was socially responsible and never aesthetically hermetic.A solid technician in the studio, Benton pioneered a painterly technique of applying pigment with egg yolk and water, and then overlaying the surface with transparent glazes. The rich tones and sensuous surfaces of his paintings are the result of this technique and of his heavily managed brushwork, in which he picked details out of the wet surface of the paint. In Haystack, the spiraling motion implicit in the hay coiled on the central pole is echoed throughout the painting, where content and artistic process meld seamlessly as Benton weaves together sky, earth, and farmer into one holistic vision of rural life in Missouri.