Tag: Art

Amélie Beaury-Saurel and Rodolphe Julian.

Amélie Beaury-Saurel

Amélie Beaury a French painter, was actually born in Barcelona on December 17th 1848.  Her family had previously lived in Spain and Corsica before moving to the Catalan city in 1845.  Her parents, Camille Georges Beaury and Irma Catalina Saurel owned a large carpet and tapestry factory with more than twenty looms, which they called Saurell, Beaury y Compañía. Amélie was their middle child.  She had an elder sister, Irmeta, also an artist, and a younger sibling, Dolores. Amélie later added “Saurel” to her name in recognition of her mother’s family who could trace their lineage to the Byzantine emperors of the 11th century.

Portrait of the artist Jean-Paul Laurens by Amélie Beaury-Saurel (1919)

The happy family life was shattered in the late 1850s when Amélie’s father died and her mother decided to relocate with her three daughters to Paris.  Amélie recalled in an interview that she and her family lived in the French capital when she was ten years old and that her widowed mother, with little money, had to endure financial hardships.   Her mother instilled a love of art in her children and she would take them to the Louvre Museum to see the works of the Masters and encourage them to copy the works of the these great artists.

Portrait of Léonce Bénédite, curator of the Musée du Luxembourg,  by Amélie Beaury Saurel (1923)

Due to this family impoverishment, Amélie’s mother decided that her daughters should help with the financial burden and set about having them train as porcelain painting, a socially acceptable way of earning a living and eventually becoming financially independent. Amélie set to work as a painter of porcelainware but later said she considered what she was doing as commercial painting which in many ways damped down her creativity.  Her mother was very supportive of Amélie’s love of painting and, in 1874, initially paid for her nineteen-year-old daughter to study at the prestigious Académie Julian.  One of her first tutors was Pauline Coeffier, a French oil painter and pastelist, who specialized in the art of portraiture. Later many of the leading artists of the day would advise and tutor her, such as Tony Robert-Fleury, William Bouguereau, Jules Lefebvre, Benjamin-Constant, Jean-Paul Laurens and Pierre Auguste Cot.

Rodolphe Julian

The Académie Julian was founded in 1868 by Rodolphe Julian. It was a private art school for painting and sculpture.  Paris was looked upon as the capital of the art world, and the centre of modern art.  This was one reason many young aspiring painters came to the French capital to discover all the latest trends in painting, like Impressionism and Post Impressionism, decorative art of various types, new forms of representational art such as expressionism, lithography and much more. Also with having a reputation as a forward-thinking art college the Académie Julian profited from the reputation of Paris.

Chez Duval by Rodolphe Julian

Another reason for the popularity of Académie Julian was that it was the only art school in Paris to accept foreign students, many of whom struggled to pass the difficult French language exam, which was conditional on their acceptance into the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Ambitious female painters were also barred from attending the official Ecole des Beaux-Arts until 1897 and even then, it was not considered suitable for women to study life drawing.  In contrast, Académie Julian was happy to offer them a full programme of education and training to women in fine art. They were offered the same classes as men, including the drawing of nude models. In fact, the Académie was one of the few schools to admit women to life-drawing classes. In fact, one of its four new branches was actually exclusively designed for female art students.

The Académie Julian was also regarded as a stepping stone to the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts by getting them prepared for the entrance exams and at the same time offered independent alternative education and training in arts.  Aspiring artists, both men and women, were welcome at the Académie Julian.   Men and women were trained separately, and women participated in the same studies as men, including drawing and painting of nude models.  The Académie Julian had no entrance requirements, was open from 8 a.m. until nightfall, and very soon became the most popular establishment of its type. Rodolphe Julian opened several branches throughout Paris, one of them especially for female artists, and by the 1880s the student population at these establishments reached six hundred.

Female Students at the Académie Julian in Paris, c. 1885

To ensure the success of the Académie, Rodolphe gathered together well-known and esteemed artists, such as Adolphe William Bouguereau, Jean-Paul Laurens, Tony Robert-Fleury, Jules Lefebvre and other foremost painters of that time trained in Academic art, to become tutors or visiting professors.  Académie Julian became recognised as a leading art establishment and its students were allowed to compete for the Prix de Rome, a prize awarded to promising young artists, and also show their work in the major Salons or art exhibitions.

So, who was Rudolphe Julian?

Rodolphe Julian was born in Lapalud, a commune in the Vaucluse department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region in southeastern France on June 13th 1839. He worked as an employee in a bookstore in Marseille but later moved to Paris, where he became a student of Léon Cogniet and Alexandre Cabanel, professor at the École des Beaux-Arts, albeit he never officially enrolled there.  Rodolphe was well aware of the struggles of artists who looked for artistic training once they had arrived in Paris and so, in 1863 he opened his own art school, Académie Julian.

Portrait of a Woman by Amélie Beaury-Saurel

Living in Paris, Amélie was determined to increase her knowledge of art and the Académie Julian offered her the best way of achieving that goal and eventually becoming a professional portrait artist.  However this course of action had to be funded so she approached Rodolphe Julian and proposed that in return to her helping out with the administrative and financial duties of the Académie, he would allow her to attend his classes free of charge.  He agreed. Rodolphe Julian had opened a women’s workshop in 1873 and in 1895 he put Amélie in charge of it.  As well as organising the workshop she had begun a very lucrative career as a portrait artist and received many commissions.

Académie by Amélie Beaury-Saurel (1890)

In 1890, Amelie completed one of her greatest paintings entitled Académie.  The title for the work refers to the art academy which at the time prohibited female painters from joining its ranks.  Her depiction conveys the compelling message to the viewer that she was not going to allow herself to be browbeaten by the male-dominated artistic establishment and she would not conform to their dictates.  The model in the painting exudes strength and determination as she stands grasping stalks of bamboo and stares out at us, challenging us.  It can be no coincidence that Amélie has depicted her model naked and this nude pose empathises the strong and defiant attitude women embraced as artists.

Deux vaincues (Two Defeated Women) by Amélie Beaury-Saurel (1892)

Two years later in 1892 Amelie produced another defiant depiction entitled Deux vaincues (Two Defeated Women).  It is looked upon as a rallying call to all female painters to be fearless as they travel through the unwelcoming and unforgiving world of art education and artistic professionalism and the many obstacles they had to overcome.  It was a plea to female artists to not allow themselves to be defeated in the face of the obstacles they would encounter.  The sketch depicts two women, both naked, chained to a wall.  Both face similar hardships but they have fared differently.  The one with her back to us is slumped forward in a defeated pose, while the other, in contrast, stands boldly upright, unrepentant and stares out defiantly.  The painting is a challenge to all women as to whether they give in or fight on. The work was exhibited at that year’s Salon.

 Portrait de Séverine by Amélie Beaury-Saurel (1893)

In 1893 Amelie completed a portrait of Caroline Rémy de Guebhard. She was a French journalist who held strong non-conformist views which labelled her as an anarchist, socialist, and communist.   She also was a great believer in feminist’s rights and opinions and this no doubt drew Amelie to paint the portrait.   Caroline Rémy de Guebhard would use the pen name Séverine, derived from the Latin severus which means “rigorous” or “brave”, for many of her newspaper articles.  When we look at the portrait, our eyes are immediately drawn to the vivid red flower on the sash of her dress.  The flower symbolizes Séverine’s leftist political views.  Look at her facial expression.  It is one that exudes strength, determination and tells you that this lady will not be moved.  Amelie’s ability as a great portraitist is borne out in this beautiful work.

Séverine by Renoir (c.1885)

A portrait of Caroline Rémy de Guebhard was also complted around 1885 by Renoir. It is in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Washington.

Dans le bleu by Amélie Beaury-Saurel (1894)

One of my favourite works by Amelie is her 1894 painting entitled Dans le bleu.  It is a pastel on canvas which depicts a young woman waking up in the morning and indulging in the gratification of smoking that first cigarette.  However that is not the point of the depiction.  It is all about feminist assertions. In this painting, we see a woman depicted in profile, boldly treating herself to the pleasures of escapism. It is a depiction of defiance as women at this time were not seen smoking, especially not in public.  It was a habit that was counter to the feminine conceptions of the time.  We should remember that Amélie Beaury-Saurel had dedicated a large part of her work to the female model and had always maintained the feminist cause.  She supported the right to arts education and artist status for women.  In 1894 when she was working on this painting her reputation in Paris as an artist was at its highest point and her paintings were exhibited all over the French capital.

The background of the work is very dark, predominantly blue and this allows the figure stand out in the work.   It is hard to know whether the scene takes place in a private dwelling such as a kitchen or a living room or whether the setting was in a public place, such as a café.  The woman in the depiction sits smoking a cigarette, chin in hand.  She appears to be daydreaming. She seems preoccupied as she watches the blue smoke unfurl from her lips, drifting upward. What is she thinking about?  Would she, like the smoke, like to drift away?  Some have suggested this might be a Beaury-Saurel self-portrait, as the model resembles the artist.  The depiction is simple and realistic and in no way staged.  Amelie’s depiction is all about everyday reality and is without any hint of idealization which would have weakened the work and it is this simplicity that has added to the beauty of the depiction and has expressed the woman’s femininity.

Our Girl Scouts by Amelie Beaury-Saurel

In this painting by Amelie, the seven women are represented in a compact group, around a table with a pile of books. On the left, holding his handlebars in his hand gloved, the Belgian cycling champion, Hélène Dutrieu; next to her, holding a paintbrush, the publisher Anna-Catherine Strebinger (Madame Henri Rochefort) who was also a student at the Académie Julian; then the collector Marguerite Roussel looks at the viewer; in the center, in professional attire and pointing to an article in a code, the lawyer Suzanne Grinberg, an eminent member of the French Union for the women’s suffrage, created in 1909; leaning on her, in the outfit that she had adopted to travel safely to the Middle East, archaeologist and explorer Jane Magre-Dieulafoy. Then comes the novelist and journalist Lucie Delarue-Mardrus and aviator Elise Deroche, First woman to obtain a pilot’s license.

After Lunch by Amelie Beaury-Saurel (1899)

In 1895, Amélie Beaury-Saurel, married Rodolphe Julian and he put her in charge of the women’s workshops which he had started in 1873.  Amélie managed the expenses for the women’s studio, served as an intermediary between instructors and students, and ran the women’s group but also continued her career as a portraitist. She earned a medal for her submissions to the 1885 Paris Salon and the bronze medal at the 1889 Exposition Universelle. 

Chateau Julian, Lapalud

Rodolphe Julian died on February 2nd 1907, aged 67, and two months later on April 10th, Amelie’s mother died.  Following the death of Julian, Amelie took on the role of director of the Académie Julian.  This was a mammoth task and so she received help from her nephews Gibert and Jacques Dupuis, the children of her sister Dolores.  Rodolphe Julian had bought a large house in the village of Lapalud, where he was born and on his death they were bequeathed to his nephews.  Amelie bought this large property from her nephews and transformed it to accommodate her family. It was called the “Mas” Julian.

Amélie Beaury-Saurel

During her last years, Amélie continued to paint but also fought for women’s rights and supported women artists and their fight against male-dominated art circles.  She participated in solidarity exhibitions for the benefit of institutions such as the Société des Artistes Français, the Société Nationale des Beaux- Arts or the Fraternité des Artistes.  Such commitment to the promotion of art and her endless creative activity were recognized in 1923, a year before her death, through her appointment as Chevalier de la Légiond’honneur.   

Amélie Beaury Saurel died on May 30th 1924 aged 75 at he Paris home which she had once shared with her late mother and sisters.

Information for this blog came from the ususal search engines plus:

Aware Women Artists

Elles-d-artistes blogspot

Musings on Art

Ville de Lapalud

The Funen Painters. Part 2.

Peter Syrak Hansen and his family.

Following the last blog regarding the early members of the Funen artists, this blog looks at some of the younger members and how they were often connected.

Peter Syrak Hansen

One of the leading figures of the Funen painters was Peter Syrak Hansen and it was his home and workshop, Mesterhuset, which became a cultural meeting place for the Funen painters. Syrak Hansen was born in Swanninge, a Danish village on South Funen, on September 10th 1853. He trained as a decorative painter at the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen under George Hinkler.

The Double Portrait of Count Preben Bille-Braheand his second wife Johanne Caroline neé Falbe by Christoffer Eckersberg (1817)

After qualifying Syrak received many decorative work commissions in South Funen’s to decorate manor houses and churches. He was also given funds by the prominent and wealthy art collector and art patron, Count Bille-Brahe of Hvedholm, and continued his artistic studies in Germany, Austria and France, where he concentrated on studying church decorations. Following his European travels, he later settled down as a master painter and decorative painter in Faaborg in southern Funen and based himself in the building, which became known as the Mesterhuset. He bought Mesterhuset, situated at Lagonis Minde 7 in 1875, and he became a sought-after decorative painter working primarily in churches and manor houses on South Funen.

Sonnige Strandansicht by Peter Syrak Hansen

Syrak Hansen became so busy with all the commissions he received he had to look for some help and he hired a journeyman painter. The painter was Fritz Syberg who worked with Syrak in his workshop from 1882. It was here that Fritz Syberg got to know his future wives, Anna and Marie Hansen.

Faarborg Harbour by Karl Schou (1917)

Syrak Hansen married Marie Birgitte née Rasmussen and he and his wife had five children.  Marie Hansen, the eldest, was born in 1865 and became a parliamentary stenographer whose first husband was the painter Karl Schou. Schou was born in Copenhagen in 1870. After normal schooling he became a student at Valdemar Sichelkow’s painting school from 1884 to 1886 and then studied under Malthe Engelsted at The National Drawing Teacher Course, Copenhagen from 1886 to 1887, Finally he attended  Kristian Zahrtmann’s School from 1887 to 1900. During those three years at Zahrtmann’s school he became friends with the Funen painters.

Three persons in conversation at an evening party by Hans Nikolaj Syrak Hansen (1903)

A year after the birth of their first child, Marie Hansen gave birth to their first son, Hans Nikolaj Syrak Hansen who became apprenticed to his father. Hans attended Zahrtmann’s School in Copenhagen from about 1885 to the spring of 1887, but he had to give up his art studies and return home in order to take over the painting company from his father in 1891.

The Hay on the Meadow, South Funen by Peter Hansen

Syrak and Marie Hansen’s third child, their second son, Peter Marius Hansen was born on May 13th 1868. He attended the Copenhagen Technical School before studying under Kristian Zahrtmann at the Kunstnernes Frie Studieskoler between 1884 and 1890. 

Double portrait of two children. The artist’s stepdaughters by Peter Hansen (1889)

Peter Hansen married Elisa Nikoline, who had previously been married to an engineer, Ludvig Conrad Neckelmann, whom she divorced. In 1898, shortly after the divorce, Peter and Elise married. Ludvig and his wife, Elisa, had had two daughters, Marie Christine and Elizabeth and Peter completed a double portrait of his stepchildren.

By the window. Double portrait of the artist’s daughter, Elena and stepdaughter, Marie Christine by Peter Hansen (1902)

Peter and Elisa went on to have their own two daughters, Elena Italia in 1899 and Anna Margrethe in 1906. In 1902 Hansen completed a double portrait of his twenty-year-old elder stepdaughter, Marie Christine and his own three-year-old child Elena Italia.

The Ploughman Turns by Peter Hansen (1902)

Peter Marius Hansen belonged to the group of Danish painters who were called the Funen Painters, since they came from and mainly worked on the island of Funen.  One of the important qualities Peter displayed was his respect for the steadily, busily working human being and he made it a key motif in his art. For him the Peasant was the epitome of this ideal, when he would depict local Danish farmers and the mountain farmers from around the Danish artists’ colony in the Italian village of Cività d’Antino in Abruzzi.

Fritz Syberg self portrait (1910)

Christian Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Syberg, generally known as Fritz Syberg, was born on July 28th 1862, in Faaborg.  He came from a poor background and was first apprenticed as a house painter under Syrak Hansen.  From there, in 1882, he attended the Copenhagen Technical School where Holger Grønvold taught him drawing. In the Spring of 1884 he enrolled for a short period at the Danish Academy but then attended the Kunstnernes Frie Studieskoler  where he became one of the first Fynboerne, along with Peter Hansen, Johannes Larsen, and Poul S. Christiansen to study under Kristian Zahrtmann.

Dodsfald (Death) by Fritz Syberg (1881)

In the early 1890s may of Syberg’s paintings were dark and this can be seen in his 1892 work entitled Dodsfald (Death) which depicts his mother, Johanne Marie, on her death bed in 1881 in the Fåborg’s poorhouse.

Fritz Syberg “Jeg vil synge dem alle, alle!, sagde Moderen” (1898). Illustration for Hans Christian Andersen’s Historien om en moder. (I will sing them all, all of them!, said the mother) (1898). Illustration for Hans Christian Andersen’s The Story of a Mother by Fritz Syberg

In addition to the sale of his paintings, Syberg accepted many book illustration commissions, the most famous being his depictions for Hans Christian Andersen’s tragic tale, The Story of a Mother, which no doubt, Syberg could relate to his own childhood.  These depictions became one of the most celebrated collections of illustrations in Denmark’s history.

Spring by Fritz Syberg

Watching Birds on the Windowsill by Fritz Syberg

Having struck up a close friendship with Syrak Hansen’s daughter Anna whilst working as Syrak’s apprentice, their friendship turned to love and the couple married in 1894. The couple went on to have seven children.   In the 1890s and the early decade of the twentieth century Fritz Syberg made a number of trips to other European countries such as Italy, The Netherlands, Germany and France, sometimes with his family.. 

Anna Syberg by her husband Fritz Syberg (1896)

Syrak and Marie Brigitte Hansen had their fourth child, a second daughter, Anna Louise Birgitte Hansen in January 1870 and she, like her brother Peter, became part of the Funen painters. Anna Syberg grew up amidst a very colourful and energetic artistic environment that differed from ordinary middle-class conventions. Her father, Peter Syrak Hansen, was a master painter, and a renowned figure in the town of Faaborg.  Fortunately for Anna, her parents believed that education was of prime importance to both their daughters as well as their sons.

Crocus, Hyacinths and Tulips by Anna Syberg (1898)

Anna loved to learn and one of her favourite pastimes was decorative painting.  In 1884 she enrolled on a two-year course at a technical school in Faaborg, and in 1889 she was receiving tuition in Copenhagen from the sculptor Ludvig Brandstrup and the painter Karl Jensen. Her artistic education was topped off when she received singing lessons, learnt to play the piano to a high standard and learnt to sing lieder and Danish songs.

Wild Roses by Anna Syberg (1898)

Anna Syberg became a key figure in the Funen Painters artists’ colony.  Her paintings, other than a few figure scenes, depicted flowers and plants, often in the vases and pots around her home, or in her garden and ones she saw when out walking in the countryside. She worked mainly in watercolours, using multiple layers that would often include sketched lines of pencil, transparent layers of watercolour and black ink contours ensuring the depiction of the floral was of the utmost accuracy.

Grapes in the Greenhouse by Anna Syberg (1903)

The subject of her depictions were often of stage-managed as she experimented with the floral arrangements.  In many of her works she would often let the depiction of her flowers and plants extend beyond the edge of the paper in a form of dynamic cropping.  Her floral painting were neither symbolic nor botanical studies.  In Anna Syberg’s pictures, flowers are not charged with symbolic significance, nor are they stringently restrained botanical studies with all its scientific accuracy. In her works, Anna Syberg portrays the simple beauty of the flowers, a testament to their beauty. In 1894 Anna Hansen married Fritz Syberg.

Fritz and Anna Syberg

So this life as a Funen painter amongst family and friends was to be part of much loved idyllic lifestyle for Anna Syberg.  What could possibly interrupt this peaceful and fulfilling way of life?   And yet………..

At the turn of the century in Denmark, like many other European countries and those across the other side of the Atlantic, the stature of women in art, and even in life itself, was continually being questioned by men.  For many men, including even some fellow artists, women simply painted as a hobby or to add to their social graces but for women in the early 1900s practicing art was problematic.  For Anna it was one thing to be a talented artist, it was another thing to have the same respect bestowed upon her for her work as that of the men.  Things came to a head in Faarborg when the town got their own museum and paintings had to be selected for display in the museum.

Mads Rasmussen

Mads Rasmussen, an important businessman in Faaborg, and his wife Kristine, held a party one evening and among the guests were the Funen Painters’ inner circle including amongst others Fritz Syberg, Peter Hansen and Jens Birkholm. Together with Johannes Larsen they were all to become part of the Museum’s purchasing committee which, in turn, came to act as the steering group for the Museum’s acquisitions, their curation and the fixtures and fittings for the gallery.  It was very unusual that the “money man” would let a group of artists dictate as to what works were to fill the gallery.

Artists hanging their works in the galleries of Faaborg Museum, May 1915. From the left: Peter Hansen, Peter Tom-Petersen, Johannes Larsen, Astrid Noack, Nicolaus Lützhøft, Christian Ernlund, Carl Petersen og Fritz Syberg.

Here was the problem – the purchasing committee for Faaborg Museum, made up of the Funen painters, were all  male artists from the group, and they didn’t believe in the quality of the works produced by the female members of the group. In the minutes of the meetings of the purchasing group, comments were recorded stating that

“…At the negotiations, Peter Hansen and Birkholm wanted to be recorded in the minutes that they voted against the acceptance of Mrs. A.(Alhed) Larsen and Miss Christine Larsen’s works. Peter Hansen also against Mrs. Syberg…”

Also in the minutes, Peter Hansen, Anna’s elder brother, noted:

“…AS (Anna Syberg) and the other ladies had no significance for Danish art…”

Gallery at the Faarborg Museum

No reasoning was ever recorded as to why they thought so little of the works of the female Funen painters but the damage was done.   Presumably, one has to recognise that at that time there was generally a reluctance for women to be able to produce an artistic work. The one thing to remember also is that flower painting traditionally had a lower rank in the art world and this could have been in the minds of the male purchasing committee.

Anna was horrified that her own brother would critique her work so harshly and the rift between siblings became bitter.  She wrote to her brother Peter:

“…Where you create yourself. You voted against me at the Faaborg Museum based on high idealistic notions of safeguarding the best interests of art in Denmark. “You did not want to hide from me”, you wrote that I and the other ladies had no significance for Danish art…”

Faaborg Museum Inauguration (1910) by Peter Hansen

Anna Syberg is not in the picture of the artist group Fynbomalerne, despite her being a central part of the group. She should have supposedly sat on the empty chair in the bottom right corner.

The empty chair.

During the heated exchanges between Anna and Peter, he was working on a painting depicting the inauguration of the Faarborg Museum. The depiction was supposed to pay tribute to a group of artists who were both well-known and acclaimed painters. Anna Syberg’s outburst of anger over the words of her brother and members of the purchasing committee came while her brother was working on the painting, and it is believed that he deliberately chose not to paint his sister as part of the group and yet, to rub salt into the wounds, he provocatively indicated her absence with the empty chair, despite her being present at the inauguration and was said to have sat tanned and dressed in festive clothes with a large hat in the front row of the group. All the other female artists in the group are in the painting.

Anna Syberg (née Hansen) 1870-1914

Anne Syberg died on July 4th 1914 following a failed operation to treat a gallbladder infection.  She was just forty-four years of age.  Sadly the recognition she deserved as a gifted artist never came until after her death.  In 1915 a retrospective of her art was held and it was a success, and sales were high, including Faaborg Museum which purchased sixteen of her works. quite central in the country. After her death, Fritz Syberg married Anna’s elder sister Marie who he had known since the days of working for is father-in-law.

In 1873 Syrak Hansen’s youngest child, Poul Gerhardt, was born.  He did not follow his siblings into the world of art. He was married to Dagmar and the couple had two children: Helga and Louise.  Poul is believed to have died at the young age of 33 in 1906.

I could not have put together the two blogs about the Funen painters without the information I gleaned from various websites:

The Beauty of the Moment

Faarborg Museum

DR

The Hirschsprung Collection

arkivdk

The Funen Painters (Fynboerne)

The term Artists’ Colonies defines gatherings of artists in towns, villages and rural areas, who have assembled at places of natural beauty and where the cost of living is less than that of city life.  In the latter part of the nineteenth century, art colonies began to spring up as village movements with thousands of professional artists taking part in a mass exodus away from urban centres and heading for the idyllic countryside where they resided for varying lengths of time in artistic communities. Art colonies appeared on both sides of the Atlantic, forming on both the East and West coasts of America.  Many were also established in Europe such as Barbizon on the outskirts of Paris, Pont Aven in Brittany, Worpswede in Germany, Giverny in the northern French department of Eure, Lamorna and St Ives in Cornwall and the Newlyn School to name just a few.  Denmark had two important art colonies.  One was in Skagen in the north of the country, which I have written about on a number of occasions and the other was on the Danish Island of Funen.  In the following blogs I want to look at the Funen Art Colony and the artists who founded it and others who came later and were part of this artistic movement.

Self portrait by Kristian Zahrtmann (1915)

The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts was founded in 1754 and was the dominating force in the teaching of art to aspiring painters in that country.  In the first half of the nineteenth century during the era of the great Danish painting, Christoffer Eckersberg “ruled”, and the period became known as the Golden Age of Danish Painting.  At the centre of this movement was Copenhagen which although it had experienced fires, bombardment and national bankruptcy, the arts took on a new period of inspiration brought about by Romanticism, the dominant intellectual movement of German-speaking countries in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.  However, many artists began to rebel against the outdated way art was taught at the Academy and its policies. They wanted an alternative and this came in the form of  the Kunstnernes Frie Studieskoler, (Artists Studio School) an art school established in Copenhagen in 1882.  It became the central institution of the Modern Breakthrough in Danish art, the name given to the strong movement of naturalism and debating literature of Scandinavia which replaced Romanticism near the end of the 19th century.  Laurits Tuxen became the school’s first director and Peder Severin Krøyer one of its teachers.

The Funen Painters

One hundred years ago an exhibition took place when the Faaborg Museum building opened its doors back in 1915, the Funen artists curated their own work, as the Museum had been conceived and built solely to show their ‘home-grown’ art. In 1915 gallery convention required that paintings were hung closely together and so there was space for the 366 paintings, sculptures and drawings, which had been purchased by the Museum from 1910-15. The entrepreneur Mads Rasmussen had the idea for a museum to showcase work by the Funen artists and he set up a purchasing committee composed of artists which had free rein to select work

The Funen Painters group, similar to other artists’ colonies in the late 1800s, searched for an alternative to city life by setting up a colony which was not just about painting but also a new lifestyle. Their aim was to connect their art with the countryside and the everyday life of the rural community which they believed created an overall vision for a ‘lifestyle’ reflecting their artistic ideals.

An oil painting recreating the frivolous court of Christian VII by Kristian Zahrtmann

In 1884 a preparatory class was added to the Kunstnernes Frie Studieskoler and in 1885 Kristian Zahrtmann became the head and, under him, it developed into an independent department.  Zahrtmann’s school became more avant-garde and innovative, due to his calls for radical experiments and strong use of colours.  By 1893 the preparatory class, which under his leadership,  turned into an independent department. He had some two hundred students from the Scandinavian countries and because of his stature as a teacher, the school was often simply referred to as “Zahrtmann’s School“.

A Family under Lamplight by Kristian Zahrtmann (1890)

Many of Zahrtmann’s students formed a group of painters who became known as Fynboerne (Funen Painters) due to their attachment to the island of Funen. His students included Peter Hansen, Fritz Syberg, Poul S. Christiansen, Johannes Larsen and Oluf Hartmann; and modern painters Karl Isakson; Edvard Weie, Harald Giersing and Olaf Rude. Zahrtmann travelled through Europe many times and his favourite country was Italy.

Piazza Santa Maria i Civita d´Antino by Kristian Zahrtmann (1904)

In June 1883, which was a very hot summer in Europe, Kristian Zahrtmann, travelled to the mountain town of Civita D’Antino in Italy, in search of cool temperatures as well as his love of good wine, and on the first afternoon in the town he decided that here was the ideal place for his summer painting school. His enduring fondness for Civita D’Antino lasted nearly 30 years and between 1890 and 1911 he spent every summer in the town living with the Cerroni family and gathering friends and students in an annual artist colony. He was named an honorary citizen of the town in 1902. This culminated in a vast production of portraits, landscapes, and scenes depicting an idyllic daily lifestyle around the mountain communit. His paintings are distinguished particularly by their realism and bold colour.

Johannes Larson, self portrait (1910)

Winter Day at the Zoo by Johannes Larson (1891)

One of the leading members of the Funen painters’ group was Johannes Larsen who was born in Kerteminde on the island of Funen on December 27th 1867. He was the son of Jeppe Andreas Larsen, a merchant and Vilhelmine Christine Bless.  During the 1880s, after regular schooling, Johannes studied art at the Free School in Copenhagen under Kristian Zahrtmann. It was whilst studying here that he met a number of aspiring painters who lived on Funen, notably Fritz Syberg and Peter Marius Hansen both of whom came from the southern port of Faaborg.  It was the coming together of these young artists that morphed into the Funen Painters group (Fynboerne).  Later they would create an art colony which would galvanise many Danish and Swedish artists to paint and exhibit their work.

Summer Sunshine and Wind by Johannes Larsen (1899)

After completing his studies with Kristian Zahrtmann, Johannes Larsen returned back home to his native Funen town of Kerteminde where he continued to paint working in oils, watercolour, woodcuts and drawing.  His depictions featured landscapes and other open-air scenes, and often included birds.  He received many commissions to illustrate books and paint large paintings for public buildings

The Garden House with Blossoming Cherries by Alhed Maria Larsen (c.1920s)

In 1898, Johannes married the painter Alhed Maria Warberg.  She played a central role within the Funen Painters group and would often have the role as hostess at their events.

Alhed Larsen

Alhed Larsen was born on April 7th 1872.  She was the second eldest of eight children, Laura Maria and Albrecht Christopher Warberg.  She had six sisters and one brother.   Her father was the estate manager for a very large farmstead, Erikshåb, and he had an office help, a teacher for the children and six servants.  Alhed grew up in well-to-do circumstances on the estate.  It was said that the seven sisters would often shock the bourgeoisie neighbours by walking around the streets of the town without wearing gloves and by using newfangled bicycles !  Many young painters would gather at the farmstead and soon Alhed began to learn to paint and was guided by the painter, Fritz Syberg.  Later it was the task of her husband, Johannes Larsen to take the role of her artistic mentor.  Peter Hansen joined the group along with his sister Anna and Maria and Johannes’ sister Christine and it was Alhed who had the role of unifying these painters of Funen.

Beach Leaves in the Window, Båxhult by Alhed Larson (1927)

When she was seventeen, Alhed went to Copenhagen and lived with her maternal uncle, the sculptor, Ludvig Brandstrup.  Between 1890 and 1893. In 1893, Alhed worked at the Royal Porcelain Factory with underglaze painting, at the same time as she received drawing lessons from her maternal uncle.  In late 1893 she travelled to Italy with the Brandstrup family and during that long holiday she managed to master the Italian language.  Back home at Erikshåb she formed a close and romantic relationship with Johannes Larsen but her parents were not happy with the prospect of their daughter marrying an impoverished artist.  She finally overcame her parent’s reluctance to have Larson as their son-in-law and in 1898 the couple married and settled in Kerteminde. Three years after the wedding the couple had a new home built on Møllebakken, on the coastal slope on the outskirts of the town.   Alhed decided that she was not satisfied with simply being the wife of an artist and decided that she wanted to become a professional artist as well.

Rhododendrons by Alhed Larson

Alhed Larsen’s artwork primarily depicted flowers, still life, interiors and window views. In 1917, Alhed and Johannes’ house was expanded with a large studio added, spacious enough for each to have their own studio space.

Møllebakken home of Alhed and Johannes Larson

Between 1901 and 1902, the couple built their home on Møllebakken in Kerteminde. Their home became the gathering place in summer months for many painters, particularly younger artists from Zahrtmann’s school.

Landscape with birds by Johannes Larsen (1946)

The Funen painters guiding principle was to encourage plein air painting, not just sketching but painting, notwithstanding the weather. Following this principle led to paintings having a fresh purity and energy which was missing from studio painting. Their works were appreciated by the public and became very popular, so much so that the Symbolist painters of the time attacked their style and in 1907 in the midst of a newspaper debate on Danish art, the Symbolists derogatively called them “farmer painters”.  Instead of being browbeaten by this tirade the artist gained greater recognition.

Birds flying over a landscape by Johannes Larson (1929?)

A turning point for the group came in 1910 when businessman Mads Rasmussen, who operated a successful cooperative canning factory in Faaborg, proposed to help the group by creating a museum next to his canning factory at Møllebakken in Kerteminde. which would promote and exhibit Funish Art. This made it possible for the public to view and buy their paintings which gave the Funen artists financial support. Johannes and Alhed Larsen lived almost their entire lives at Møllebakken.

In the autumn of 2006, a sculpture by the city’s two great artists, Johannes Larsen (1867-1961) and Fritz Syberg (1862-1939), was unveiled on Nordre Kirkerist, Kerteminde, next to the parish church, executed by local sculptor Bjørn Nordahl.

Johannes Larsen is looked upon as one of the greatest painters of birds and a knowledgeable pictorial storyteller of nature. His knowledge, his role as a conservationist and his beautiful artwork earned him an honorary membership of the Danish Society for Nature Conservation. At the age of 92, he was named president of the Wildlife Foundation established by the prime minister’s department.

………to be continued.

Hungarian Artists. Part 2.

Károly Ferenczy and the family

In this blog I am looking at the lives and works of a talented Hungarian family of painters.

Károly Ferenczy

Károly Ferenczy

Károly Ferenczy is considered one of the most important pioneers of Hungarian Modernism,    He was the son of Ida Graenzenstein and the Austrian railway construction official Karel Freund, who moved to Budapest with the construction company. Ferenczy was born in Vienna on February 8th 1862 and soon after his birth, his mother died.

Boys throwing Stones by Károly Ferenczy (1890)

Boys Throwing Stones was a major work completed by Ferenczy in 1890, whilst he was living in the River Danube town of Szentendre, having returned from Paris and his studies at the Académie Julian.  The setting is a barren landscape which had a sense of melancholia to the work and adds a gloomy backdrop to the three boys throwing stones into the river.  There is not one bright spot of colour and it is the shades of the pearly grey which he used for the water that lightens the rest of the dull earthly colours.

In Front of the Posters by Károly Ferenczy (1891)

Károly Ferenczy first studied law and completed his economics degree at the University of Vienna. In 1885 Ferencszy married a fellow artist and distant cousin, Olga Fialka who was twelve years older than him.  She studied painting under Jan Matejko in Kraków and went on to study under August Eisenmenger in Vienna. She was known for her paintings and book illustrations.

Portrait of Artist’s Wife by Károly Ferenczy (1891)

After she married Károly Ferenczy, the couple went on to have three children. With the birth of the children, Fialka turned her attention away from her art and focused on looking after the family.  The couple’s first child Valér Ferenczy, who was born in 1885, became a painter and printmaker. In 1890 Olga gave birth to twins, Béni Ferenczy, who went on to became a famous sculptor and Noémi Ferenczy, who became an equally well-known textile artist.

Triple Portrait by Károly Ferenczy (1911)

Károly Ferenczy‘s three children, his son Valér, painter and graphic artist, and the twins Béni , painter and graphic artist and Noémi, a painter who established tapestry in Hungary.

Noémi with Let-down Hair by Károly Ferenczy (1903)

In 1885 Károly enrolled at the Art Academy of Naples (Accademia di Belle Arti), but the following year moved to Munich. Ferenczy studied art in Budapest at the Academy of Fine Arts where his Hungarian tutors were Bertalan Székely the history and portrait painter who worked in the Romantic and Academic styles. and Gyula Benczúr who specialized in portraits and historical scenes. Benczúr is now looked upon as the greatest Hungarian masters of “historicism”, a term used to encompass artistic styles that draw their inspiration from recreating historic styles or imitating the work of historic artists and artisans. Ferencszy was living in Hungry at a period when the country was undergoing a cultural renaissance, and Ferenczy became part of a generation of artists eager to explore new artistic ideas and break away from academic conventions.

Birdsong by Károly Ferenczy (1893)

Károly Ferenczy became interested in plein air painting when he was studying in Munich.  One of is most famous works at that time was entitled Birdsong which he completed in 1893.   Unlike other realist depiction Ferenczy’s depiction is free from details. The random appearance of impressionism in details of nature and capturing atmospheres, lights and colours hastily painted could not be more unusual for him.   He spent much time working out the composition of the work and the solitary figure in the depiction is a woman, dressed in red, embracing the trunk of the tree, gazing upwards as she listens to the melodic tones of a bird in full song.  The forest is symbolized by white trunks of birch-trees and the green of the leaves.

On the Hill Top by Károly Ferenczy (1901)

In 1889, at the age of twenty-seven, Ferenczy travelled to Munich, where he first came aware of western European artistic styles such as Impressionism and the plein air works of the Barbizon School artists.  It was the works of this latter group which led Ferencszy to explore plein air painting and the effects of light on the landscape. His greatest influences were that of the French painters, particularly Édouard Manet and Camille Pissarro, and they stimulated his change of artistic direction towards a more liberated and expressive style.

Gardeners by Károly Ferenczy (1891)

Ferenczy completed Gardeners whilst living at Szentendre. The way he puts the painting together with the use of lighting, colours and details follow the ethos of Naturalism. It is typical of him to see that the space is limited. There are two figures, one of the old gardener and the other the young boy who is standing next to him in front of a light background. How Ferenczy managed the arrangement of his two figures and the balance between light and dark colours demonstrate his appreciation of decoration which were a constant throughout his career as a painter.  Gardeners is considered to be a major picture of Ferenczy’s early period and highlights his skills as an artist at the beginning of his career.

Simon Hollósy. Self-portrait, 1916

Between 1893 and 1896 he lived in Munich with his family. There he joined the circle of Simon Hollósy, a Hungarian painter who, as a young man, had moved to the German city because there was no academy of fine arts in Hungary at that time.  However, he was critical of the way art was taught at the German Academy which was strongly based on copying classical models. He left the Munich Academy and set up his own private school where he gave free classes.  His way of teaching art appealed to many young talents who were interested in realistic portrayal of their subjects.  Simon Hollósy was persuaded by some of his friends and pupils to re-locate his class in the summer of 1896 to Nagybánya, which is now Baia Mare, Romania.  He agreed and it was that new location that led to the founding of the Nagybánya artists’ colony, of which, Károly Ferenczy was one of the founding members. Nagybánya was an idyllic rural location and was the perfect place for plein air painting. It was the artists at this colony who played an important role in introducing Impressionism and Post-impressionism.

Sermon on the Mount by Károly Ferenczy (1896)

In his later years, Ferenczy painted subjects ranging from portraits, to nudes, and Biblical scenes.  Ferenczy was highly productive, and he worked in a variety of materials and genres. In November 2011, a major retrospective exhibition opened for six months at the Hungarian National Gallery, featuring nearly 150 paintings and 80 prints and drawings, together with about 50 documents (photographs, letters, catalogues and books) related to his art and life. Sadly, Károly Ferenczy’s life and prolific career were cut short by illness. He succumbed to pneumonia on March 18th, 1917, at the age of 55.

Olga Fialka

Béni Ferenczy  by his mother, Olga Fialka (1892)

Károly Ferenczy was just one part of a talented artistic family.  In 1885 he married Olga Fialka, who on her mother’s side was a relative of his, whom he met for the second time in 1884.  Olga had developed a love of art as a teenager and had family support for her desire to become a professional artist.  She studied art in Krakow under Jan Matejko, a Polish painter, and leading 19th-century exponent of history painting, known for his depictions of events from Polish history.  She then went to Vienna and attended the Academy of Fine Arts under the tutelage of August Eisenmenger, a portrait and historical painter. 

The Fialka Family by Olga Fialka (1874)

In the painting entitled The Fialka Family, Olga depicts her family taking coffee in a simple, bourgeois interior. At the head of the table is her mother, Karoline, and beside her stands her younger sister, Milada von Fialka. One of the two male family members is perhaps Károly Fialka.  If you look carefully at the right background, you can just make out a woman painting and this is thought to be Olga herself. The picture is a combination of the common interior genre and the group portrait. What differentiates this work from other contemporary genre painting of the time is that the interrelationship of the four figures comes not from a purported story line, but from a simple everyday conversation between family members and does not have the sense of a rigid group portrait. One can believe that Olga has simply conjured up a snapshot of an everyday scene.

Valér Ferenczy

Self Portrait by Valér Ferenczy

Valér Ferenczy was born on November 22nd 1885 in Kremnica, Slovakia.  He was the eldest son of Károly Ferenczy and Olga Fialka Ferenczy.  The family moved to Baia Mare in 1898, where Valér began his artistic tuition given to him by his parents in his father’s studio.  Between 1896 and 1901 he was enrolled at the Hollósy School in Baia Mare.  Between 1902 and 1906 he attended the drawing and painting courses held in the Free School of Painting and at the same time he also travelled abroad and attended various European academies of art.  In 1903 he studied at the Munich Academy before going on to the private school of the German secessionist painter, Lovis Corinth, in Berlin through 1904 and 1905.  From Munich he travelled to Paris where he attended the Colarossi School and later the Julian Academy in 1906.Between 1911 and 1912 he returned home and studied at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts.

Nude by Valér Ferenczy

In 1914 Valér returned to the French capital to study the technique of engraving with Orville Houghton Peets, the American painter and printmaker.

The Artist’s Mother by Valér Ferenczy

Valér applied for and was granted Romanian citizenship in 1919 and two years later married painter Eta Sárossy in 1921.

Valér Ferenczy died in Budapest on December 23rd 1954, aged 69.

Eta Sárossy

Eta Sárossy in her studio (1923)

Her father was Barnabás Sárosi, who was a sergeant in the Imperial and Royal 15th Hussar Regiment, and her mother Maria (Irma) was from Moldova. She grew up in Szilágysomlyó and graduated from high school there. From 1920 she studied painting at the free school in Baia Mare, for three years. 

Fire Flowers by Eta Sárossy

Young Man with a Tennis Racket by Eta Sárossy (1933)

Eta’s marriage to Valér ended in 1929 and she remarried the following year.  She regularly exhibited her work and was a founding member of the National Salon. Initially she painted landscapes, then studied portrait painting with the Hungarian painter, Oszkar Glatz, at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts.

Béni Ferenczy

Béni Ferenczy by Kaoly Ferenczy (1912)

On June 18th 1890 Karoly Ferenczy’s wife Olga gave birth to twins, Béni and Noémi. Béni was the second son of Karoly and Olga Ferenczy. As a young man, Béni followed in the footsteps of his elder brother Valér and father Karoly and went to study art in both Munich and Paris.  During his stay in the French capital, he studied under both the French sculptor, Antoine Bourdelle at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and the Ukranian sculptor Alexander Archipenko, a resident in La Ruche, an artist’s residence in the Montparnasse district of Paris.

Béni Ferenczy carving his statue Hercules. (Nagybánya, 1916)

Once he had completed his studies abroad, he returned to Hungary and lived in Budapest.  Béni was swept up by the short-lived (March to August 1919) Hungarian Commune described as a “genuine, grandiose, albeit unfinished revolution”.  He played his part in it by becoming one of the leading artists to instigate a reform of the national art scene and the setting up of a new art programme for the Hungarian nation.  After the fall of the Hungarian Commune in 1919 which only lasted 133 days, Béni exiled himself to Nagybánya in annexed Transylvania, and from there, in 1921, travelled via Czechoslovakia to Vienna and that summer he settled down in the Austrian capital.

Danae by Béni Ferenczy (1934)

The Pair by Béni Ferenczy

Béni arrived in Vienna in 1921 and married an Austrian lady and the couple had a son and daughter. He and his wife went to live in Berlin and Potsdam but found the cost of living too high and so returned to Vienna. His marriage ended in divorce and in 1932, he moved to Moscow, where he married a second time.  His bride was Erzsi (Elizabeth), a Hungarian, who had also spent her childhood in Nagybánya. From Moscow they moved to Vienna in 1936 and on to Budapest in 1938. Erzsi, beautiful, strong, full-bodied, and full of life, became the model for many of his sculptures, drawings and watercolours. Erzsi became his close companion, an inspiration for his work.  After her husband’s death in 1967, Erzsi Ferenczy worked to preserve his work and memory.  

The Ferenczy Museum in Szentendre

In 1972, Erzsi Ferenczy founded the Ferenczy Museum in Szentendre, with a large art collection that included works by each member of the family. In 1993, Erzsi established the Ferenczy Family Foundation. She died in 2000 at the age of 96.

Noémi Ferenczy

Béni and Noémi Ferenczy

Noémi and her twin brother Béni were born to Karoly and Olga Ferenczy on June 18th 1890. Noémi, like her twin brother, first began to practice art in her father’s studio and often visited the artists’ colony in Baia Mare.  In 1911 she went to Paris and learned tapestry weaving at the Manufacture des Gobelins but was largely self-taught. Contrary to common practice, she not only designed her creations, but also made them herself. She wove her paintings on cardboard using woollen yarns that she had dyed with plant paint. Her first works were designed and woven in Baia Mare, where she exhibited for the first time in 1916 at the Ernst Museum in a joint exhibition with her father Károly and her brother Béni.  The title of the exhibition was Károly Ferenczy and his children.

State of Innocence by Noémi Ferenczy

At the age of 23, however, she started working on an early masterpiece entitled Teremtés (Creation). She chose to remain responsible for the creative process from the beginning to the end, from the numerous pencil drawings, colour sketches and cartoons, to the weaving itself.

She recalled the inspiration for this tapestry:

“… My mother and I travelled a great deal and once we went to Chartres, the cathedral of those famous 13th century glass paintings.  Brilliant in the shafts of light, the beautiful, artistic glass paintings were spellbinding.  This was where I first felt the uncontrollably inspiring force of the desire to create, which has not abandoned me throughout my career.  Creation is my first truly large-scale work.  But even that stemmed from the magic of Chartres…”

In 1920, Following the collapse of the Hungarian Commune the year before, Noémi Ferenczy moved back to Nagybánya/Baia Mare, which had become part of Romania. There she helped organise a general workers’ strike, for which she was arrested and spent a few weeks in prison. She remained active in the Communist movement, taking part at the Fifth Congress of the Communist International in Moscow in 1924.

Her works were regularly displayed in Hungary, as well as in Romania and abroad. In 1932 she moved to Budapest. By this time, her style had changed: her compositions became more monumental, with fewer, but larger figures.  From 1945 she taught at the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts. She received the Kossuth Prize in 1948 and the title of Meritorious Artist in 1952. She died on December 20th 1957, aged 67, in Budapest, and is buried in Kerepesi Cemetery.

The Hungarian Artists. Part 1.

Viktor Madarász & Pal Szinyei Merse

Museum Of Fine Arts Budapest

Buda Castle

I visited the Hungarian city of Budapest the other week and decided to visit some of its art museums.  The two main establishments are the Szépművészeti Múzeum, the Museum of Fine Arts on the Pest side of the city and the Hungarian National Gallery on the Buda side of the city which is located inside the royal palace of Buda Castle, and the vast collection there traces the country’s creative history from medieval triptychs through to post-1945 art and sculpture.  In the following blogs I want to look at the works of art of the Hungarian painters which feature predominantly in these collections.

Viktor Madarász

Self portrait by Viktor Madarász

Viktor Madarász was born on December 4th 1830 in the small village of Csetnek, (today: Štítnik, Slovakia) in what is now middle-eastern Slovakia.  He came from a once noble family.  His father, András was an iron manufacturer and craftsman. Originally, his parents wanted Viktor to have a career in law and so he went to study in Bratislava.  The majority of Hungary had been under Ottoman rule from 1541 and 1699 at which time the Habsburg monarchy defeated the Ottoman forces and took control over Hungary. 

In 1848, when the Hungarian Revolution began, Madarász left college to join the struggle for independence. Despite being only seventeen, which was too young to join the army, he was accepted and participated in numerous battles and became a Second Lieutenant.  The revolution failed and for Madarász the experience was traumatic and one which he never forgot. He dedicated his art to the idea of Hungarian independence from Habsburg rule for the Hungarian people and recalled pictorially the heroic and tragic memories of this time in the history of Hungary.

Kuruck and Labanc by Viktor Madarász

One of his early historical paintings was entitled Kuruc and Labanc which depicted two brothers fighting on opposite sides of the Hungarian Revolution. The Kuruck was a group of armed anti-Habsburg grouping that wanted to rid Hungary of the Habsburg rule and the word “kuruck” is used in both a positive sense to mean “patriotic” and in a negative sense to mean “chauvinistic.” The term Labanc was designated to those Hungarians who advocated cooperating with the outside powers, the Habsburgs, and is almost always used in a negative sense to mean “disloyal” or “traitorous”. The painting was well received by the critics.

Thököly’s Dream (The Dream of an Exile) by Viktor Madarász (1856)

Dózsa’s People by Viktor Madarász

After the war of independence, the uprising had been defeated, and Madarász lived in exile and after hiding out briefly, returned on foot to his family’s home in Pécs.  Once back home he continued with his legal studies but also enrolled in art lessons from a local artist. In 1853, he enrolled for preparatory work at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna but was disheartened with the old-conservative atmosphere there, and he went to the private school of Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, who was looked upon as a bold innovator at the time. In 1856, Viktor Madarász moved to Paris where he studied in the studios of Léon Cogniet and at the École des Beaux Arts.

The Mourning of László Hunyadi by Viktor Madarász (1859)

One of Madarász most popular works and considered the main work of his life, is part of the Hungarian National Gallery collection. It is entitled The Mourning of László Hunyadi and was completed by Madardsz in 1859 whilst he was living in Paris. It is a major work of romanticism. The painting depicts the altar of the Church of Mary Magdalene in Buda, before which is the body of László Hunyadi. László Hunyadi, the son of János Hunyadi, who had defeated the Ottomans and became a national hero, was ordered to be killed by Vladislav V. Young Hunyadi enjoyed widespread popularity among the Hungarians, so he was seen as a threat to the seventeen-year-old, inexperienced King Vladislav V, the only son of the Habsburg German King Albert II.   The king, fearing the popularity of Hunyadi, ordered his execution and he was beheaded on March 16th 1457.  In this depiction we see two women kneeling at the feet of Hunyadi.  One was his mother, Erzébet Szilágyi, the other was his bride, Maria Gara.  This painting by Madarasz was believed to be an anti-Habsburg political statement during a time of the Habsburg oppression of the Hungarian people.  The work of art became a symbol of the failed Hungarian Revolution and National self-sacrifice.  The painting was thought of as the Hungarian Pieta following the iconography of the Lamentation of Christ, in which Christ’s torso was removed from the cross and his friends mourned over his body and so in a way Madarasz’s painting offered a promise that like Christ, the Hungarian nation would rise again. 

Zrínyi and Frangepán in Bécsújhely Prison by Viktor Madarász (1864)

Another painting in the Hungarian National Gallery by Madarász was his 1864 historical work entitled Zrínyi and Frangepán in Bécsújhely Prison. When the painting was first exhibited in 1866 people flocked to see it.  The painting depicts two men, Péter Zrínyi, the Ban (local ruler) of Croatia, and the Hungarian Count Ferenc Frangepán, sitting facing each other across a table in the Bécsújhely prison.  Guards and imperial officials can be seen in the background.  Both had been implicated in the Wesselényi Conspiracy, a plot among Croatian and Hungarian nobles to oust the Habsburg Monarchy from Croatia and Hungary.  The two men are saying their last farewells to each other before they were both executed.

Pal Szinyei Merse

Self portrait by Pal Szinyei Merse (1897)

The second artist I am showcasing is Pál Szinyei Merse. Pál Szinyei Merse was an outstanding master of nineteenth-century Hungarian painting and one of the most influential figures in Hungarian art. He was born on July 4th 1845 in Szinyeújfalu, a village and municipality in the Prešov District of eastern Slovakia..  He was the third of eight children of Félix Szinyei Merse and Valéria Jekelfalussy and came from a noble family which had 700 years of history, but by the 19th century the family wealth had dwindled, and yet, Pál, because of his art, never ever had problems making ends meet. 

Winter by Pal Szinyei Merse (c.1905)

After the death of his grandfather in 1850, the family moved to the mansion in the east Slovakian town of Jernye (now Jarovnice). His father graduated in law from Košice and became ambassador to the town of Sibiu during the 1839/40 Parliament, and was appointed Alispan, an office held by the most prestigious and generally wealthiest of the commoners and in 1871 became the High Sheriff.  His father was a great supporter of his son and his artistic ambitions, and his mother was a lover of literature and music, who brought considerable wealth into their marriage.

Skylark by Pál Szinyei Merse.(1882)

From 1856 Pál studied at the Catholic high school in Prešov and remained there until he reached the sixth grade. He remained a private student until 1859, and, in the autumn of 1861, he studied in Oradea, where he graduated in the summer of 1863. Pál Szinyei started to become interested in painting and took it more seriously during his high school years and received tuition from Lajos Mezey a local artist from Oradea.

The Field by Pál Szinyei Merse (1909)

In 1864, thanks to the support of his parents, he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where he studied under the Hungarian artist, Alexander von Wagner, and later, from 1867 to 1869, his tutor was Karl von Piloty, the German historical painter.  Another famous artist he met whilst attending the Academy was Wilhelm Leibl, who introduced Pál to plein-air painting. After seeing a major art exhibition in 1869, Pál was anxious to get to work on his own and decided to leave the Academy. Pál Szinyei Merse was a ground-breaking pioneer and the first true colourist in the history of Hungarian painting. 

On October 15, 1873, Pál Szinyei Merse married the love of his life, Zsófia Probstner, the twenty-year-old daughter of the owner of the Lublo bath. They went on to have six children, a son, Laszlo Paul Felix and five daughters, Sophie, Mary, Valeria, Elisabeth and Adrienne.

Picnic in May by Pál Szinyei Merse (1873)

In 1873 Pál Szinyei Merse completed the painting entitled Picnic in May and although it was ridiculed by his contemporaries it is now looked upon as one of the finest Hungarian paintings.

In his autobiography Pál wrote about the painting, saying :

“…I painted myself into the picture prone, minching away, with my back to the spectator. I must admit I was thinking of the critics who would dislike my picture…”

Lady in Violet by Pál Szinyei Merse (1874)

Probably one of his most famous works was painted a year later, 1874, and is entitle Lady in Violet. It is seen on many posters around Budapest advertising the Hungarian National Gallery. It has become the Hungarian Mona Lisa and is one of the most well-known painting to this day.The painting depicts the artist’s wife, Zsófia, who was pregnant at the time, resting in the garden of their manor house in Jernye. She is wearing a taffeta bustle dress which was very popular in those days. The artist started the painting using complementary colours and then created a new colour harmony by juxtaposing yellow, violet and green. While he was in Munich he had bought the high-quality violet paint from Richard Wurm, a paint merchant and a mutual friend of both Pál Szinyei Merse and the Swiss Symbolist painter, Arnold Böcklin. It was Böcklin who encouraged Pál to use colour vigorously.

The Artist’s Wife Dressed in Yellow by Pál Szinyei Merse (1875)

The painting of his wife, which was never finished, was painted a year after his painting, Lady in Violet.

Portrait of Zsigmond Szinyei Merse by Pál Szinyei Merse (1866)

His family featured in many of his painting, such as his 1866 painting, Portrait of Zsigmond Szinyei Merse which he completed while spending his summer in Jernye. It is a depiction of his younger brother Zsigmond with a red cap, lost in thought as he plays a chibouk.

Portrait of Ninon Szinyei Merse by Pál Szinyei Merse (1870)

Pál Szinyei was working in Hungary during the French-Prussian war and painted several pictures of members of his family in a naturalist style. This portrait of his elder sister is one of them.

Portrait of Artist’s wife by Pál Szinyei Merse (1880)

Lovers by Pál Szinyei Merse (1869)

One of Szinvei’s favourite themes was outdoors parties and the enjoyment of periods of relaxation.  His 1869 painting entitled Lovers depicts two people relaxing in a rural setting, on a hillside during the early summer.  The artist has used pale colours which he has used harmoniously and this muted colouration evokes a lyrical aspect to the scene.  It is a scene of great intimacy as we see the couple lock eyes whilst their fingers tenderly intertwine and set in an almost dream-like countryside background.

…….to be continued

Theresa Bernstein. Part 2.

William Merowitz in his studio.

John Weichsel was the founder of the People’s Art Guild in 1915.  It was to be an alternative to the system of traditional fine art galleries. The Guild would set up exhibitions in various unconventional spaces and by doing so, the Guild brought avant-garde art into the immigrant settlement houses and tenements of the Lower East Side with the goal of exposing a new set of people to modern art and at the same time, providing artists with direct contact to new markets. One of the helpers at the Guild was William Meyerowitz.

Theresa and William’s Wedding Photograph (1919)

Meyerowitz called on Theresa at her studio and asked if she could offer some of her paintings for a benefit show with the Guild.  From this initial meeting a friendship developed which blossomed into romance and finally on February 7th 1919 the couple married in Philadelphia.

The Studio (54th West 74th Street) by William Meyerowitz (1935)

William Meyerowtiz was born in Ekaterinoslav, now Dnipro in Eastern Ukraine, on July 15, 1887.   He and his father had immigrated to New York City in 1908, and they settled in the Lower East Side. William studied etching at the National Academy of Design and was also a talented singer and while he was a student he sang in the chorus of the Metropolitan Opera. Later, he rented a studio in the same building as the 291 gallery run by Alfred Stieglitz.

Portrait of the Artist by Theresa Bernstein (1920)

Their marriage took an early blow when their baby daughter died of pneumonia. and from that tragedy, they remained childless. Despite this tragic occurrence the couple lived a happy and contented life. In her 1986 biography of her husband, William Meyerowitz, The Artist Speaks. Theresa Bernstein Meyerowitz wrote:

“…In the Autumn evenings, we used to take a little table from the studio and place it in front of the fireplace. William would split some logs and light the fire. … We would have cozy conversations about our work, our friends, ourselves and they were precious evenings we spent together. We never tired of each other’s company. . . . From the day we met, our life was one absorbing conversation...”

The Immigrants by Theresa Bernstein (1923)

In 1891, Theresa Bernstein had been an immigrant entering America with her mother and father when she was just one-year-old. Thirty-two years later she completed a painting entitled The Immigrants, depicting the deck of the Cunard liner, Aquitania and the plight of immigrants heading for the “promised land”.  The centre point of this depiction is a young mother and her baby and maybe Theresa wanted, through this painting, to recall what it would have been like for her mother making that sea passage across the Atlantic.  The young woman is surrounded by her fellow immigrants.  She seems to be lost in her thoughts.  What are her thoughts?  Behind her right shoulder is a young man hovering nearby.  Could she be thinking of a new relationship, a new romance?  Behind her left shoulder is a group of children with their mother.  Maybe the young woman daydreaming about a happy family life with numerous children.  This is a depiction which directs our thoughts on the vulnerability, change and challenge which affect this young woman but at the same time offers a glimmer of hope with regards her possible new beginning.

The Milliners by Theresa Bernstein (1921)

Bernstein’s 1921 painting entitled The Milliners is typical of many of her figurative works depicting a large group of people.  Look back at some of her multi-figured paintings: the job-seekers in a crowded waiting room (Waiting Room – Employment Office), people crowded into a train on the elevated railway (In the Elevated), and many others depicting beach scenes at Coney Island or audiences at the music hall or theatre.   Theresa was Jewish and although this 1918 painting, The Milliners, could not be termed Jewish, it was personal to Theresa as her sister-in-law worked in the millinery industry, a typical “vocation” that was both immigrant and Jewish. 

View through window (The Milliners)

In the painting we see a group of female workers, engaged in the fastidious and creative labour of creating hats. It depicts six women gathered around a table which is brimming with accessories.  The depiction is a close-up of the women and this view emphasizes the cramped nature of the space that the women are working in but it also offers us a close look at their individual features.  The setting is probably a room in a city tenement apartment.  If you look carefully at the upper left, you can just make out a window, windowsill and through this space we can just make out the metal fire escape which was common in this type of building.

Mother and Mother-in-law

This is also a depiction of Theresa’s beloved family.  Theresa’s mother is the woman we see depicted at the upper left of the group, with greying hair, talking to Theresa’s mother-in-law, whose hands hide the delicate threads she is working with, head bowed as if in prayer. On either side of the mothers are two of Theresa Bernstein’s sisters-in-law, Bessie and Sophie, who was actually  a milliner herself. One of them, dressed in black, has placed a newly made black hat on her head and is admiringly viewing the result in a hand-held mirror.  Her sister, dressed in bright yellow, watches as her sibling vainly gazes lovingly at her reflection.  She holds a black hat which has two large flame-like yellow feathers attached to it.  In the lower right of the group, diametrically opposite her mother, is Minna, Theresa’s third sister-in-law, dressed in a white dress and they are testament to two generations of milliners.  The final member of this working group of women sitting on the far right, dressed in green, is Katie.  She is the only one to be looking out us.  Maybe she is silently inviting us into this intimate circle.  Katie was the family housekeeper and Theresa’s much-loved confidante.

Katie by Theresa Bernstein (1917)

Katie, the Bernstein’s housekeeper was the subject of Theresa’s portrait in 1917. Although Theresa thought of her as a friend and part of the family. For Katie, her role in the Bernstein household was somewhere between an employee and a sister to Theresa.  Bernstein did not choose sitters for their glamour or their social status, her choice of subjects was based upon people she liked.  In this portrait which uses earth tones we see Katie wearing a heavy shabby coat.  She is pinching the lapels tightly together.  On her head is a hat, with the haloed brim positioned at a jaunty angle allowing the feathers, attached to it, to cascade downwards.

Woman with a Parrot by Theresa Bernstein (c.1917)

Elsa Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven the German-born avant-garde visual artist and poet, who was active in Greenwich Village, New York, from 1913 to 1923, where her radical self-displays came to embody a living Dada. She was considered one of the most controversial and radical women artists of the era.  Theresa Bernstein painted several striking portraits of this Dada artist, poet, model, and muse, whom she befriended in New York’s Greenwich Village. Was it the sitter’s uncompromising attitude to life which attracted Bernstein for she too was equally radical in her own time, as she established her own path as a Jewish immigrant and a female artist in the male-dominated art market.  In this painting entitled Woman with a Parrot which she completed around 1917, we see the baroness gracefully poised against a plain background; her back is partially exposed, and she holds a red parrot.

The Cribbage Players by Theresa Bernstein (1927)

The New York Society of Women Artists (NYSWA) was founded in 1925 and devoted itself to avant-garde women artists.  Theresa Bernstein was one of the earliest members and and took part in this and other women artists’ groups throughout her career.  Theresa was acutely sensitive to the discrimination against her within the profession because she was a woman and for that reason, she would often use only her first initial when exhibiting, especially at the National Academy of Design. She was both disillusioned and disappointed with never having been nominated to the Academy. She would often amusingly recount an anecdote about the male artistic preserve, the Salmagundi Club of New York City. (It only began to admit women in the 1970s.) Her story goes that a delegation from the club visited her studio at one point in search of a Mr. Bernstein. At first Theresa believed that they were looking for her father. After some amusing banter, it soon became apparent that they wished to offer “Mr. Bernstein” a membership in the club and they stalked off in a mood when they found out that the painter of the canvases, they so admired, was in fact Theresa Bernstein.

Metropolitan Opera by Theresa Bernstein (1924)

Metropolitan Opera by Theresa Bernstein

Toscanini at Carnegie Hall (1930)

Two subjects that fascinated Theresa Bernstein and were often depicted in her works of art were her love of music which she had got from her husband and the depiction of crowds and both these elements can be seen in her depiction of musical events at the Metropolitan Opera House and Carnegie Hall,

The Music Lover by Theresa Bernstein (1913)

Theresa Bernstein died at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan on February 12th 2002, sixteen days before her 112th birthday, although it is thought she may have been older, but she had never been forthcoming regarding her birthdate!  Her husband William Meyerowitz had dies in 1981.  She will always be remembered as one of the first to paint in the Realist style.

Music Lovers by Theresa Bernstein (1934)

I will leave the last words on this wonderful artist to Patricia M Burnham, lecturer in American studies and art history at the University of Texas, who wrote an article about Theresa Bernstein in the Woman’s Art Journal, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Autumn, 1988 – Winter, 1989).  She wrote:

“…Her work has not gone unrecognized. Each decade of her 80-year career has been marked by gallery representation and one-woman shows. Her early work especially generated considerable excitement among reviewers and critics.  But she has never gained the national reputation one might have expected nor are her works to be found in a large number of major art museums.  Happily, Theresa Bernstein is now being rediscovered.  Along with many other women artists, she has been a beneficiary of the women’s movement and feminist art scholarship.20 Art historians taking another look at early-20th-century American art are beginning to recognize her achievements.   Yet to come is a full evaluation of her work that will reveal the weaknesses among the strengths, the particulars among the universals, the womanly among the human and ultimately provide a meaningful synthesis worthy of its subject…”

Anna Richards Brewster. Part 2.

Marriage and Personal Tragedy

During the three-year period between 1901 and 1904 Anna, her father and young brother went on several painting trips.  They travelled through Europe to Norway as well as taking a couple of trips around the east coast of America.   Anna and her father, the painter, William Trost Richards, had joint exhibitions of their work in New York, Boston and Washington at which twenty of her works she had completed in Clovelly were displayed.

In 1904 whilst Anna was enjoying a trip back home in Boston she got news that her elderly friend and patron, Mr Kemp-Welch, had died.  During her stay in America, she went to New York to visit her brother Herbert who was a professor of Botany at Barnard College, Columbia University.  Whilst with her brother she met his roommate a professor of English literature, William Tenney Brewster.   From that first meeting with him the pair spent many hours together during Anna’s two-week American vacation.  She eventually sailed back to England but the pair corresponded regularly.  Their friendship blossomed and in January 1905, William proposed marriage to Anna.

William Trost Richards in his Newport Studio by Anna Richards Brewster (1892)

Anna didn’t accept right away as she had a lot to think about.  She wanted to carry on being a professional artist and she was concerned that marriage would interfere with that as it had done to so many female painters who had chosen married life over the role of a professional painter.  In March, after much soul searching, Anna agreed to marry William and they were married on July 18th 1905 at the Parish Church of St Luke in Chelsea and she became Mrs Anna Richards Brewster.  The couple went on honeymoon and for the first part of it her father and brother, Herbert, accompanied them.

Landscape with Wild Flowers by Anna Richards Brewster (1901)

Anna and William decided that they must live in New York because of his teaching post and they settled on a plan to rent two apartments on the same floor of a building on the upper west side of New York, one for them and the other for her father and brother.  The plan was to share meals and staff and one room in the second apartment would be set up as a studio for Anna and her father.  The plan never came to fruition as in the Autumn of 1905, her father, William Trost Richards had a heart attack, whilst working on a large painting in his Newport studio on a large painting, and died.

Anna’s worries about her dual role as a wife and a professional artist proved unfounded as her husband pushed her to continue painting and exhibiting her work even while her life and interests were changing.   Anna was content with how her life had evolved and wrote to her friend Annie Winsor in 1906 telling her about her new sense of purpose:

“…The sense of permanency — of its being ‘the real thing’ as it were, in marriage is a comfort and a struggle to me and I like the problems of life becoming less shadowy and unreal than they are to a single person. I have always felt irresponsible — a spectator before; but now at last I am in the arena…”

Anna Richards Brewster with her three-year-old son Herbert (1908)

William Tenney Brewster with his son Herbert (1909)

In 1906 Anna gave birth to her first child, a boy, and she and her husband named him Herbert, presumably after her brother.  It proved to be a complicated birth and at one point the lives of mother and baby were in peril.  In June 1906 in a letter to Annie Winsor, Anna described the traumatic birth and her proud husband:

“…It was a capable doctor who saved us — and indeed it was all they could do to save the little hoy’s life…. The boy is doing well now…. he is his father’s son — Dick [i.e. William Tenney Brewster] is delighted with and about him. He was charming and spontaneously devoted all the time — I think it is the profoundest experience he has ever had. I didn’t suppose he would care so much so soon….. I’m sorry that the child is rather a ticklish one to take care of, being excessively sensitive to heat and cold — his circulation is bad. It is so hard to get one’s experience with babies: for experience is won through mistakes: and mistakes are disastrous with babies…”

From the letter we can deduce that the baby’s health was an issue which would later haunt them. The early years with baby Herbert were talked about by Edith Price, Anna’s niece, in a May 1986 interview with Susan Brewster McClatchy.

“…Of course they spoiled him dreadfully. … He was the wonder of wonders and she had ideas she had gotten from some German child health expert at the time, that you let them run around naked…. Anyway, he was such a poor, puny, one-foot-in-the-grave little baby that mother [Anna’s sister Nelly] said. “He’s off to an awfully bad start.” Well, the German exercises did him good and he became quite a sturdy little boy…”

Once again we get the feeling that all was not right with baby Herbert.

Campfire Long Pond ME by Anna Richards Brewster

Lily Pond Matunuck Rhode Island by Anna Richards Brewster (1915)

When Anna’s father died he left Anna and her husband a property on Cedar Swamp Pond in Matunuck, Rhode Island, as a wedding present. There they built a small summer camp, and it was here that the couple would spend the next thirty summers.

Palma Majorca by Anna Richards Brewster (1932)

Meanwhile, Anna’s best friend Annie Winsor, an educator, was living with her uncle William Ware, who owned a boarding house in New York.  She taught at the Brearley School, an all-girls private school in New York City, located on the Upper East Side.  Her uncle had also invited Annie’s distant cousin, Joseph Allen to come and live with them.  Joseph, a Harvard graduate, had been teaching at Cornell and in 1897 began teaching at the City College of New York.  Annie and Joseph’s friendship turned to love and the couple were engaged in 1899 and married the following year.  The couple had three children by 1905 and decided that New York was not an ideal place to bring up children and so they moved to White Plains, a town in Westchester County, a northern suburb of New York. Unfortunately Annie found the schooling there was below her standard and decided to home-school her children and from this she also began to teach the children of her neighbours.  In 1907, buoyed by the success of teaching the neighbourhood children she founded the Roger Ascham School, a progressive, co-education school that included all grades from first to high school.  Later the school relocated to the nearby town of Scarsdale.

Autumn Path by Anna Richards Brewster (1915)

Anna Richards Brewster and her husband William decided, for the same reason as Annie and her husband, that New York city life was not the place to raise their son Herbert and they too moved to Scarsdale and built themselves a house.  Anna immersed herself in the Scarsdale community, founding the Scarsdale Art Association, and helped to found the Scarsdale Women’s Club.  She also became a trustee of her friend Annie Winsor Allen’s Roger Ashcam School in 1909.  Despite the upheaval of bringing up her son, looking after her husband and the issues around re-location she still managed to exhibit works at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts

Butler Road, Scarsdale, New York by Anna Richards Brewster

In January 1910, a month before the completion of their new house in Fenmore Road, Scarsdale, their son Herbert was taken seriously ill and tragically passed away.  The cause of death was believed to have been complications from a bout of pneumonia.  Anna and her husband William were devastated. Edith Price, Anna Richards Brewster’s niece, remembered that sad time in an 1986 interview:

“…The house that was to be for their boy was being built through the Winter of 1909 and early months of 1910, but in February there was no child. It was a beautiful house. . . . I saw it first in 1913 , when I went alone to visit. It was overwhelmingly haunted, for me, and always remained so. . . . The little presence that their love and lasting loneliness had caused to dwell there was inescapable…”

Twenty years later Edith revisited the house and recalled that visit:

“…I slept in the nursery, whose pictures I had secretly copied many years before. . . . Anna had meant to paint fairytale scenes in a high dado all around the room. Instead there were pictures of a three-year-old hoy — in the snow on Riverside Drive, in the woods at Cedar Swamp.  It must have helped many dark hours – painting them – trying to hold him from slipping away. I wonder what WTB [Anna’s husband] did with those paintings. I would dearly love to have one. I wonder if he destroyed them…”

The paintings were never found.

The outward appearance of Anna and her husband after the death of their son was one of resignation and yet they seemed to have recovered but I am sure inwardly their minds were in utter turmoil, but life still had to go on. 

No. 9 Fenemore Road, Scarsdale in Early Autumn by Anna Richards Brewster

In February 1910 the construction of their new house was completed and they moved in.  Anne returned to her painting but only showed her work infrequently.  The couple still spent the summers at their cottage in Matunuck, Rhode Island.  William carried on lecturing but every seven years Barnard College allowed him to take a year’s sabbatical and during those twelve months he and Anna would travel. 


Camogli [Italy by Anna Richards Brewster (1933)

Portofino by Anna Richards Brewster

Their European journeys took them to the Lake Como area of Italy and Camogli, a seaside town close to Sorrento and towns such as Portofino on what is now known as the Italian Riviera.

Via Dolorosa, Jerusalem by Anna Richards Brewster

Outside the Jaffa Gate, Jerusalem by Anna Richards Brewster

A Market In Biskra, Algeria by Anna Richards Brewster

They also travelled to the Middle East and North Africa and Anna recorded their journey through her paintings.

In 1919 William Brewster was due to take another one-year sabbatical and he and his wife had once again planned to travel abroad but their plans changed when he was offered and accepted a position with the University Union in Paris.  He was tasked with converting this private club for wealthy American military officers to a civilian educational establishment now that World War I was almost over.  Consequently, Anna and William decided to rent out their Scarsdale property and she would take up residence at the Metropolitan Club in New York City while her husband found an apartment tor them in Paris.

However, the plan and his position within the organisation ended badly probably due to the directors not willing to go along with William’s revolutionary ideas.  He had wanted to integrate the American students with the French and this would include finding them housing in French homes. Even more distasteful to the directors was William’s plan to provide scholarships for middle-class Americans and to open the programme to women students.  William’s post was severed. However, their Scarsdale home had been rented out and so Anna had to spend the next year living in New York City.

Ardsley Road Bridge by Anna Richards Brewster

Besides depicting the various places she and William visited abroad she completed numerous sketches of rural Scarsdale before it became industrialised which she often used to complete finished works.  Her husband recalled her interest in their neighbourhood, he wrote:

“…She sketched deftly, accurately and rapidly and thus in more than sixty active years, made thousands of sketches all drawn and coloured on the spot… From such sketches she often made larger and more finished pictures…”

Anna received many painting commissions including a portrait commission to paint the portraits of eight professors at Columbia University and closer to home she was also asked to paint a portrait of the founder of the Scarsdale library.

First exhibition of the Scarsdale Art Society

Throughout the 1930s, Anna and her husband would take many trips to Europe, especially Italy, a country they both loved.  Anna tirelessly sketched during these journeys of discovery.  In 1938, Anna founded the Scarsdale Art Association and for many years she would offer to tutor members at her house. 

Tucson Arizona by Anna Richards Brewster (1940)

Anna Brewster’s painting of Tucson comes from a group of works found in her studio at the time of her death in 1952. It was one of a select number of pieces that her husband, William Tenney Brewster, included in a privately published book in 1954 titled A Book of Sketches by Anna Richards Brewster.

In 1950 Anna’s health began to deteriorate and her sight became very limited causing her to stop painting.  On May 23rd 1952 she suffered a stroke and on August 21st 1952 Anna Richards Brewster died, aged 82.

In the book of Anna’s sketches that her husband published in 1954, he described his wife’s style and innate talent.  He wrote:

“…She could do about anything in oil, watereolor, paistel, pen and ink and pencil: from portraits to miniatures; from actual gardens to charming assemblages of flowers; from comic skits to wholly sober and serene representations of people and places.   As her father said, ‘She could have had wide success if she had chosen one line and developed a speciality but she preferred to express her wide range of sympathies.’ . . . Of the various forms that I have spoken of, by far the most characteristic are the oil sketches. They are the most numerous; the two thousand that she left at the time of her death are hardly half of what she made in sixty years. . . . She painted very rapidly, with little reliance on the eraser or paint rag and was able to find something interesting anywhere. Her gear was the simplest. I never knew her to tote an easel or stretched canvas. … A small box with a block of canvas about seven inches by five sufficed . . . for larger sketches, a box about nine by thirteen was the thing. The larger sketches are more numerous and more detailed than the smaller, but neither kind occupied more than a single sitting or was continued after an interruption. A sketch in the morning and another in the afternoon would be not uncommon…”

Some of the information was gleaned from the usual search engines but most came from a 2008 book entitled Anna Richards Brewster, American Impressionist which was a collection of essays edited by Judith Kafka Maxwell with contributions from Wanda Corn, Leigh Culver, Judith Kafka Maxwell, Susan Brewster McClatchy and Kirsten Swinth.

Anna Richards Brewster. Part 1. 

The Early Years

Anna Richards (c.1885)

My featured artist today is Anna Richards Brewster, the much-admired American Impressionist painter who was one of the most successful women artists of her time and yet her name has largely been forgotten. Anna was born in the Germantown neighbourhood of Philadelphia in 1870. She was the sixth of eight children of William and Anna Richards.

William Trost Richards 

Her father was William Trost Richards, the American landscape artist, who was associated with both the Hudson River School and the American Pre-Raphaelite movement. After living most of his life in Pennsylvania, William Trost Richards rented a summer home in Newport, Rhode Island, and later built a summer home, Gray Cliff, on Conanicut Island in 1881, so as to be closer to the ocean. Richards was recognized by his colleagues as one of America’s foremost marine painters.

A Rocky Coast by William Trost Richards (1877)

Anna’s mother was Anna Matlack Richards, an intellectual Quaker from a prominent Philadelphia family. She was a children’s author, poet and translator best known for her fantasy novel, A New Alice in the Old Wonderland. Anna Matlack and William Richards married in 1856.

The 2009 edition of Anna Matlack Brewster’s book, A New Alice in the Old Wonderland.

Anna Matlack, as a young woman published fictional works, plays, and poems, including a fictional autobiography by “Mrs. A. M. Richards” with the title Memories of a Grandmother in 1854.  After she married William Trost Richards they spent many years travelling abroad.  In the 1890s, she published comic poems for children in the popular children’s magazines Harper’s Young People and The St. Nicholas Magazine. The success of these comics led her to publish A New Alice in the Old Wonderland in 1895, which featured illustrations by her daughter Anna. It is recognised as one of the more important “Alice imitations”, or novels inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice books.

Landscape with a Canal by Anna Richards Brewster (1887)

Anna Matlack Richards educated their children at home to a pre-college level in the arts and sciences and her son-in-law later wrote about his wife and siblings gaining knowledge from their mother’s teachings:

“… Besides the usual subjects, all of them knew something about art, literature and music; each played a musical instrument; and each was encouraged to follow some special interest and to understand and to care for excellence…”

Mentome France by Anna Richards Brewster

Between 1878 and 1880, the family lived in England, mainly in Cornwall and London, and for a short time in Paris, where Anna’s father found subjects for his painting and Anna would often accompany her father during his painting trips. Having returned to America, the family lived in Boston from 1884 to 1888 so that their son, Theodore, was able to attend Harvard University.

Country House near Exeter, England by Anna Richards Brewster

At the age of fourteen Anna exhibited at the National Academy of Design.  Now living with her family in Boston, she studied with Dennis Miller Bunker at the Cowles Art School where he was the chief instructor of figure and cast drawing, artistic anatomy, and composition. In 1888 the school awarded her the first scholarship in Ladies Life classes.

Langdale Pikes by Anna Richards Brewster (1905)

From there, in 1890, Anna left Boston and went to New York to study at the Art Students League for a few months each winter beginning in 1889 and these annual trips continued until early 1894. Here she was tutored by William Merritt Chase, Henry Siddons Mowbray and John La Farge.  In 1889 she won the Dodge Prize, worth $300, awarded by the National Academy for the best picture painted by an American woman of any age. The winning painting was entitled An Interlude to Chopin.

Near Williamstown Ma. by Anna Richards Brewster

Whilst in New York, she rented a room at Mrs. Jacobs’s boarding house, and it was here that one day she met Annie Ware Winsor, who taught at the Brearley School, a private school for girls in New York City. Winsor was five years older than Anna but they became life-long friends and intellectual soulmates. Annie Winsor, through her family’s connections, was able to inroduce Anna to many important and prominent families, such as the Vanderbilts and Schuylers.

Moulin Huet, Guernsey by Anna Richards Brewster

Annie and Anna both became members of the Social Reform Club, an organization for improving the conditions of the poor, and the Louisa May Alcott Literary Circle, where they read books and poetry. This allowed Anna to break away from the insular life of living with her family and the lack of any social interaction when living at home.

Portrait of the Artist’s Father by Anna Richards Brewster

Between 1890 and 1895, Anna once again went to Europe with her father and, like him, she managed to capture what she saw on canvas and in numerous sketch books.  They travelled to various places in England, Ireland, Scotland and the Channel Islands.  She even went to Paris where she studied at the Académie Julian with the French painters, Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant and Jean-Paul Laurens.  Whilst at the family home in Boston she would receive private art lessons from LaFarge who was a friend of the family.  She recounted in a letter to her friend Annie Winsor one such session:

“…The whole afternoon I was wrapped in the pleasure of admiration for Mr. LaFarge. Father and I agree that no mortal could have acted with more perfect courtesy, quietness and charm. I am very glad he came, though it wasn’t much of a lesson…”

Clovelly by Anna Richards Brewster

Anna was now in her early twenties and both her parents who had been backing her financially began to wonder when she would become a professional painter and earn her own living and they began to pressurise her.   She had always had a difficult relationship with her father and mother.  She was much closer to her father.  Her father had been giving her lessons in art from an early age and had to critique her work which often led to many heated arguments.  Anna would also have heated discussions with her mother who was both a serious scholar and a formidable woman.  Her mother described Anna as “an uneasy household presence” and was tiring of her lack of future plans.  In a letter Anna wrote to her friend Annie Winsor in September 1893 in which she recounted the words of her mother:

“…Mother said that if I was good for anything I should never have a pencil out of my hand, (that I should draw everything, anything) and think of nothing else.  That I ought to read nothing, think nothing, write nothing…..Most people don’t have the physical strength or mental strength to concentrate themselves…….no other thing can attain perfection and perfection is the only thing that exists nothing else counts.  I reject that doctrine but nevertheless it is not without effect but I don’t believe, won’t believe that to be a painter one must be a fanatic…”

Clovelly Village, England by Anna Richards Brewster (1895)

Anna had some exhibiting success during the early 1890s.  She had exhibited and sold four of her paintings at the National Academy of Design in New York and in 1895 she illustrated two books for JD Lippinott, a family friend, who owned his own publication business. A decision was made in 1895 between twenty-five-year-old Anna and her parents.  It was time for her to leave home and make a life for herself as an artist.  She had made a number of trips to England with her father and he believed that it was there that his daughter could make a name for herself and make a living from her art.  It was decided that she should head for the small, picturesque Devon coastal village of Clovelly.

Devonshire Farm House by Anna Richards Brewster

Anna remained in Clovelly for a year and then in 1896 moved to London where she and her parents agreed it would be an ideal place to show and sell her work.  In 1896 she rented a studio and an apartment in Chelsea, where she lived for the next nine years. Whilst living in the English capital she sold a number of her paintings and exhibited four times at the Royal Academy. Thirteen of her paintings featuring life at Clovelly were even exhibited in Baltimore, Maryland.  Her works were also shown at the National Academy of Design and at Knoedler Gallery in New York; and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.  In England her work was on show at the Royal Society of Artists, in Birmingham and three times at the Royal Miniature Society.

Battersea Bridge at Twilight by Anna Richards Brewster

On an earlier trip to London, Anna’s parents had become friends with an elderly couple, Mary and Henry Kemp-Welch, who were leading lights in the London art world and Mrs. Kemp-Welch became Anna’s patron and introduced her to many socially prominent families and from these introductions Anna received some portrait commissions.

A Summer Morning in London by Anna Richards Brewster

Anna’s living expenses had been met by her father whose financial situation had been sound due to the sale of his own paintings.  He had also financially helped his other children.  Anna must have been very conscious and somewhat felt guilty, about relying on her  father for money and this is borne out in letter she wrote to her friend, Annie Winsor on August 28th 1900:

“…Money is the one thing I feel I have no control over whatsoever, and whose workings, bearings, laws, and significance I do not understand…”

And in another letter to Annie on November 29th 1900, she wrote:

“…My mind’s much occupied with the question of making money. I must … I shall never get any feeling of self-respect until I can support myself…”

Trafalgar Square London by Anna Richards Brewster

In 1900, Anna’s patron and friend Mrs Kemp Welch, now in old age, had become frail and she was advised by her doctors to leave England during the cold damp winter months and move to a warmer climate.  Anna had a lot to be thankful for the elderly lady’s support and so offered to accompany her to Italy as her chaperone.  She had a lot to do before she could leave London and one can tell the pressure she was under as one notes a letter she sent to Annie Winsor prior to her departure.  She wrote:

“…Next Tuesday, Mrs. K-W (who is far from well) and I start for Italy for her health; and before then I have to rent my flat . . . finish my academy pictures, ditto a portrait, ditto some work for Mr. Holiday [a stained-glass artist], give my five pupils their last lessons…”

Italian Gardens at Mount Vesuvius by Anna Richards Brewster

Anna and Mrs Kemp Welch did get to travel to Italy in December 1900.  That month had been a sad period for Anna as she received news of her mother’s death, aged 66.  It had not been altogether a shock to Anna as her mother had been diagnosed as having breast cancer two years earlier and she was later diagnosed as being terminally ill.  Anna’s mother was adamant that her daughter remained in England and not come back to America.  She had visited her daughter in London in October 1900, two months before her death.  On December 22nd 1900 Anne wrote to her friend Annie Wintor telling her about that last meeting she had with her mother:

“…Yes, it is a great happiness that – just lately, she and I got a restful feeling of mental understanding, more than ever before….I got to say what I had been longing to – that whatever happened I could always feel that now we understand each other, and that all misconceptions were past……She grew so much in those years from the moment when she learned of her mortal malady, and met the knowledge with all the bigness of her soul…. I felt nearer to her than I ever had.  She has grown more human and beautiful to the end…”

……….to be continued.

Some of the information was gleaned from the usual search engines but most came from a 2008 book entitled Anna Richards Brewster, American Impressionist which was a collection of essays edited by Judith Kafka Maxwell with contributions from Wanda Corn, Leigh Culver, Judith Kafka Maxwell, Susan Brewster McClatchy and Kirsten Swinth.

Maritime Art. Part 2.

The Sea and the Workers who risk their lives for others.

In this look at Maritime or Marine Art I want to showcase those paintings which feature the people who have dedicated their lives to saving seafarers and those working the seas in a continual search for food to put on our tables. 

For the first of my forays into the depiction of fisherman I want to delve into the work of the great Skagen painters.  These were a group of Scandinavian artists who had come together in the small coastal village of Skagen, which is situated in the northernmost part of Denmark, from the late 1870s until the turn of the century. One of the Skagen painters was Peder Severin Krøyer.  He was born in Stavanger, Norway on July 23rd 1851 but moved to Denmark as a child. At the age of fourteen, he attended the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. Even at that young age he was a proficient portrait painter and was esteemed for his artwork and received many commissions.

Fishermen hauling nets, North Beach, Skagen by Peder Severin Krøyer (1883)

Krøyer depictions of fishermen were often in more serene situations rather than those showing the fishermen and their boats battling the elements.   His painting entitled Fishermen Hauling a Net at the North Beach, Late afternoon, was one of his first works painted on the beaches of Skagen and he wrote to his patron the tobacco manufacturer Heinrich Hirschsprung that for this painting he wanted to be close to the fishermen who had been hauling a net at the North Beach one late afternoon sundown when the sun appears flat and the weather is clear.  He had made many small preliminary sketches before taking the large canvas to the beach to complete the work en plein air.  He wrote to his patron:

“…I was on Nordstrand for the first time with my large picture this afternoon, driving with all my goods and chattels. It was a huge treat. It was calm and clear, really important for me…”

Fishermen on Skagen Beach by Peder Severin Krøyer (1883)

In his painting, Fishermen on Skagen Beach, several fishermen are shown relaxing on the beach, two of them are catching up on some sleep. The sense of tranquility of this scene is reinforced by a calm sea. This is one of those depictions which invites the viewer to mull over what is going on. Have they had a successful day or had it been a day to forget? Whatever happened they seem to now be exhausted.

Fishermen on the Beach on a Peaceful Summer´s night by Michael Ancher (1881)

Michael Ancher was the first of the Skagen painters to settle in Skagen during the summer of 1881. In his work entitled Fishermen on the Beach on a Peaceful Summer´s night Michael Ancher depicts a group of fishermen from Skagen talking on the beach on a sunny summer evening. What are they chatting about? Perhaps they are exchanging news from Skagen, or simply planning tomorrow’s next fishing expedition. Ancher was a realist who always used living models, preferably fishermen and he knew their individual names and through his depiction they have come to life.  They have had a hard life battling the elements which can be seen by their heavily lined faces.  This painting which is owned by the National Gallery of Denmark, is currently  exhibited in the Danish Parliament.

Fisherman Coming to Shore by Michael Ancher

Michael Ancher has depicted a completely different portrayal of a fisherman than the previous paintings. This is not a relaxed study of a fisherman, quite the opposite. Observe the fiercly determined look on the face of the fisherman in Ancher’s painting entitled Fisherman Coming to Shore. He is trying to steer the boat to the safety of the shore whilst battling against a mighty following sea which makes steering almost impossible.

On the Quay, Newlyn by Walter Langley

Between the Tides by Walter Langley (1901)

Walter Langley, the son of a journeyman tailor, was born on June 8th 1852.  At the age of fifteen, he was apprenticed to a lithographer and six years later he won a scholarship to South Kensington School where he studied design for two years. He returned to Birmingham but took up painting full-time, and in 1881 was elected an Associate of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists (RBSA). In that year, aged twenty-nine, he received a £500 commission for a year’s work by the Birmingham-based photographer Robert White Thrupp, a wealthy patron, to spend twelve months in the Cornish town of Newlyn, and pictorially record the lives of the fisherfolk.  Having been brought up in a poor working-class family environment Langley could empathise with the hardship faced by the fishing community and his paintings often depicted stories of family tragedies and loss of loved ones.

Among the Missing by Walter Langley

Never Morning Wore to Evening but Some Heart Did Break by Walter Langley (1894)

The painting, Never Morning Wore to Evening but Some Heart Did Break, was completed by the English artist Walter Langley in 1894.  The painting today, as was the painting before, is about loss.  The title of the painting emanates from Canto VI of Tennyson’s poem In Memoriam, which reads:

That loss is common would not make
My own less bitter, rather more:
Too common! Never morning wore
To evening, but some heart did break

The painting, Never morning wore to evening, but some heart did break depicts a young woman being comforted on the quayside at Newlyn harbour by Grace Kelynack, the elderly widow of a Newlyn fisherman.

Old Grace by Walter Langley (1894)

Langley had also completed a portrait of Grace Kelynack entitled Old Grace.

The Ninth Wave by Ivan Aivazovsky (1850)

One of my favourite seascape paintings by Aviazovsky is his 1850 work entitled The Ninth Wave. It is also probably his best-known work. The title refers to a popular sailing legend that the ninth wave is the most terrible, powerful, destructive wave that comes after a succession of incrementally larger waves. In his painting, set at night, he depicts a raging sea, which has been whipped up by a storm. In the foreground we see people clinging to the mast of a vessel which had sunk during the night. Note how the artist has depicted the debris the people are clinging to in the shape of a cross and this element can be looked upon as a metaphor for salvation from the earthly sin.  One wants to believe that the desperate will to survive will triumph over the raging ocean.  The people clinging to the debris are lit by the warmth of breaking sunlight and this gives one to believe that they may yet be saved.  For a life-or-death depiction the painting is not a gloomy one. In fact, it is full of light and air and thoroughly transfused by the rays of the sun which endows it with a feeling of optimism. The painting was originally acquired for the State Russian Museum of St Petersburg and was one of the first paintings in the collection of the Emperor Alexander III Russian Museum in 1897.

The Rainbow by Aviazovsky (1873)

Another of Aivazovsky’s works which is part of the Tretyakov Museum collection in Moscow is his painting entitled The Rainbow which features a sailing ship foundering on rocks while two lifeboats full of sailors from the doomed vessel are battling against the fierce seas as they try to manoeuvre their boats ashore. It is a truly remarkable work in which Aviazovsky created a scene of a storm as if seen from inside the raging sea.  In the foreground, we see the sailors who have taken to a lifeboat and abandoned their sinking ship which had foundered on the rocky shoreline. They had spent the whole night in the boat. Suddenly they see a rainbow and feel that all is not lost. The reflection of the rainbow can just be seen to the left of the painting.  Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Russian novelist, was an admirer of Aivazovsky’s art and The Rainbow was his favourite work.  Of the painting, Dostoevsky wrote:

“…This storm by Aivazovsky is fabulous, like all of his storm pictures, and here he is the master who has no competition. In his storms there is the trill, the eternal beauty that startles a spectator in a real-life storm…”

The Shipwreck by J.M.W Turner (c.1805)

Storms and shipwrecks were a popular theme for paintings during J.M.W.Turner’s life.   He completed his painting The Shipwreck around 1805.  It depicts fishermen battling the huge waves as they attempt the rescue of an overcrowded lifeboat.   In the painting, we see a ship foundering and about to capsize and sink in the dark seas. Turner was fascinated by this dramatic theme which conveyed the danger of life at sea. To get us to better appreciate the peril the seafarers had to endure he places us close to the drama and with no sight of land it is as if we are part of the rescuing crews as they battle the ferocity of the sea,

It is thought that Turner was inspired by the re-publication in 1804 of the fourth edition of William Falconer’s poem, The Shipwreck, which was illustrated by another marine painter Nicholas Pocock, part of which (3rd Canto, lines 640-645) is below:

Again she plunges! Hark! A second shock

Tears her strong bottom on the marble rock! 

Down on the vale of death, with dismal cries,

The fated victims shuddering roll their eyes, 

In wild despair; while yet another stroke,

With deep convulsion, rends the solid oak. 

The fourth edition of William Falconer’s The Shipwreck was published in 1772. This poem in three cantos of more than 900 lines each, recounts the final voyage of the merchant ship Britannia and her crew. This fourth edition of The Shipwreck is the first edition of the poem to be published after Falconer’s death, ironically due to a shipwreck. Falconer had been appointed purser onboard the frigate Aurora in 1769 when it was lost after rounding the Cape of Good Hope. An introduction to a 1798 edition of Falconer’s works supposes the loss was caused by the Aurora catching fire after rounding the Cape.

The Storm on the Sea of Galilee by Rembrandt (1633)

A marine painting with a biblical connotation is the one by Rembrandt von Rijn entitled The Storm on the Sea of Galilee which he completed in 1633. It was one of his earliest large format works.  It depicts a close-up view of Christ’s disciples as they grapple  to gain control of their fishing boat.  A large wave has crashed into the side of the boat, swamped the deck and ripped the mainsail.  The vessel lurches dramatically in the rough sea.  We see one of the disciples leaning over the side of the boat being sick.  A man faces us as he clings hold of the rigging.  This is a self-portrait of the artist.  All the people on board the vessel are panic-stricken, except for one, Christ, who can be seen on the right, calmly looking ahead.  The depiction is based on a passage from the bible (Luke  8: 22-25):

22 One day Jesus said to his disciples, “Let us go over to the other side of the lake.” So they got into a boat and set out. 23 As they sailed, he fell asleep. A squall came down on the lake, so that the boat was being swamped, and they were in great danger.

24 The disciples went and woke him, saying, “Master, Master, we’re going to drown!”

He got up and rebuked the wind and the raging waters; the storm subsided, and all was calm. 25 “Where is your faith?” he asked his disciples.

In fear and amazement they asked one another, “Who is this? He commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him.

In the third and final part of these blogs featuring marine art I will be looking at paintings that extoll the joys of the sea and shoreline.

Maritime Art. Part 1.

The Sea and the Ships

Storm at Sea by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1569)

Maritime painting is an art genre that depicts ships and the sea.  Early examples of this genre were found in Greek vase paintings and the wall paintings of Pompeii.   Storm at Sea is one of earliest specific seascapes and was painted around 1569 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s and thought to be one of his last paintings. It is unfinished and, like so many of his works, defies unambiguous interpretation. On the one hand, we see ships threatened by a storm reminding us that man is not master of Nature, in fact man is often its victim. To try and save themselves from the stormy sea the sailors have poured oil onto the water.  They have also sacrificed a barrel from their cargo to distract the mighty whale who is attacking their vessel.

The Battle of Terheide (1657), commemorating the Battle of Scheveningen on 10 August 1653 by Willem van de Velde the Elder.

The greatest marine artists of the 17th century were Willem van de Velde the Elder and his son, Willem van de Velde the Younger.  They were best known for their spectacular depictions of storms at sea, and of nautical life, as well as their painstakingly drawn depictions of ships and naval battles. To commemorate the Dutch naval commander Maerten Harpertsz Tromp, his family commissioned a series of pen paintings of Tromp’s best-known battles from Willem van de Velde the Elder. The artist used pen and ink on canvas for these works, which which bear a resemblance to meticulous, accurate engravings. Van de Velde witnessed the Battle of Terheide in 1653 and he used the sketches that he produced on board as studies for this pen painting.

Men O’ War in Action by Willem van de Velde the Elder

Willem van de Velde the Elder was born in Leiden in 1611.  He was the son of the captain of a merchant vessel, Willem Willemsz van de Velde. When he was young, he would often accompany his father on sea voyages and this probably shaped his career as a marine artist.   Van de Velde married Judith van Leeuwen in Leiden in 1631 and the couple went on to have three children, a daughter, Magdalena, and two sons who would become renowned painters, Willem van de Velde the Younger, a marine artist and Adriaen van de Velde, a landscape painter.

Ships in a Stormy Sea by Willem van de Velde the Younger (c.1672)

The painting entitled Ships in a Stormy Sea by Willem van de Velde the Younger depicts the drama and the excitement of those who braved the seas in the 17th century.  Willie van de Velde the Younger had first-hand knowledge of sailing, and his marine paintings were appreciated for their realistic depictions of ships and sailing tactics. In this work the ship in the foreground is a kaag, a light fishing vessel.  The artist has depicted it as sailing close-hauled in the strong breeze, which is one of the most difficult sailing manoeuvres, in which the vessel sails into the wind as directly as it can without causing the sails to flap uselessly.

States Yacht and other vessels in a very light air by Willem van de Velde the Younger.

Whereas his father specialised in drawings and pen paintings, Van de Velde the Younger was best known for his oil paintings, which depicted life at sea in full colour.  He was born in Amsterdam in 1633 and trained as a painter with the Dutch artist Simon de Vlieger, who was known for his marine paintings, beach scenes, landscapes and genre work.  Unlike his father, Willem de Velde the Younger was a trained artist, unlike his father who was self-taught.  Van de Velde the Younger worked closely with his father and the pair brought their artistic visions to life. Often, he would use his father’s drawings as a guide to create his own masterpieces. The father was a master of detail whereas his son was a master of light.  It was this combination of artistic talents that was to lead to the success of their studio business.

The Home Fleet Saluting the State Barge by Jan van der Capelle (1650)

Shipping in a Calm at Flushing with a States General Yacht Firing a Salute by Jan van de Cappelle (1649)

Jan van de Cappelle was a Dutch Golden Age painter of seascapes and winter landscapes, also notable as an industrialist and art collector. He is now considered the outstanding marine painter of 17th century Holland. Jan van de Cappelle was wealthy and was occupied full-time running his father’s dyeing business. Though he painted some beach scenes and winter landscapes, most of his paintings represent the mouths of wide rivers or quiet inner harbours, where groups of ships at anchor were depicted in glassy calm waters. Many of his marine art works depict full cloud formations which hover over these tranquil waters and are mirrored in colourful reflections, often set in early morning or evening. When he died, aged fifty-three, in 1679, his estate was worth more than 90,000 guilders.

The Ships “Winged Arrow” and “Southern Cross” in Boston Harbour by Fitz Henry Lane (1853)

Fitz Henry Lane was born on December 19, 1804, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Lane and was christened Nathaniel Rogers Lane three months later and would remain known as such until he was twenty-seven.  In March 1832, Lane requested that his name be changed to Fitz Henry Lane.  The reasons behind Lane’s decision to change his name, and for choosing the name he did, are still very unclear. Lane and his family lived on the outskirts of Gloucester close to the harbour’s working waterfront and so, growing up, Lane had contact with all the elements of maritime life.  Lane’s father, Jonathan Lane was a sailmaker and it was thought that his son would follow him into the business or become a seafarer.  Unfortunately, when only eighteen months of age he became ill and suffered a form of paralysis of the legs.  Growing up he was unable to join his friends in games and became withdrawn and stayed at home where, for amusement, he began to draw.  This developed into an amazing talent and living close to the sea and the harbour he began to sketch the ships and the harbour.

Salem Harbor by Fritz Henry Lane (1853)

For fifteen years, Lane was employed at Pendleton’s Lithography shop in Boston and during those years as a lithographer Lane honed his artistic skills.  He produced many works of marine art and was listed as a marine painter in the 1840 edition of the Boston Almanac.  His works became extremely popular and were in great demand.  Then despite living in Boston, it never prevented him returning on a number of occasions to his birthplace, Gloucester.  Aged forty-eight Lane left Boston and moved back to Gloucester where in 1849 he designed and had constructed his own granite house with seven gables and a studio on Duncan’s Point.  This house would remain his primary residence to the end of his life. Fitz Henry Lane died on August 14th, 1865, aged 60.

Rainbow at Sea with some cruising Ships by Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg (1836)

Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, a Dutch painter, was born in Blåkrog in the Duchy of Schleswig on January 2nd 1783.  He was at the forefront of the Golden Age of Danish Painting, a period from 1800 to around 1850 and is often referred to as the “Father of Danish painting”.  After 1821 seascapes had become Eckersberg’s favourite subject.

The Russian Ship of the Line “Asow” and a Frigate at Anchor in the Roads of Elsinore by Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg (1828)

Eckersberg’s best loved maritime painting is his 1828 work entitled The Russian Ship of the Line “Asow” and a Frigate at Anchor in the Roads of Elsinore. This majestic work is not a true rendition of the scene but an idealised version as the setting of the scene is not Copenhagen where he had studied Russian ships of the line on two occasions.  We also know from his diaries that he had also studied the ship’s design from technical drawings he had borrowed from the naval dockyard.   However the backdrop is not Copenhagen but Elsinore where we can see Kronborg Castle in the background.  Kronborg is the castle and stronghold in the town of Helsingør, Denmark, which was immortalized as Elsinore in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.  The depiction is what the ship, Asow, would have looked like if viewed from a vantage point on the Øresund.

The Corvette Galathea in a Storm in the North Sea by Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg (1839)

Although he was known for his portraiture and historical paintings, marine paintings was another genre he developed.  Eckersberg developed a passion for ships, and, at the age of fifty-six, sailed around the Skagerrak, the Kattegat, the North Sea, and as far as the English Channel.  These sailing trips on the open seas brought home to Eckersberg that sea could be quite threatening and whereas many of his early work focused on cam seas, later works often depicted the ferocity of the sea.

If you would like to read more about the art of Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg then have a look at the five blogs I did focusing on his life life and paintings.

Northeaster by Wilmslow Homer (1895)

Winslow Homer was an American landscape painter and illustrator and is renowned for his marine subjects.  By many, he is considered one of the leading painters of 19th-century America.  His 1895 painting entitled Northeaster can be found in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City.   It depicts a wave crashing aggressively against a rocky Maine shoreline.  Homer loved the East coast of America around Maine and eventually settled down there in 1883, moving from New York to Prouts Neck, Maine where he lived at his family’s estate in the remodelled carriage house seventy-five feet from the ocean.  The title of the painting, Northeaster, does not refer to a location in America, but is a name given to a specific type of wind that occurs within the western North Atlantic Ocean. The painting depicts just a small section of rock seen in the lower left corner whilst, in the background, a spectacular section of sea is seen riding relentlessly towards the shore.

Early Morning, After A Storm At Sea By Winslow Homer (1900-1903)

Whilst living at Prouts Neck, Winslow Homer looked out upon the sea and once commented to a friend that painting was all about timing:

“…You must not paint everything you see. You must wait, and wait patiently until the exceptional, the wonderful effect or aspect comes. Then, if you have sense enough to see it—well . . . that is all there is to that…”

Homer began this seascape in 1900 and based it on a watercolour he had completed in 1883. He was proud of the finished work in oils stating that it was the best picture of the sea that he had painted but was totally dismayed when it was poorly received by the critics.   He just said of this dismissive reception that no one understood the work and besides that, the people never see the early morning effect. They don’t get up early enough.

View of Lac Léman by Gustave Courbet (1874)

Threatening grey clouds move across the sky above the calm Swiss lake but the cloud formation threatens an oncoming storm.  The depiction is set in the evening and on the horizon against the vivid orange and gold of the setting sun we can just barely make out a tiny boat.   Soft red reflections streak the surface of the water.   Courbet had left France in 1873  for political reasons and settled on the shores of Lac Léman in Switzerland where he painted a number of scenes featuring the lake at sunset.

Marine by Gustave Courbet

Four years earlier during the late summer of 1869 Courbet travelled to Étretat, a small fishing village which was famous for its towering coastal cliffs with their rock arches carved out by the relentless sea. Courbet was fascinated by the sea and completed twenty-nine works during his stay at Étretat.  His depictions of the sea would vary from the quiet tranquillity of the calm sea to the violence of crashing waves upon the rocks.  In the above work Courbet shows us the power of the sea with white-capped waves with foam fringes as they approaches us.  The painting has captured the feel of motion and the immense power of the relentless waves.

In Part 2, I will be looking at Marine paintings which feature those who enjoy relaxing by the sea and those whose living is connected with the sea.