Richard Morris
@ahistoryinart
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Brief lives of great painters, dealer in 19thC/20th British and European art email: richard @richardmorris .org
East Anglia
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My dear, wonderful mother died this morning after suffering a severe stroke in May. The last of the older generation, here she is with pa at their wedding in 1956.
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In the summer of 1878 John Singer Sargent, aged 22, travelled to Capri. In this superb work he's experimenting with the effects of sunlight on architectural forms; the flight of steps is painted from a low vantage point to capture the maximum amount of reflection.
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Painted at the height of his career, this moonlit street scene in Leeds from 1887 is a fine example of John Atkinson Grimshaw's skill at capturing the mood of a deserted road, quietly bathed in soft moonlight.
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'The Tea Table,' (1920) I'm writing an essay on British post WW1 paintings and their social history. Look at this work by Harold Harvey and you will see the woman is buttering bread before slicing it. Was this to do with thrift or was it a custom in certain areas of the country?
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'Les raboteurs de parquet,' (The Floor Scrapers) painted by Gustave Caillebotte in 1875 is our forty-second
#myfavouritepainting
and has chosen by the actor and theatre director Samuel West
@exitthelemming
Sam writes: 'I remember being captivated by this picture when I first saw…
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On 22 February 2024, Tate Britain will stage an exhibition of over sixty paintings by John Singer Sargent together with clothes and accessories worn by some of his sitters. The works will include 'Madame X,' and this work 'Miss Elsie Palmer,' from 1890. The show ends on 7th July.
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'Sunlight on a Building,' painted in 1937, has the Scottish artist James Proudfoot's early customary luminosity which reflected upwards, almost like stage lights or sunlight shining off a snowscape.
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A snowy day was an experiment in light for the impressionists.This painting of a magpie on a winter's day (c1868) was created in the early and controversial years of this modern movement. Monet sees in snow what he could also see in a dawn sky: a new age where nothing is solid.
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'The Model Makers.' (1958) In the mid-1950s Norman Blamey adopted powerfully effective distortions in his paintings - it betrays the impression made on him by Stanley Spencer's work, notably at the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere.
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In the summer of 1878 John Singer Sargent, aged 22, travelled to Capri. In this superb work he's experimenting with the effects of sunlight on architectural forms; the flight of steps is painted from a low vantage point to capture the maximum amount of reflection.
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On 22 February 2024, Tate Britain will stage an exhibition of over sixty paintings by John Singer Sargent together with clothes and accessories worn by some of his sitters. The works will include Lady Agnew of Lochnaw from 1892. The show ends on 7th July.
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Harold Knight is such a quiet and introspective artist that sometimes it is hard to grasp why his work isn't as well known as it should be. This is his sublime portrait of the concert pianist Ethel Bartlett from 1937.
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As a war artist, Stephen Bone spent time aboard submarines during WW2. In this painting he creates a dynamic composition, contrasting artificial and natural light. The position of the viewer is implied by the hand on the ladder of a crew member standing inside the sub.
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'Lime Tree Shade.' (1913) Like many talented women artists, Amy Browning has been overlooked by art historians. She's a compelling painter & much of her output was impressionistic, aimed at catching the subjective experience of light and fleeting fragments of perception.
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'Morning Underground.' (1922) Weaver Hawkins’s work explored the modern age. In this picture he takes the viewpoint of a passenger on the London tube where most passengers read their newspaper or sleep.
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From an early moment in his life, Albrecht Dürer was aware of himself as a genius, as an inspired creator; he was an accurate, loving student of nature; his art is full of meticulous, captivating depictions of vegetation. In 'The Great Piece of Turf,' created in 1503, each blade…
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Whilst still a student at the Glasgow School of Art, Norah Neilson Gray exhibited at the Salon in Paris as well as the Royal Academy. Following the outbreak of WW1, she volunteered as a nurse in France. During the war she continued to paint and produced some remarkable work.
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When Sorolla painted 'Niña en mar
plateado,' in 1909, it was amongst the most luminous, brilliant, and freely handled works he had produced; he was on the threshold of becoming one of Spain's most celebrated artists. The newspaper 'La Nación' reported in 1906 that 'Sorolla is…
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This view by Lily Joseph was painted from her studio in Bedford Row looking towards St Paul's Cathedral in London. She didn't attend the private view of her 1912 exhibition; she was in Holloway Prison after being arrested for taking part in a women's suffrage rally.
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'Peeled Lemons.' (1958) Eliot Hodgkin painted this work in tempera, a quick-drying medium made from binding pigment with egg yolk which he preferred to painting in oils. As he wrote in 1946: ‘Why tempera?… Because tempera enables me most nearly to achieve the effects I am aiming…
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My favourite painting by Wilhelm Holter. The majesty of this work from 1904, comes from the deep, pearl-like iridescence of the walls, the illumination of the gilt picture frames, the reflections from the floor and the furniture; all from a single light source which casts a slant…
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A Morocco Street Scene,' (1880) is quintessential John Singer Sargent in its dynamic use of angles and fascination with how direct and indirect light reflects onto and off white surfaces set against an intense blue sky.
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In 1924, the year this picture of the Grand Canyon was painted, Gunnar Widforss exhibited a large group of works depicting scenes from US National Parks. An art critic at the time considered Widforss as 'possibly the greatest watercolorist in America today.'
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'Attic Window.' (1937) Noel Kilgour was a contemporary and friend of fellow Australian artists while living in London including William Dobell and Arthur Murch. This picture features the roof outside his bedsit when he lived in Pimlico.
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'Waiting.' (1923) Edward Hopper’s primary influence in printmaking was fellow illustrator Martin Lewis who taught him the art of exact, flat, hard-edged printmaking and how light and shadow drifts between buildings.
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Many of Olga Antonova's still lifes show her love of lustrous surfaces. In them she explores how varied textures reflect light in different ways - seen admirably here in the contrast between the kettle and that of the tablecloth.
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This view of the harbour at St Ives, Cornwall of people at the shore's edge catching sardines in drift nets was painted by William Osborn, who lived in the town in the 1890s. He was often near poverty and frequently exchanged paintings for food and lodgings, bartering works to…
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David Inshaw's 'She Did Not Turn,' (1974) takes its title from a Thomas Hardy poem. Based directly on a landscape in the Wiltshire Downs near Devizes where Inshaw had recently gone to live, it is simply a painting of farewell, of an ending.
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Frank Taylor Lockwood was better placed than many artists to turn WW2 restrictions to his advantage and began a series of interiors of his house in Dalston Road, Acocks Green, Birmingham. This work depicts the scullery and is from 1944.
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Ellen Thesleff's self portrait of 1895, goes beyond a depiction of outward appearances and conveys the enigma of the artist who helped introduce Impressionism to Finland; she regarded herself as a poet with a brush, always trying to capture what she called 'the dream of life.'
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William McCloskey's painting has a very contemporary feel but it was painted in 1889.
He studied under the great American figurative painter Thomas Eakins who famously told his students: 'Paint an orange. After you have it done, introduce a white thing...Take an egg or an…
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The great Victorian critic and artist John Ruskin believed all beauty comes from nature. Look closely at this painting of a Bleinheim Orange apple (1873), and you'll see how Ruskin's lighting and shadow animate and dramatise a simple object.
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Euan Uglow was as radical and experimental as any celebrated British post-war artist. The ideas he pursued had nothing to do with setting a narrative or painting a photographic likeness, but creating a structured painting 'full of controlled potent emotion.'
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Mabel Alvarez painted this self-portrait in 1923; it exemplifies the timeless beauty that she sought to create. The black outline, around the rim of her hat, which also appears on her shoulder, is a device adapted from Cézanne to frame colour.
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There's a beauty in the open, well-lit living spaces Mary Dawson-Elwell painted. This interior 'The Landing in Summer,' (1930) features her home at Bar House, Beverley in the East Riding of Yorkshire.
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When John Atkinson Grimshaw's 'Lovers in a Moonlit Lane,' was first exhibited in 1837, newspaper reports tell us a 'queue of eager viewers nearly two miles in length,' waited in London's Piccadilly to see it.
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John Singer Sargent visited the Alhambra, Granada, Spain in 1879 and made a number of studies in watercolour and oil of its architectural design and ornament. This work depicts the Patio de los Arrayanes (Court of the Myrtles).
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Every detail and nuance of colour in Gustav Wintzel's picture 'The Chess Players,' (1886) adds to a sense of obsessive purpose. Nothing is accidental in this work. Wintzel (facing us) wants us to see his world, his wide interests: it's his intellect made visible.
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'The White Kitchen.' (c1944) Edward Seago was essentially a self-taught artist but crucially was mentored by Bertram Priestman in 1923 when Seago was 13 years old. Priestman's influence can be seen clearly in his early interiors and in his striking landscapes.
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The Danish painter Laurits Andersen Ring depicts his wife Sigrid in 'At Breakfast,' (1898) reading the liberal daily newspaper Politiken.
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'Running the Bath.' (1895) Ramón Casas was a leading Spanish avant-garde painter. This picture, with its subtle graduations of colour and suffused light, is reminiscent of the introverted 'Symphonies' of Whistler and the muted interiors of Vilhelm Hammershøi.
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'Trieste Harbour.' 1907 was an important year for 17 year old Egon Schiele, still a student at the Vienna Academy he had outgrown its doctrines and its tutors. It was also the year he first got to know Klimt, 'through' whom, as he later said, he was to reach his own unique style.
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'Tree Shadows on the Wall, Roundhay, Leeds.' (1878) John Atkinson Grimshaw is considered one of the most accomplished nightscape and townscape artists of all time. He used a camera obscura to project scenes onto canvas, which made up for his shortcomings as a draughtsman.
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In Elin Danielson-Gambogi's self portrait from 1903, she depicts herself looking at us, straight in the eye with a slightly knowing look. A former pupil of Gustave Courtois, she also studied sculpture with Auguste Rodin.
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Frank Brangwyn was an apprentice to William Morris from 1882 to 1884, and, like Morris, thought an artist's mission was to paint life. He was a polymath painting murals, making prints and designing furniture, textiles, stained glass and ceramics. 'The Swans,' is from 1921.
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Apologies to followers outside the UK but today is the first day of the county cricket season. This is David Inshaw's 'The Cricket Game,' a painting which evokes soft, early evening light and the fullness of high summer; the perfection of cricket in the landscape.
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While Vilhelm Hammershøi limited his colouring to tonal greys, whites and blues, Carl Holsøe employed a more naturalistic palette. His careful observation of light can be seen in the radiant light of the window shining to the floor and reflecting on the its surface.
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'Fowey Harbour, Cornwall.' (1887) Frank Brangwyn was among the new generation of artists who painted radically different coastal pictures in Britain in the 1880s, their vision sharpened and modernised by the new methods which came with hand-held photography.
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John Singer Sargent painted this study of a monastery stairwell during a visit to Italy in 1878 and reveals his interest in capturing the play of natural light over architectural forms - a constant subject throughout his career.
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Albrecht Dürer was second only to Leonardo da Vinci as a Renaissance student of nature. In
his 'The Great Piece of Turf' painted in 1503, we can only marvel at the balance of definition of plants and grasses and the depth he achieved in this watercolour.
In a letter to Jakob…
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'Fowey Harbour, Cornwall.' (1887) Frank Brangwyn was among the new generation of artists who painted radically different coastal pictures in Britain in the 1880s, their vision sharpened and modernised by the new methods which came with hand-held photography.
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Painted in 1916, J D Fergusson's 'Poise,' is thought to be a portrait of the writer Katherine Mansfield. The picture was rediscovered in 2016 in an attic of a house in Giverny after being hidden away for almost a century.
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Going back to yesterday's
#myfavouritepainting
of 'Les raboteurs de parquet,' (The Floor Scrapers) Gustave Caillebotte painted another (less well-known) version of the same subject twelve months later.
Although at first glance this painting might seem nondescript, it is another…
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Turner painted this work of the Thames at night in 1797, the year after he showed his first oil painting at the Royal Academy. It was fashionable to show moonlight effects in pictures which were mostly based on Dutch 17thC painters, then popular with British collectors.
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Painted in 1913, Paul Nash gave this picture the ultimate simplicity of a title, 'A Drawing.' The elm trees marked the boundary of his family's home at Wood Lane House, Iver Heath in Buckinghamshire. Trees always held a spiritual quality for him.
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'A Woman's Work.' John Sloan was one of the founders of the Ashcan School, America's first avant garde group of artists who rebelled against both American Impressionism and academic realism; this beautifully observed scene was painted from his Manhattan apartment in 1912.
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Piet Mondrian started out as a naturalistic painter under the influence of the Hague School of Impressionism and only began to paint abstract art in 1917, in his mid-forties, under the influence of Cubism. 'Apples, Ginger Pot and Plate on a Ledge,' was painted in 1901.
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'Paper bags.' (1970) Claudio Bravo's meticulously painted images of mundane, everyday objects and scenes have a photographic quality to them; his ability to depict creases, indentations and folds in his still life work has been compared to that of Francisco de Zurbarán and…
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Gilbert Spencer once said that after witnessing hand-to-hand fighting during WW1 he tried to build about him 'a little globe of ease.' Painting this work of laundry drying gave him great contentment and peace of mind.
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The scene in Laura Knight's 'On the Cliffs,' (1917) is high above the coves at Lamorna in Cornwall where she painted several of her most arresting pictures of sunlight refracting from the sea.
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During the summer of 1896, Monet rose at 3:30am, rowed a short distance on the confluence of the Epte and Seine to board his studio boat and set off downstream to a bend in the river. Here, he sat working on paintings as the sun rose capturing the effects of the lightening sky.
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Klimt's picture (1913) depicts the village of Cassone on Lake Garda in Italy. In contrast to his figure compositions, he never made any preparatory sketches of his landscapes and so they bear witness to his direct response to the natural world.
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At first, William Nicholson's composition (c1910) appears to be spontaneous and informal, but on closer examination, it becomes apparent how controlled it is, resulting in a balanced and harmonious interplay of objects and light. It's the use of different rlements that enabled…
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When Whistler showed 'Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket,' in 1875, he outraged the chief moralist of art John Ruskin: 'I... never expected to hear a coxcomb ask 200 guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.' And so a lawsuit began.
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Harold Harvey's painting shows the Cornish village of Mousehole in 1922. On this clear day, it looks more like a village in a primitive painting, equivalent to a Tuscan hill town in a Florentine 15th Century fresco.
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The Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela never quite forgot his symbolist past - the zig-zag pattens in the water of his Lake Keitele,' (1919) lend a meditative, tranquil quality to his picture, cleverly holding our attention.
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Leonard Campbell Tayor is now an obscure name in the art market, but in the 1930s, he explored the gentle rurality of inter-war England with great sensitivity. His 'Restaurant Car,' (1936) recalls the days of silver service meals on British railways.
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Paul Cornoyer moved to New York City in 1899 and was inspired by the architecture of the Gilded Age. While many of his peers in the Ashcan School portrayed the gritty reality of urban life, he painted moments of quietude such as 'Christmas, Madison Square Park.' (1910)
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During the Great Depression, Douglass Crockwell made several paintings for the Works Progress Administration including this work from 1932, which celebrates the industrial workers at the newspaper plant in the town of Glens Falls, New York.
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One summer evening in 1894, Winslow Homer spent hours capturing this scene as it unfolded in front of him. It was painted in and by the light of the moon, and never retouched. That tiny spot of red, off-centre on the horizon, is a lighthouse on Wood Island, Prouts Neck near Maine
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Self Portrait.' (1944) Anna Zinkeisen won a scholarship to the Royal Academy Schools from Harrow School of Art. During WW2, she worked the mornings in the casualty ward at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, London, and painted in a disused operating theatre in the afternoons.
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'After the Dance.' (1899) Ramon Casas began studying under John Singer Sargent's mentor Singer Carolus Duran when he was just 16. A year after painting this work, he held a solo show in Barcelona which established him as the leading Catalan portrait painter of his day.
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This painting depicts Vilhelm Hammershøi's sister Anna, who was two years his junior. It is one of the earliest known paintings by him of a figure viewed from behind. It created a sensation when it was first exhibited in 1885.
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Robert Sawyer's painting is based on a story told by his mother, who
during WW2 saw a schoolboy on a tram with an chamber pot stuck on his head. The boy's mother was taking him to hospital to have it removed. She was so embarrassed that she put his school cap on top of the pot.
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Summer's Day.' (1915) Unless you live in Canada or the US, rarely will you have seen a painting by Tom Thomson. It's a great oversight, given that Thomson is high on the list of Canada's greatest artists.
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'The Courtyard.' (1905) Vilhelm Hammershøi’s interest in isolation is powerfully articulated in this work which shows the exterior of his house in Strandgade 30, the oldest part of Copenhagen. He painted in a room so deep that even in summer, it remained in subdued twilight.
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Virginia Woolf, one of the great literary giants of the 20thC, was born on this day in 1882. In this photo from 1894, Virginia appears on the left with her sister, the artist Vanessa Bell playing a straight bat. My especial thanks to
@EJWoolf
for the reminder.
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Valuing property for an estate and came across a collection of work by Raymond Sheppard, illustrator for Hemingway's 'The Old Man and the Sea.' Look at the suberb draughtsmanship in this self portrait from 1947.
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Painted at the very beginning of the 20thC, this work is among Klimt’s most evocative landscapes. Depicting the waters of the Attersee (Atter Lake) in Austria, it marks a key moment in Klimt’s career, as he pioneered a new and distinctive approach to landscape painting.
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'The Town.' (c1880s) August Strindberg is known as a prolific writer, but he was also a radical painter for his time. He turned to painting in times of upheaval in his life or when his capacity as a writer failed him, he mostly painted seascapes outside his native Stockholm.
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It's not unusual to come across an artist who has no exhibition history or whose work only rarely appears in private sales or auctions. But this portrait by Violet Evelyn Arnott and which dates from around 1925 is the only known example of her paintings.
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Hannah Hirsch's 'Breakfast Time,' from 1887 demonstrates the qualities of her paintings. At first, the composition appears to be spontaneous and informal, but on closer examination it becomes apparent how controlled it is, a beautiful harmonious interplay of objects and light.
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When Piet Mondriaan painted 'Farm Near Duivendrech,' (1916) he was painting what the conservative local art market wanted. Few could have predicted, he would die an avant-garde hero in New York in 1944, and be remembered as one of the greatest of all modern artists.
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'The Fried Fish Shop.' (1936) Many British artists of the 1930s opted for a new kind of hard-edged, sharp-focused realist painting, and here Clifford Rowe paints an everyday scene with startling clarity and attention to detail.
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Anna Zinkeisen's portrait is that of her daughter, Julia; the black eye the result falling out of a tree. Anna had a reputation as a fine illustrator; during WW2 she worked mornings on a casualty ward and painted in a disused operating theatre in the afternoon.
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'Portrait of a Lady in Black.' (1894)
Gustav Klimt is about as familiar as an artist can be or at least, one whose work is known mainly through reproduction. His earlier portraits are worth pondering over for their sensitivity, their fall of light and humanity.
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Dazzle camouflage was created during WW1 to protect British ships from German artillery - it works by making it difficult to estimate range of speed and heading. Edward Wadsworth supervised the design of of the camouflage patterns. This is his 'Dazzle Ships in Drydock,' from 1919
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Water Mill,' (1892) As a former marine painter it is no surprise that water plays a central role in Frits Thaulow's works; as a brother in law to Paul Gauguin and a close friend of Claude Monet, he was certainly attuned to the direction of Impressionism.
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John Nash's 'The Viaduct,' painted in 1916 just before he joined the British army in France, would become a poignant memorial to remembering a lost way of life. His characteristic pattern-making transforms the English countryside into blocks of colour, which help to make up the…
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Gustav Klimt's 'Birch Forest,' from 1903, is a perfectly square canvas that has no extraneous explanatory context, a solitude accentuated by the absence of any single point of focus. Klimt's landscapes are spaces without boundaries, in which we float rather than walk.
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'The Sun.' (1904) Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo began work on what he described as his greatest picture in 1903 and completed it a year later. His aim was to achieve 'an exact replica of a sunrise'; the picture was made by applying pure, unmixed strokes of colour side by side.
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Victor Moody’s distinctive style of painting is yet to find a large appreciative public. He is in good company with other British artists from the 1920s and 1930s who are almost always out of vogue. This portrait is of Moody's wife, May from 1926.
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A remarkable painting for its time, 'Winter Scene in Moonlight,' (1869) is Henry Farrer's earliest known watercolour landscape, possibly depicting Brooklyn. The technique reveals an adherence to Pre Raphaelite ideals and anticipates Surrealism by 50 years.
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John Singer Sargent, undoubtedly one of the most significant formal portraitists of the fin-de-siècle glitterati, both in America and abroad, was born on this day in 1856.
The expressive brushwork and creative lighting in 'Nonchaloir (Repose)' from 1911 creates a painting that…
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'Venetian Passageway.' Like many of his contemporaries, John Singer Sargent was captivated by Venice and visited the city frequently between 1898 and 1913. There's a fluid spontaneity in this work, evident in the rendering of the rippling water of the canal.
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'Le bouillon.' (c1890) A particularly good picture by the French painter Étienne Tournes of a convalescent. The bowl is in crisp focus, and as the eye wanders further away from the optical centre of the painting, the edges and details become progressively more blurred; an effect…
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Lighting Up.' Leslie Worth was one of Britain's finest watercolourists. Self-taught he learned by trial and error and by studying the English masters. Rooted largely in Romantic and literary traditions, he produced wonderfully quirky pieces of work.
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'A Window in St John's Wood,' is one of a series of meticulous painted scenarios by Harold Knight showing single female sitters absorbed in an activity, such as reading, writing, or sewing. This
is from 1932.
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