【大都会 English script】第六章：大地与天空 Earth and Sky
Chapter 6: Earth and Sky
Landscape constitutes a centerpiece in the Western tradition of representing nature even though it did not emerge as an independent genre until the sixteenth century. Before then, the outdoors was shown not for itself, but as the setting for narrative scenes. Interest in depicting the natural world for its own sake increased in both Northern and Southern Europe during the Renaissance. Artists strove to do more than simply copy a given scene, however, making adjustments in order to impart ennobling qualities to their pictures.
Cultural history and the maker's point of view shape how we see nature as depicted in art. The Arcadian tradition based on classical ideals, presented in Chapter 1, is only one type of landscape. In seventeenth-century Flanders and the Netherlands, a more domesticated, localized, and naturalistic vision predominated. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, artists in Europe and America chose between various conceptions of landscape meant to communicate moral, aesthetic, spiritual, or patriotic messages. Technical terms arose for specific landscape modes, such as the Romantic, the sublime, the heroic, and the picturesque. Later in the nineteenth century, especially in France, fundamental changes in the status of landscape painting and the role of the artist upended tradition and set a new course for art history. Artists embraced nature but eschewed illusionism, celebrating the physical reality of paint on flat canvas.
Most books about landscape frame their discussion of the genre's development in terms of geographical tradition and date, for the Northern European type differs from the Italian, and landscape painting underwent radical stylistic shifts after the mid-nineteenth century. All the dominant landscape types are represented here, but they are organized by subject—trees and forests, rocks and mountains, and sky—rather than by geography or chronology. In Chapter 7, seascapes and other marine themes will take the stage.
（一）大地与天空 ：林间漫步：
本部分以荷兰画家梅因德尔特·霍贝玛（MeyndertHobbema）的一幅作品拉开序幕，霍贝玛被誉为西方风景画传统领域最为杰出的画家之一，他的这幅作品仿佛在邀请欣赏者走进画面，顺着这条泥土路迈入森林，漫步林间。托马斯·庚斯博罗（ThomasGainsborough）的一幅作品也让人如临其境，仿佛徜徉在郁郁葱葱的林间。在英国画家约翰·康斯特布尔（JohnConstable）和美国画家沃辛顿·惠特瑞吉（Worthing-tonWhittredge）所创作的19世纪风景画中，画面中央的景色则被精心排布的树木环绕起来。而勇于挣脱现实主义桎梏的艺术家们，如文森特·凡·高（VincentvanGogh）、亨利·埃德蒙德·克劳斯（Henri-Ed-mondCross）和亨利·卢梭（HenriRousseau），则以独特的方式为其笔下的树木增添了无限活力。
I. Earth and Sky: into the woods
One of the finest artists of the Western landscape tradition, the Dutch painter Meyndert Hobbema introduces this group of masterpieces with a composition that invites the viewer to enter the picture, following the dirt road through the trees and into the woods. Likewise, Thomas Gainsborough's canvas evokes a leisurely walk through wooded scenery. In nineteenth-century landscapes by the Englishman John Constable and the American Worthington Whittredge, carefully placed trees frame the central scene. Defying the constraints of realism, Vincent van Gogh, Henri-Edmond Cross, and Henri Rousseau bring energetic vitality to their trees.
Woodland Road
Meyndert Hobbema (Dutch, 1638–1709)
ca. 1670
Oil on canvas
94.6 x 129.5 cm
Bequest of Mary Stillman Harkness, 1950 (50.145.22)
Meyndert Hobbema was Jacob van Ruisdael's (see cat. 106) most talented disciple, having studied with him in Amsterdam about 1655–60 and then rivaling him in depictions of an idyllic Dutch countryside for the next ten years. In 1668 the artist was awarded the lucrative civic office of wine gauger, and from then on appears to have painted only for his own pleasure.
Woodland Road is a later work by Hobbema, dating from about 1670. The close description of foliage and other naturalistic details and the overall tonalities of brown and green found in his works of the mid-1660s have given way to stronger local colors and a more rhythmic and somewhat decorative arrangement of trees and clouds. And yet the artist's usual impression of a stroll in the countryside, in search of picturesque sights, remains as convincing as ever. Paintings like this one were made for fairly prosperous city folk who liked to imagine the woodlands, fields, and rustic cottages of Holland as peaceful refuges from the pressures of urban life. The theme, as many Dutchmen knew, went back to Roman writers such as Horace (65–8 B.C.) and Virgil (70–19 B.C.), and continues in many cultures today.
Reference:
Liedtke, Walter. Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 2007, pp. 344–46.
Stechow, Wolfgang. Dutch Landscape Painting of the Seventeenth Century. London, 1966, p. 79.
Thomas Gainsborough (English, 1727–1788)
Wooded Upland Landscape
Probably 1783
Oil on canvas
120.3 x 147.6 cm
Gift of George A. Hearn, 1906 (06.1279)
Born in Sudbury, Suffolk, near the North Sea, Thomas Gainsborough left home at an early age for London, where he may have studied with Francis Hayman (1708–1776). The young man was fortunate to have a steady income from his wife, the illegitimate daughter of an aristocrat, whom he married in 1746, but even so he could not make a living as a landscape painter in the city and so returned to Sudbury, where he accepted commissions for small individual and group portraits. In 1758 he moved to Bath, a West Country spa town, where for the first time he painted dazzling portraits to the scale of life. He began exhibiting these portraits in London in 1761 and in 1774 moved there permanently.
Gainsborough was interested in seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting. During his first stay in London, he made a chalk drawing (Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester) after a picture by Jacob van Ruisdael (see cat. 106) that he may have seen in the auction rooms. Back in Sudbury he reconnected with the countryside of his childhood and later, in Bath, he rode about the wooded hills visiting the great houses and sketching the environs. The artist never lost interest in landscape: in 1783, he wrote that he would visit the lakes in Cumberland and Westmoreland for the first time and paint them for the Royal Academy. The tour inspired his late images of mountain scenery.
Wooded Upland Landscape and the sketch that preceded it (Corsham Court Collection, Wiltshire) would have been made in the artist's London studio. The sweeping view is imaginary, brushed broadly in colors so delicate and transparent that they suggest not oil but watercolor. Strong contrasts of light and shade emphasize the zigzag of the track among the hills, which is punctuated by a horse-drawn cart, and peasants by the wayside.
Reference:
Baetjer, Katherine. British Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1575–1875. New York, 2009, pp. 92, 104–6, no. 46.
Hayes, John. The Landscape Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough: A Critical Text and Catalogue Raisonné. 2 vols. Ithaca, 1982. Vol. 1, pp. 140, 145, vol. 2, pp. 325, 521–23, no. 150.
John Constable (English, 1776–1837)
Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds
ca. 1825
Oil on canvas
87.9 x 111.8 cm
Bequest of Mary Stillman Harkness, 1950 (50.145.8)
Constructed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the Gothic style, Salisbury Cathedral, seen here from the southwest, features the tallest church spire in England. The Metropolitan's canvas is one of six that relate to a commission undertaken by John Constable at the request of his friend, John Fisher, bishop of Salisbury, probably in 1822; Fisher appears together with his wife in the lower left corner. Constable worked on the commission for four years, during which time he gained an international reputation for his intensely naturalistic approach to the depiction of landscape epitomized by The Hay Wain (National Gallery, London), which caused a sensation at the Paris Salon of 1824.
The first version of Salisbury Cathedral completed for Fisher (Victoria and Albert Museum, London) was well liked at the Royal Academy exhibition held in London in 1823, but the patron himself was dissatisfied. Finding the sky above the steeple too dark and threatening, he asked the artist to change it. Instead, Constable executed an entirely new painting, the present one, on which work began by July 1824. Infrared reflectography reveals that it started with an outline traced from the first version, but that the artist then proceeded to improvise directly on the canvas—opening up the mass of foliage that had previously arched over the south transept and laying in a relatively placid sky. This work eventually served as a study for the final picture (The Frick Collection, New York), which Constable described as "nearly compleated [sic]" in November 1825. Fisher had died the previous May, and was thus deprived the opportunity to see the painting grace his London dining room, where he had intended to display it.
Reference:
Baetjer, Katherine. British Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1575–1875. New York, 2009, pp. 237, 242–46, no. 117.
Worthington Whittredge (American, 1820–1910)
The Trout Pool
1870
Oil on canvas
91.4 x 68.9 cm
Gift of Colonel Charles A. Fowler, 1921 (21.115.4)
After traveling extensively throughout Europe from 1849 to 1859, Worthington Whittredge returned to the United States and set his sights on mastering the realities of the American wilderness. He recalled in his autobiography: "It was impossible for me to shut out from my eyes the works of the great landscape painters which I had so recently seen in Europe, while I knew well enough that if I was to succeed I must produce something new and which might claim to be inspired by my home surroundings. I was in despair. Sure, however, that if I returned to nature I should find a friend, I seized my sketch box and went to the first available outdoor place I could find. I hid myself for months in the recesses of the Catskills."
The Trout Pool exemplifies the artist's mature style and is among his most successful efforts in capturing the American landscape. The woodland subject, likely inspired by the works of his colleague Asher B. Durand (see cat. 5), is one that Whittredge also favored, and is the result of his direct study of nature. He carefully chose a segment of the forest interior dominated by tall trees in the foreground that serve as a framing element. A brilliantly lit middle ground reinforces a sense of depth in the composition. The painting conveys a hushed reverence for nature.
Reference:
Bibliography
Baur, John I. H., ed. The Autobiography of Worthington Whittredge, 1820–1910. New York, 1969.
Janson, Anthony F. Worthington Whittredge. London, 1989.
Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890)
Cypresses
1889
Oil on canvas
93.4 x 74 cm
Rogers Fund, 1949 (49.30)
Cypresses was painted in late June 1889, shortly after Vincent van Gogh began his yearlong stay as a voluntary patient at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, in the south of France. The subject, which he found "as beautiful of line and proportion as an Egyptian obelisk," both captivated and challenged the artist: "It is a splash of black in a sunny landscape, but it is one of the most interesting black notes, and the most difficult to hit off exactly that I can imagine." Van Gogh's initial fascination with cypresses resulted in three paintings: two showing the "big and massive trees" at close range, in vertical format (this one and another in the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo), and a majestic horizontal view, Wheat Field with Cypresses (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), which he later repeated in two variants. These works were intended to form part of a series that would be "the contrast and yet equivalent" of the sunflower pictures he had made earlier, in nearby Arles.
Having relied on a large pen-and-ink drawing (Brooklyn Museum) to work out various aspects of the present composition, Van Gogh painted the landscape with unhesitating gusto, making only one substantive revision: X-radiographs reveal that he shifted the placement of the crescent moon to the right. Presumably, this was the Cyprès shown at the 1890 Salon des Indépendants in Paris.
Reference:
Pickvance, Ronald. Van Gogh in Saint-Rémy and Auvers. Exh. cat. New York, 1986, pp. 108–10, 113, 189, 191, 298–99, no. 15.
Stein, Susan Alyson. In Masterpieces of European Painting, 1800–1920, In The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 2007, pp. 170, 258–59, no. 158.
Vincent van Gogh: The Letters. Edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, and Nienke Bakker. Amsterdam, 2009. Vol. 5, pp. 41–42, 46, 49, fig. 10; 106, fig. 5; 206–7, fig. 1.
Henri-Edmond Cross (French, 1856–1910)
Pines Along the Shore
1896
Oil on canvas
54 x 65.4 cm
Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975.1.164)
Born Henri-Edmond Delacroix, the French painter adopted the English translation of "croix" as a surname to distance himself from the legendary French Romantic artist Eugene Delacroix (see cat. 23). Cross was a practitioner of the Neo-Impressionist style of painting late in the nineteenth century. The artists associated with this short-lived avant-garde movement believed that painting with individual touches of interwoven pigment resulted in a greater vibrancy of color in the observer's eye than conventional color blending.
This call to separate color into broken strokes is clearly articulated in Cross's light-drenched landscapes. Pines Along the Shore was painted in the south of France, overlooking the Mediterranean. In the early 1890s, Cross relocated from Paris to a hamlet near Saint-Tropez called Saint-Clair, where he built a house and remained for the rest of his life. In the company of fellow Neo-Impressionists Paul Signac (1863–1935) and Maximilien Luce (1858–1941) and other artists, most notably Henri Matisse (1869–1954), Cross reveled in the region's unspoiled landscapes, seascapes, and ever-present, brilliant sunshine. The present canvas is a paradigmatic example of Neo-Impressionist brushwork. Cross built up his paint surface in a tapestry-like fashion, from cool tones on the pine grove floor to brilliant foliage at the water's edge to softer hues in the sky and mountains beyond. This appealing study of nature presents a broad spectrum of luxuriant, nuanced color resonating with the idiosyncratic techniques of Neo-Impressionist practice.
Reference:
Amory, Dita. "Georges Seurat (1859–1891) and Neo-Impressionism." In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York, 2000– . http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/seni/hd_seni.htm (accessed September 20, 2011).
Brettell, Rick, Paul Hayes Tucker, and Natalie H. Lee. Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Paintings in the Robert Lehman Collection. Vol. 3. New York, 2009.
Henri Rousseau (le Douanier) (French, 1844–1910)
The Banks of the Bièvre near Bicêtre
ca. 1908–9
Oil on canvas
54.6 x 45.7 cm
Gift of Marshall Field, 1939 (39.15)
The artist identified the subject of this painting in a handwritten note, affixed to the back of its stretcher, dated 1909, the year he consigned it for sale to the dealer Ambroise Vollard (1866–1938). Sixteen years earlier, Henri Rousseau had retired from his post as a customs agent (which had earned him the nickname "le Doaunier") to dedicate himself full-time to his art. Yet in this work and others from his maturity, the sensibility of the onetime Sunday painter continued to hold sway: he gravitated to settings on the periphery of Paris, proximate to the toll stations he had manned during his workaday shifts, and to motifs that highlight the unfettered hours given over to the simple pleasures of strolling on a quiet afternoon.
The airy vistas Rousseau devoted to the Île-de-France stand in contrast to the dense tropical splendor of his exotic jungle scenes. Rather than suspending reality for fantasy, they tally with the pedestrian life of an artist who, as he admitted, "had never travelled further than to the hothouses in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris." Indeed, the site shown in the present work is just upstream from the city's botanical gardens, which the river Bièvre skirts before it meets the Seine.
Within the city limits, the banks of the Bièvre were rank with contamination. But only a few miles to the south, near the outlying suburb of Bicêtre, as this picturesque view lays bare, there were still pockets of nature evocative of the verdant river valley celebrated in the painted idylls of Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) and the poetry of Victor Hugo (1802–1885). Rousseau presents a parcel of landscape that exudes the freshness of spring, animated by vestiges from the past, such as the quaint figures in peasant dress on the tree-lined path at left and the seventeenth-century aqueduc d'Arcueil, which defines the horizon line at right.
Reference:
Certigny, Henry. Le douanier Rousseau en son temps, bibliographie et catalogue raisonné: Supplément No. 3. Paris, 1991, p. 22.
Hoog, Michel. Henri Rousseau. Exh. cat. New York, 1985, pp. 222–23, no. 54 [French ed., 1984 pp. 226–27, no. 53].
Attributed to Anna Frances Simpson (American, 1880–1930)
Embroidered wall hanging with cypress motif
ca. 1910–29
Silk on linen
90.8 x 41.3 cm
Purchase, Barrie A. and Deedee Wigmore Foundation Gift, 2004 (2004.334)
Newcomb College, the women's school at Tulane University, in New Orleans, Louisiana, was a major center for Arts and Crafts design in the early years of the twentieth century. While the Newcomb name is most often associated with the pottery produced in the college's art workshops, the female students and professional artists there also designed, made, and marketed metalwork, jewelry, bookbindings, and textiles. Anna Frances Simpson, to whom the design of this piece is attributed, entered Newcomb as an undergraduate art student in 1902; was a graduate student there for two more years; and functioned as a full-fledged, paid Art Craftsman between 1908 and 1929. Like many practitioners of the Arts and Crafts Movement, Simpson worked in multiple media: while her primary art form was ceramics, she also produced embroideries.
Newcomb designs often glorified the natural beauty of Louisiana. This evocative scene shows a native cypress tree hung with Spanish moss partially obscuring a full moon. The coarsely woven ground fabric is a tan color, and the embroidery, executed in a simple darning stitch, is rendered in soft, naturalistic shades. A trademark of the Newcomb embroideries is that there are often two or more colors of thread in each representational area; the closeness of the stitching allows the eye to blend the various shades. In this picture, for example, the silvery gray Spanish moss is actually composed of a multitude of colors.
Simpson favored subjects from nature in her decorative work, and this composition conveys the stylized, simplified expression inherent to the Arts and Crafts Movement. It also suggests Simpson's familiarity with Japanese prints, which often depicted a fragment of a larger landscape with hanging plants such as wisteria (echoed here by the Spanish moss) serving to frame the top of the image.
Reference:
Bragg, Jean, and Susan Saward. The Newcomb Style. New Orleans, 2002, p. 126.
Designed by John Henry Dearle (English, 1860–1932)
Woven by John Martin (life dates unknown) of the firm Morris & Company
Greenery
Designed 1892; woven 1915
Wool and silk, 4 warp threads per cm
187 x 470 cm
Purchase, Edward C. Moore Jr. Gift, 1923 (23.200a)
Enveloped within dense woodland, two fallow deer prick up their ears and eye a pair of hares scampering past. A fox turns to watch, and a pheasant, as if startled, takes flight from a chestnut tree. The forest floor is a riot of color, as ripening strawberries grow cheek-by-jowl with foxgloves, bluebells, pimpernels, and a host of other flora. This almost mystical abundance is shared by the three trees that anchor the composition, their boughs heavy with pears, chestnuts, and acorns. Above, three unfurled scrolls bear verses—or riddles—composed by the famed English craftsman and designer William Morris (1834–1896). The words seem to give voice to each of the trees:"by woodman's edge I faint and fail / by craftsman's edge I tell the tale
high in the wood • high o'er the hall / aloft I rise • when low I fall unmoved I stand • what wind may blow / swift swift before the wind I go.
Morris's text alludes to the purpose the timber from each tree would serve after it was felled: the first, pearwood, was commonly used for carving, or "telling the tale"; the second, chestnut, was traditionally made into roof rafters; the third, oak, tended to be the lumber of choice for building sailing ships.
The tapestry, woven at the Merton Abbey Tapestry Works from a design by John Henry Dearle, unites Victorian sentimentality with the loftier ideals of the Arts and Crafts Movement. William Morris had founded this workshop at Merton, in Surrey, in 1881 as part of his vision to use the integrity of medieval craftsmanship to revitalize the art and design of postindustrial Britain.
Reference:
Parry, Linda. William Morris Textiles. New York, 1983, p. 120.
Standen, Edith A. European Post-Medieval Tapestries and Related Hangings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1985, no. 136.
（二）大地与天空：秀山险石：
萨尔瓦托·罗莎（SalvatorRosa）的这件作品表达了对阿卡迪亚（Arcadia）自然观的抗辩，带有早期浪漫主义风格。罗莎的自然风景中满是暴戾之气，古典的安宁祥和全然不见，取而代之的却是戏剧性、危险和暴力。阿尔伯特·比兹塔特（AlbertBierstadt）的这幅作品气势宏伟，描绘了加州约塞米蒂峡谷（YosemiteValley）怪石嶙峋的山峰，赞颂了美国旷野景色的恢弘壮美。法国画家居斯塔夫·库尔贝（GustaveCourbet）的作品则描绘了故乡奥南（Ornans）上空的悬崖峭壁，体现了他独具特色的绘画技法。而在巴尔蒂斯（Balthus）和马斯登·哈特利（MarsdenHartley）的作品中，崇山峻岭则被塑造成了富有神话色彩的建筑。
II. Earth and Sky: Rock and Mountain
Salvator Rosa here offers the proto-Romantic counterargument to the Arcadian vision of nature: instead of classical serenity, Rosa brings drama, danger, and violence to his landscape full of banditi. Albert Bierstadt memorializes the grandeur of the American wilderness with his majestic view of the jagged mountain peaks of California's Yosemite Valley. The French painter Gustave Courbet's portrait of the great bluff of rock overlooking his hometown of Ornans reveals his distinctive handling of paint. Balthus and Marsden Hartley transform mountains into mythic structures.
Salvator Rosa (Italian, 1615–1673)
Bandits on a Rocky Coast
1655–60
Oil on canvas
74.9 x 100 cm
Charles B. Curtis Fund, 1934 (34.137)
The scene Salvator Rosa paints is wonderfully described by Helen Langdon: "On a wild stretch of coastline, remote from the distant city on the horizon, a group of armed men, touches of bright colour against the rocks, conspiratorially point and gesture, talking intensely with one another. The landscape threatens. A wind blows through the grass and trees and whips up stormy clouds, while dark shadows play over the rocks and water." She notes, "It was the mystery of the mood which he created that inspired writers to spin legends and stories around them."
In fact, this is one of the rare paintings by Rosa that shows bandits in a rugged landscape—the theme he was most famous for in nineteenth-century Britain. Lady Morgan, who wrote a biography of the artist in 1824, embraced the legend that Rosa had, himself, been taken prisoner by bandits in the hills of the Abruzzi. Yet he typically treated the subject of bandits in etchings rather than paintings. The figures in the Metropolitan's canvas are closely related to these engravings, suggesting that the picture dates from the 1650s. Rosa's evocation of a rugged and unpredictable nature played a great role in the notion of the sublime.
Reference:
Langdon, Helen. In Salvator Rosa. By Helen Landgon, Xavier F. Salomon, and Caterina Volpi, pp. 35, 132, 183, 188–89, no. 26. Exh. cat. London, 2010.
Wallace, Richard W. Salvator Rosa in America. Exh. cat. Wellesley, Mass., 1979, pp. 14–15, 23.
Albert Bierstadt (American, 1830–1902)
Merced River, Yosemite Valley
1866
Oil on canvas
91.4 x 127 cm
Gift of the sons of William Paton, 1909 (09.214.1)
Albert Bierstadt secured his lasting identity as one of the preeminent painters of the American West by traveling on expeditions to the western frontiers of the Nebraska Territory and the Rocky Mountains, where he took sketches that resulted in highly acclaimed, grand-scale canvases. On May 12, 1863, Bierstadt departed New York for San Francisco in the company of the writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow (1836–1870). Their trip to California was probably inspired by large stereoscopic photographs of the Yosemite Valley by Carlton E. Watkins (see cat. 80), who had recorded the valley's magnificent peaks under various atmospheric conditions. Bierstadt and his party reached Yosemite in August of 1863 and, according to Ludlow, made their first camp in a "green meadow, ringed by woods, on the banks of the Merced."
From the many studies he created during this trip, Bierstadt later painted a number of large works in his New York studio. These included the present painting, which was undoubtedly inspired by views from this first campsite. Here Bierstadt juxtaposes jagged background peaks with a low, carefully detailed foreground that includes the figures of Native Americans on the rocky ledges overlooking the Merced River.
Reference:
Anderson, Nancy K., and Linda S. Ferber. Albert Bierstadt: Art & Enterprise. Exh. cat. New York, 1991.
Hendricks, Gordon. Albert Bierstadt: Painter of the American West. New York, 1974.
Gustave Courbet (French, 1819–1877)
View of Ornans
Probably mid-1850s
Oil on canvas
73 x 92.1 cm
Bequest of Alice Tully, 1993 (1995.537)
In the 1850s, Gustave Courbet established his reputation as the leading figure in the Realist movement with a group of paintings of contemporary rural life set in his native Franche-Comté region, which he exhibited at the Paris Salon. These works flouted convention in their subjects drawn from daily life, large scale, and emphatic rejection of academic ideals. At the same time, Courbet memorialized the area's unique topography in landscapes including this work, a panoramic view of the Loue River Valley painted about 1855. These images embody his dictum, "To paint a landscape, you have to know it. I know my country, I paint it." The artist grew up surrounded by the limestone cliffs, rugged forests, and verdant valleys of his imagery, which he came to know intimately through walks and hunts near his birthplace, Ornans. His landscapes, then, take on an autobiographical aspect.
This work is a composite of various sites in and around Ornans: the bridge in the foreground is that of the nearby village, Scey-en-Varais, while Ornans is represented by the church steeple in the middle distance as well as the distinctive limestone cliff known as the Roche du Mont. Such composite views were typical of Courbet's subjective approach to landscape although a bit at odds with the notion of pictorial realism that his art purports to be. A similar view of the Loue River Valley occupies the center of the artist's monumental self-portrait A Painter's Studio (1855, Musée d'Orsay, Paris), a picture within a picture that signals the central role of landscape in Courbet's art.
Reference:
Morton, Mary, and Charlotte Eyerman, with an essay by Dominique de Font-Réaulx. Courbet and the Modern Landscape. Exh. cat. Los Angeles, 2006.
Marsden Hartley (American, 1877–1943)
Mt. Katahdin, Maine, No. 2
1939–40
Oil on canvas
76.8 x 102.2 cm
Edith and Milton Lowenthal Collection, Bequest of Edith Abrahamson Lowenthal, 1991(1992.24.3)
Early in his career, the American painter Marsden Hartley associated with Alfred Stieglitz (see cat. 84) and his New York gallery "291," where the most avant-garde European and American artists of the early twentieth century exhibited (including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Constantin Brancusi, Auguste Rodin, and Arthur Dove).
It was also where, in 1909, Hartley first exhibited a group of small landscapes depicting the mountains of his home state of Maine. Over the course of his career, the artist painted many abstract compositions, human figures, and still-life objects, but he invariably identified most with the majestic mountains that he regularly turned to for inspiration and solace.
This painting is a large and late example of these mountain subjects. It features Maine's highest peak, Mount Katahdin, which appears in more than eighteen paintings dating from 1939–42. The sixty-two-year-old artist went there on an eight-day camping trip in mid-October 1939, with a guide who led him on an eighty-mile car ride and a four-mile hike through arduous terrain. He stayed by Katahdin Lake in a log cabin, from which he had a view of both the water and the summit of the mountain. His first pictures made at the site were drawings and small oil sketches, which he later referred to when painting larger canvases, like this one, in his studio. The Metropolitan's picture reflects the autumnal reds and yellows of the season. Others, painted in cool blues and grays, capture the bleakness of Maine winters. All, however, feature the mountain's recognizable conical shape silhouetted against the sky. That fall Hartley wrote: "I have achieved the 'sacred' pilgrimage to Ktaadn Mt [he preferred the Native American spelling]. . . . I feel as if I have seen God for the first time—I find him so nonchalantly solemn."
Reference:
Kornhauser, Elizabeth Mankin, ed.Marsden Hartley. 2003. Exh. cat. New Haven, 2003, no. 91, pp. 27, 184, 185, 256, 322.
Messinger, Lisa Mintz. "American Art: The Edith and Milton Lowenthal Collection." Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 54, no. 1 (Summer 1996): pp. 3, 7, 11, 46.
Robertson, Bruce. Marsden Hartley. New York, 1995, p. 122.
（三）大地与天空： 天空
本部分开篇的两件展品分别展现了两种截然不同的天空概念：一件中世纪浮雕柱头描绘的是天使栖息的国度，而另一件来自17世纪伊朗的伊斯兰星盘(Islamicastrolabe)则见证了早期对天体和行星的科学探索。其他展品则主要描绘了天空、太阳和各种天文现象。著名的荷兰风景画画家雅各布·凡·鲁伊斯达尔（JacobvanRuisdael）的作品中展现的则是云中的一段戏剧故事。两位美国画家，乔治·英尼斯（Ge-orgeInness）和约翰·弗雷德里克·肯塞特（JohnFrederickKen-sett）分别展示了一天开始和结束时的华美景色。而爱德华·霍珀（EdwardHopper）的作品则描绘了一座缅因州灯塔的光辉景象，画面中，在万里晴空和清澈、明亮日光的映衬下，一切都显得轮廓分明。
III. Earth and Sky: Sky
At the outset of this section, two objects show contrasting definitions of sky: a carved medieval capital depicts the celestial realm of angels, while an Islamic astrolabe from seventeenth-century Iran attests to the nascent scientific exploration of the stars and planets. In the balance of the works, the dominant element of the composition is either the sky or the sun and its effects. Jacob van Ruisdael, the great Dutch landscape painter, presents a drama unfolding in clouds. Two Americans, George Inness and John Frederick Kensett, bring out the luminous wonder of the sky at the beginning and end of day. A vivid sky and clear, bright light carve all the forms in Edward Hopper's striking image of a Maine lighthouse.
Capital with an angel emerging from a cloud
ca. 1150–1200
French, Burgundy
Limestone
32.7cm x 32.9cm x33 cm
The Cloisters Collection, 1949 (49.60.7)
The ancient world of Greece and Rome invented the Corinthian capital, the classical form of architectural capital decorated with acanthus, a plant that grows naturally in Mediterranean lands. This form continued in the European Middle Ages but evolved in many different ways. Here, the acanthus leaves (similar to those found in Burgundian churches such as Avallon and Vezelay) are less spiky and naturalistic than in ancient examples. The tradition of foliage capitals extends unbroken, but continually modified, from ancient Greece to the present day.
While the conventional form of the Corinthian capital can be perceived in its basic structure, a hovering angel pointing down from heaven dominates the present object. The addition of such a figure to the classical tradition of the acanthus capital is a typical Romanesque transformation and reveals the sculpture as a narrative fragment. Another figure or figures, possibly carved in the column below, would have completed the story. These likely included a representation of the Virgin Mary, and together with the angel the whole scene would have represented the Annunciation. Thus the capital combines images of the natural world with the miraculous story from the Gospels.
Reference:
Gaborit, Jean René. La Sculpture Romane. Paris, 2010.
Muhammad Zaman al-Munajjim al-Asturlabi (active ca. 1641–1678)
Planispheric astrolabe
Safavid period, A.D. 1065/A.D. 1654–55
Iranian, Mashhad
Brass and steel
21.6 x 17.1 x 5.7 cm
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1963 (63.166a-j)
The astrolabe was common to medieval Europe and the medieval Islamic world. It was used for astronomical, astrological, and topographical calculations as well as for telling time. For Muslims, it was an important device for determining the direction of Mecca and the time of prayer. Its astrological function is attested by sixteenth-century Persian paintings of armies going into battle led by white-bearded sages holding up astrolabes to decide on the most auspicious moment to enter the fray.
This example consists of a case (umm) fitted with five disc-shaped plates with different markings corresponding to various terrestrial latitudes and longitudes. These plates could be changed depending on the user's location. On the back of the astrolabe is a sighting bar, or spider (alidade), that can rotate and is fixed to the instrument through the central pierced pivot hole. The faceplate (ankabut) is carved with an arabesque scroll and the phrase 'Bismallah al-rahman al-rahim' (In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate.) It is bordered by the twelve astrological signs of the zodiac. The tips of the leaves in the arabesque serve as star-pointers on the plate below.
This astrolabe is signed by Muhammad Zaman al-Munajjim (the astronomer) al-Asturlabi (the astrolabe maker), a well-known maker of scientific instruments from Mashhad, an important shrine city in northwestern Iran. The date of 1654–55 corresponds to the first half of Muhammad Zaman's career. Although this astrolabe is of a standard size and would have been easily portable, some very large examples were produced for the shahs of Iran. Despite the introduction of European clocks in the late sixteenth- or early seventeenth century, astrolabes continued to be popular in part because they did not require winding or frequent repairs.
Reference:
Pingree, D. "Astorlab." Encyclopaedia Iranica 2. London, 1987, pp. 853–57.
Jacob van Ruisdael (Dutch, 1628/29–1682)
Grainfields
ca. 1665–70
Oil on canvas
47 x 57.2 cm
The Friedsam Collection, Bequest of Michael Friedsam, 1931 (32.100.14)
Jacob van Ruisdael was the greatest of all Dutch landscapists during the seventeenth century, and his work was celebrated by painters and writers of the next two hundred years. This canvas was almost certainly owned by the great English artist Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) from 1756 until his death.
In his 1816 essay "Ruisdael als Dichter" ("Ruisdael as a Poet"), Wolfgang von Goethe suggested that the artist's landscapes often evoke the passage of time by including ruins or other significant details (here, the traveler on the road, the passing clouds, and the rich grainfields, which imply summer or early autumn). A Dutch viewer of Ruisdael's day might also have noted a connection between the rain clouds, the grainfields, the mill (which ground grain), and perhaps the church in the distance, which serves as a reminder that all of nature is the gift of God.
Ruisdael devoted great attention to actual appearances, such as different types of clouds and trees, and convincing effects of light and atmosphere. His drawings include many sketches made out of doors. However, his compositions reveal careful stagecraft, demonstrated here in the way two trees connect the windmill and church to the most dramatic area of the sky, and the way the road and sandy bank lead the eye diagonally across the foreground to the main motifs. Both the design and the subject indicate that the painting dates from about 1665–70, when Ruisdael was at the height of his success in Amsterdam.
Reference:
Liedtke, Walter. Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 2007, pp. 792–97.
Slive, Seymour. Jacob van Ruisdael: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings, Drawings, and Etchings. New Haven, 2001, 100.
Sunrise
1887
Oil on canvas
76.2 x 114.9 cm
Anonymous Gift, in memory of Emil Thiele, 1954 (54.156)
George Inness's early landscapes were influenced by the style of Hudson River School artists such as Thomas Cole (see cat. 4) and Asher B. Durand (see cat. 5). Their meticulously detailed canvases defined the standards at New York's National Academy of Design, where Inness studied and showed his works. In 1851, during his first trip to Europe, Inness spent more than a year in Rome, renting a studio above that of the American painter William Page (1811–1885), who likely introduced him to the philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). This Swedish intellectual held that everything in nature corresponds with something spiritual, and that mystical experience shapes one's perspective on nature. During trips to Paris in the early 1850s, Inness came under the sway of French Barbizon artists, especially Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1796–1875), whose landscapes were noted for their loose brushwork, dark palette, and emphasis on mood.
Inness's works of the 1860s and 1870s, which include views of his native country and scenes inspired by his European travels, were often panoramic and picturesque. After he settled in Montclair, New Jersey, in 1885, Hudson River literalism yielded to Barbizon poetry and Swedenborgian mysticism. Inness's mature works, including this canvas, are usually intimate scenes that respond to transitional times of day such as dawn or dusk. Generalized shapes are described with soft edges and jewel-like color, and the paint handling is spontaneous and suggestive. Such works helped define the American style known as Tonalism, were eagerly sought by collectors, and influenced many other American painters.
Inness undertook a scientific study of color and, at times, a highly rational, mathematical approach to composition, claiming, "The poetic quality is not obtained by eschewing any truths of fact or of Nature." At the same time, he maintained, "The true use of art is, first, to cultivate the artist's own spiritual nature."
Reference:
Bell, Adrienne Baxter. George Inness and the Visionary Landscape. New York, 2007.
DeLue, Rachel Zaidy. George Inness and the Science of Landscape. Chicago, 2007.
Quick, Michael. George Inness: A Catalogue Raisonné. 2 vols. New Brunswick, N.J., 2007.
John Frederick Kensett (American, 1816–1872)
Sunset on the Sea
1872
Oil on canvas
71.1 x 104.5 cm
Gift of Thomas Kensett, 1874 (74.3)
John Frederick Kensett was a leading member of the New York art world in the mid-nineteenth-century and one of the founders of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1784, the artist's brother Thomas donated to the Museum nearly forty landscapes that Kensett had painted in the final year of his life. Called "Last Summer's Work," the paintings were executed in the summer of 1872, when he lived on Contentment Island, off the coast of Darien, Connecticut, and were in the artist's studio at the time of his death.
Influenced by the new styles they encountered in Europe after the American Civil War, light became the virtual subject for many later Hudson River School artists, including Kensett. The aesthetic for which he is most admired is evident in Sunset on the Sea, which consists of a reductive composition, subdued palette, and emphasis on the effects of light and atmosphere. Kensett's eulogist, Dr. Samuel Osgood (1812–1880), singled out this painting for comment: "Perhaps his most remarkable picture in this series is that which presents the sea under the sunlight, with nothing else to divide the interest—no land or sail, no figure, and not even a noticeable cloud to give peculiar effect, or a rock to provoke the dash of waves. It is pure light and water, a bridal of the sea and sky."
Reference:
Driscoll, John Paul, and John K. Howat. John Frederick Kensett: An American Master. Exh. cat. New York, 1985.
Wilton, Andrew, and Tim Barringer. American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820–1880. Exh. cat. London, 2002.
Lucy Trask Barnard (American, 1800–1896)
Hooked rug
ca. 1860
Wool and cotton on burlap
152.4 x 73.7 cm
Sansbury-Mills Fund, 1961 (61.47.3)
This hooked rug is one of three made by Lucy Trask Barnard of Dixfield Common, Maine, in about 1860. Motifs from nature abound in the composition: two tall trees flank the house on a hill at center, which is framed by a rainbow overarching the scene. Below the house at the foot of the hill are a flower garden and a pond, where a couple canoes. Barnard's rendering betrays the stylization and artistic license often employed in primitive landscape paintings and handmade figural textiles of the period. The vibrant, fantastical flowers dwarf the canoeing figures, while the artist's depiction of the circular pond denotes a flattened picture plane.
While many nineteenth-century hooked rugs derived from ready-made patterns, Barnard's were original designs. As imaginative as this composition appears, the artist was inspired by local sights: the house in this rug, with its double chimneys and adjoining stables, is thought to be that of her best friend. It still stands today in Maine.
Lucy Trask married Silas Barnard (1795–1873), who served in the War of 1812, was a state senator in 1842, and spent the balance of his career as a land surveyor. While her husband traveled the nation for his work Lucy remained in Dixfield Common, caring for the couple's growing family and continuing her sewing. An inveterate stitcher even into her eighties, according to a family member, she made upwards of "one hundred patchwork quilts . . . [distributing] them among the poor and unfortunate." This hooked rug, however, graced her own household, and was passed down in her family until it, and the two companion rugs, were sold to the Museum in 1961.
Reference:
Bianco, Jane. "Mystery M.A.D. Ad Leads to Renewed Treasures." Maine Antiques Digest (April 2011).
Kent, William Winthrop. Rare Hooked Rugs, and Others Both Antique and Modern from Cooperative Sources. Springfield, Mass., 1941, 148–51.
Edward Hopper (American, 1882–1967)
The Lighthouse at Two Lights
1929
Oil on canvas
74.9 x 109.9 cm
Hugo Kastor Fund, 1962 (62.95)
Beginning in 1914, the American realist painter Edward Hopper regularly summered in Maine, on the northeast coast of the United States. The state's extensive shoreline along the Atlantic Ocean and inland bays made it a popular vacation spot that was particularly attractive to artists, who coveted the unspoiled natural scenery and clear, bright light. This picture is one of a series of oil paintings and watercolors that Hopper made during the summer of 1929 of the 120-foot-high lighthouse tower and adjoining Coast Guard station on Cape Elizabeth. The artist's official record books, faithfully kept by his wife, Jo, and annotated with illustrations and texts by the artist describes the scene: "Very blue sky, white shaft of the light in shadow—black top & balcony—patches of bayberry—dark—on hill side, 2 white wings in sky, dark roof of keeper's house."
As this passage suggests and Hopper's painting illustrates, the artist was more interested in the formal relationship of colors and shapes to one another and in capturing the light than in telling a specific human narrative, or even showing much of the landscape. No people appear in the image, nor does the water surrounding this rocky promontory. Fellow American painter Charles Burchfield (1893–1967) described Hopper's viewpoint as "essentially classic; he presents his subjects without sentiment, propaganda, or theatrics. He is the pure painter, interested in his material for its own sake, and in the exploitation of his idea of form, color, and space division." To Hopper, the lighthouse symbolized a last bastion against the onslaught of change in an industrial society. The timeless clarity of works such as this made Hopper an enduring force in American art for forty years, and he remains one of the nation's most popular artists.
Reference:
Levin, Gail. Edward Hopper: A Catalogue Raisonné, Volume III: Oils. New York, 1995, O-266, p. 192.
Troyen, Carol, Judith A. Barter, and Elliot Bostwick Davis. Edward Hopper. Exh. cat. Boston, 2007, 52, pp. 107, 109, 248.
Georgia O'Keeffe (American, 1887–1986)
Pelvis II
1944
Oil on canvas
101.6 x 76.2 cm
George A. Hearn Fund, 1947 (47.19)
Georgia O'Keeffe's subjects were almost exclusively based on the rural places she lived and the objects she found in nature, such as flowers, trees, and bones. By the 1930s she was spending almost half of each year in New Mexico, in the American Southwest, and in 1949 she moved there permanently. The region's vast desert landscape was punctuated by enormous mountain ranges and unusual rock formations, some surprisingly striated and colorful. Of particular interest to O'Keeffe were the sun-bleached animal bones that she collected in the desert and brought back to her studio to paint, which also decorated the walls of her homes. While many people associate bones with death, the artist saw them differently, as "strangely more living than the animals walking around. . . . The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even tho' it is vast and empty and untouchable—and knows no kindness with all its beauty."
At first O'Keeffe painted these skulls and antlers and pelvic bones realistically and in their entirety. Eventually she focused on increasingly more magnified sections of the pelvic bone, offering glimpses of the mountains, the moon, or the sky, as seen here, through its empty sockets. From 1943 to 1947 she created fourteen canvases on this theme, which her friend the novelist Jean Toomer (1894–1967) described as images of "the universe through the portal of a bone."
Reference:
Lynes, Barbara Buhler. Georgia O'Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné. 2 vols. New Haven, 1999. Vol. 2, p. 678, 1076.
Messinger, Lisa Mintz. Georgia O'Keeffe. New York, 1988, pp. 77, 78, 81, fig. 59, 92.
Landscape constitutes a centerpiece in the Western tradition of representing nature even though it did not emerge as an independent genre until the sixteenth century. Before then, the outdoors was shown not for itself, but as the setting for narrative scenes. Interest in depicting the natural world for its own sake increased in both Northern and Southern Europe during the Renaissance. Artists strove to do more than simply copy a given scene, however, making adjustments in order to impart ennobling qualities to their pictures.
Cultural history and the maker's point of view shape how we see nature as depicted in art. The Arcadian tradition based on classical ideals, presented in Chapter 1, is only one type of landscape. In seventeenth-century Flanders and the Netherlands, a more domesticated, localized, and naturalistic vision predominated. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, artists in Europe and America chose between various conceptions of landscape meant to communicate moral, aesthetic, spiritual, or patriotic messages. Technical terms arose for specific landscape modes, such as the Romantic, the sublime, the heroic, and the picturesque. Later in the nineteenth century, especially in France, fundamental changes in the status of landscape painting and the role of the artist upended tradition and set a new course for art history. Artists embraced nature but eschewed illusionism, celebrating the physical reality of paint on flat canvas.
Most books about landscape frame their discussion of the genre's development in terms of geographical tradition and date, for the Northern European type differs from the Italian, and landscape painting underwent radical stylistic shifts after the mid-nineteenth century. All the dominant landscape types are represented here, but they are organized by subject—trees and forests, rocks and mountains, and sky—rather than by geography or chronology. In Chapter 7, seascapes and other marine themes will take the stage.
（一）大地与天空 ：林间漫步：
本部分以荷兰画家梅因德尔特·霍贝玛（MeyndertHobbema）的一幅作品拉开序幕，霍贝玛被誉为西方风景画传统领域最为杰出的画家之一，他的这幅作品仿佛在邀请欣赏者走进画面，顺着这条泥土路迈入森林，漫步林间。托马斯·庚斯博罗（ThomasGainsborough）的一幅作品也让人如临其境，仿佛徜徉在郁郁葱葱的林间。在英国画家约翰·康斯特布尔（JohnConstable）和美国画家沃辛顿·惠特瑞吉（Worthing-tonWhittredge）所创作的19世纪风景画中，画面中央的景色则被精心排布的树木环绕起来。而勇于挣脱现实主义桎梏的艺术家们，如文森特·凡·高（VincentvanGogh）、亨利·埃德蒙德·克劳斯（Henri-Ed-mondCross）和亨利·卢梭（HenriRousseau），则以独特的方式为其笔下的树木增添了无限活力。
I. Earth and Sky: into the woods
One of the finest artists of the Western landscape tradition, the Dutch painter Meyndert Hobbema introduces this group of masterpieces with a composition that invites the viewer to enter the picture, following the dirt road through the trees and into the woods. Likewise, Thomas Gainsborough's canvas evokes a leisurely walk through wooded scenery. In nineteenth-century landscapes by the Englishman John Constable and the American Worthington Whittredge, carefully placed trees frame the central scene. Defying the constraints of realism, Vincent van Gogh, Henri-Edmond Cross, and Henri Rousseau bring energetic vitality to their trees.
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Woodland Road |
Woodland Road
Meyndert Hobbema (Dutch, 1638–1709)
ca. 1670
Oil on canvas
94.6 x 129.5 cm
Bequest of Mary Stillman Harkness, 1950 (50.145.22)
Meyndert Hobbema was Jacob van Ruisdael's (see cat. 106) most talented disciple, having studied with him in Amsterdam about 1655–60 and then rivaling him in depictions of an idyllic Dutch countryside for the next ten years. In 1668 the artist was awarded the lucrative civic office of wine gauger, and from then on appears to have painted only for his own pleasure.
Woodland Road is a later work by Hobbema, dating from about 1670. The close description of foliage and other naturalistic details and the overall tonalities of brown and green found in his works of the mid-1660s have given way to stronger local colors and a more rhythmic and somewhat decorative arrangement of trees and clouds. And yet the artist's usual impression of a stroll in the countryside, in search of picturesque sights, remains as convincing as ever. Paintings like this one were made for fairly prosperous city folk who liked to imagine the woodlands, fields, and rustic cottages of Holland as peaceful refuges from the pressures of urban life. The theme, as many Dutchmen knew, went back to Roman writers such as Horace (65–8 B.C.) and Virgil (70–19 B.C.), and continues in many cultures today.
Reference:
Liedtke, Walter. Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 2007, pp. 344–46.
Stechow, Wolfgang. Dutch Landscape Painting of the Seventeenth Century. London, 1966, p. 79.
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Wooded Upland Landscape |
Thomas Gainsborough (English, 1727–1788)
Wooded Upland Landscape
Probably 1783
Oil on canvas
120.3 x 147.6 cm
Gift of George A. Hearn, 1906 (06.1279)
Born in Sudbury, Suffolk, near the North Sea, Thomas Gainsborough left home at an early age for London, where he may have studied with Francis Hayman (1708–1776). The young man was fortunate to have a steady income from his wife, the illegitimate daughter of an aristocrat, whom he married in 1746, but even so he could not make a living as a landscape painter in the city and so returned to Sudbury, where he accepted commissions for small individual and group portraits. In 1758 he moved to Bath, a West Country spa town, where for the first time he painted dazzling portraits to the scale of life. He began exhibiting these portraits in London in 1761 and in 1774 moved there permanently.
Gainsborough was interested in seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting. During his first stay in London, he made a chalk drawing (Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester) after a picture by Jacob van Ruisdael (see cat. 106) that he may have seen in the auction rooms. Back in Sudbury he reconnected with the countryside of his childhood and later, in Bath, he rode about the wooded hills visiting the great houses and sketching the environs. The artist never lost interest in landscape: in 1783, he wrote that he would visit the lakes in Cumberland and Westmoreland for the first time and paint them for the Royal Academy. The tour inspired his late images of mountain scenery.
Wooded Upland Landscape and the sketch that preceded it (Corsham Court Collection, Wiltshire) would have been made in the artist's London studio. The sweeping view is imaginary, brushed broadly in colors so delicate and transparent that they suggest not oil but watercolor. Strong contrasts of light and shade emphasize the zigzag of the track among the hills, which is punctuated by a horse-drawn cart, and peasants by the wayside.
Reference:
Baetjer, Katherine. British Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1575–1875. New York, 2009, pp. 92, 104–6, no. 46.
Hayes, John. The Landscape Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough: A Critical Text and Catalogue Raisonné. 2 vols. Ithaca, 1982. Vol. 1, pp. 140, 145, vol. 2, pp. 325, 521–23, no. 150.
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Salisbury Cathedral from the B |
John Constable (English, 1776–1837)
Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds
ca. 1825
Oil on canvas
87.9 x 111.8 cm
Bequest of Mary Stillman Harkness, 1950 (50.145.8)
Constructed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the Gothic style, Salisbury Cathedral, seen here from the southwest, features the tallest church spire in England. The Metropolitan's canvas is one of six that relate to a commission undertaken by John Constable at the request of his friend, John Fisher, bishop of Salisbury, probably in 1822; Fisher appears together with his wife in the lower left corner. Constable worked on the commission for four years, during which time he gained an international reputation for his intensely naturalistic approach to the depiction of landscape epitomized by The Hay Wain (National Gallery, London), which caused a sensation at the Paris Salon of 1824.
The first version of Salisbury Cathedral completed for Fisher (Victoria and Albert Museum, London) was well liked at the Royal Academy exhibition held in London in 1823, but the patron himself was dissatisfied. Finding the sky above the steeple too dark and threatening, he asked the artist to change it. Instead, Constable executed an entirely new painting, the present one, on which work began by July 1824. Infrared reflectography reveals that it started with an outline traced from the first version, but that the artist then proceeded to improvise directly on the canvas—opening up the mass of foliage that had previously arched over the south transept and laying in a relatively placid sky. This work eventually served as a study for the final picture (The Frick Collection, New York), which Constable described as "nearly compleated [sic]" in November 1825. Fisher had died the previous May, and was thus deprived the opportunity to see the painting grace his London dining room, where he had intended to display it.
Reference:
Baetjer, Katherine. British Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1575–1875. New York, 2009, pp. 237, 242–46, no. 117.
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The Trout Pool |
Worthington Whittredge (American, 1820–1910)
The Trout Pool
1870
Oil on canvas
91.4 x 68.9 cm
Gift of Colonel Charles A. Fowler, 1921 (21.115.4)
After traveling extensively throughout Europe from 1849 to 1859, Worthington Whittredge returned to the United States and set his sights on mastering the realities of the American wilderness. He recalled in his autobiography: "It was impossible for me to shut out from my eyes the works of the great landscape painters which I had so recently seen in Europe, while I knew well enough that if I was to succeed I must produce something new and which might claim to be inspired by my home surroundings. I was in despair. Sure, however, that if I returned to nature I should find a friend, I seized my sketch box and went to the first available outdoor place I could find. I hid myself for months in the recesses of the Catskills."
The Trout Pool exemplifies the artist's mature style and is among his most successful efforts in capturing the American landscape. The woodland subject, likely inspired by the works of his colleague Asher B. Durand (see cat. 5), is one that Whittredge also favored, and is the result of his direct study of nature. He carefully chose a segment of the forest interior dominated by tall trees in the foreground that serve as a framing element. A brilliantly lit middle ground reinforces a sense of depth in the composition. The painting conveys a hushed reverence for nature.
Reference:
Bibliography
Baur, John I. H., ed. The Autobiography of Worthington Whittredge, 1820–1910. New York, 1969.
Janson, Anthony F. Worthington Whittredge. London, 1989.
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Cypresses |
Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890)
Cypresses
1889
Oil on canvas
93.4 x 74 cm
Rogers Fund, 1949 (49.30)
Cypresses was painted in late June 1889, shortly after Vincent van Gogh began his yearlong stay as a voluntary patient at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, in the south of France. The subject, which he found "as beautiful of line and proportion as an Egyptian obelisk," both captivated and challenged the artist: "It is a splash of black in a sunny landscape, but it is one of the most interesting black notes, and the most difficult to hit off exactly that I can imagine." Van Gogh's initial fascination with cypresses resulted in three paintings: two showing the "big and massive trees" at close range, in vertical format (this one and another in the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo), and a majestic horizontal view, Wheat Field with Cypresses (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), which he later repeated in two variants. These works were intended to form part of a series that would be "the contrast and yet equivalent" of the sunflower pictures he had made earlier, in nearby Arles.
Having relied on a large pen-and-ink drawing (Brooklyn Museum) to work out various aspects of the present composition, Van Gogh painted the landscape with unhesitating gusto, making only one substantive revision: X-radiographs reveal that he shifted the placement of the crescent moon to the right. Presumably, this was the Cyprès shown at the 1890 Salon des Indépendants in Paris.
Reference:
Pickvance, Ronald. Van Gogh in Saint-Rémy and Auvers. Exh. cat. New York, 1986, pp. 108–10, 113, 189, 191, 298–99, no. 15.
Stein, Susan Alyson. In Masterpieces of European Painting, 1800–1920, In The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 2007, pp. 170, 258–59, no. 158.
Vincent van Gogh: The Letters. Edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, and Nienke Bakker. Amsterdam, 2009. Vol. 5, pp. 41–42, 46, 49, fig. 10; 106, fig. 5; 206–7, fig. 1.
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Pines Along the Shore |
Henri-Edmond Cross (French, 1856–1910)
Pines Along the Shore
1896
Oil on canvas
54 x 65.4 cm
Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975.1.164)
Born Henri-Edmond Delacroix, the French painter adopted the English translation of "croix" as a surname to distance himself from the legendary French Romantic artist Eugene Delacroix (see cat. 23). Cross was a practitioner of the Neo-Impressionist style of painting late in the nineteenth century. The artists associated with this short-lived avant-garde movement believed that painting with individual touches of interwoven pigment resulted in a greater vibrancy of color in the observer's eye than conventional color blending.
This call to separate color into broken strokes is clearly articulated in Cross's light-drenched landscapes. Pines Along the Shore was painted in the south of France, overlooking the Mediterranean. In the early 1890s, Cross relocated from Paris to a hamlet near Saint-Tropez called Saint-Clair, where he built a house and remained for the rest of his life. In the company of fellow Neo-Impressionists Paul Signac (1863–1935) and Maximilien Luce (1858–1941) and other artists, most notably Henri Matisse (1869–1954), Cross reveled in the region's unspoiled landscapes, seascapes, and ever-present, brilliant sunshine. The present canvas is a paradigmatic example of Neo-Impressionist brushwork. Cross built up his paint surface in a tapestry-like fashion, from cool tones on the pine grove floor to brilliant foliage at the water's edge to softer hues in the sky and mountains beyond. This appealing study of nature presents a broad spectrum of luxuriant, nuanced color resonating with the idiosyncratic techniques of Neo-Impressionist practice.
Reference:
Amory, Dita. "Georges Seurat (1859–1891) and Neo-Impressionism." In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York, 2000– . http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/seni/hd_seni.htm (accessed September 20, 2011).
Brettell, Rick, Paul Hayes Tucker, and Natalie H. Lee. Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Paintings in the Robert Lehman Collection. Vol. 3. New York, 2009.
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The Banks of the Bièvre near B |
Henri Rousseau (le Douanier) (French, 1844–1910)
The Banks of the Bièvre near Bicêtre
ca. 1908–9
Oil on canvas
54.6 x 45.7 cm
Gift of Marshall Field, 1939 (39.15)
The artist identified the subject of this painting in a handwritten note, affixed to the back of its stretcher, dated 1909, the year he consigned it for sale to the dealer Ambroise Vollard (1866–1938). Sixteen years earlier, Henri Rousseau had retired from his post as a customs agent (which had earned him the nickname "le Doaunier") to dedicate himself full-time to his art. Yet in this work and others from his maturity, the sensibility of the onetime Sunday painter continued to hold sway: he gravitated to settings on the periphery of Paris, proximate to the toll stations he had manned during his workaday shifts, and to motifs that highlight the unfettered hours given over to the simple pleasures of strolling on a quiet afternoon.
The airy vistas Rousseau devoted to the Île-de-France stand in contrast to the dense tropical splendor of his exotic jungle scenes. Rather than suspending reality for fantasy, they tally with the pedestrian life of an artist who, as he admitted, "had never travelled further than to the hothouses in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris." Indeed, the site shown in the present work is just upstream from the city's botanical gardens, which the river Bièvre skirts before it meets the Seine.
Within the city limits, the banks of the Bièvre were rank with contamination. But only a few miles to the south, near the outlying suburb of Bicêtre, as this picturesque view lays bare, there were still pockets of nature evocative of the verdant river valley celebrated in the painted idylls of Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) and the poetry of Victor Hugo (1802–1885). Rousseau presents a parcel of landscape that exudes the freshness of spring, animated by vestiges from the past, such as the quaint figures in peasant dress on the tree-lined path at left and the seventeenth-century aqueduc d'Arcueil, which defines the horizon line at right.
Reference:
Certigny, Henry. Le douanier Rousseau en son temps, bibliographie et catalogue raisonné: Supplément No. 3. Paris, 1991, p. 22.
Hoog, Michel. Henri Rousseau. Exh. cat. New York, 1985, pp. 222–23, no. 54 [French ed., 1984 pp. 226–27, no. 53].
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Embroidered wall hanging with |
Attributed to Anna Frances Simpson (American, 1880–1930)
Embroidered wall hanging with cypress motif
ca. 1910–29
Silk on linen
90.8 x 41.3 cm
Purchase, Barrie A. and Deedee Wigmore Foundation Gift, 2004 (2004.334)
Newcomb College, the women's school at Tulane University, in New Orleans, Louisiana, was a major center for Arts and Crafts design in the early years of the twentieth century. While the Newcomb name is most often associated with the pottery produced in the college's art workshops, the female students and professional artists there also designed, made, and marketed metalwork, jewelry, bookbindings, and textiles. Anna Frances Simpson, to whom the design of this piece is attributed, entered Newcomb as an undergraduate art student in 1902; was a graduate student there for two more years; and functioned as a full-fledged, paid Art Craftsman between 1908 and 1929. Like many practitioners of the Arts and Crafts Movement, Simpson worked in multiple media: while her primary art form was ceramics, she also produced embroideries.
Newcomb designs often glorified the natural beauty of Louisiana. This evocative scene shows a native cypress tree hung with Spanish moss partially obscuring a full moon. The coarsely woven ground fabric is a tan color, and the embroidery, executed in a simple darning stitch, is rendered in soft, naturalistic shades. A trademark of the Newcomb embroideries is that there are often two or more colors of thread in each representational area; the closeness of the stitching allows the eye to blend the various shades. In this picture, for example, the silvery gray Spanish moss is actually composed of a multitude of colors.
Simpson favored subjects from nature in her decorative work, and this composition conveys the stylized, simplified expression inherent to the Arts and Crafts Movement. It also suggests Simpson's familiarity with Japanese prints, which often depicted a fragment of a larger landscape with hanging plants such as wisteria (echoed here by the Spanish moss) serving to frame the top of the image.
Reference:
Bragg, Jean, and Susan Saward. The Newcomb Style. New Orleans, 2002, p. 126.
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Woven by John Martin (life dat |
Designed by John Henry Dearle (English, 1860–1932)
Woven by John Martin (life dates unknown) of the firm Morris & Company
Greenery
Designed 1892; woven 1915
Wool and silk, 4 warp threads per cm
187 x 470 cm
Purchase, Edward C. Moore Jr. Gift, 1923 (23.200a)
Enveloped within dense woodland, two fallow deer prick up their ears and eye a pair of hares scampering past. A fox turns to watch, and a pheasant, as if startled, takes flight from a chestnut tree. The forest floor is a riot of color, as ripening strawberries grow cheek-by-jowl with foxgloves, bluebells, pimpernels, and a host of other flora. This almost mystical abundance is shared by the three trees that anchor the composition, their boughs heavy with pears, chestnuts, and acorns. Above, three unfurled scrolls bear verses—or riddles—composed by the famed English craftsman and designer William Morris (1834–1896). The words seem to give voice to each of the trees:"by woodman's edge I faint and fail / by craftsman's edge I tell the tale
high in the wood • high o'er the hall / aloft I rise • when low I fall unmoved I stand • what wind may blow / swift swift before the wind I go.
Morris's text alludes to the purpose the timber from each tree would serve after it was felled: the first, pearwood, was commonly used for carving, or "telling the tale"; the second, chestnut, was traditionally made into roof rafters; the third, oak, tended to be the lumber of choice for building sailing ships.
The tapestry, woven at the Merton Abbey Tapestry Works from a design by John Henry Dearle, unites Victorian sentimentality with the loftier ideals of the Arts and Crafts Movement. William Morris had founded this workshop at Merton, in Surrey, in 1881 as part of his vision to use the integrity of medieval craftsmanship to revitalize the art and design of postindustrial Britain.
Reference:
Parry, Linda. William Morris Textiles. New York, 1983, p. 120.
Standen, Edith A. European Post-Medieval Tapestries and Related Hangings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1985, no. 136.
（二）大地与天空：秀山险石：
萨尔瓦托·罗莎（SalvatorRosa）的这件作品表达了对阿卡迪亚（Arcadia）自然观的抗辩，带有早期浪漫主义风格。罗莎的自然风景中满是暴戾之气，古典的安宁祥和全然不见，取而代之的却是戏剧性、危险和暴力。阿尔伯特·比兹塔特（AlbertBierstadt）的这幅作品气势宏伟，描绘了加州约塞米蒂峡谷（YosemiteValley）怪石嶙峋的山峰，赞颂了美国旷野景色的恢弘壮美。法国画家居斯塔夫·库尔贝（GustaveCourbet）的作品则描绘了故乡奥南（Ornans）上空的悬崖峭壁，体现了他独具特色的绘画技法。而在巴尔蒂斯（Balthus）和马斯登·哈特利（MarsdenHartley）的作品中，崇山峻岭则被塑造成了富有神话色彩的建筑。
II. Earth and Sky: Rock and Mountain
Salvator Rosa here offers the proto-Romantic counterargument to the Arcadian vision of nature: instead of classical serenity, Rosa brings drama, danger, and violence to his landscape full of banditi. Albert Bierstadt memorializes the grandeur of the American wilderness with his majestic view of the jagged mountain peaks of California's Yosemite Valley. The French painter Gustave Courbet's portrait of the great bluff of rock overlooking his hometown of Ornans reveals his distinctive handling of paint. Balthus and Marsden Hartley transform mountains into mythic structures.
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Bandits on a Rocky Coast |
Salvator Rosa (Italian, 1615–1673)
Bandits on a Rocky Coast
1655–60
Oil on canvas
74.9 x 100 cm
Charles B. Curtis Fund, 1934 (34.137)
The scene Salvator Rosa paints is wonderfully described by Helen Langdon: "On a wild stretch of coastline, remote from the distant city on the horizon, a group of armed men, touches of bright colour against the rocks, conspiratorially point and gesture, talking intensely with one another. The landscape threatens. A wind blows through the grass and trees and whips up stormy clouds, while dark shadows play over the rocks and water." She notes, "It was the mystery of the mood which he created that inspired writers to spin legends and stories around them."
In fact, this is one of the rare paintings by Rosa that shows bandits in a rugged landscape—the theme he was most famous for in nineteenth-century Britain. Lady Morgan, who wrote a biography of the artist in 1824, embraced the legend that Rosa had, himself, been taken prisoner by bandits in the hills of the Abruzzi. Yet he typically treated the subject of bandits in etchings rather than paintings. The figures in the Metropolitan's canvas are closely related to these engravings, suggesting that the picture dates from the 1650s. Rosa's evocation of a rugged and unpredictable nature played a great role in the notion of the sublime.
Reference:
Langdon, Helen. In Salvator Rosa. By Helen Landgon, Xavier F. Salomon, and Caterina Volpi, pp. 35, 132, 183, 188–89, no. 26. Exh. cat. London, 2010.
Wallace, Richard W. Salvator Rosa in America. Exh. cat. Wellesley, Mass., 1979, pp. 14–15, 23.
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Merced River, ... |
Albert Bierstadt (American, 1830–1902)
Merced River, Yosemite Valley
1866
Oil on canvas
91.4 x 127 cm
Gift of the sons of William Paton, 1909 (09.214.1)
Albert Bierstadt secured his lasting identity as one of the preeminent painters of the American West by traveling on expeditions to the western frontiers of the Nebraska Territory and the Rocky Mountains, where he took sketches that resulted in highly acclaimed, grand-scale canvases. On May 12, 1863, Bierstadt departed New York for San Francisco in the company of the writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow (1836–1870). Their trip to California was probably inspired by large stereoscopic photographs of the Yosemite Valley by Carlton E. Watkins (see cat. 80), who had recorded the valley's magnificent peaks under various atmospheric conditions. Bierstadt and his party reached Yosemite in August of 1863 and, according to Ludlow, made their first camp in a "green meadow, ringed by woods, on the banks of the Merced."
From the many studies he created during this trip, Bierstadt later painted a number of large works in his New York studio. These included the present painting, which was undoubtedly inspired by views from this first campsite. Here Bierstadt juxtaposes jagged background peaks with a low, carefully detailed foreground that includes the figures of Native Americans on the rocky ledges overlooking the Merced River.
Reference:
Anderson, Nancy K., and Linda S. Ferber. Albert Bierstadt: Art & Enterprise. Exh. cat. New York, 1991.
Hendricks, Gordon. Albert Bierstadt: Painter of the American West. New York, 1974.
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View of Ornans |
Gustave Courbet (French, 1819–1877)
View of Ornans
Probably mid-1850s
Oil on canvas
73 x 92.1 cm
Bequest of Alice Tully, 1993 (1995.537)
In the 1850s, Gustave Courbet established his reputation as the leading figure in the Realist movement with a group of paintings of contemporary rural life set in his native Franche-Comté region, which he exhibited at the Paris Salon. These works flouted convention in their subjects drawn from daily life, large scale, and emphatic rejection of academic ideals. At the same time, Courbet memorialized the area's unique topography in landscapes including this work, a panoramic view of the Loue River Valley painted about 1855. These images embody his dictum, "To paint a landscape, you have to know it. I know my country, I paint it." The artist grew up surrounded by the limestone cliffs, rugged forests, and verdant valleys of his imagery, which he came to know intimately through walks and hunts near his birthplace, Ornans. His landscapes, then, take on an autobiographical aspect.
This work is a composite of various sites in and around Ornans: the bridge in the foreground is that of the nearby village, Scey-en-Varais, while Ornans is represented by the church steeple in the middle distance as well as the distinctive limestone cliff known as the Roche du Mont. Such composite views were typical of Courbet's subjective approach to landscape although a bit at odds with the notion of pictorial realism that his art purports to be. A similar view of the Loue River Valley occupies the center of the artist's monumental self-portrait A Painter's Studio (1855, Musée d'Orsay, Paris), a picture within a picture that signals the central role of landscape in Courbet's art.
Reference:
Morton, Mary, and Charlotte Eyerman, with an essay by Dominique de Font-Réaulx. Courbet and the Modern Landscape. Exh. cat. Los Angeles, 2006.
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Mt. Katahdin, Maine, No. 2 |
Marsden Hartley (American, 1877–1943)
Mt. Katahdin, Maine, No. 2
1939–40
Oil on canvas
76.8 x 102.2 cm
Edith and Milton Lowenthal Collection, Bequest of Edith Abrahamson Lowenthal, 1991(1992.24.3)
Early in his career, the American painter Marsden Hartley associated with Alfred Stieglitz (see cat. 84) and his New York gallery "291," where the most avant-garde European and American artists of the early twentieth century exhibited (including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Constantin Brancusi, Auguste Rodin, and Arthur Dove).
It was also where, in 1909, Hartley first exhibited a group of small landscapes depicting the mountains of his home state of Maine. Over the course of his career, the artist painted many abstract compositions, human figures, and still-life objects, but he invariably identified most with the majestic mountains that he regularly turned to for inspiration and solace.
This painting is a large and late example of these mountain subjects. It features Maine's highest peak, Mount Katahdin, which appears in more than eighteen paintings dating from 1939–42. The sixty-two-year-old artist went there on an eight-day camping trip in mid-October 1939, with a guide who led him on an eighty-mile car ride and a four-mile hike through arduous terrain. He stayed by Katahdin Lake in a log cabin, from which he had a view of both the water and the summit of the mountain. His first pictures made at the site were drawings and small oil sketches, which he later referred to when painting larger canvases, like this one, in his studio. The Metropolitan's picture reflects the autumnal reds and yellows of the season. Others, painted in cool blues and grays, capture the bleakness of Maine winters. All, however, feature the mountain's recognizable conical shape silhouetted against the sky. That fall Hartley wrote: "I have achieved the 'sacred' pilgrimage to Ktaadn Mt [he preferred the Native American spelling]. . . . I feel as if I have seen God for the first time—I find him so nonchalantly solemn."
Reference:
Kornhauser, Elizabeth Mankin, ed.Marsden Hartley. 2003. Exh. cat. New Haven, 2003, no. 91, pp. 27, 184, 185, 256, 322.
Messinger, Lisa Mintz. "American Art: The Edith and Milton Lowenthal Collection." Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 54, no. 1 (Summer 1996): pp. 3, 7, 11, 46.
Robertson, Bruce. Marsden Hartley. New York, 1995, p. 122.
（三）大地与天空： 天空
本部分开篇的两件展品分别展现了两种截然不同的天空概念：一件中世纪浮雕柱头描绘的是天使栖息的国度，而另一件来自17世纪伊朗的伊斯兰星盘(Islamicastrolabe)则见证了早期对天体和行星的科学探索。其他展品则主要描绘了天空、太阳和各种天文现象。著名的荷兰风景画画家雅各布·凡·鲁伊斯达尔（JacobvanRuisdael）的作品中展现的则是云中的一段戏剧故事。两位美国画家，乔治·英尼斯（Ge-orgeInness）和约翰·弗雷德里克·肯塞特（JohnFrederickKen-sett）分别展示了一天开始和结束时的华美景色。而爱德华·霍珀（EdwardHopper）的作品则描绘了一座缅因州灯塔的光辉景象，画面中，在万里晴空和清澈、明亮日光的映衬下，一切都显得轮廓分明。
III. Earth and Sky: Sky
At the outset of this section, two objects show contrasting definitions of sky: a carved medieval capital depicts the celestial realm of angels, while an Islamic astrolabe from seventeenth-century Iran attests to the nascent scientific exploration of the stars and planets. In the balance of the works, the dominant element of the composition is either the sky or the sun and its effects. Jacob van Ruisdael, the great Dutch landscape painter, presents a drama unfolding in clouds. Two Americans, George Inness and John Frederick Kensett, bring out the luminous wonder of the sky at the beginning and end of day. A vivid sky and clear, bright light carve all the forms in Edward Hopper's striking image of a Maine lighthouse.
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Capital with an angel emerging |
Capital with an angel emerging from a cloud
ca. 1150–1200
French, Burgundy
Limestone
32.7cm x 32.9cm x33 cm
The Cloisters Collection, 1949 (49.60.7)
The ancient world of Greece and Rome invented the Corinthian capital, the classical form of architectural capital decorated with acanthus, a plant that grows naturally in Mediterranean lands. This form continued in the European Middle Ages but evolved in many different ways. Here, the acanthus leaves (similar to those found in Burgundian churches such as Avallon and Vezelay) are less spiky and naturalistic than in ancient examples. The tradition of foliage capitals extends unbroken, but continually modified, from ancient Greece to the present day.
While the conventional form of the Corinthian capital can be perceived in its basic structure, a hovering angel pointing down from heaven dominates the present object. The addition of such a figure to the classical tradition of the acanthus capital is a typical Romanesque transformation and reveals the sculpture as a narrative fragment. Another figure or figures, possibly carved in the column below, would have completed the story. These likely included a representation of the Virgin Mary, and together with the angel the whole scene would have represented the Annunciation. Thus the capital combines images of the natural world with the miraculous story from the Gospels.
Reference:
Gaborit, Jean René. La Sculpture Romane. Paris, 2010.
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Planispheric astrolabe |
Muhammad Zaman al-Munajjim al-Asturlabi (active ca. 1641–1678)
Planispheric astrolabe
Safavid period, A.D. 1065/A.D. 1654–55
Iranian, Mashhad
Brass and steel
21.6 x 17.1 x 5.7 cm
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1963 (63.166a-j)
The astrolabe was common to medieval Europe and the medieval Islamic world. It was used for astronomical, astrological, and topographical calculations as well as for telling time. For Muslims, it was an important device for determining the direction of Mecca and the time of prayer. Its astrological function is attested by sixteenth-century Persian paintings of armies going into battle led by white-bearded sages holding up astrolabes to decide on the most auspicious moment to enter the fray.
This example consists of a case (umm) fitted with five disc-shaped plates with different markings corresponding to various terrestrial latitudes and longitudes. These plates could be changed depending on the user's location. On the back of the astrolabe is a sighting bar, or spider (alidade), that can rotate and is fixed to the instrument through the central pierced pivot hole. The faceplate (ankabut) is carved with an arabesque scroll and the phrase 'Bismallah al-rahman al-rahim' (In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate.) It is bordered by the twelve astrological signs of the zodiac. The tips of the leaves in the arabesque serve as star-pointers on the plate below.
This astrolabe is signed by Muhammad Zaman al-Munajjim (the astronomer) al-Asturlabi (the astrolabe maker), a well-known maker of scientific instruments from Mashhad, an important shrine city in northwestern Iran. The date of 1654–55 corresponds to the first half of Muhammad Zaman's career. Although this astrolabe is of a standard size and would have been easily portable, some very large examples were produced for the shahs of Iran. Despite the introduction of European clocks in the late sixteenth- or early seventeenth century, astrolabes continued to be popular in part because they did not require winding or frequent repairs.
Reference:
Pingree, D. "Astorlab." Encyclopaedia Iranica 2. London, 1987, pp. 853–57.
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Grainfields |
Jacob van Ruisdael (Dutch, 1628/29–1682)
Grainfields
ca. 1665–70
Oil on canvas
47 x 57.2 cm
The Friedsam Collection, Bequest of Michael Friedsam, 1931 (32.100.14)
Jacob van Ruisdael was the greatest of all Dutch landscapists during the seventeenth century, and his work was celebrated by painters and writers of the next two hundred years. This canvas was almost certainly owned by the great English artist Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) from 1756 until his death.
In his 1816 essay "Ruisdael als Dichter" ("Ruisdael as a Poet"), Wolfgang von Goethe suggested that the artist's landscapes often evoke the passage of time by including ruins or other significant details (here, the traveler on the road, the passing clouds, and the rich grainfields, which imply summer or early autumn). A Dutch viewer of Ruisdael's day might also have noted a connection between the rain clouds, the grainfields, the mill (which ground grain), and perhaps the church in the distance, which serves as a reminder that all of nature is the gift of God.
Ruisdael devoted great attention to actual appearances, such as different types of clouds and trees, and convincing effects of light and atmosphere. His drawings include many sketches made out of doors. However, his compositions reveal careful stagecraft, demonstrated here in the way two trees connect the windmill and church to the most dramatic area of the sky, and the way the road and sandy bank lead the eye diagonally across the foreground to the main motifs. Both the design and the subject indicate that the painting dates from about 1665–70, when Ruisdael was at the height of his success in Amsterdam.
Reference:
Liedtke, Walter. Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 2007, pp. 792–97.
Slive, Seymour. Jacob van Ruisdael: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings, Drawings, and Etchings. New Haven, 2001, 100.
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sunrise |
Sunrise
1887
Oil on canvas
76.2 x 114.9 cm
Anonymous Gift, in memory of Emil Thiele, 1954 (54.156)
George Inness's early landscapes were influenced by the style of Hudson River School artists such as Thomas Cole (see cat. 4) and Asher B. Durand (see cat. 5). Their meticulously detailed canvases defined the standards at New York's National Academy of Design, where Inness studied and showed his works. In 1851, during his first trip to Europe, Inness spent more than a year in Rome, renting a studio above that of the American painter William Page (1811–1885), who likely introduced him to the philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). This Swedish intellectual held that everything in nature corresponds with something spiritual, and that mystical experience shapes one's perspective on nature. During trips to Paris in the early 1850s, Inness came under the sway of French Barbizon artists, especially Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1796–1875), whose landscapes were noted for their loose brushwork, dark palette, and emphasis on mood.
Inness's works of the 1860s and 1870s, which include views of his native country and scenes inspired by his European travels, were often panoramic and picturesque. After he settled in Montclair, New Jersey, in 1885, Hudson River literalism yielded to Barbizon poetry and Swedenborgian mysticism. Inness's mature works, including this canvas, are usually intimate scenes that respond to transitional times of day such as dawn or dusk. Generalized shapes are described with soft edges and jewel-like color, and the paint handling is spontaneous and suggestive. Such works helped define the American style known as Tonalism, were eagerly sought by collectors, and influenced many other American painters.
Inness undertook a scientific study of color and, at times, a highly rational, mathematical approach to composition, claiming, "The poetic quality is not obtained by eschewing any truths of fact or of Nature." At the same time, he maintained, "The true use of art is, first, to cultivate the artist's own spiritual nature."
Reference:
Bell, Adrienne Baxter. George Inness and the Visionary Landscape. New York, 2007.
DeLue, Rachel Zaidy. George Inness and the Science of Landscape. Chicago, 2007.
Quick, Michael. George Inness: A Catalogue Raisonné. 2 vols. New Brunswick, N.J., 2007.
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Sunset on the Sea |
John Frederick Kensett (American, 1816–1872)
Sunset on the Sea
1872
Oil on canvas
71.1 x 104.5 cm
Gift of Thomas Kensett, 1874 (74.3)
John Frederick Kensett was a leading member of the New York art world in the mid-nineteenth-century and one of the founders of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1784, the artist's brother Thomas donated to the Museum nearly forty landscapes that Kensett had painted in the final year of his life. Called "Last Summer's Work," the paintings were executed in the summer of 1872, when he lived on Contentment Island, off the coast of Darien, Connecticut, and were in the artist's studio at the time of his death.
Influenced by the new styles they encountered in Europe after the American Civil War, light became the virtual subject for many later Hudson River School artists, including Kensett. The aesthetic for which he is most admired is evident in Sunset on the Sea, which consists of a reductive composition, subdued palette, and emphasis on the effects of light and atmosphere. Kensett's eulogist, Dr. Samuel Osgood (1812–1880), singled out this painting for comment: "Perhaps his most remarkable picture in this series is that which presents the sea under the sunlight, with nothing else to divide the interest—no land or sail, no figure, and not even a noticeable cloud to give peculiar effect, or a rock to provoke the dash of waves. It is pure light and water, a bridal of the sea and sky."
Reference:
Driscoll, John Paul, and John K. Howat. John Frederick Kensett: An American Master. Exh. cat. New York, 1985.
Wilton, Andrew, and Tim Barringer. American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820–1880. Exh. cat. London, 2002.
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Hooked rug |
Lucy Trask Barnard (American, 1800–1896)
Hooked rug
ca. 1860
Wool and cotton on burlap
152.4 x 73.7 cm
Sansbury-Mills Fund, 1961 (61.47.3)
This hooked rug is one of three made by Lucy Trask Barnard of Dixfield Common, Maine, in about 1860. Motifs from nature abound in the composition: two tall trees flank the house on a hill at center, which is framed by a rainbow overarching the scene. Below the house at the foot of the hill are a flower garden and a pond, where a couple canoes. Barnard's rendering betrays the stylization and artistic license often employed in primitive landscape paintings and handmade figural textiles of the period. The vibrant, fantastical flowers dwarf the canoeing figures, while the artist's depiction of the circular pond denotes a flattened picture plane.
While many nineteenth-century hooked rugs derived from ready-made patterns, Barnard's were original designs. As imaginative as this composition appears, the artist was inspired by local sights: the house in this rug, with its double chimneys and adjoining stables, is thought to be that of her best friend. It still stands today in Maine.
Lucy Trask married Silas Barnard (1795–1873), who served in the War of 1812, was a state senator in 1842, and spent the balance of his career as a land surveyor. While her husband traveled the nation for his work Lucy remained in Dixfield Common, caring for the couple's growing family and continuing her sewing. An inveterate stitcher even into her eighties, according to a family member, she made upwards of "one hundred patchwork quilts . . . [distributing] them among the poor and unfortunate." This hooked rug, however, graced her own household, and was passed down in her family until it, and the two companion rugs, were sold to the Museum in 1961.
Reference:
Bianco, Jane. "Mystery M.A.D. Ad Leads to Renewed Treasures." Maine Antiques Digest (April 2011).
Kent, William Winthrop. Rare Hooked Rugs, and Others Both Antique and Modern from Cooperative Sources. Springfield, Mass., 1941, 148–51.
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The Lighthouse at Two Lights |
Edward Hopper (American, 1882–1967)
The Lighthouse at Two Lights
1929
Oil on canvas
74.9 x 109.9 cm
Hugo Kastor Fund, 1962 (62.95)
Beginning in 1914, the American realist painter Edward Hopper regularly summered in Maine, on the northeast coast of the United States. The state's extensive shoreline along the Atlantic Ocean and inland bays made it a popular vacation spot that was particularly attractive to artists, who coveted the unspoiled natural scenery and clear, bright light. This picture is one of a series of oil paintings and watercolors that Hopper made during the summer of 1929 of the 120-foot-high lighthouse tower and adjoining Coast Guard station on Cape Elizabeth. The artist's official record books, faithfully kept by his wife, Jo, and annotated with illustrations and texts by the artist describes the scene: "Very blue sky, white shaft of the light in shadow—black top & balcony—patches of bayberry—dark—on hill side, 2 white wings in sky, dark roof of keeper's house."
As this passage suggests and Hopper's painting illustrates, the artist was more interested in the formal relationship of colors and shapes to one another and in capturing the light than in telling a specific human narrative, or even showing much of the landscape. No people appear in the image, nor does the water surrounding this rocky promontory. Fellow American painter Charles Burchfield (1893–1967) described Hopper's viewpoint as "essentially classic; he presents his subjects without sentiment, propaganda, or theatrics. He is the pure painter, interested in his material for its own sake, and in the exploitation of his idea of form, color, and space division." To Hopper, the lighthouse symbolized a last bastion against the onslaught of change in an industrial society. The timeless clarity of works such as this made Hopper an enduring force in American art for forty years, and he remains one of the nation's most popular artists.
Reference:
Levin, Gail. Edward Hopper: A Catalogue Raisonné, Volume III: Oils. New York, 1995, O-266, p. 192.
Troyen, Carol, Judith A. Barter, and Elliot Bostwick Davis. Edward Hopper. Exh. cat. Boston, 2007, 52, pp. 107, 109, 248.
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Pelvis II |
Georgia O'Keeffe (American, 1887–1986)
Pelvis II
1944
Oil on canvas
101.6 x 76.2 cm
George A. Hearn Fund, 1947 (47.19)
Georgia O'Keeffe's subjects were almost exclusively based on the rural places she lived and the objects she found in nature, such as flowers, trees, and bones. By the 1930s she was spending almost half of each year in New Mexico, in the American Southwest, and in 1949 she moved there permanently. The region's vast desert landscape was punctuated by enormous mountain ranges and unusual rock formations, some surprisingly striated and colorful. Of particular interest to O'Keeffe were the sun-bleached animal bones that she collected in the desert and brought back to her studio to paint, which also decorated the walls of her homes. While many people associate bones with death, the artist saw them differently, as "strangely more living than the animals walking around. . . . The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even tho' it is vast and empty and untouchable—and knows no kindness with all its beauty."
At first O'Keeffe painted these skulls and antlers and pelvic bones realistically and in their entirety. Eventually she focused on increasingly more magnified sections of the pelvic bone, offering glimpses of the mountains, the moon, or the sky, as seen here, through its empty sockets. From 1943 to 1947 she created fourteen canvases on this theme, which her friend the novelist Jean Toomer (1894–1967) described as images of "the universe through the portal of a bone."
Reference:
Lynes, Barbara Buhler. Georgia O'Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné. 2 vols. New Haven, 1999. Vol. 2, p. 678, 1076.
Messinger, Lisa Mintz. Georgia O'Keeffe. New York, 1988, pp. 77, 78, 81, fig. 59, 92.
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