Just think of the competition these paintings faced at the International Exposition of 1900. People-moving escalators, films that talked, the world's largest telescope, and a globe that rivaled the Eiffel Tower in size. Not to mention the triumph of the latest style - Art Nouveau. And yet two paintings by American artists, both New Englanders, Ben Foster and Winslow Homer, were snapped up by the French state for the Luxembourg Museum and the lesser known of the two won a gold medal: Berce par le murmure d'un ruisseau . (Lulled by the murmur of a stream),was signed by the artist "Ben Foster, September, 1899".
Today, the name of Ben Foster (1852-1926) is obscure, even for a Tonalist painter. The consensus is that Foster's lifelong bachelorhood was a bad career move, since it meant there were no offspring to keep his reputations alive. :Foster studied with Abbott Handerson Thayer in New York and visited Paris in the 1890s. The late-blooming artist was forty-eight when he won the medal in Paris. The French saw something distinctively American in the brooding melancholy of his picture of a small Connecticut town near the Housantonic River. He was drawn to themes that drew from the Symbolist vocabulary., so that may have bees the connecting point. His compositions often appear awkward or unbalanced at first, then give way to a sense of disquiet. that a puzzled contemporary described as "the aloofness of nature."
Winslow Homer's painting was something else. As a young man Homer (1836-1910), Homer had painted idyllic scenes of verdant rural life, but by the time he painted Summer Night in 1890 he had lived for seven years at Prout's Neck, Maine, a fishing village on the rocky, inhospitable Atlantic coast. Again, the French saw a peculiarly American lyricism in the scene of two young women dancing on the shore as the waves crash. Homer, who was usually in need of funds, must have been especially gratified that the French nation moved so quickly to acquire these two paintings for the Musee de Luxembourg.
You may also be interested in Winslow Homer at Haughton Farm, posted here 1 August 2009.
Images:
1. Ben Foster - Berce par le murmure d'un ruisseau, 1899, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
2. Winslow Homer - Nuit d'Ete, 1890, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
2 comments:
They're both night scenes with moonlight. But the Winslow Homer one is very strange - like a stage with an seascape backdrop.
Melinda, Homer's attitude toward women was unusual for his time. Although he never married and had little to say about women that has been preserved, he did quite a number of artworks that show women doing unconventional things. For instance, young women ice-skating in the 1860s on Boston Common - a daring thing. Homer's image appears to be a mundane event, like a cookout, but there is nothing to explain this eruption of exuberance. If you compare this with French pictures of the time, you get an idea of what made the American girl seem exotic to them.
The light in this painting is preternatural; it seems to come from different directions, without revealing the sources.
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