Goblin Lanterns

Image:  Helen Hyde - Goblin Lanterns, 1914, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.

Dreams Of Brittany

“I also dream of Brittany.  If it were not for the accursed river Cousnon which puts the Mont in Brittany, I should be Breton, too.  I’m just a Granvillois, still it’s on the same bay at Saint-Michel and Saint-Malo.”  - Maurice Denis, from his journal, at age 15.

In fact, if it hadn’t been for the need to flee the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Maurice Denis (1870-1943) would have been born at the family's suburban home in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, far inland from Granville on the Normandy coast. 

The devotion of the Breton people and the music of the Catholic liturgy combined to strike a chord in the earnest young Maurice, seen above in a self-portrait from 1890 when he was a student at the Academie Julian in Paris, a momentous year for the founders of the Nabi group: Denis, Roussel, Serusier, Vuillard, and Bonnard  His use of repetive stylized lines connects his image with the patterned cascading branches of a tree at right, just as he unites the seated Breton woman through a curving pattern of dots that seems roll across the canvas like a wave.

 How quickly Denis developed his personal style, his version of nature as stylized patterns, as artifice. His chosen  colors were pale rose, emerald green and blue, heightened with ochre, and yellow. 

“The Nabi is alone in the deserted forest.  He orders the leaves to reflect the rhythm of his feelings, just as a magnet orders iron filings to obey its will” Denis wrote in his journal in June 1891:   There really is something musical in the rhythms Denis creates with trees and their shadows.

It easy to to see as objective correlatives for the music of water in Denis' patterned waves . His human figures participate in the patterning and also stand apart from it in their humanity, possibly because of the artist's religious faith.  In Regatta At Perros-Guriec the loops of white light reflecting off the water seem part of the festivity of the occasion.  Whereas the choppy waves incised on an ink-blue sea attest to the sobriety of work for The Cow Girl and her dappled charge.

Those strong upright trees, in blue in The Cider Bowl,  suggest pillars in a cathedral of nature, another pattern Denis repeats in his work.  A curious thing is that I haven't found any images of the cathedral at Mont Saint-Michel by Denis.

Images:
1. Orphans, 1891, private collection - France, Montreal Museum of Art.
2. Self-Portrait, 1891, private collection - France, Montreal Museum of Art.
3. Breton Woman In A Boat, c. 1891, Museum of Fine Arts, Quimper.
4. Yellow Landscape, 1891, Art Museum of the University of Kentucky, Lexington.
5. April, 1891, private collection, Museum of Modern art, Trento.
6. Procession Under The Trees, 1892, Peter Marino Collection, New York.
7. Regatta At Perrros-Guirec, c. 1892, Museum of Fine Arts, Quimper.
8. The Cow Girl, 1893, Indianapolis Museum of Art
9. The Cider Bowl, c. 1894, Musee Maurice Denis, Saint-Germanin-en-Laye.

Jujol And The House Of Eggs

Its harmonious asymmetry made me think of the traditional Japanese aesthetic of wabi sabi, particularly one of my favorite books: Hideyuke Oka's How To Wrap Five Eggs (1965).  How curious then to find that the this house has a nickname: 'The House of Eggs.'

Josef Maria Jujol  (1878-1949) was born in the school building where his father taught school in Tarragona, a Catalan city on the Mediterranean coast, near the border with France. Dating back to at least Roman times, Tarragona was punctuated by its  stone remains.  The Jujol family moved to Barcelona in 1888, where Josef  studied at the School of Architecture under Antoni Gaudi and its director Lluis Domenech i Montaner, giants of the Spanish modernista movement, addressing  what the movement saw as the crisis of classical architecture.  Outside Spain, Gaudi's name is the familiar one, and Jujol colloborated with Gaudi on several projects.  Jujol is widely credited with executing much of the mosaic work for the famous serpentine benches of the Parc Guell.

What keeps Jujol's work fresh today is that he found his metier in designing homes for clients of modest means and in renovating buildings, not as historic preservation but  as opportunities for innovative redesign. While creating fully detached single homes was a goal of 20th century planning, in Jujol, Gaudi's idea of construction as the creation of controversy was tempered by the idea of the home as a manifestation of uplift and faith in transcendental values.

Jujol built his first house in 1909 and in 1913, his aunt Dona Josefa Romeu commissioned a vacation home, Torre de la Creu, in Sant Joan Despi that took three years to complete and soon acquired the nickname Casa dels Ous or 'House of Egg'. 

The house comprises two separate flats that share a common entrance and a small garden. Jujol superimposed five cylinder-shaped towers (the torre) that thwart our expectation of symmetry in a duplex; three for rooms and two for staircases leading up to the roof.  From his work with Gaudi Jujol adapted ceramic brick to effect, combining it with the more economical stucco.  Unlike Gaudi, he made his sgraffito designs on smooth surfaces.  The loops, rings and knotted shapes  he shaped in ironwork accent the cylinders and meander charmingly at the same time.

The spiral staircase is a marvel of lightness, with concealed windows and skylights, encouraging a trip to the roof.  There the architect provided an elevated balcony for viewing the city and the sea and a pavilion, suited to private pursuits, with protection from the sun.  The architect Jujol has no obvious successors but his work is ready to inspire.

Images: photographs by Melba Levick for Jujol, by Ignasi de Solo-Morales Rubio, published by Rizzoli International: 1991, except for 1. Torre de la Creu  photographed by Didac Lopez, Andorra. 

 2. - lower part of a iving room.  3. - upward view of roof towers.  4. - spiral staircase.  5. - Steps to a balcony.  6. - roof pavillon.

You may also be interested in Gaspar Homar: The Circle Dance ( posted here 08/07/2010),

Anglada Camarasa: An Artist From Barcelona  (01/29/2010),

Art In Everything: Adevrtising The Good Life (09/15/2008).

At The Vallottons

It's called The Effect Of Light, this portrait of the Vallotton family at supper, and its ordering principle is reiterated in subtle ways, in the green-on-green-on-green of the houseplant refracted through the glass of the wine bottle that also reflects light from the silhouette lamp overhead.  Continuity reaches across five years as the red and white cloth is again on the dining table though the lamp has been replaced by an electric chandelier.

Felix Vallotton (1865-1925) was a Swiss artist who met Edouard Vuillard during his brief connection with Nabi group in Paris.  Their friendship was close and life-long.  Vuillard's portrait of his friend, shows Vallotton sitting  on a table in his Parisian studio at 6 Rue de Milan. With arms folded on his chest and legs twined together, Vallotton looks the picture of the retiring person his friends described.  Vuillard barely suggest his facial features, choosing rather to accentuate Vallotton's red slippers and the art works hanging on the walls.    At  right a Vallotton woodcut hangs, while at left a painting of a  Chinese wedding scene may be a reference to Vallotton's recent marriage to Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriques, sister of Parisian art dealers Gaston and Josse Bernheim. Vuillard, the  confirmed bachelor, disapproved of the marriage in spite of its useful connections.

 While critics have often admired Vuillard's mastery of muted tones, Vallotton's sharp-edged uncompromising realism has been underrated.  His cropping of images is decisive and adds to the interest of his domestic scenes.  Vallotton may have shunned the limelight but, in  a telling gesture, he attempted to enlist in the French Army in 1914, although he was disqualified by his age.

Images:
1. Felix Vallotton - The Effect Of Light, 1899, Musee d'Orsay, Paros.
2. Felix Vallotton - The Dining Room - Evening, 1904, Swiss Art Research Institute, Zurich.
3.  Edouard Vuillatrd - Felix Vallotton In His Studio, 1900, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
4.  Felix Vallotton - Corner Of The Apartment, 1904, Swiss Art Research Institute, Zurich.
5.  Edouard Vuillard - Afternoon At The Vallottons', 1899, private collection, France.

Solitude

"We must reserve a little back-shop, all our own, entirely free, wherein to establish our true liberty and principal retreat and solitude." - Michel de Montaigne

"The worst solitude is to be destitute of sincere friendship." - Francis Bacon

"No man will ever unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least checker his life with solitude." - Thomas de Quincey

 As these images demonstrate, how the viewer interprets solitude depends on whether it is chosen or not.  Artists begin with their choice of a vantage point, with implications flowing from there.  But, as viewers, we can question our interpretations.  Kersting's young woman weaving a garland may look happy to us because the leaves are green and we see her basket beside her, but, then, what do we make of Clarence White's Autumn Allegro?  The coloration is somber and pale as the sun recedes but White's title suggests emotions not readily visible is the static image.  The girl appears to be wearing a costume so she may have paused for a moment's introspection before joining some festivity. 

 How to interpret  the pair of images Songe et realite (Thought And Reality)?  Morbelli invites us to look beyond what we can see by 'peeling' back a corner of each picture.  It may be that these two old people are enjoying a restful moment in the warmth of the sun, or the grey hues in the pigments may suggest a more wintery view of their situation. Morbelli exhibited a series of paintings at the International Exposition of 1900 in Paris hightlighting the neglect of old people.

Villa By the Sea seems obviously a Romantic gesture toward the smallness of individuals and their worldly cares.  All function as Rorschach tests of a kind; from daubs of paint and grains of chemicals our imaginations take flight.

Images:

1.  Georg Friedrich Kersting - Young Woman Weaving A Garland Of Leaves, 1815, National Gallery of Berlin.  

 2. & 3.  Angelo Morbelli - Songe et realite, c.1905, Casa Risparmio della Provence Lombarde, Milan.  

4. Clarence White - Autumn Allegro, c. 1905-1908, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.    5. Arnold Bocklin - Villa By The Sea, 1864, Bayerische State Gallery, Munich.

The Autumn Of Mary Cassatt

"Now's the time when children's noses

All become as red as roses

And the colour of their faces
Makes me think of orchard places
Where the juicy apples grow,
And tomatoes in a row.
And to-day the hardened sinner
Never could be late for dinner,
But will jump up to the table

Just as soon as he is able,

Ask for three times hot roast mutton--

Oh! the shocking little glutton.

Come then, find your ball and racket,

Pop into your winter jacket,

With the lovely bear-skin lining.

While the sun is brightly shining,

Let us run and play together

And just love the autumn weather."

 - Autumn Song by Katherine Mansfield

In 1922, eight years after poor eyesight had forced her to give up painting,  Mary Cassatt gave this autumn portrait of her older sister Lydia to the Musee du Petit Palais. Perhaps in gratitude to the French nation which had awarded her the Legion d'Honneur in 1904.  But Cassatt was no tragic figure.  If she could not paint she would promote the work of other women artists and support women's suffrage.  Of the many paintings Mary made of Lydia, I like this one especially for the cheery shawl, full of autumn's bright colors as the first few leaves begin to turn on the trees in the background.   For those attuned to nature's rhythms, fall is not necessarily a sad season.  The riot of color during harvest season is joyous or, as another American, poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), wrote in Merry Autumn: "It's all a farce,—these tales they tell /About the breezes sighing". 

Image: Mary Cassatt - Portrait of C. Lydia Cassatt,  1880, Musee du Petit Palais, Paris.

House Of Dreams: Hermann Hesse

"(T)he entire simple cycle of life that so much preoccupies men and  which all religions interpret with veneration, takes place unambiguously, rapidly, and in silence" in the garden. - from In The Garden by Hermann Hesse, 1908.

Looking at this domestic watercolors by the writer Hermann Hesse offers a moment of uncomplicated pleasure.

His love of gardening  was born in his first flower bed,  a small plot his mother gave him in the back yard when Hermann was nine years old. His preference for brightly colored flowers came from the idea that they were sources of energy and vitality that kept the human mind alert.

The gardens of  the adult Hesse were near the village of Montagnola in Ticino a Canton in the south of Switzerland surrounded on three sides by Italy and bounded on the north by the Canton of Valais (where the French artist Marguerite Burnat-Provins settled).  The German Hesse found serenity there, following the ideas of Goethe and Lau-Tzu.

As a painter, Hesse has been compared to the painters of Byzantine icons, for his repetitions of a few treasured subjects, his house and garden, the hills and lakes that surrounded him.  Although we think of Hesse usually as a writer, painting was very important to him.  Consider this, from a letter he wrote to a friend, Ina Seidel, in 1925: "It is a fact that I would have been dead long ago if, in the darkest moments of my existence, I had not found consolation and salvation in my first attempts at painting."

This small gem is rescued in Flavia Arzeni's book An Education In Happiness: The Lessons of Hesse and Tagore, translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis, Pushkin Press, London, 2009.

Images:

1. Hermann Hesse - Hauser am Waltrand, 1929, Heiner Hesse Arcegno.

While Awaiting Guests, Lighting The Lanterns

A simple subject makes an elegant picture.  A noble personage sits in a courtyard, contemplating the cultivated flowering trees. From the silent, moon-bathed garden,  servants emerge to light the lanterns along the avenue, signaling the imminent arrival of guests.

To suggest the atmosphere of an evening scene, Ma Lin created layers of lightness. Though small in size,  the picture gives a  spacious and detailed view. The  eye is arrested by the horizontal planes of the house and the pavilion, set in the diagonals of the hills inclining towards the horizon. The lliveliness and freshness of the scene are highlighted by an immense and  featureless sky.

The artist Ma Lin was a native of  Hezhong (now Yongji) Prefecture  in  Shanxi Province  and heir tof four generations of painter. He served as a royal painter in the Academy under the reigns of two emperors Ningzong (1194-1224) and Lizong (1224-1264). . Most of his  works preserved today illustrate poems written by  emperor or empress Yang (1162-1232). His subjects were varied: he liked to paint famous personages and poetic landscapes and While Awaiting Guests is one of his most charming.  He signed his pictures "Your servant Ma Lin."

Image: Ma Lin - While Awaiting  Guests, Lighting The Lanterns, Song Dynasty (1194-1264), Taipei National Museum, China.

"She's Too Young And You're Too Old": Jean-Louis Forain

“He paints with his hands in my pockets" said Edgar Degas of his friend Jean-Louis Forain (1852-1931).

Forain's etchings, like Maison Close at left, were used as illustrations for the book publication of Parisian Sketches by Forain's friend  Joris-Karl Huysmanns.  Their circle also included the young poet Arthur Rimbaud, another connoisseur of the demi-monde.

Forain's career as a bohemian effectively ended in 1891 when he married fellow artist Jeanne Bosc and became a father.  Scenes of cafes and dance halls gave place to other subjects.   Degas introduced Forain the backstage world of the  ballet  where Forain exercised his satirical bent, focusing on the dancers' ambivalent position in society, admired as artists by the critics yet subject to propositions by wealthy men.  Unlike some of his colleagues, Forain came from a working-class family and was more sensitive to the moral implications of intermingling than they were.

Images of prostitutes and other women in public places refelected a generalized anxiety about how to place individuals in the new and unstable urban society.

With She's Too Young For You And You're Too Old the caption tells the story for anyone who might be naive to the milieu Forain frequented.  Does it need to be underlined that  the young Tightrope Walker performing at a music-hall is as vulnerable to the intrusive stares of the men looking up (under her skirt) at her legs as she is to the vagaries of the rope she stands on.

 Although the graphic arts of etching and lithography were often used during the 19th century to portray more controversial subjects, Forain used oil paintings for gritty subjects.  The Young Woman On The Balcony In Profile seems to stand in the path of encroaching smokestacks, their symmetrical lineup suggesting the malevolent force that industrialization seemed to effect in the lives of the Parisian working class.

As individuals mingled  in public places of amusement it became more difficult to pigeonhole their places in the social hierarchy.  Among the first to investigate the beer halls, cabarets, cafe-concerts and dance halls where women and children went out at night, sometimes without being properly escorted by men, even the famously worldly Goncourt brothers were unsttled at this new spectacle. in places of public entertainment it became difficult to pigeonhole  where their fit in the social hierarchy. Among the first visit the beer halls, cabarets, café-concerts, and dance halls where women and children could be seen out at night, whether or not they were ‘properly’ escorted by men, unsettled even the famously worldly Goncourt Brothers. 

Images:
1. Maison Close-At the Folies-Bergere, from Parisian Sketches, 1880, Paris.
2. At the Folies-Bergere, from Parisian Sketches, 1880, Paris.
3. At The Restaurant, c. 1880s, Cleveland Museum of Art.
The Waiter and the Drunken Guest, c. 1875-1880, Albertina museum, Vienna.
4.  She's too Young And You're Too Old, 1880s, Museum of Fine Arts, San Francisco.
5. The Tightrope Walker, 1895, Art Institute of Chicago.

6.  Young Woman on The Balcony In Profile,  c.1900, Louvre Museum, Paris.

7. Le Trottin de Paris, 1895, Musee du Petit Palais, Geneva.

8. On A Garden Path, undated, Louvre Museum, Paris.

Parisian Sketches: The Folies-Bergere

"Imagination is decidedly a very good thing:  it allows you to credit people with ideas even more stupid than those they undoubtedly already have." - J.-K. Huysmanns, 1879.

It also allows for nostalgic glamor.  Posters like Leonetto Cappiello's dancer (at left) or Jules Cheret's dashing and often reprinted images of the exotic Loie Fuller create an aura far different than the more mundane entertainments of tumbling acrobats and the paraphernalia that Huysmanns liked to call "bank-holiday orientalism." 

The music-hall (the French appropriated the term from English, Gallicizing it by adding the hyphen) was a place where the  working people of Paris went for entertainment, where the classes rubbed elbows (and possibly more intimate parts), a place where alcohol and sex were for sale: a demilitarized zone, if you will, in their daily lives.

Joris-Karl Huysmanns (1848-1907) was the son of a Dutchman and a French schoolmistress who, like  many aspiring writers at his generation, fell under the dark spell of Baudelaire.  Fame came with the publication of Against Nature (1884), Huysmann's novel of   the varieties of decadence.  His vignettes of night life published in newspapers were the apprenticeship.  They are another view of the dance-halls and brasseries  so colorfully documented by graphic artists.

"An usherette, her pink ribbons fluttering over a white bonnet, offers you a programme which is a marvel on an art-form that is at once both spiritualist and positivist: phony Indian cartomancers, a lady who calls herself a palmist and a graphologist, a hypnotist, clairvoyants, soothsayers who tell fortunes using coffee grounds, pianos and ocarinas for hire, job lots of maudlin music for sale, all this for the soul; radical cures for intimate afflictions, a unique treatment for diseases of the mouth, all this for the body.  Only one thing disconcerts: an advert for a sewing machine.  It's easy to understand why there's one for a fencing-school, there are a lot of stupid men about!  But the 'SilentWonder' and the 'Singer' aren't tools you ordinarily associate with working girls who come here; unless this advert was placed here as a symbol of respectability, as an inducement to chaste labours.  It is perhaps, under a different form, one of those moral tracts the English distribute to lead creatures of vice back to virtue."  

"Applause crackles around the hall.  The orchestra grinds out a circus waltz: a man and a woman enter wearing flesh colored tights. gorgets and Japanese-style shorts, indigo and turquoise blue with silver spangles and fringes....The man leaps onto a rope...Next the  woman climbs up onto  the net...and walks across it from one end to the other, bouncing at each step as if on a trampoline...Leaning forward a little, the woman also grabs a trapeze...Then, the waltz stops dead.  An ominous silence descends, broken suddenly by an explosion from a champagne bottle...The woman hurls herself through the air... she falls, feet foremost, into the arms of the man..then throws her into the net where, with her silver and azure-blue tights, she rebounds like a fish twisting and jumping in a cast-net."

"What is truly admirable, truly unique, is that this theatre has a real air of the boulevards about it.

It is ugly and it is superb, it is both exquisitely good and outrageously bad taste.  It's also unfinished, like anything that aims to be truly beautiful....

(t)he vague smell of those bar-saloons in the old suburbs decorated with oriental columns and mirrors, this theatre, with its auditorium whose faded reds and tarnished golds clash with the brand-new luxury of the faux-jardin, is the only place in Paris that stinks so deliciously of the make-up of bought carcasses and the desperation of depravities that fail to excite." 

THE FOLIES-BERGERE IN 1879 from Parisian Sketches by Joris-Karl Huysmanns, translated into English by Brendan King, Dedalus European Classics, London.
Images:
1. Leonetto Cappiello - poster for Folies-Begere, 1900, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
2. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec - Emiliene d'Alencon and Margita at the Folies-Bergere, 1893, Cleveland Museum of Art.
3. I. Levy - poster for Mayol Freres - L'Homme Obou, undated, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris.
4. Jean-Louis Forain, Portrait of Joris-Karl Huysmanns, c1880s, Chateau de Versailles, France.

Eline Vere: A Novel Of The Hague

"Every human being is a sacrifice.' - Hendrik Ibsen

Eline Vere by Louis Couperus has often been compared to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1878), as though great novels with female protagonists are so odd as to require a segregated genre.  More apt comparisons with Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899), rescued from oblivion by feminist scholars or Maurice Guest (1908)  by Henry Handel Richardson another brilliant first novel of obsession that still languishes.  Both were written by women, which only highlights  Couperus's  ability to create fully realized female characters.  His understanding of the experience of emotional turmoil, often dismissed as neurasthenia in women, remains exemplary.

A capacious novel, Eline Vere is like Tolstoy's great novels in presenting a large cast of characters, each one fully developed with a place in the story that only makes Eline's tragedy the more poignant.  Frederique, also twenty-three, is able to reconcile her inner turmoil with her need to connect with others. While Eline, with a loving family, admiring friends, and numerous suitors, remains isolated within herself, unruly egotism  her only avenue of expression.   She rejects both Otto and St. Clare as alien, and mistakes Victor's similarities for genuine feeling.

In  the late 19th century northwestern Europe enjoyed a balance of prosperity and stability by comparison with  more volative neighbors France and Great Britiain.  Yet this equilibrium often felt like stasis to those who lived it.  What could be more suggestive then, than the novel's first chapter that introduces the cast of main characters as they prepare to present  tableaux vivant at a party?  This theatrical entertainment, gone like the parlor piano,  was once a popular excuse to get into costume and get up make believe scenes from history, mythology, or imitate famous paintings.  Significantly, Eline Vere is absent from the festivities.

Eline Vere's imaginative capabilities are alive to the darker dimensions of life, alienating her from her enviably comfortable existence. After an argument with her sister Betsey and beloved brother-in-law Henk with whom she lives, Eline find refuge with a former schoolmate, Jeanne, who lives with husband and children in more precarious circumstances. Eline and Freddie, by contrast, lead such circumscribed lives that, in their twenties they remain trapped in adolescence like insects in amber.  A paradox, still timely, is that creature comforts make freedom of action possible, but attenuated hunger and self-wasting are just as possible outcomes.

The novel feels much less dated than you might imagine.  Theories of hereditary influence have been drastically overhauled from those Couperus drew on, but we still recognize its formative influence on temperament.  In the relationship  between Eline and her cousin Vincent, Couperus prefigures Carl Jung's theory of personality.  When Vincent  suggests that one can easily live a life based on one's own free will, Eline responds with passion: "But being independent, doing eaxctly as you please...that takes more moral courage than most of us possess."

Eline's capabilities count for so little that the reader could easily miss them.  She is fluent in French and English,  her musicality, playing piano and singing,  brings great pleasure to those around her but ends in an obsession with a second rate opera singer.   Her avid interest in the  workings of the mind brings her no peace or resolution.   She breaks off her engagement to Otto van Erlsvooert, a kind, loving man because she cannot imagine the emotional equilibrium needed to sustain love. 

One of the great Dutch writers, Louis Couperus (1863-1923) was the youngest of  eleven children of  a councilor to the Netherlands High Courts.  When Louis was nine, the family was posted to the Dutch East Indies for six years. Back in The Hague, his first poem was published in 1883, and in January of 1887, Couperus's first novel Eline Verve began a year long serialization in the newspaper.  After it was published in book form to immediate acclaim, Couperus spent a year in Paris (1890), returning to marry his childhood sweetheart, Elisabeth Baud, in September, 1891.

 Couperus's versatility is  impressive, ranging from psychological, mythological and historical novels to fairy-tales and journalism. An admirer of Hendrik Ibsen's plays, Couperus was ffundamentally pessimistic, his themes work themselves out fictionally on many levels, individual, cultural, political. The internal workings of individual temperament struggle wirh  mysterious and incomprehensible forces of fate.  In counterpoint, a strong

aesthetic sense asserts itself in the consoling power of beauty. 

The Couperus revival in English comes by way of Pushkin Press, U.K., which publishes Eline Vere along with Inevitable and Psyche.  In the United States, Archipelago Press of Brooklyn is the publisher of Eline Vere, translated impressively by Ina Rilke, also known for her translation of Sijie Dai's Balzac And the Little Chinese Seamstress.

Images:

1. Georg Hendrik Breitner - Meisij In A Red Kimono, private collection, Amsterdam.

2. Unindentified photographer - Street Scene. The Hague, c.1890s, .Adje van Daalen Collection, Netherlands.

3. Jan Toorop - Despair, 1890, Gemeentemuseum, The Hague.

4. Unidentified photogrpaher - The Couperus Home at Mauritskade 43 The Hague, Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren.

5. L. A.  Haye - The New Uitleg In The Hague, c.1890, Library Of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Visit the Louis Couperus website (in Dutch).

An Unloved Landscape Finds Its Painter

"Degas seems to have found his own, virtually unpainted stretch of countryside.  With an independence that verges on the perverse, Degas chose to base his most important sequence of landscapes on one of the least admired areas of inland France." - Richard Kendall, in Degas Landscapes, Yale University Press, 1993.

"I have wanted for so long to make a series of monotypes." - Edgar Degas to Pierre Jeanniot

Dienay, a tiny town in the departement of La Cote d'Or in southern France has never been a tourist destination but in October of 1890, the artist Pierre-Georges Jeanniot invited his friend, Edgar Degas, to visit him at home.  The week in Burgundy was no quiet vacation, rather an outburst of creativity that began on the very first day.

In Jeanniot's studio, Degas created a series comprising some twenty monotypes on lead plates.  He worked the oils with both brush and fingers on a pad, then pressed them onto the plate and the image was ready to be printed on a roll press.  Afterward, he applied pastels when the papers dried. 

As Jeanniot described it: "(H)e would ask for some pastels to finish the monotypes, and it was there, even more than in the making of the proof, that I admired his taste, his imagination, and the freshness of his recollections.  He remembered the variety forms, the structure of the terrain, the unexpected oppositions and contrasts; it was delightful!"

 Although the Burgundian landscape was not considered dramatic by connoisseurs, Degas was charmed by the meandering roads and rolling hills. He captured passing moments of drama, as you can see in Squall In The Mountains.   Images like Path Leading to A Copse Of Trees   and Pathway In A Field seem to invite the viewer to re-photograph their locations, but Degas was also creating works of daring ambiguity, verging on abstraction. 

We respond to Autumn Landscape At L'Esterel as the artist intended, by experiencing the emotions a striking vista evokes  through its vaguely horizontal layers.  In a letter to his sister Marguerite, Degas describes his new works as "imaginary landscapes."

Two years later, at the late age of fifty-eight, Edgar Degas chose from these monotypes for his first solo exhibition, held at Galerie Durnad-Ruel in Paris.

 Images:

1.  Path Leading To A Copse Of Trees, 1890, Thaw Collection, J. P. Morgan Library, NYC.

2. Pathway In A Field, 1890, Yale University Museum of Art, New Haven, CT.

3. Landscape With Smokestacks, 1890, Art Institute of Chicago.

4. Squall In The Mountains, 1890, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA.

5. Burgundian Landscape, 1890, Louvre Museum, Paris.

6. Autumn Landscape at L'Esterel, 1890, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena.

7. A Tiny Isle In The Sea, 1890, Louvre Museum, Paris.

8. Cape Near Saint-Valery-sur-Somme, 1890. British Museum, London.