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| Aert van der Neer - Night Landscape with a River, c. 1650 |
Saturday, February 26, 2022
Jean Delville (Belgian, 1867-1953)- Le Lac au Clair de Lune
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| Jean Delville (Belgian, 1867-1953)- Le Lac au Clair de Lune |
Henry Farrer - Winter Scene in Moonlight, 1869
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| Henry Farrer - Winter Scene in Moonlight, 1869 |
English-born Henry Farrer was the brother of Thomas C. Farrer, the principal founder of the Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art, which represented the Pre-Raphaelite movement in America. Unlike his brother, who studied drawing with John Ruskin in London, Henry was probably self-taught, beginning in the early 1860s to produce painstakingly wrought still lifes and landscapes in watercolor. He exhibited them regularly at the American Watercolor Society, which he helped to found.
"Winter Scene in Moonlight," Farrer's earliest known watercolor landscape, probably represents a site in Brooklyn, where he lived most of his life. The picture's prosaic terrain and precise technique reveal the young artist's early adherence to Pre-Raphaelite ideals, while its faint primitivism betrays the earnest autodidact that he was. Because of that quality, as well as its chill nocturnal setting and subtle asymmetry of composition, the image anticipates the disturbing tenor of twentieth-century Surrealist landscapes.
Albert Pinkham Ryder - The Toilers of the Sea, 1880-85
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| Albert Pinkham Ryder - The Toilers of the Sea, 1880-85 |
Ryder probably either selected or approved the title of this painting, which relates it to Victor Hugo’s famous 1866 novel of the same name (Les travailleurs de la mer, in the original French). The painting could illustrate any one of several scenes in that novel, which features a fisherman character whose personality and attitudes resemble Ryder’s own. The surface has changed and suffered over the years; still, as with most of Ryder’s works, the composition conveys the artist’s vision of the mystical relationship between people and nature.
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