Nature Into Art: How a Pioneering Group of French and British Artists Reimagined Landscape Painting
These scenes captured life in the countryside in a whole new way
Let's take it outside! Landscape painters in 19th- and early 20th-century France and Britain took these fighting words quite literally in their effort to create a fresh approach to painting, which eventually gave birth to Modern art. Their fisticuffs were not against each other (usually!) but rather against the old way of making art, in the studio, working slowly and painstakingly to fashion paintings of nature that sat at one remove from them, outside.
New approaches demanded new gear and ways of working. This new breed of artists opted for material that was more portable such as smaller panels and paints in tubes, and they needed to dress for the elements as they headed into the countryside to redefine the possibilities of painting a landscape. The trailblazing Barbizon artists, British landscapists, and later the French and Scottish Impressionists shared a deep commitment to nature as both subject and source of artistic inspiration. Their goal was to capture direct, sensory experience – to paint what they saw and felt in the open air. Leaving behind the comfort and conventions of the studio, these painters roamed the Forest of Fontainebleau, wandered the snowy paths of Normandy, trekked across Wales, and waded along Scotland's
shores, painting not only what they saw, but their experience of it.
The immediacy of that vision is captured in a remarkable group of landscapes offered in Heritage's November 18 Fine European Art Signature® Auction
. In the mid- to late 19th century, such works appealed to a new class of collectors seeking refuge from industrialization and urban growth in poetic evocations of rural life. Unlike the grand historical or mythological subjects favored by the Academies, these landscapes celebrated the beauty of fields, forests, and agrarian labor. Painted across countries, topographies, and time, they continue to offer viewers a similar respite today – an invitation to travel through France and England and to glimpse landscapes that, in many cases, remain unspoiled.
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