FRITS THAULOW IN A NEW LIGHT
(Editor's Note: The following was excerpted from material researched by Thea Tweet for a Viewpoints lecture on Thaulow.)
Docents revisiting the 19th-century gallery with its revealing new lights might be interested in using the painting The Stream (73.151), by Johan Frederick (Frits) Thaulow (1847-1906), as a pivotal point for re-examining the works there.
It is best to begin a study of the painting by reading the article by Candace Adelson, curator of European art, in Vols. 17-19 of Porticus. She relates why George Eastman chose a Thaulow rather than a Turner for his personal collection.
Then examine this painting by the Norwegian ex-patriot artist who, by 1895, the date of our painting, was working far more frequently in his adopted country, France, than in his native country.
Thaulow had spent considerable time examining Dutch painting of the 1600s and the Spanish Baroque. He had studied for two winters with painter J. F. Gude, where he learned the romantic realism sometimes seen in his work. He was the first of his generation of Norwegian painters to arrive in Paris, at a time when the French realist painters of 1830-1900 were working. But he also adopted elements of Impressionism.
Compare The Stream with The Washerwomen (37.2), by Léon Augustin L'Hermitte. L'Hermitte's work represents a typical French academic painting; Thaulow has moved beyond realism. It is not unusual to see a Thaulow painting in which the foreground is rendered impressionistically and the middle and background realistically.
Thaulow was a plein air painter, just like his friend, Claude Monet. Both Thaulow and Monet painted in Normandy—Monet on the coast, Thaulow on a quiet river near Dieppe. (The Stream was painted there.) Monet's coastline is stormy. Thaulow's weather is placid, tranquil, more in keeping with his temperament. He said of himself, "I am more drawn to the gentle and harmonic than to the vigorous."
It is interesting to note that Thaulow had urged Monet to paint in Norway, and Monet finally went there in the winter of 1895, to visit his stepson who had located there. But Monet found the climate too difficult. The temperature was 20 degrees below zero when he arrived, and his painting was impeded by the excess of light on the white sno. Not too surprisingly, Monet never returned to Norway. One Norwegian winter was enough for him! When the snow scenes of Monet and Thaulow are compared, it is as one would expect. In his color palette Monet used a great deal of blue and lavender. His painting of Sandvika looks as though it had been done in a blizzard. Thaulow's paintings, even of snow scenes, often have a golden glow.
Thaulow was enormously sensitive to color. His preference for a warm color palette is consistent throughout his career. In his winter scenes he particularly loved the combination of red, white and black that he could achieve, for example, by painting a red building contrasted with white snow and dark water. He disliked the works of contemporary Norwegian painters whom he found obsessive in their use of blue and green, colors which he thought gave a forbidding atmosphere to their winter landscapes. Though many of his countrymen in the 1890s were drawn to mood landscapes, Thaulow stayed with the sun.
Thaulow’s handling of the water in The Stream and in many other of his paintings is similar to that of the French Impressionists. He knew water intimately. A great boatsman, he took his own boat to Sweden, and he spent the summer of 1883 living on it in the Oslo fiord. He made several trips to Venice to paint the water there. When he was urged by his French dealer to concentrate his paintings on water scenes, he refused to accept that limitation, and continued to paint what he saw as he saw it. He knew how to make an ordinary subject extraordinary, yet his work has an intimate character.
Unfortunately, Thaulow’s career was cut short by diabetes, although he painted productively right until the end, leaving a total of some 1200 works. He never kept a register, and most of the paintings are undated.
Today Thaulow is considered one of the pivotal figures on the European art scene at the close of the 19th century. His painting is ideally placed and now brilliantly lit in the 19th century gallery.
………………
The Memorial Art Gallery has in its collection a painting by another great friend of Thaulow: Morning on the River (13.5), by Jonas Lie. Although Lie was Norwegian by birth, he did the greater part of his paintings in New York City and the Adirondacks. Stylistically he is of a similar bent to Thaulow.
No comments:
Post a Comment