The Hay Wain

  Painted by John Constable (1776-1837) in 1821.  The large canvas (4 x 6 feet) portrays a hay wagon crossing the River Stour on the border of Essex and Suffolk.  The building on the left is Willy Lott's Cottage, the subject of another Constable painting.  William Lott (1761-1849) was a tenant farmer who lived in the cottage his entire life, spending only four nights away.  The cottage still stands.

Constable's skill and the pastoral setting have consistently made it voted one of the most popular paintings displayed in England.  It's been in the National Gallery since 1886.  In July 2022, two barbarians from Just Stop Oil glued themselves to the painting causing minor damage to the surface varnish and frame.

Hotel Lobby

By Edward Hopper (1943).  I find the empty spaces in Hopper paintings more interesting than the people.

Tuleninova

I have no idea who Olga Tuleninova is, or whether she or he exists, but enjoy the twitter account which features 19th and 20th century art, often by artists of whom I know little and lesser known paintings by more famous artists.  Some recent ones:

James Proudfoot,
( Scottish, 1908–1971)
"Sun on a House, Dieppe,"
1937
Oil on canvas
64.1 x 76.8 cm
Estate of James Proudfoot
Perth Art Gallery, Scotland pic.twitter.com/W9yBQOV1bv

— Olga Tuleninova 🦋 (@olgatuleninova) February 23, 2023

Igor Dubovoy (Russian, b. 1972) - On the Hill, oil on canvas, n/d pic.twitter.com/8Q5TufWJap

— Olga Tuleninova 🦋 (@olgatuleninova) February 23, 2023

Camille Pissarro pic.twitter.com/UIIdVI41yS

— Olga Tuleninova 🦋 (@olgatuleninova) February 23, 2023

Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943).
“Fishermen's Last Supper, Nova Scotia”, 1940-41, Oil on canvas, Neuberger Museum of Art, New York. pic.twitter.com/piGNYrnv06

— Olga Tuleninova 🦋 (@olgatuleninova) February 23, 2023

The Picnic

By Thomas Cole in 1846, who actually titled it Pic-Nic.

Winter In New England

Now that we've been living in Arizona for a year, this is how I remember New England in the winter:



The painting is by George Henry Durrie (1820-1863).  Born in Hartford, CT, he moved to New Haven in 1842 and made a name painting scenes of rural New England.  Three years before he died he gained wider popularity when Currier and Ives began selling prints of his artwork.

The County Election

(From Reynoldahouse)

By George Caleb Bingham (1852).  Bingham was a Missouri resident and, as you can see, the rituals of voting in those days were a mite different from today.  There was no registration so each voter took an oath, you declared your vote publicly, and the provision of liquor at polling places, often courtesy of the candidates, was commonplace (you can see a gentleman holding up a dead drunk friend in the painting).

Willard Metcalf

(Gloucester Harbor, from allartclassic)

An American artist who THC had never heard of until recently (thanks to Ace of Spades!).  Metcalf (1858-1925) was born in Lowell, Massachusetts and spent most of his life in New England and New York, with the exception of five years in Europe during the 1880s (along with a side trip to Algeria and Tunisia.

Considered an American impressionist, he is also known for his New England landscape paintings and was called the poet laureate of the New England hills.

(from wikipedia)
(from artinthepicture)

New York 1911

THC first saw this walking through the National Gallery of Art last year and was taken by the energy and dynamism depicted in the painting by George Bellows (1882-1925), known for his artwork capturing the urban life of New York City.

There is so much going on here.  It's a winter scene.  In the background are the first generation of skyscrapers, with advertisements plastered on some of them and we can see the smoke rising from their heating vents.  There are two streams of traffic, snarled at an intersection at the right.  Moving towards us is a streetcar, while another exits on the left.  It is 1911 so we still see horse drawn transport.  You can feel the vibrancy of a fast-growing city.

Pont Neuf

THC particularly likes this 1872 painting of Pont Neuf by Auguste Renoir as he and the Mrs have walked across the bridge on many occasions over the past forty years.  It is from the perspective of an observer in the lower floors of one of the buildings on the Right Bank of the Seine (the side the Louvre is on), looking towards the buildings on Ile de la Cite on the left and, on the right, the equestrian statue of Henry IV who inaugurated the bridge, the oldest in Paris, in 1607 (unfortunately, the statue is partially obscured by the side column of this blog).  Between the buildings and the statue you can see the buildings of the Left Bank in the background.

One our last trip to Paris, the apartment we rented was a half-block down a Left Bank street, the view of which is blocked by the tree to the right of the Henry IV statue.

In the foreground, with a light colored hat, cane and greenish pants, is Renoir's brother Edmond, who the painter asked to delay some people in the street as he outlined the scene.

Looking For A Place To Stay In Chicago?

This place is available on AirBnB.  And, it's cheap, only $10 a night courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
 
It's a promotion for the Institute's exhibition, Van Gogh's Bedrooms.  Here's the original.


Courtesy of Twisted Sifter.

Roman Theater, Taormina

The French artist Louise Josephine Sarazin de Belmont (1790-1870) painted two versions of the ruins of the Roman theater at Taormina in Sicily during the 1820s.  Little known today, Sarazin, was born in Versailles and studied under Pierre Henri Valenciennes, who was attempting to revive classical French landscape painting.  Lacking a patron, Sarazin lived by auctioning her paintings to finance her travels becoming the first female artist to have her works sold at a solo auction (for more on her background and career see the Master's Thesis by Alexandria Samantha Guillory (Louisiana State University, 2014).


From alafoto.com.  That's Mount Etna in the background.

(from flickr)
In this version we have different figures in the foreground, two of them apparently monks, and Mount Etna seems more active.

Taormina was founded in the 8th century BC by immigrants from the Greek island of Naxos.  By the late third century it had fallen under the rule of the Roman Republic and thereafter was part of the Empire (both the one centered in Rome and then part of the Byzantine) for most of the next 1100 years until it fell to Arab invaders in 902 AD.

Theaters were an essential element of Roman cities and can be found from Spain and Morocco to Syria.  The haunting ruins remind us of the scale of classical civilization.

The modern Taormina is a popular higher end resort.