Van Gogh and the Painters of the Petit Boulevard
Self-portrait with Grey Felt Hat, 1887
Les peintres du petit boulevard. So they were called, first probably by Van Gogh himself. On a recent Saturday, my “art partner” Jean and I went to a Smithsonian program about these artists. The lecturer was art historian Bonita Billman, two of whose presentations we’ve already attended and greatly enjoyed.
When attending a function of this sort, one always hopes to receive a handout replete with definitions of terms, bibliography, and other enriching information. This Ms Billman provided. Here are the first two paragraphs of the handout:
Vincent Van Gogh spent 1886 to 1888 in Paris, living with his brother Theo, an art dealer. Theo’s connections with the avant-garde art world gave Van Gogh a quick and intensive contemporary art education as he was drawn into a social and artistic circle of like-minded painters that included Pissarro, Seurat, Signac, Gauguin, Laval, Bernard, Anquetin, and Toulouse-Lautrec. He called the rising group the Painters of the Petit Boulevard to distinguish them from the established and successful impressionists like Monet, Degas, and Renoir.
Van Gogh’s time among these young artists was among the most influential in his brief life. In searching for his own style, he rapidly passed through approaches including impressionism and divisionism, lightening his Dutch-inspired palette and breaking up his brushstrokes. He conceived the idea of his fellow artists joining him in a community he called the Studio of the South – a colony that never came to pass.
Divisionism is defined by Ms Billman in her handout as a “…painting technique making use of color theory in which the application of dots of complementary colors heightens their luminosity…” This is similar to pointillism, a term greatly disliked by Seurat, to whose work it was principally applied.
Seurat’s most celebrated painting, Un dimanche après-midi à l’île de la Grande Jatte, holds pride of place in the Art Institute of Chicago, where my granddaughter, a Chicago resident, is always happy to encounter it.
More art by painters in this group:
Avenue de Clichy, Louis Anquetin
Portrait of Felix Feneon, by Paul Signac
Laborer at Celeyran, by Toulouse-Lautrec
Une Bergère Bretonne (a Breton shepherdess), by Paul Gauguin 1886
Bathers at Asnières by Seurat, 1884
Elégante de profil au Bal Mabille, 1888
And there she is again, Grandma’s little art lover!
I saved Camille Pissarro for last because I’ve fallen deeply in love with his paintings, especially the early works. This just happened – honestly! Here are several:
Road in a Forest, 1859
Paisaje tropical con casas rurales y palmeras, 1853
Entrée du village de Voisins, 1872
Two women chatting by the sea, 1856
To me, there is something magical about these two women. I imagine they are talking over some small, mundane matter as they stand by the sea, bathed in the calm and beautiful sunshine. Some time ago I titles a post about the art of Vermeer, ‘Quotidian moment, frozen in time.’ The same phrase might be applied, I think, to this painting.
In these works, Pissarro shows an almost uncanny way of capturing light, especially sunlight at a certain time of day. In 1885, he began studying With Seurat and Signac, adopting for a time their Divisionist technique:
La Récolte des Foins, Eragny (1887)
Pretty, but I rue the absence of that special light. At any rate, after a few short years, Pissarro abandoned the neo-Impressonist style, claiming that
‘It was impossible to be true to my sensations and consequently to render life and movement, impossible to be faithful to the effects, so random and so admirable, of nature, impossible to give an individual character to my drawing, [that] I had to give up,’
[From John Rewald’s biography of Pissarro, quoted in the Wikipedia entry.]
The artists of the petit boulevard frequently painted and drew one another:
Émile Bernard by Toulouse-Lautrec, 1886
Paul Signac, by Georges Seurat, 1890
The above portrait is executed in conté-crayon, defined in Wikipedia as “a drawing medium composed of compressed powdered graphite or charcoal mixed with a wax or clay base, square in cross-section.” The entry goes on to further elucidate:
They were invented in 1795 by Nicolas-Jacques Conté, who created the combination of clay and graphite in response to the shortage of graphite caused by the Napoleonic Wars (the British naval blockade of France prevented import). Conté crayons had the advantage of being cost-effective to produce, and easy to manufacture in controlled grades of hardness.
Van Gogh, by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1887
Henri de Toulouse-Laurec by Louis Anquetin, 1886
Although Toulouse-Lautrec painted numerous different scenes and portraits, his fame rests largely on his depictions of the patrons and the performers at the Moulin Rouge:
Bal au Moulin Rouge
And here it is, brought to vivid, joyous life in the 1952 film Moulin Rouge. Watch carefully: About a third of the way in, you’ll see Toulouse-Lautrec’s hands sketching the scene.
London art museums: the National Gallery and the Tate Britain: Two
[Click here for One in this series]
Last Saturday, Professor Bonita Billman regaled us with numerous fascinating stories to go along with the spectacular art works on display. For instance:
The Origin of the Milky Way, by Jacopo Tintoretto – ca. 1575-1580
According to myth, the Milky Way was formed by the goddess Hera, wife of Zeus, in a fit of pique. (If my recollection of the field of mythology is correct, she was prone to these.) It seems that her half-sister Athena brought the infant Heracles to Hera so that she could nurse him. Hera was initially willing to perform this task – never mind that Heracles (Hercules) was the offspring of one of Zeus’s innumerable illicit love affairs – but Heracles suckled with such vigor that she cast him off. In the process of doing this, she scattered her mother’s milk over a wide area. So wide, in fact, that it coalesced into the galaxy we now call the Milky Way.
How to respond to such a tale except by exclaiming: Who knew??
There’s more on this in the Wikipedia entry on Heracles, along with wonderful additional illustrations.
London art museums: the National Gallery and the Tate Britain: One
The Ambassadors, By Hans Holbein the Younger – 1533
[Click twice to enlarge.]
This extraordinary painting is one of many discussed last Saturday by our presenter Bonita Billman at our day long lecture on London’s National Gallery and the Tate Britain. This was the second such outing for my fellow art lover and friend Jean and myself. It was just as enjoyable as Seductive Paris from last November, with the added attraction of the trains having run on time.
That strange object at the bottom of the canvas is what is called an animorphosis. Wikipedia enlarges on its use here and also provides this normalized version of the image:
I read somewhere that if you hold the back of a highly polished spoon up to the image in the painting, you can resolve it into the image shown directly above. I tried it, and after much contorting and head twisting, had to admit defeat. Try it yourself, if you like, and let me know if you can make it work.
‘The life of Henry Ossawa Tanner is nothing short of inspirational.’
Henry Ossawa Tanner by Thomas Eakins, 1900
So begins the foreword to the catalog that accompanied the 2012 retrospective at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. The exhibit was entitled Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit.
Born in Pittsburgh in 1859, Tanner moved with his family to Philadelphia while he was still very young. The city served as an incubator for great American art and artists, and so it proved to be with him.
Tanner’s professional journey began at age thirteen with a walk beside his father, Benjamin Tucker Tanner, through Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, where they encountered a landscape painter. Transfixed by the magic of this artist’s craft, Tanner knew at that formative moment that he wanted to be an artist.
[From the above cited Foreword, by David R. Brigham]
In 1879, Tanner enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. He profited greatly from his studies there, especially those undertaken with Thomas Eakins. Nevertheless, his exposure to the taunts and routine humiliation of racism distracted and dismayed him. And so, like many of his fellow artists, he journeyed to France. This was in 1891. In 1899, he married Jessie Olsson, a Swedish-American opera singer. They had a son, Jesse. With the exception of several short trips back to America, Tanner remained living abroad for the remainder of his life.
Tanner’s style was fluid; his subject matter ranged from scenes of daily life for African-Americans to religious subjects.
In paintings like The Banjo Lesson, one can see the fluid use of paint, as if he effortlessly swept the pigment onto the canvas. The light and color of the piece echo the Impressionists in that it seems as if the subjects are caught at a fleeting moment as the sun starts to fade. While many of his works were influenced by Impressionism he never moved into the whole of that style, and because of this he was often criticized as being too “old fashion.” Yet, when looking at his use of color and the application of paint, there is such vitality and softness that it is hard to imagine calling it “old fashioned.”
Both in his genre scenes, African American paintings and his religious work, there is a type of compassion and gentleness between the subjects, which is rarely seen in art. In his painting The Annunciation (1898), the divine light of an angelic presence illuminates the entire room. The young Mary, frightened but full of gentleness looks questioningly towards the messenger whose warm light seems to embrace her.
[From the Henry Ossawa Tanner entry on Sullivan Goss: An America Art Gallery]
The Banjo Lesson, 1893
The Thankful Poor, 1894
Spinning by Firelight, 1894
The Annunciation, 1898
Abraham’s Oak, 1904
View of the Seine Looking Toward Notre Dame, 1896
Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, 1897
A Mosque in Cairo, 1897
In recognition of his achievements as an artist, Henry Ossawa Tanner was honored in his adoptive country France by being made Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1923.
Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1859-1937
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To view more of Tanner’s art, go to The Athenaeum.
Books to the Ceiling 