Eye Candy for Today: Levitan’s Birch Grove

Birch Grove, landscapepainting by Russian painter Isaac Levitan
Birch Grove, landscapepainting by Russian painter Isaac Levitan (details)

Birch Grove, by Isaac Levitan, oil on paper mounted to canvas, roughly 12 x 20 inches (30 x 50 cm). Link is to image page on WikiArt (click “View all Sizes” for access to large image); original is in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

This is a beautiful and widely recognized landscape painting by the brilliant 19th century Russian painter.

I love everything about this — the dappled shade, the feeling of summer, the strong value relationships, the compositional arrangement of the birch trunks, the delicate accents of color on them and the depth created by their variation in width.

For painters who complain of “too much green” when painting trees and foliage in mid to late summer, I present to you a textbook example of how “too much green” can be taken into the realm of the sublime.

 
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Edmund Dulac (revisited)

Edmund Dulac, golden age illustration
Edmund Dulac, golden age illustration

Edmund Dulac was a French illustrator who moved to England relatively early in his career and eventually became a naturalized British citizen. He worked in the latter part of the “Golden Age” of illustration and beyond.

He was renowned in particular his illustrations for several series of books based on the Arabian Nights.

I wrote more extensively about him in my post about Dulac in 2006, and I’ll refer you to that post for more of my comments. At the time, I was not including as many example images in a post as I currently do, so in this revisit I hope to rectify that.

 
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Eye Candy for Today: Jules Bastien-Lepage genre painting

Le Pere Jacques (The Wood Gatherer)
Le Pere Jacques (The Wood Gatherer)

Le Père Jacques (The Wood Gatherer), Jules Bastien-Lepage, oil on canvas, roughly 77 x 71 inches (197 x 182 cm). Original is in the Milwaukee Art Museum.

One of the things that has always fascinated me about 19th century French painter Jules Bastien-Lepage is his use of value relationships.

Notice how vibrantly the young girl, and in particular her blue dress, stand out in the original painting, and yet how, in the grayscale version of the image I’ve provided, she almost disappears into the background.

It accentuates the color in a different way than just applying bright colors.

I’ve seen Impressionist paintings in which a similar technique was used — objects made to stand out only with color, their values kept close to that of the background. See my previous post on Values in Monet’s Impression, Sunrise.

 
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Values in Monet’s Impression, Sunrise

Values in Monet's Impression Sunrise
Values in Monet's Impression Sunrise

Originally exhibited in the April 1874 exhibit of the Societe’ Anonyme des Artistes, Peintires, Sculpters, Graveurs, Etc. (Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Engravers, etc.), now referred to as the First Impressionist Exhibition, this painting by Claude Monet appeared with the title: Impression, Sunrise.

The name was picked up by unsympathetic critics and used derisively to label the group “Impressionists”. The name stuck, and the Impressionists picked it up and ran with it.

The painting is, as Monet has suggests in his title, an impression, or quick representation, of a fleeting effect.

As part of their effort to portray the effects of light and atmosphere, the Impressionist painters, and Monet especially, were fascinated with new theories of color that were being investigated at the time. Perhaps one of the most important of these ideas was the concept of simultaneous contrast, as presented by French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul in his book The Principles of Color Harmony and Contrast.

But simultaneous contrast was only one of the visual tools the Impressionist painters were adding to their methods of conveying the effects of light.

In more recent times, a professor of neurobiology at Harvard, Dr. Margaret Livingstone, noticed that if you reduce an image of Impression: Sunrise to grayscale — so that we see only value (luminance) — the sun almost disappears, save for the edges of the scant few brushstrokes with which it was painted.

She went on to point out this gave the painting a particular quality.

Our brain processes visual information in two different parts of our visual cortex, old and new. The older one senses light in a relatively primitive way — shared with other mammals, — in which it detects only luminance, but not color. The other, more evolutionarily recent area of the visual cortex — that we share only with other primates — sees color.

So, to one part of our brain, Monet’s sun, and the bright orange areas in the water and sky, are almost invisible. To the other, more sophisticated part, the sun is very much visible. In addition, against the muted blue of the background clouds, the effective brightness of the orange areas is accentuated by simultaneous contrast.

 
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Some early work by M.C. Escher

Some early work by M.C. Escher
Some early work by M.C. Escher

Many people are aware of the graphic work of Dutch printmaker M.C. Escher that bends logic and presents mind-boggling visions of impossible worlds and structures. Fewer have seen many of his earlier works, that are much more straightforward and “possible” (if sometimes fanciful).

Here are a few examples.

For more images and info, see my previous posts on M.C. Escher.

 
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