Autumn Trees along a Stream by Hugh Bolton Jones, oi on canvas, 16 x 24 inches (41 x 61 cm). Link is to page on Wikimedia Commons from which you can view a larger image. I don’t know the location of the original, but it was imaged by Vose Galleries, so I assume it’s in a private collection at this point.

American painter Hugh Bolton Jones, though not well known, is one of my favorite landscape painters. I partiularly enjoy his brushy, painterly techniques for representing trees and other foliage.

In this piece, he gives us an unassuming but beautiful scene of a group of young trees around a small stream.

Happy Autumnal Equinox!

Yerres, Effect of Rain, Gustave Caillebotte, oil on canvas, roughly 32 x 23 inches (80x 59 cm).

Link is to page on WikiArt, from which you can click “View All Sizes” to get to a larger image. Original is in the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University Bloomington.

I had the pleasure of seeing this in person at an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2009. Most of the images of this painting on the internet, including the museum’s website, are too dark and oversaturated. The one I’m linking to is not bad, though I’ve taken the liberty of lightening is slightly. There is another here on Flickr.

Several of Caillebotte’s works are subtitled with the word “effect” — as in Rooftop View (Effect of snow). Like the other French Impressionists, Caillebotte was concerned with the effects of light and atmosphere under different conditions.

Here, he gives us a perfect evocation of the light and atmosphere of a light rain on a small stream. The Yerres River is a tributary of the Seine, southeast of Paris, near where the artist lived.

La Bascule (The See-saw), Jean-Honoré Fragonard, oil on canvas, roughly 30 x 39″ (75 x 99 cm), in the collection of the Louvre, currently on display at Musée Fabre, Montpellier. Link is to the Louvre’s page, which has zoomable and downloadable images.

This painting and another by the French Rococo artist were recently acquired by France after having been thought missing for years.

Fragonard is sometimes dissed as frivolous and pandering, but I quite like him — particularly his drawings. Here, though, the elements of his painting style I most admire are present: his soft, atmospheric landscapes, theatrical lighting and playful compositions.