Paintbox Leaves: Autumnal
Inspiration from Cole to Wyeth
September 25, 2010 - January 16,
2011
There is one season when the American
forest surpasses all the world in gorgeousness -- that is the autumnal
every hue is there...from the most golden yellow to the intensest crimson....
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- In 1835, Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole penned
these words in his Essay on American Scenery, and for the past
175 years, Americans have continued to extol and paint the attractions
of their fall season. Paintbox Leaves explores this cultural phenomenon
beginning with Cole's vivid scenes and continuing as a narrative to today
in paintings ranging from landscape panoramas to detailed leaf studies.
Cole bemoaned one recurring artistic dilemma: the more painters highlighted
colorful trees as a distinctly American terrain, the more likely they would
learn that, "...in the old world his truest imitations of the American
forest, at this season, are called falsely bright, and scenes in Fairy
Land."
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- At its heart, Paintbox Leaves is a meditation
on how we and 81 artists have mingled appreciation of fall's luscious beauty
with visceral connections to its seasonal symbolism. Mid-nineteenth-century
artists contributed to an autumnal mythology of colorful foliage and bountiful
harvests and the emotional responses it roused. In 1859, Henry David Thoreau
gave impassioned voice to these painted and poetic sentiments in his lecture
"Autumnal Tints," which forecast the contemporary devotion to
"leaf-peeping,"
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October is the month of painted leaves.
Their rich glow now flashes round the world.
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- Thomas Cole (1801-1848)
- The Clove, Catskills,
c. 1827
- Oil on canvas
- Collection of New Britain Museum of American Art, Charles
F. Smith Fund
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- As a native-born Englishman, Cole had an outsider's view
of the American landscape that tended to sharpen his reactions to the colors
and terrain of his adopted country. The Kaaterskill Clove contains some
of the most stunning scenery in the Catskills and became a popular tourist
destination beginning in the 1820s. Cole depicts a single Native American
(now obscured) to evoke the timelessness of a primitive and sublime land,
less touched by the hand of man than was actually true at the time. He
highlights the fall colors by dividing the composition into two sections.
On the left brilliant foliage indicates the height of the autumnal season,
the bushes aflame with red and orange, while the darker green pines dominate
the right half of the picture in shadow.
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- (N.C.) Newell Convers Wyeth (1882-1945)
- Chadd's Ford Hills,
1927
- Oil on canvas
- Collection of Ron and Cheryl Howard
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- N.C. Wyeth captures the magnificent topography and foliage
of the Brandywine Valley, with which he and his artistic family are so
strongly associated. Using figures for scale and empathy, much as did the
Hudson River School painters, he lets the fall beauty dwarf his horsemen.
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- In the early 20th century, N.C. Wyeth represented the
link between popular and fine art, but he wanted to move beyond book illustration
to be recognized for his landscapes. He painted in pure Impressionist hues,
but often added dramatic contrasts of light and dark and stressed solidity
and compositional design, such as these stylized nestled trees -- dense
balls of orange paint.
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- Thomas) Worthington Whittredge (1820-1910)
- Portrait of an Artist with an Easel, 1861
- Oil on panel
- Private Collection, courtesy of Godel & Co. Fine
Art, New York
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- In the mid-19th century, most artists planned sketching
trips as a group activity, for economy, safety, and camaraderie. Whittredge
was in the Catskills with Sanford Gifford and Jervis McEntee when he painted
this small panel. The subject is presumed to be the artist Jervis McEntee,
who is painting a closeup view of dense red trees. Whittredge and Jasper
Cropsey both depicted artists painting, but Cropsey's figure is part of
a broad panorama, while Whittredge's painter is the central element of
a focused view. The compositional space gives a tangible sense of being
down in the trees, and we understand both Whittredge and his depicted artist
are creating a very different sort of experience.
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- Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823-1900)
- Artist Painting the Hudson, 1872
- Oil on canvas
- Collection of the Newington-Cropsey Foundation
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- In American art, Cropsey's devotion to the autumn palette
is as legendary as the fall scenery along the Hudson River. He visited
Lake George and other artist haunts, but always returned to the Hudson.
Here, while his artist is painting, the woman admires the actual early
autumn view rather than his creative handiwork. It is a small ironic commentary
by Cropsey on the relative value of art and nature.
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- Although English guidebooks specifically recommended
the Hudson Valley foliage to foreign tourists, when Cropsey and Thomas
Cole displayed their paintings in London, English critics doubted the veracity
of their vivid coloration. Likewise, Henry David Thoreau noted, "There
is no account of such a phenomenon in English poetry, because the trees
acquire but few bright colors there."
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- Winslow Homer (1836-1910)
- In Autumn Woods, c.
1877
- Watercolor on paper
- Courtesy of Godel & Co., Inc., New York
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- Artists were not the only people in search of leafy paths
and clearings. Nature tourism, born of elite cultural sensibilities, became
more democratized after the Civil War with the growth of transportation
networks, a leisured middle class and guidebooks. Homer frequently depicted
seasonal outdoor subjects of idealized women at work and at play in his
early watercolors. Real or imaginary, this young lady with leaves blowing
onto her clothing could be paused at any number of sites from the Catskills
to the White Mountains, already tourist destinations, or simply out collecting
leaves in suburban woods close to home. Homer used a similar Japanese-influenced
diagonal pattern of steep hill and leaning tree, in two related oil paintings
of figures surrounded by autumn trees and leaves.
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- George Frank Higgins (active 1859-1891)
- Four Seasons: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, 1868
- Oil on board
- Courtesy of Godel & Co., Inc., New York
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- Autumn painting had roots in the ancient tradition of
illustrating all four seasons, with overarching analogies to the phases
of human life. Higgins and many other American artists painted a series
of the seasons. Jasper Cropsey produced several sets. Higgins includes
tiny figures, such as farm workers and ice skaters, in addition to indicating
the times of year with fall foliage, flowering trees, snow, and other landscape
signs. Genre figures were a major element of European seasonal art. This
autumn scene shows fishermen, a frequent inclusion in American fall scenes.
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Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823-1900)
- View at Hastings-on-Hudson, c. 1891
- Oil on canvas
- Lent by Hastings High School, Union Free School District
No. 4
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- Cropsey moved to Hastings-on-Hudson in 1885 and, though
the Hudson River School was out of vogue, he religiously painted the river's
unfolding seasons from his studio window. The Palisades, seen in the background,
are directly across the Hudson from his house, and they provided him with
constant visual inspiration.
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- Late works like this demonstrate Cropsey's continuing
power and skill at capturing the Hudson Valley's scenic beauty. Depicting
a location just a few miles north of the present Hudson River Museum, he
used autumnal trees as a colorful framing device for a bucolic composition
similar to his early masterpiece Autumn on the Hudson, which had
incited much debate about American art and autumnal colors when it was
displayed in London in 1860.
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- Stephen Hannock (b. 1951)
- Final Study: The Oxbow, after Church, after Cole,
Flooded,
- 1979-1994 (Flooded River for the Matriarchs, E.
& A. Mongan), 1994
- Polished oil on canvas
- Collection of the artist, courtesy McKenzie Fine Art,
New York
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- The influence of the Hudson River School continues to
loom large in contemporary autumnal landscape painting in a variety of
guises. Hannock has long been inspired by Thomas Cole and Frederic Church,
as well as the Luminist artists. He spent more than fifteen years studying
the famous Oxbow (a bend in the Connecticut River) that inspired works
by both Cole and Church. Here, he poetically combines seasons, depicting
the spring flooding of the river with an autumnal palette inspired by the
work of Jasper Cropsey. Hannock brings out the luminescence of the landscape
by polishing the oil on the canvas with sandpaper. He does not document
an actual fall scene, but rather creates a meditation on tonality and light.
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- Sanford Gifford (1823-1880)
- An October Afternoon, Kauterskill Falls, 1868
- Oil on canvas
- Collection of Kristian Davies
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- Gifford was one of the Hudson River School artists who
gradually toned down his color palette and adopted elements of Luminism.
As a critic for the New York Times once noted about another of his
paintings, "this is as full of feeling for the beauty of the American
Autumn expressed, not as Mr. Cropsey likes to give it, in the too glaring
red of our October forests, but in the deeper tones of grass-lands in November
and December."
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- While the Hudson River landscape emphasized the sublime,
Luminist landscapes featured calmer, more contemplative terrains with glistening
water and pure, gleaming light. In the clear, amber glow of the low-lying
sun over these famous falls, the viewer finds the calm and serene side
of autumn.
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- Kysa Johnson (b. 1974)
- blow up 97- the molecular structure of environmental
pollutants ethane, methane, propane, hexane, benzene, and acrolein after
McEntee's Autumn Landscape, 2008
- Watercolor, graphite on panel
- Private Collection
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- Johnson is inspired by the work of Hudson River School
painter Jervis McEntee, who often interpreted the "bleak" period
of autumn, with more restrained use of color than Cole and Cropsey. She
incorporates her own 21st-century bleakness by building the landscape composition
with the globular shapes and patterns of chemical compounds currently polluting
the Hudson Valley. Nevertheless, she describes autumn as her favorite season,
in which "the moody grey skies signal when everything begins again,"
and reflects that this is the time of year when one becomes wistful for
one's school days, which represent a fresh beginning in the academic world
just as the natural cycle is drawing to a close.
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- Jervis McEntee (1828-1891)
- An Adirondack Lake,
c. 1860
- Oil on board
- Collection of Hawthorne Fine Art, New York
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- McEntee exhibited at the National Academy for thirty
years between 1861 and 1890, but in only six of those years did he show
works that did not have a title with an autumn theme. Works such as Where
Late the Wild Flower Bloomed, the Brown Leaf Lies, quoted from William
C. Bryant, exemplify the artist's view of the season. An Adirondack
Lake was completed before the post-Civil War trend away from brightness
in color and mood. One positive review of his later painting, noted "frost
has touched all the leaves and dulled the thousand hues of October into
one monotonous brown."
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- Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823-1900)
- Catskill Mountain House,
1855
- Oil on canvas
- Collection of Newington-Cropsey Foundation
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- A golden autumnal calm suffuses Cropsey's mountain vista,
with the popular hotel barely glimpsed across the valley. The Mountain
House was built in Pine Orchard, in 1824 and was promoted on its healthful
fresh air and "improving" quality. Though Thomas Cole and Sanford
Gifford also painted the Mountain House, most artists sought less expensive
accommodations, such as boarding houses.
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- Cropsey depicts the transition from late summer to early
autumn, when there is still a good deal of green in the foliage. This view
would have reflected the experience of many of the guests, for at the time
few tourists traveled after mid-September, when the hotel usually ended
its season.
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- James Fairman (1826-1904)
- Autumn Landscape: Mts. Madison and Jefferson, Androscoggin
River, near Gorham,
- New Hampshire 1867
- Oil on canvas
- Collection of the Hudson River Museum, Purchase, 1975
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- The White Mountains were an early destination for artists.
At least three guidebooks had been published by the time Fairman visited.
The Scottish native served in the Civil War, then became known as one of
the most skilled technicians of the autumn landscape, especially for the
richness of his colors. With its single central peak extending above the
tree line, surrounded by luxurious skirting of color in the lower topography,
his panoramic view recalls the format of Cole's Hoosac Mountain;
but Fairman's soothing landscapes reflect a calming stillness and golden
light that signaled the shift towards Luminism. The metaphorical stormy
skies and windswept hills of Thomas Cole's landscapes had no place in the
healing post-War rehabilitation.
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- James Hope (1818-1892)
- Green Mountains, Vermont,
1866
- Oil on canvas
- Collection of Kristian Davies
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- Nothing can surpass the splendor of this autumnal
pageantry, as beheld in the Green Mountains of Vermont and Western Massachusetts,
in the early part of October. This region abounds in Sugar-Maples, which
are very beautifully tinted...
- The Atlantic Monthly, 1861
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- In the mid-19th century, the Green Mountains of Vermont
were one of the main destinations for artists venturing beyond the Hudson
Valley. Most of the painters spent their winters in urban art centers but
Scottish immigrant James Hope had married a woman from West Rutland, Vermont
and lived in Castleton, in central part of the state. He would not have
far to travel for this early fall scene that captures a tiny figure fishing
in the distance.
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- Thomas Moran (1837-1926)
- The Woods in Autumn,
1864
- Oil on canvas
- Collection of The Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington,
NY, August Heckscher Collection, 1959.134
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- Moran is best known for his scenes of the Yellowstone
Territory, the Western Indians, and America's many grand national parks,
painted as part of the so-called "Rocky Mountain School." An
intimately quiet picture, The Woods in Autumn, was painted shortly
after Moran returned from studying art in England, where he absorbed the
influences of Turner's landscapes. Moran makes an unusual choice of composition
by placing an evergreen pine at its center and surrounding it with "leaf"
trees.
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- Charles Edward Dubois (1847-1885)
- Palisades, Hudson River,
1875-1876
- Oil on canvas
- Private collection
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- DuBois chooses a sheer and stark vision on the Hudson's
west bank, from the very base of the Palisades, looking up at the cliffs.
His view cleverly contrasts the richness of the ephemeral autumn foliage
with the steep ancient wall of rock. Although extremely picturesque, the
scene contains both steam and sailboats -- a contrast between the contemporary
and historic. The beached sailboat and smoke from a campfire invoke a cool
fall day and a nod to the pioneering spirit. The Palisades soar to an immense
height, hugged by a tiny fringe of pine trees at the top of their cliffs.
The changing scale between the boat, the leaves, and the massive rocks
creates a sense of monumentality that is also an oasis of calm.
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- George Herbert McCord (1848-1909)
- Hudson River View,
c. 1870
- Oil on board
- Collection of the Hudson River Museum, Gift of Mrs. Grace
Varian Stengel, 43.62
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- McCord spent was still living on Ashburton Avenue in
Yonkers with his parents in 1870, when he probably painted this view of
the Palisades that line the west bank of the Hudson River. He had gazed
across the Hudson at the spectacular rock face for years and probably knew
its profile by heart. McCord must have set up his easel in the rural north
part of town and from this low viewpoint, the orange foliage seems to rise
above the cliffs. In the distance, his autumn colors mark the point where
the Palisades turn into rolling hills.
- Samuel Colman (1832-1920)
- Near Cro's Nest on the Hudson, New York, n.d.
- Oil on academy board
- Collection of Questroyal Fine Art, LLC
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- The rocky hills of the Hudson Highlands, like the Palisades
to the south, seem to offer little soil for deciduous trees and shrubs,
but both do present unique fall color with the season's hot orange contrasting
with the cold grey granite. The adventurous Colman's artistic travels ranged
from the American West abroad to Morocco, but he lived in Irvington-on-Hudson
in Westchester County in the 1860s and returned to the subject of the Hudson
River throughout his career. Most of Crow's Nest Mountain, seen here, is
within the northern boundaries of West Point.
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- Regis Francois Gignoux (1816-1882)
- First Snow Along the Hudson River, 1859
- Oil on canvas
- Collection of Hawthorne Fine Art, New York
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- Many poets and artists, from William Cullen Bryant to
Charles Burchfield, have focused their attention to the turning points
of seasons. Gignoux used his noted skill to depict snow that highlights
autumn on the brink of change. In his Book of the Artists (1867),
Henry Tuckerman described a similar painting as one of Gignoux's most celebrated
achievements. He added that the artist had moved from his popular winter
landscapes to fall subjects, for which there was growing demand.
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- Ernest Lawson (1873-1939)
- Mountaintop Jewels,
n.d.
- Oil on canvas
- Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Davies
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- As a student at Cos Cob Art Colony, Lawson discovered
a love of landscape, which he never abandoned despite affiliation with
New York Social Realists and a role in organizing the 1913 Armory Show.
He painted the Hudson and Harlem Rivers in all seasons, including late
fall and winter, and traveled to the town of Cornish and other areas to
find mountainous views like the one here. Lawson applied colors thickly
and vigorously, painting foliage that looks like a volcano of jewels, a
lava of leaves about to flow down the mountainside. In a memorial published
by the National Arts Club, painter Edmund Greacen praised his "rugged
sincerity," adding "his peculiar style of impressionism, with
its fused colors, gave a quality of crushed jewels to his painting..."
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- George Bellows (1882-1925)
- Hills of September,
1912
- Oil on panel
- Collection of S. Peck, Larchmont, NY
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- Bellows found the rural landscape invigorating. Best
known for urban scenes, he painted his atypical vista while living in Woodstock,
a locale with vibrant foliage, Bellows first experienced autumn in the
Catskill Region in 1912, where he stayed in Onteora Park, a few miles north
of Woodstock. The paintings he produced there, like this, were small in
scale, but Bellows considered them an artistic breakthrough. He chose a
similar one from this series for the 1913 avant-garde Armory Show. In 1920,
he moved to Woodstock and, according to Life (1946), built his own
house by hand in 1922.
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- Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902)
- Autumn Landscape,
n.d.
- Oil on canvas
- Collection of the Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington,
NY, Museum Purchase, 1987.10
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- Like Cole and Cropsey, Bierstadt may also have been criticized
abroad, in his case Paris, for gaudy fall colors. The late Hudson River
School painter was best known for his dramatic paintings of the so-called
"Rocky Mountain School." In the mid-19th century, landscape painters
increasingly moved beyond the terrain and distinctive autumn leaves of
the Northeast to explore the far-reaching vistas west of the Mississippi.
In this small work, Bierstadt paints a more tranquil setting that is at
decided variance with the dramatic mountainous terrain and overt theatricality
for which he is remembered, but he intensifies the color of his painting
by contrasting the bright foliage in the center of the composition with
the dark green pines of the forest.
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- Frank Swift Chase (1888-1958)
- Woodland Valley Overlooking Woodstock, n.d.
- Oil on canvas
- Collection of Erik Davies
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- Chase's golden Woodland Valley, is filled with
his "joy in color and paint," which is not that stylistically
different from fellow Woodstock visitor George Bellows, whose Hills
of September is far removed from the edginess of his urban works. The
relaxation of a resort community may have softened stylistic innovation,
but the quality of the work both Bellows and Chase produced is of a high
order. Woodstock held a continuing appeal for Chase, who was there at the
time of his death.
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- Wolf Kahn (b. 1927)
- On the Bank of the Gihon River, 2005
- Oil on canvas
- Courtesy of the artist and Ameringer McEnery Yohe, A/Y#11810
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- Painting in Vermont for over 40 years, Kahn may inherit
Jasper Cropsey's title "America's painter of autumn." Kahn has
written:
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- Bright orange resists being used in a subtle way,
is never reticent, or decorous, or delicate. It seems made to order to
represent intensity, exuberance, and heightened feelings.... There remains
the question of whento employ this useful color without leaving oneself
open to accusations of hedonism.... The answer is: in fall.... Then no
one can quarrel with one's use of orange, since it is sanctioned by actual
occurrence in nature...
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- George Inness (1825-1894)
- Indian Summer, 1894
- Oil on canvas
- Collection of Fayez Sarofim Collection
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- As the title, suggests, Inness shows two moments, the
brilliance of an unusually warm autumn day and the drabness of the November
weather to come. He painted Indian Summer in the last year of his
life, and its mood and details recall the transience of life and the nostalgia
that is omnipresent during the fall season. The mistiness of his birch
tree's orange foliage suggests its ephemeral nature and recalls Henry David
Thoreau's words,
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- It is pleasant to walk over the beds of these fresh,
crisp, and rustling leaves. How beautifully they go to their graves! --
painted of a thousand hues So they troop to their last resting-place, light
and frisky... scampering over the earth.... before they rest quietly in
their graves!.... They teach us how to die.
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- Bill Sullivan (b. 1942)
- View from Olana with Foliage, 2005
- Oil on canvas
- Collection of Columbia Memorial Hospital
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- Living in the heart of the Hudson Valley, Sullivan draws
its inspiration for his vision of autumn from the intense coloration in
the paintings of Hudson River School painter Frederic Church. For over
a century, the stunning vistas from Church's home Olana, near Hudson, have
inspired countless artists. Sullivan, known for his brilliant landscapes
in high keys, shows the river valley leaves ablaze against a Technicolor
pink, purple, and orange sky that reflects onto the river's mirror-like
surface. Each of Sullivan's trees is part of a unified color scheme that
creates a veritable rainbow. These hues are amped up from "real life,"
although as his 19th-century artistic predecessors did before him, Sullivan
might insist that each of these colors can actually be found in autumn's
foliage.
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- Levi Wells Prentice (1851-1935)
- Near Saranac Lake, Adirondacks, 1874
- Oil on canvas
- Courtesy of Godel & Co., Inc., New York
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- Prentice was raised on a farm in the Adirondacks, where
he painted the mountain scenery in a Hudson River School style tinged with
the precisionist impulses of some folk art and a fondness for smooth lake
surfaces akin to the Luminists. This graphic emphasis on detail, combined
with mirrored expanses of water, gives his landscapes a surreal aura, as
if we are privy to more than could be seen with the naked eye. Here, he
shows sensitivity to the life cycles of the region in his choice of view-an
inlet of burnt trees surrounded by colorful new growth.
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- A large summer scene by Prentice, featuring fallen trees
and a luminous turquoise pool, is hanging in Glenview's Great Hall.
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- George Kelly (1909-1998)