There are two occasions in the year when we should all go out and celebrate the beauty of trees: in the Spring at blossom time, and in the autumn/fall when their leaves transform into flames. This weekend I follow the seasons of the northern hemisphere and go leaf peeping as the trees prepare us for the start of winter. Today’s paintings culminate at the end of the nineteenth century, leaving tomorrow for the twentieth.
It’s sometimes claimed that Impressionism depended largely on two technical advances in oil paint: their presentation in tubes making it easier to paint en plein air, and the advent of modern synthetic pigments of high chroma. As these first few paintings demonstrate, neither is true.
Back in 1652, Paulus Potter developed the effects of light together with the early autumn season, almost to the point of being impressionist in his use of colour in Cattle in the Meadow.
Several of George Inness’s views of the Catskill Mountains in New York State were painted in the fall. This view Across the Hudson Valley in the Foothills of the Catskills (1868) is my favourite for his perfect timing, in catching a mixture of different colours, from the perfect location to demonstrate the contrast between those trees that have burst into flame, and those still left in last summer’s green.
Claude Monet’s masterwork Autumn on the Seine, Argenteuil from 1873 is a fine example of his waterscapes of this period, with its broken and rippled reflections and brilliant colour.
Winslow Homer also made full use of autumn colours. Although this painting of Autumn (1877) was made before he stayed at Cullercoats in north-east England, it must rank as one of the better paintings from his early career.
Marie Bashkirtseff, protégé of Jules Bastien-Lepage, painted her view of Autumn in 1883. Although both are known as Naturalists, this is a thoroughly Impressionist depiction of a row of trees on the bank of the River Seine in the centre of Paris. A year later, when she was only twenty-five, she died of tuberculosis.
Alfred Sisley’s l’Etang de Chevreuil from about 1888 shows a pond near the River Loing to the south-east of Paris.
This is one of two views painted by Paul Gauguin at Les Alyscamps, Arles, on 28-31 October 1888, subtitled The Three Graces at the Temple of Venus. This was during the intense period of nine weeks that he stayed with Vincent van Gogh in the Yellow House there.
Gauguin painted that alongside van Gogh, who painted two views of his own including Les Alyscamps, Avenue in Arles, showing the same avenue of poplars with old Roman stone sarcophagi.
Julian Alden Weir’s Autumn Rain (1890) shows the intensification of chroma that often occurs following rain, and was probably painted in rural Connecticut.
The following year near his house at Giverny in France, Claude Monet painted his first formal series of rhythmic poplars, including Poplars on the Bank of the Epte, Autumn: eleven paintings in all. These articulate the contrasts in form within each tree, with sections of bare trunk, and those of extensive canopy, the colours cast by light and those of the leaves themselves, the rhythmic assembly of the line of trees, their reflections in the water, and the formation of the line of poplars into sweeping curves in depth.
A branch of that main series consists of six further paintings of poplars, also completed in 1891, of which The Three Trees, Autumn is an example. These explore the same themes but with different emphasis within them.
William Merritt Chase painted the whole countryside in blazing colours, near his country retreat at Shinnecock on Long Island, in October of about 1893.
In the autumn of 1899, probably October, Paul Signac stayed in the little town of Samois, near Fontainebleau to the south-east of Paris. He painted a series of small Divisionist oil studies of the River Seine there, among them this view of The Seine at Samois.
