Staffage – people, animals, birds, carts and ships – make a big difference to many landscape paintings. Have you met the Wanderer too?
Fearnley
Who’d want to paint much of their canvas dull, pale grey? If these paintings are anything to go by, many of the Impressionists
The figure appears in later landscapes, including one by Martín Rico, and a pastel by Millet, before being radically revised by Ferdinand Hodler.
The wanderer with his back to the viewer takes on new life with Thomas Fearnley. Is he the artist’s alter ego?
Views of one glacier over 250 years show how it has changed. Others in Greenland and Iceland are rapidly vanishing too.
What is a professor of obstetrics doing learning to paint with Caspar David Friedrich? Also an important precursor to Darwin, and a friend of Goethe – and wonderful paintings as well.
Although often the preserve of specialists who concentrated on nocturnes, coasts are ideal locations for moonlit views. Caspar David Friedrich, JC Dahl, and more.
Are they part of a narrative, or staffage? Do they provide scale, or enhance the effect? Are the figures part of the landscape, or even the landscape itself?
Two people looking at a cross in the middle of a vast canvas filled with lush plains, rising hills, and distant snow-capped peaks. How should we read them?
Who is the wanderer and painter in Thomas Fearnley’s landscapes? Does he have any deeper purpose, or was he just a graphical signature?
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