How to paint a landscape with faithful and coherent cast shadows, why most painters don’t do so, and a few get it wrong.
Sisley
The hard road to realism: development and propagation of knowledge, how to apply it in paintings, and its benefit on visual art.
From Samuel Palmer in 1830, through Sisley’s Terrace at Saint-Germain, to van Gogh’s pink orchards, a festival of Spring blossom.
The myth of Deucalion and Pyrrha, and others, painted by Rubens, Poussin, John Martin, and real floods by Alfred Sisley.
Caillebotte’s gardening almost stopped him from painting, and Vincent van Gogh shows vegetable gardens on the hill of Montmartre.
With Claude Monet and others, one of the originators of Impressionist landscape painting. Successful portraitist and figurative painter too.
As the fiery reds of falling leaves change to dull earth browns, and we get the odd flurry of snow, we know that winter is almost upon us.
He first suggested the Impressionist exhibitions, co-founded their collective, and wrote their charter. Yet he didn’t achieve commercial success until he was in his sixties.
Probably the only French Impressionist who died poorer than he was when he started painting, he showed five paintings at the First Impressionist Exhibition.
Reflections seen in landscapes from Dürer’s pioneering watercolour, through Poussin and Turner to Monet, Sisley and Neo-Impressionists.
The Eclectic Light Company 