Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [59]
THE ARTIST’S PALETTE
The Machine Age — in full swing by the nineteenth century — brought improved materials that affected the way artists painted. For one thing, a wider range of colors was available. Before, artists used earth colors because most pigments come from minerals in the earth. Now chemical pigments were invented that could approximate a greater variety of the colors in nature. Emerald green, cobalt blue, and artificial ultramarine were a few of the pigments discovered.
The burden of laboriously preparing colors shifted from the artist to professional tradesmen. Part of every artist’s training had been how to grind paint by hand and mix it with linseed oil to create oil paint. Now machines ground pigments that were mixed with poppy oil as a binder and sold to artists in jars. With the poppy oil, the paint retained the mark of the brush more, for a textured effect as in van Gogh’s paintings. For the Impressionist generation, in fact, the visible sign of brushwork represented an artist’s individual signature.
With these innovations, chiaroscuro, or the multilayered, subtle gradations of color to suggest three-dimensional volume, gradually became obsolete. No longer did artists — as they had since Leonardo’s time — indicate shadows by thin, transparent washes of dark color and highlights by thick, opaque clots of light pigment. Painters represented both light and shade in opaque colors applied with a loaded brush. Instead of successive layers of paint, each applied after the preceding one had dried, the rapid, sketchlike alla prima style took over by 1850, allowing artists to produce an entire work at a single sitting.
The biggest change resulted from the invention of the collapsible tin tube for paint in 1840, which made the artist’s studio portable. By the 1880s, the Impressionists chose to paint outdoors using the new bright colors, so they could heed Corot’s maxim, “Never lose the first impression which has moved you.”
ENGLISH ROMANTICISM
Two English painters, born only a year apart, did more than anyone to establish landscape painting as a major genre. Yet stylistically J.M.W Turner and John Constable could not have been further apart. Constable made nature his subject, while for Turner the subject was color. Constable painted placid scenes of the actual countryside, while Turner’s turbulent storms existed mainly in his imagination.
CONSTABLE: FIELD AND STREAM. What William Wordsworth’s poems did for England’s Lake District, John Constable’s (1776-1837) landscapes did for East Anglia, now known as Constable country, on the east coast of England. Both romanticized boyhood rambles through moors and meadows as the subject for poetry and art.
Constable’s work was not well received during his lifetime. His father, a prosperous miller, bitterly opposed Constable being a “lowly” painter, and Constable did not sell a painting until he was 39. Members of the Academy called his work, now considered bold and innovative, “coarse” and “rough.”
In turn, Constable looked down on conventional landscape painters who based their work on tradition rather than what they actually saw. He said others were always “running after pictures and seeking the truth at second hand.” Constable, in contrast, never went abroad and learned only from close observation of nature in his native Suffolk. His views of the English countryside are serene, untroubled, and gentle: “the sound of water escaping from mill-dams,” he wrote, “willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork