{painting} – Page 91 – { feuilleton }

Valette’s steam and smoke

Windsor Bridge on the Irwell (1909).

Adolphe Valette (1876–1942) was a contemporary of Lionel Walden, and where Walden was an American who spent some time painting views of Cardiff, Valette moved to Manchester in 1905 where he painted a series of celebrated views of the city. If it’s a commonplace that foreign eyes often see what locals ignore, this has certainly been the case in Manchester. Friedrich Engels catalogued the lethal living and working conditions of the city’s labourers in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1845, and it took Valette to find a subject for his art in the city’s smogs and polluted atmospheres at a time when many British artists were still painting scenes from Tennyson or the tales of King Arthur.

India House, Manchester (1912).

Valette’s Manchester paintings now reside in the Manchester Art Gallery whose curators have always made much of his being “the Manchester Impressionist”. The term isn’t unjustified even though Impressionism was long gone by the time he began these paintings; there is something Monet-like to a few of them. The gallery contains a large amount of fairly typical Victorian art, including a couple of well-known Pre-Raphaelite pieces, so Valette’s work has always stood apart not only for its urban theme but for its looser technique. My favourite is the view of India House from the banks of the River Medlock. Many of the bridges and buildings in these paintings can be seen today, albeit cleaned and (in the case of India House) gentrified. Valette captures the final years of unrestrained industrial pollution when the air in Manchester, London and other cities was often as bad as it is in some parts of China today.

Bailey Bridge, Manchester (1912).

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Steam and smoke

Cardiff Docks (1894) by Lionel Walden.

There’s a tendency to consider the art of the 19th century as being preoccupied with the rural, the mystical and the historic: all true in the case of the Pre-Raphaelites. But the effects of the Industrial Revolution attracted enough artists to create a sub-genre of painting that takes the miasmas of factories and the hellish glow of furnaces as its subject; Philip de Loutherbourg’s Coalbrookdale by Night (1801) is one of the more well-known examples, not least for being a painting that shows the future emerging from a rural landscape in a truly infernal manner.

Lionel Walden (1861–1933) was an American artist who was in Wales long enough to paint several scenes of the Cardiff docks and the steelworks. I’d not seen this gorgeously atmospheric painting of the docks before but it captures the light and the ambience of a British autumn/winter with the same fidelity as John Atkinson Grimshaw, an artist who made chilly mornings and smoky twilights his speciality. Walden’s other paintings are a lot lighter, with more traditional views of docks, boats and fishermen. (Via Beautiful Century.)

The Steelworks, Cardiff at Night (1893–97) by Lionel Walden.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• How It Works
• The art of John Atkinson Grimshaw, 1836–1893

The art of Fabrizio Clerici, 1913–1993

Un istante dopo (1978).

An Italian painter of the fantastic who’s managed to stay off my radar for one reason or another despite doing many of the things I like to see: weightless structures, imaginary architecture, and (towards the end of his career) a series of variations on Arnold Böcklin’s endlessly adaptable The Isle of the Dead. The latter paintings are some of the best Böcklin variants I’ve seen. These alone would have made him worthy of attention but the rest of his oeuvre is an equally accomplished development of late Surrealism (or, if you need another category, Fantastic Realism). The official website is a very good one so there’s plenty more to see. (Thanks to Michelangelo for the tip!)

La tromba d’aria (1965).

Latitudine Böcklin (1974).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A Picture to Dream Over: The Isle of the Dead
• The Isle of the Dead in detail
• Arnold Böcklin and The Isle of the Dead

The art of Victor Linford, 1940–2002

Victor Linford was a British artist who relocated to the Netherlands so his work seems to be more familiar there than elsewhere. According to the Johfra Museum site, Linford was part of the Dutch Meta-Realist group in the 1970s, along with Johfra Bosschart himself and five other painters. Johfra’s art has been mentioned here before but I hadn’t heard of the others, Linford included. You’d think someone who spent so much time producing detailed oil paintings of surreal/alien landscapes would be better known. Some of his works were used on a series of Dutch sf paperbacks in the 1970s, unsurprisingly when many of his paintings resemble the alien landscapes being produced by Bruce Pennington for British sf books throughout the decade.

There are two main sites showing Linford’s works, here and here. I prefer the landscapes that don’t have too many human figures inserted into them but even the ones that do are worth a look. (None of the paintings are titled or dated.)

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The art of Carlos Schwabe, 1866–1926

Le Faune (1923).

Yesterday’s Pan prompted me to repost Carlos Schwabe’s wonderful painting of a faun, one of my favourite faun/satyr depictions, and easily one of the best in the entire Symbolist corpus. Other satyr aficionados of the period such as Arnold Böcklin and Franz Stuck had an unfortunate knack for making their goat gods look rather foolish.

Schwabe was a German artist, and one of the more mystical of the Symbolists, with a fondness for winged figures and a preoccupation with death. The mystical end of the Symbolist spectrum is the one I enjoy the most so I often point to Schwabe or Jean Delville as exemplars of this type of art. Both Schwabe and Delville were connected briefly by Joséphin Péladan’s very mystical Salon de la Rose + Croix although Delville later gravitated to Theosophy. Schwabe produced illustrations for an edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, and would have featured in the Baudelaire posts last week if some of those drawings hadn’t appeared here already. The title page was a new find, however, so it’s included below.

Jour de morts (1890).

La mort du fossoyeur (1895).

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