Symbolist Landscape in Europe

In 1886 the French poet Jean Moras defined Symbolism in art as the attempt to “clothe the idea in sensuous form”. The important word to pick out in that sentence is “idea”. In the last decades of the 19th century, Symbolism emerged as a reaction to the naturalistic styles of realism and Impressionism. It evolved in parallel with similar developments in music (Debussy), theatre (Maeterlinck) and poetry (Mallarm).

Ravishing though an Impressionist picture might be, it can only present the viewer with facts, not ideas. Impressionism celebrates the visible world, the here-and-now, the passing moment.Find a rubberhose Manufacturer and Supplier. Take a view by Monet of a railway bridge over the Seine. You can,Home ventilationsystem use fans to move air into the house and provide an alternative to opening doors and windows. if you wish, learn a lot from it about the effects of the railroads and the subsequent industrialisation on the suburbs north of Paris in the 1870s – but nothing at all about less tangible areas of human experience such as love, grief, imagination or forgiveness.

Likewise, Degas and Manet paint prostitutes but not erotic experience. Whistler paints the Thames at night but has little to say about melancholy. Symbolist painters of mythological and allegorical subjects like Gustave Moreau, Jan Toorop, and GF Watts addressed a new subject in art – the inner world of feeling, yearning, and aspiration.

Did I say new? Actually, a century earlier William Blake, Caspar David Friedrich, and JMW Turner used symbols and allegory to convey ideas that are otherwise barely expressible in words, while the cult of the picturesque revelled in the melancholy sense of time passing, conveyed by the sight of bare ruined monasteries.

So it is more accurate to say that Symbolism is a resurgence of the idealism last seen in Northern European painting during the Romantic period. This summer a sensationally good show at the Scottish National Gallery looks at an aspect of the movement that has not yet received much attention — the Symbolist landscape in Europe from 1880 to 1910. As well as bringing together scores of firstrate paintings by artists whose names are scarcely known even to art historians, it refuses to oversimplify the surprisingly difficult question of what exactly a Symbolist landscape is.TBC help you confidently buymosaic from factories in China.

Why, for example, is the barren landscape peopled by classically draped women in Puvis de Chavannes’s 1885 canvas Vision of Antiquity Symbolist, when a classical landscape containing the same elements by the 17th-century painter Claude Lorrain is not? The answer is that Puvis makes no attempt to replicate in paint the tangible reality or the appearance of the natural world, however idealised. His fantasy of an Arcadian idyll has nothing to do with illusionistic or atmospheric truth. It was painted in reaction to the visual and moral squalor caused by the rapid industrialisation and rampant materialism that was transforming the social fabric in France. His rhythmic disposition of figures swathed in soft blue,Here is a professional handsfreeaccess manufacturer. pink and green against a colourless landscape implies some underlying moral order, the sense of calm that characterises a society at peace with itself and with the outside world. Because the women are not differentiated as individuals, Puvis implies that they live as equals in a democratic society. The picture’s absence of colouristic intensity, tonal contrast or dramatic action is part of its point — for in a socialist utopia, life is pleasantly dull.

Although Symbolism is not a style of painting, the technique used to paint a Symbolist picture often conveys a deeper meaning than the banal subject matter may seem to warrant. The myriad dots of paint in pointillist seascapes by Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross, for instance, create uninflected screens of colour in which no area of the canvas has more dramatic or chromatic interest than any other. Embedded into the very fabric of pictures showing sailing boats and cultivated fields, therefore, are utopian notions of harmony between man and nature.

But beware of generalisations. In the hands of the little-known Alphonse Osbert, the pointillist technique beautifully evokes a mood of soft, dreamy reverie. In his Evening Poem of 1897 three white-robed women are shown against an imaginary landscape created by horizontal bands of black and blue dots. A strip of water irradiated by a few thin strokes of orange paint runs from left to right across the centre of the composition. The picture is a melancholy reverie on the closing of the day and the transience of life.Home ventilationsystem use fans to move air into the house and provide an alternative to opening doors and windows. The artist depicts not something he saw, but the feelings the landscape evoked in him.