Saturday, March 25, 2017

Painted Landscapes of the 19th century

Jean-Victor Bertin (France)
Entry to the Park at St Cloud
1810
oil on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

"In one sense, I'm probably interested in the past because of this. I'm not at all interested in the past to try to bring it back to life but because it's dead. There's no teleology of resurrection there, but rather the realization that the past is dead. Starting from that death, we can say absolutely serene things, completely analytic and anatomical, not directed toward a possible repetition or resurrection. And for that reason as well, nothing is of less interest to me than the desire to rediscover in the past the secret of origin."

John Constable (England)
The Lock
1824
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Samuel Palmer (England)
Landscape with Barn, Shoreham, Kent
ca. 1828
watercolor
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

"I'd say that writing, for me, is associated with death, maybe essentially the death of others, but this doesn't mean that writing would be like killing others and carrying out against them, against their existence, a definitively lethal gesture that would hunt them from presence, that would open a sovereign and free space before me. Not at all. For me, writing means having to deal with the death of others, but it basically means having to deal with others to the extent that they're already dead. In one sense, I'm speaking over the corpse of the others. I have to admit that I'm postulating their death to some extent. In speaking of them, I'm in the situation of the anatomist who performs an autopsy. With my writing I survey the body of others, I incise it, I lift the integuments and skin, I try to find the organs and, in exposing the organs, reveal the site of the lesion, the seat of pain, that something that has characterized their life, their thought, and which, in its negativity, has finally organized everything they've been. The venomous heart of things and men is, at bottom, what I've always tried to expose." 

 from Speech Begins after Death, text of a 1968 interview with Michel Foucault (1926-1984) conducted by Claude Bonnefoy, edited by Philippe Artières, translated by Robert Bononno, published in English by University of Minnesota Press in 2013

Karl Friedrich Lessing (Germany)
Landscape with Crows
ca. 1830
oil on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Christian E.B. Morgenstern (Germany)
Oaks beside water
1832
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Carl Gustave Carus (Germany)
Colosseum by night, Rome
ca. 1830-35
oil on canvas
Hermitage,  Saint Petersburg

August Matthias Hagen (Germany)
Mountains
1835
oil on canvas
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

JMW Turner (England)
Landscape with river and bay in background
1835-40
canvas
Louvre, Paris

Gustaf Wilhelm Palm (Sweden)
View of Arricia
1841
oil on paper, mounted on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Théodore Rousseau (France)
View of the plain, Montmartre
ca. 1848
oil on panel
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Eugène-Joseph Berboeckhoven
and Joseph Quinaux (Belgium)
Landscape with herd
ca. 1860-65
oil on panel
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Andreas Achenbach (Germany)
Landscape with river
1866
oil on panel
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Gustave Courbet (France)
La Brème
1866
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Vincent van Gogh (Netherlands)
Landscape with house and ploughman
1889
oil on canvas
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg