Seasonal

Lodovico Settevecchie and Leonardo da Brescia
The Four Seasons
ca. 1570
fresco
Castello Estense, Ferrara

Neil Welliver
Shadow
1977
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Stuart Franklin
Deer Farm at the Rothiemurcus Estate
2009
inkjet print
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Howard Hodgkin
Spring Rain
2000-2002
oil on panel
Museum of Modern Art, New York

François Barois
Pomona, or, Spring
ca. 1693-1705
marble term
Musée du Louvre

Alfred Edward Chalon
Herb Gatherer
(illustration for 'Spring' in Thomson's Seasons)
1810
drawing
British Museum

Charles Demuth
Spring
1921
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Oleksandr Bohomazov
Rayonist Composition: Spring
1914
oil on canvas
private collection

Maurice Denis
Badminton
1900
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Séraphine
Tree of Paradise
ca. 1928
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Joan Eardley
Harvest
1960
oil on panel
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Kazimir Malevich
To the Harvest: Marthe and Vanka
ca. 1928-29
oil on canvas
State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg

Abraham van Diepenbeeck
Harvest Feast
before 1675
ink and wash on paper
British Museum

Ettore Tito
Autumn
1914
oil on canvas
Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome

Maurice de Vlaminck
Autumn Landscape
ca. 1905
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Charmion von Wiegand
The Wheel of the Seasons
1957
oil on canvas
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Meissen Manufactory (Dresden)
Figures of the Four Seasons
18th century
porcelain
Musée du Louvre

    Most readers, at the present day, now that the whole noisy controversy has long taken its quiet place in the perspective of Time, would, I think, agree that Diderot and the rest of the Encyclopaedists were mistaken.  As we see him now, in that long vista, Rousseau was not a wicked man; he was an unfortunate, a distracted, a deeply sensitive, a strangely complex, creature; and, above all else, he possessed the quality which cut him off from his contemporaries, which set an immense gulf betwixt him and them: he was modern.  Among those quick, strong, fiery people of the eighteenth century, he belonged to another world – to the new world of self-consciousness, and doubt, and hesitation, of mysterious melancholy and quiet intimate delights, of long reflexions amid the solitudes of Nature, of infinite introspection amid the solitudes of the heart.  Who can wonder that he was misunderstood, and buffeted, and driven mad?  Who can wonder that, in his agitation, his perplexities, his writhings, he seemed, to the pupils of Voltaire, little less than a frenzied fiend?  'Cet homme est un forcené!'  Diderot exclaims. 'Je tâche en vain de faire de la poésie, mais cet homme me revient tout à travers mon travail; il me trouble, et je suis comme si j'avais à côté de moi un damné: il est damné, cela est sûr . . .  J'avoue que je n'ai jamais éprouvé un trouble d'âme si terrible que celui que j'ai . . .  Que je me revois plus cet homme-là, il me ferait croire au diable et à l'enfer.  Si je suis jamais forcé de retourner chez lui, je suis sûr que je frémirai tout le long du chemin: j'avais la fièvre en revenant . . .  On entendait ses cris jusqu'au bout du jardin; et je le voyais!  . . .  Les poètes ont bien fait de mettre un intervalle immense entre le ciel and les enfers.  En vérité, la main me tremble.'   Every word of that is stamped with sincerity; Diderot was writing from his heart.  But he was wrong; the 'intervalle immense' across which, so strangely and so horribly, he had caught glimpses of what he had never seen before, was not the abyss between heaven and hell, but between the old world and the new. 

– Lytton Strachey on Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1907)

Frigid

Wilson Bentley
Twenty Snow Crystals
ca. 1920
gelatin silver print
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
(Achenbach Foundation)

Elisheva Biernoff
Winter
2015
acrylic on plywood with painted poplar stand
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Esther Bubley
Pupils returning to School
after Lunch at the General Store, East Orange, Vermont
ca. 1953
gelatin silver print
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Denys van Alsloot
Winter Landscape with view of Tervuren Castle
1614
oil on panel
Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels

Max Beckmann
Winter Landscape
1930
oil on canvas
Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands

Frank Hurley
Banded Face of Ice Shelf
ca. 1913
carbon print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Georgia O'Keeffe
Black Door with Snow II
1955
oil on canvas
Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin

Madoka Takagi
East River Park, New York
1990
platinum-palladium print
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Richard Kauffman
Mount St Elias from Upper King Glacier
ca. 1958
tricolor carbro print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Abbott Handerson Thayer
Winter, Monadnock
ca. 1900
watercolor and gouache on paper
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Arthur Lismer
A Clear Winter
ca. 1940
oil on canvas
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

Peter Doig
Pink Snow
1991
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Caspar David Friedrich
Winter Landscape
ca. 1811
oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

Frank Thiel
Perito Moreno #11
ca. 2012-13
C-print
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Andrew Wyeth
Chestnut Ridge
ca. 1944
watercolor on paper
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Kasimir Malevich
Morning in the Village after a Snowstorm
1912
oil on canvas
Guggenheim Museum, New York

Wilson Bentley
Frost
ca. 1910
gelatin silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Coming to Racine with Shakespeare and the rest of the Elizabethans warm in his memory, it is only to be expected that [the English reader] should be struck with a chilling sense of emptiness and unreality.  After the colour, the moving multiplicity, the imaginative luxury of our early tragedies, which seem to have been moulded out of Nature herself, the Frenchman's dramas, with their rigid uniformity of setting, their endless duologues, their immense harangues, their spectral confidants, their strict exclusion of all visible action, give one at first the same sort of impression as a pretentious pseudo-classical summer-house appearing suddenly at the end of a vista, after one has been rambling through an open forest. 'La scène est à Buthrote, ville d'Epire, dans une salle du palais de Pyrrhus' – could anything be more discouraging than such an announcement?  Here is nothing for the imagination to feed on, nothing to raise expectation, no wondrous vision of 'blasted heaths' or the 'seaboard of Bohemia'; here is only a hypothetical drawing-room conjured out of the void for five acts, simply in order that the persons of the drama may have a place to meet in and make their speeches.

                                                        *          *         *

The true justification for the unities of time and place is to be found in the conception of drama as the history of a spiritual crisis – the vision, thrown up, as it were, by a bull's-eye lantern, of the final catastrophic phases of a long series of events.  Very different were the views of the Elizabethan tragedians, who aimed at representing not only the catastrophe but the whole development of circumstances of which it was the effect; they traced, with elaborate and abounding detail, the rise, the growth, the decline, and the ruin of great causes and great persons; and the result was a series of masterpieces unparalleled in the literature of the world.  . . .  But Racine carried out his ideals more rigorously and more boldly than any of his successors.  He fixed the whole of his attention upon the spiritual crisis; to him that alone was of importance; and the conventional classicism so disheartening to the English reader – the unities, the harangues, the confidences, the absence of local colour, and the concealment of the action – was no more than the machinery for enhancing the effect of the inner tragedy, and for doing away with every side issue and every chance of distraction.

– Lytton Strachey on Racine (1908)

Freeze

Richard Misrach
Untitled (#553)
2007
inkjet print
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Hans Konrad Escher von der Linth
View of Lauteraar Glacier at Grimsel
1794
watercolor on paper
Graphische Sammlung, Zentralbibliothek Zürich

Hans Meyboden
Seehorn (Davos)
1934
oil on canvas
Kunsthalle Mannheim

Émile Friant
Young Woman of Nancy in a Snowy Landscape
1887
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy

Louis Oppenheim
S. Adam - Winter Sports Clothing
1911
lithograph (poster)
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Kasimir Malevich
Winter Landscape
1929
oil on canvas
Museum Ludwig, Cologne

Johan Wilhelm Bergström
Garden in Snow
ca. 1845
daguerreotype
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Jacques d'Arthois
Winter Landscape with Figures
ca. 1650
oil on panel
private collection

Jules Laurens
Ruins of the Blue Mosque in Tabriz
1872
oil on canvas
Musée Fabre, Montpellier

Alfred Sisley
La Place du Chenil à Marly - effet de neige
1876
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen

Joost Cornelisz Droochsloot
Skaters on the City Moat
1622
oil on panel
Clemens-Sels Museum, Neuss, Germany

Willem Witsen
Forest in Snow
1894
oil on canvas
Dordrechts Museum, Netherlands

Gustave Courbet
Landscape with Snow
1862
oil on canvas
Musée de Grenoble

Adolf Karpellus
Moravia Meteor
1910
lithograph (poster)
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Kåre Kivijärvi
My Brother's House
ca. 1980
gelatin silver print on plastic
Stortingets Kunstsamling, Oslo

Todd Hido
Untitled #2431
1999
C-print
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

I am Thespis, who first modelled tragic song, inventing a new diversion for the villagers, at the season when Bacchus led in the triennial chorus whose prize was still a goat and a basket of Attic figs. Now my juniors remodel all this; countless ages will beget many new inventions, but my own is mine.  

Do not wonder at seeing on Myro's tomb a whip, an owl, a bow, a grey goose and a swift bitch. The bow proclaims that I was the strict well-strung directress of my house, the bitch that I took true care of my children, the whip that I was no cruel or overbearing mistress, but a just chastiser of faults, the goose that I was a careful guardian of the house, and this owl that I was a faithful servant of owl-eyed Pallas. Such were the things in which I took delight, wherefore my husband Biton carved these emblems on my gravestone.

Come let us see who lies under this stone. But I see no inscription cut on it, only nine cast dice, of which the first four represent the throw called Alexander, the next four that called Ephebus – the bloom of youthful maturity – and the one the more unlucky throw called Chian. Is their message this, that both the proud sceptered potentate and the young man in his flower end in nothing, or is that not so? – I think now like a Cretan archer I shall shoot straight at the mark. The dead man was a Chian, his name was Alexander and he died in youth. How well one told through dumb dice of the young man dead by ill-chance and the life staked and lost!

We the six sons of Iphieratides – Eupylidas, Eraton, Chaeris, Lycus, Agis and Alexon – fell before the wall of Messene, and our seventh brother Gylippus having burnt our bodies came home with a heavy load of ashes, a great glory to Sparta, but a great grief to Alexippa our mother. One glorious shroud wrapped us all.

In thy first youth thou didst perish too, Machatas, grimly facing the Aetolians in the portion of thy fathers. It is hard to find a brave Achaean who hath survived till his hairs are grey. 

We lie, stranger, in the rough woodland, Mantiades and Eustratus of Dyme, the sons of Echellus, rustic woodcutters as our fathers were; and to shew our calling the woodman's axes stand on our tomb. 

– from Book VI (Sepulchral Epigrams) of the Greek Anthology, translated and edited by W.R. Paton (1917)