Yesterday I strimmed an area of our garden we call the wilderness, which is the other side of our little stream. It has a few trees, not much grass and had got overgrown with weeds.
I love the tree shadows, especially this one of the flowering cherry tree, which is just in bud so you can still see the shape of the branches.
Shadow Shot Sunday is hosted at Hey Harriet.
Eugene Henri Paul Gauguin (1848 – 1903), a Post-Impressionist painter, described himself as ‘a great artist‘ and also as ‘a savage‘. He was ‘tormented more than ever by art, and neither my money worries not my search for business can divert me from it.‘
Gauguin by Himself, edited by Belinda Thomson is a collection of his works as both an artist and as a writer. This large book is illustrated with over 230 of his works of art and includes extracts from his letters to his wife and friends, including many to Van Gogh and Pisarro. Gauguin travelled around the world looking for his ideal of the ‘primitive’ from Paris and Copenhagen to Brittany, Provence, Panama, the West Indies and finally to the South Pacific.
Gauguin - Portrait of Vincent Van Gogh Painting Sunflowers, 1888
He was an ‘intimate friend‘ of Vincent Van Gogh. I like this painting, showing Van Gogh painting his famous Sunflower painting. After Van Gogh’s death in 1890 Gauguin wrote to Theo Van Gogh c. 2 August 1890:
We have just received the sad news and are greatly distressed. I do not wish to offer you mere phrases of condolence. You know that he was for me a true friend, and that he was an artist, a rare thing in our time. You will continue to see him in his works. As Vincent often said – stone will perish, words will remain. And for myself, I will see him with my eyes and my heart in his words.
Kind regards, P. Gauguin
They had shared a studio in Arles, although it was difficult. Gauguin described it as a battle between two human beings, ‘the one like a volcano and the other boiling too.‘ Everything was in a mess from the paints that spilled out of the paint-box, tubes that had been squeezed and never recapped to the messy state of their joint finances. Yet in spite of the chaos and mess their paintings glowed and they both produced a ‘colossal amount of work’.
See more ABC Wednesday.
Last weekend we went to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, an island off the north-east coast of England. Access to the Island is over a causeway, so you have to time your visit according to the tide which floods the causeway twice a day. It was a grey day last Sunday, either raining or threatening to rain, so there was little chance of any shadows, except for the displays in the Lindisfarne Heritage Centre.
This Viking Warrior guards the entrance to the exhibition: Vikings on Lindisfarne:
“AD. 793. This year came dreadful fore-warnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully: these were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery dragons flying across the firmament. These tremendous tokens were soon followed by a great famine: and not long after, on the sixth day before the ides of January in the same year, the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the church of God in Holy-island, by rapine and slaughter.” (Entry for the year 793 in the Anglo Saxon chronicle.)
Visit Hey Harriet for more Shadow Shots.
To participate in Alyce’s Saturday Snapshot meme post a photo that you (or a friend or family member) have taken. Photos can be old or new, and be of any subject as long as they are clean and appropriate for all eyes to see. How much detail you give in the caption is entirely up to you. All Alyce asks is that you don’t post random photos that you find online.
This is Broadway Tower, a Capability Brown Folly on Broadway Hill in the Cotswolds.
We were staying near Broadway a few years ago and visited this Tower. It was built for the 6th Earl of Coventry as a Folly completed in 1798, built on an ancient beacon site. Members of the Arts and Crafts movement used Broadway Tower as a holiday retreat. Pre-Raphaelite artists William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones were frequent visitors. (Broadway Tower website)
There are exhibitions on each of the three floors, including a William Morris Room. It was a clear day when were there and from the top of the Tower, over 1,000 metres above sea level, we could see 13 counties (apparently!).
I like J M W Turner’s paintings. The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her berth to be broken up is one of my favourites. This shows the last journey of the Temeraire, a gunship that had fought in Lord Nelson’s fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar, 1805. The Temeraire was a 98-gun three-decked ship of the line, that had been launched in 1798 during the French Revolutionary War. Later she became a prison ship, then a receiving ship used in harbour, before being broken up at Rotherhithe.
The painting is in the National Gallery, London. I love its colours, with the contrast between the glorious sunset and the elegant, almost ghostly ship behind the ugly little tugboat as they make their way up the River Thames. The end of an era.
Whist the original is in London, there are many reproductions available – including this in a jigsaw. The colours aren’t right – the original is more golden, with the ship painted in white and gold, shimmering in contrast to the black tug. But it’s still a beautiful image.
Gustave Caillebotte was a French Impressionist artist, although his paintings were more realistic than say Monet’s. Often he used sombre colours portraying more modern subject matter and almost photographic in style – frozen snapshots in time.
His painting The Floor Planers or Floor Strippers (Les Rabotuers de Parquet) shows urban workers stripping floorboards. This was a break from the traditional academic paintings. The poet Baudelaire had advocated painting scenes of urban life, scenes that were relevant to modernity, scenes of ordinary people in everyday life. Paris in the 1870s was being transformed into a modern metropolis and with the rise of the bourgeoisie there was a market for domestic art.
Caillebotte presented this painting at the 1875 Salon and when it was rejected because of its ‘vulgar subject matter’ he decided to join the Impressionists and presented it at their second exhibition in 1876.
See more ABC Wednesday.
To participate in Alyce’s Saturday Snapshot meme post a photo that you (or a friend or family member) have taken. Photos can be old or new, and be of any subject as long as they are clean and appropriate for all eyes to see. How much detail you give in the caption is entirely up to you. All Alyce asks is that you don’t post random photos that you find online.
My photos today are some I took two years ago when we visited Linlithgow Palace.
Linlithgow Palace is 15 miles west of Edinburgh. Building began in 1424 and it was the birthplace of Mary Queen of Scots in 1542. Now it’s roofless and in ruins. Although the sun was shining it was a bitterly cold day when we visited; the wind was ferocious and took my breath away. The Palace stands on a green promontory over looking a small loch – an easily defensible position.
A view of inside.
And a view of the loch from a window.
One of my favourite paintings is by the Scottish artist William Dyce. It’s a detailed seascape called Pegwell Bay, Kent – a Recollection of October 5th 1858 (1859 – 1860, Tate Britain). The figures in the foreground are members of Dyce’s family, dwarfed by the chalk cliffs behind. I love the detail and colour in this painting. It doesn’t show in the reproduction below but in the sky is the trail of Donati’s comet.
See ABC Wednesday for more illustrations of the letter D.
The Palm House, Kew taken from the Gardens
I visited Kew Gardens nearly two years ago, a beautiful, sunny August day. We were picnicking in the garden behind the Palm House when I took this photo and then noticed the two people in the flower beds also taking a photo!
The Palm House, Kew Gardens
The Palm House was completed in 1848, built of wrought iron and glass and it was then the largest greenhouse in the world. The statues in front of the Palm House are replicas of the Queen’s Beasts, heraldic statues made for the Queen’s coronation. The Unicorn of Scotland is in the foreground.
See more Shadow Shots at Tracy’s blog Hey Harriet.
Saturday Snapshot is hosted by Alyce:
To participate in the Saturday Snapshot meme post a photo that you (or a friend or family member) have taken. Photos can be old or new, and be of any subject as long as they are clean and appropriate for all eyes to see. How much detail you give in the caption is entirely up to you. All I ask is that you don’t post random photos that you find online.
I’ve made a start on sorting through old photos, which haven’t been put into albums, to identify people and places. The first pile I looked at this morning contained these photos of Little Morton Hall in Cheshire. The photos aren’t dated but as my hair on them is dark they were taken about 20 years ago when we were staying with my mother-in-law and visited the Hall.
Little Moreton Hall is a Tudor half-timbered building, a moated manor house. It’s crooked and irregular built around a cobbled courtyard and topped by a long gallery which the owners and their friends used for exercise on rainy, cold days. The gallery was added at a later date and caused the lower floors to sag and warp. I love it.
(That’s me in the red jacket.)
