Exhibition Guide
Paysage (A Winter Day in Brittany)
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Looking with the Curator
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Art Object Info
Orchestrated on a grand scale, with a somber, silvery palette and an almost brutal painterly surface, William Lamb Picknell’s landscape represents French-influenced American modernist painting at a key point. The dark “old-masterish” canvases of the Munich School were giving way to light effects most famously initiated by French impressionists during the 1870s and early 1880s. Numerous American impressionist pictures hang on the far side of this gallery.
Paysage depicts a road leading toward Concarneau in Brittany, France. Picknell lived in neighboring Pont-Aven, where an American expatriate art colony flourished, led by Robert Wylie. Picknell adopted Wylie’s energetic use of the palette knife to apply swathes of heavy pigment in a manner reminiscent of the controversial French recluse Gustave Courbet. Despite their size, Picknell’s canvases were painted outdoors, with only minor finishing in a studio.
Among thousands of pictures shown at the 1881 Paris Salon, a reviewer for the avant-garde journal Gil Blas singled out Picknell’s Paysage for praise, calling it “superb” and “one of the most remarkable pictures in the exhibition.” A year earlier, Picknell had received honorable mention as a landscape painter at the Paris Salon, the first American ever to be so recognized.
Art Object Info
Orchestrated on a grand scale, with a somber, silvery palette and an almost brutal painterly surface, William Lamb Picknell’s landscape represents French-influenced American modernist painting at a key point. The dark “old-masterish” canvases of the Munich School were giving way to light effects most famously initiated by French impressionists during the 1870s and early 1880s. Numerous American impressionist pictures hang on the far side of this gallery.
Paysage depicts a road leading toward Concarneau in Brittany, France. Picknell lived in neighboring Pont-Aven, where an American expatriate art colony flourished, led by Robert Wylie. Picknell adopted Wylie’s energetic use of the palette knife to apply swathes of heavy pigment in a manner reminiscent of the controversial French recluse Gustave Courbet. Despite their size, Picknell’s canvases were painted outdoors, with only minor finishing in a studio.
Among thousands of pictures shown at the 1881 Paris Salon, a reviewer for the avant-garde journal Gil Blas singled out Picknell’s Paysage for praise, calling it “superb” and “one of the most remarkable pictures in the exhibition.” A year earlier, Picknell had received honorable mention as a landscape painter at the Paris Salon, the first American ever to be so recognized.