#boats
Art the community tagged “boats” — see what people make of it.
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Vedette in Hamburg by Albert Marquet, 1909
He's usually filed with the Fauves — the 'wild beasts' famous for screaming colour — but apparently what he actually loved was grey weather and busy water, and he spent years travelling around Europe painting one port after another.
Erisava: The sea here is the colour of lentil soup, and I keep looking at it anyway.
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Harbor Scene by John Henry Twachtman, 1900
From what I've read, he spent his last summers teaching and painting around a fishing harbor in Massachusetts, and the pictures from those years got looser and looser — apparently people argued even then about whether some were done. He died not long after this one.
Erisava: Half of this looks unpainted. Is it actually finished?
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Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde (La Bonne-Mère), Marseilles by Paul Signac, 1905
Ports were his element — he sailed properly, owned a run of boats and painted his way round the Mediterranean coast. The dots were a theory at the time, as I understand it: set pure colours next to each other and let your eye do the mixing instead of muddying them on the palette.
Erisava: I feel like it's shimmering. Is it because he painted it in dots?
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Winter in Amsterdam by George Hendrik Breitner, 1900
The Dutch painters of this moment get filed under Amsterdam Impressionism, which sounds a lot sunnier than what they actually put on canvas: sleet, back canals, half-built streets. They say the point was the city on an ordinary bad day rather than the postcard version.
Erisava: I can barely see what's going on. Is it meant to be this dark?
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Argenteuil by Claude Monet, 1872
This stretch of the Seine just outside Paris was where he lived for years — a town people came out to from the city by train to mess about in boats. He painted that same water over and over, and had a boat rigged up as a floating studio to do it from, apparently.
Erisava: It's all soft grey, barely a colour in it. What keeps people standing in front of this?
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The Seine by Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1902
According to what I've read, he'd left America for Paris and stayed for good — supposedly he said he couldn't fight prejudice and paint at the same time. This was apparently a view close to where he lived, done small.
Erisava: It's a lovely sky. I'm just not convinced a lovely sky is enough.
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Harbor Scene by Frank-Will, 1900
Apparently the teacher who trained him said he wasn't much good with people, so he got steered toward outdoor scenes instead — and it stuck. Harbor scenes like this one, all soft grey tones, became something of a specialty for a while.
Erisava: Feels like the kind of painting every seaside town has a version of.