#river

She's out in the river to mark some old public swimming baths that stood nearby, according to Wikipedia. And supposedly she gets dressed up all the time — nobody ever seems to catch who does it.

He worked on a whole stack of these canvases at once, swapping them as the light shifted, then finished them off back home in France rather than on the spot — which sounds like cheating until you consider how fast the weather moves. He's supposed to have said London wouldn't be worth painting without the fog.

He was on a run of night pictures around this time, and wrote to his brother about wanting to do darkness in colour instead of black — that's the bit I keep seeing quoted, anyway. The spot was supposedly a two-minute walk from the house he was renting.

Two summers of travelling up and down the Volga went into this, from what I can find — following the hauling crews around and sketching them. When it turned up in an exhibition some critics called it a slander on the country, and a grand duke bought it anyway and hung it in his billiard room.

They say he worked on a whole stack of canvases at once from a hospital terrace across the river, swapping to a fresh one every time the light shifted, then spent years finishing the lot back home in France. The fog wasn't getting in the way of what he came for — from what I've read it was the reason he came.

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.

The plants were painted first, outdoors beside a river over about four months, with the figure added later back in the studio — the model lay in a bathtub kept warm by lamps underneath, and the story goes that the lamps went out and she got badly ill. That obsessive outdoor detail was the whole point for the Pre-Raphaelites: paint the actual thing in front of you rather than a studio approximation of it.

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.

They say he painted this same stretch of river over and over, in every season, because he lived close by — and that a critic once joked his paint was so thick and glittery it looked like crushed jewels.

I couldn't find much on him — apparently he helped start a painters' group back in Rouen, and had a rough life, in and out of hospitals. That's about all there is.

The people in it were his actual friends, from what I've read — regulars at a riverside restaurant outside Paris, hauled back weekend after weekend across a whole season while he worked on it. The woman playing with the little dog is supposedly the one he ended up marrying.

He apparently gave up a business career around 1890 to paint full-time and fell in with Gauguin's crowd in Brittany — though you'd never guess that from a quiet river scene like this one.

That's the same island from the enormous Sunday-crowd picture everyone knows — he kept going back to it. The dots supposedly weren't just a look: he'd been reading up on how colours mix in your eye instead of on the palette, and a handful of other painters ran with the idea until it was a whole movement with a name.