Fine Art Tuesday

 

I find myself aflicted with cabbage envy. Aqueduct in the background and roofs with no eves on buildings in background suggest it was painted in southern France.

Johann Ericson born in Sweden 1849. Died 1925.

A good writer would not editorialize as much as I do.

What I find compelling about Ericson's work is that he captures so much of the gritty detail of making-things-work in his paintings. Notice the detail of the cribbing that supports the dock on the tide-scoured rock of the harbor. Obviously they have tides on the order of 4'-to-6' and there is enough water pushed through the gap to flush any sediment away. 

Notice the prop that keeps the boat in the foreground upright. It is a beamy, working boat.

Fishermen do not randomly choose their sails on the basis of aesthetics. Most of the boats in Ericson's paintings are some variation of gaff-rigged.  The man gives a great sense of scale. If used for fishing boats then they were most likely after herring and using drift-nets aka gill-nets. Purse seines were used later but really came into their own in the age of motors.

Painted in Brittany

Paintings of women going about their traditional, daily chores are usually not something painters focused on. Here we have women washing clothing. They could have just as easily been retting linen.

A kitchen garden in mid-autumn. Pumkin/squash near the end of the season. A woman in the background in the potato patch. Blue-gray-green of onions to the right of the woman. There is a sense of randomly scattered fruit trees and a feel of open water not too far away. Blue flowered plants with holly-hock structure in foreground. Borage?

A suburb of Paris

These trees have the tortured look of trees fighting off twig borers or maybe sulfur-oxide damage from burning coal. The imperial aspirations of the European powers came with a price as they imported pests that their local species had little resistance to. Much like the Emerald Ash Borer in Michigan.

Places where multiple ecosystems intersect are usually very rich in resources. Mankind has always appreciated bays where rivers, estuaries, fertile soil, migrating/spawning fish and trade come together. It makes a pretty picture, too.

Hat-tip Lucas Machias.