Dolbadarn Castle in Wales

Dolbadarn Castle by William Turner

Photograph by Alan Novelli, Alamy

Commissioned before A.D. 1230, Dolbadarn Castle in Snowdonia National Park features the best surviving example of a Welsh round tower.

Take a walk on the moors, go horseback riding on ancient trails, or tour a medieval village in one of the U.K.'s 15 national parks. Known as "Britain's breathing spaces," the parks offer outdoor and sightseeing activities against dramatic landscapes and historic treasures.

Monet - Landscape

Two images of the same painting - color is iffy.

Artist: Hubert Robert and some of his Bridges

Hubert Robert, French artist, born in Paris. (May 22, 1733 – April 15, 1808)

Hubert Robert spent eleven years in Rome; after the young artist's official residence at the French Academy in Rome ran out, he supported himself by works he produced for visiting connoisseurs like the abbé de Saint-Non, who took Robert to Naples in April 1760 to visit the ruins of Pompeii. The marquis de Marigny, director of the Bâtiments du Roi kept abreast of his development in correspondence with Natoire, director of the French Academy, who urged the pensionnaires to sketch out-of-doors, from nature: Robert needed no urging; drawings from his sketchbooks document his travels: Villa d'Este, Caprarola. Robert spent his time in the company of young artists in the circle of Piranesi, whose capricci of romantically overgrown ruins influenced him so greatly that he gained the nickname Robert des ruines.The albums of sketches and drawings he assembled in Rome supplied him with motifs that he worked into paintings throughout his career.

His success on his return to Paris in 1765 was rapid: the following year he was received by the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, with a Roman capriccio, The Port of Rome, ornamented with different Monuments of Architecture, Ancient and Modern. During the Revolution, he was arrested in October 1793. He survived his detentions at Sainte-Pélagie and Saint-Lazare, by painting vignettes of prison life on plates, before he was freed at the fall of Robespierre.Robert narrowly escaped the guillotine when through error another prisoner died in his place. Subsequently he was placed on the committee of five in charge of the new national museum at the Palais du Louvre.

Le Pont Sur Le Torrent, painted in the mid-1780s by Hubert Robert, measures over 20 feet wide by 13 feet high, and carries an estimate of $2 million - $3 million. Originally commissioned by the Duc de Luynes for the dining room of his mansion in Paris, in 1925 it was acquired at auction by William Randolph Hearst and once decorated the beachfront castle that the newspaper baron purchased in late 1927 in Sands Point, Long Island as a retreat for his wife Millicent. The awe-inspiring artwork has not been seen in public in more than 50 years.

Artist: Hubert Robert Title: The Bridge Confiscated Collection: Sel 169 (previously Sel 156) (Seligmann, Paris)

This work was seized by the Nazis from Edouard Alphonse James de Rothschild. In 1940, the Baron and his wife escaped to Lisbon, Portugal right after the Nazi occupation of France. From there they were able to continue on their way to New York City, New York. It is there that they waited until the end of World War II to return to their homeland of Austria. But before his escape to the United States, James and his wife did their best to hide their massive art collection worth millions from the Nazi's. He hid most of his collection somewhere on the Haras de Meautry farm and at his Château de Reux estate. But in 1940, the Nazi's caught up with the Rothschild's treasure, raiding and looting everything in sight.

In this image Hubert Robert draws a rare view of Paris and depicts its most iconic building, the cathedral of Notre Dame. It is shown from the unusual angle beneath the Pont au double also known as the Pont de l'Hôtel Dieu (replaced in 1883 with the current bridge). The cathedral is seen from the east with its two Gothic towers and flying buttresses. The imposing monumentality of the cathedral is tempered by the bridge which takes up nearly half the sheet. The main protagonists, the three fishermen in the lower left corner, while diminutive in comparison to the architecture do not fail to capture the viewer's eye either.

Strangely, and perhaps tellingly, Robert chose to emphasize the bridge rather than the Gothic church. Bridges, real or imagined were a frequent motif in Robert's oeuvre. Two paintings by him depict the transformation of two bridges in Paris: The demolition of houses on the Pont Notre-Dame in 1786 (Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle), and The demolition of houses on the Pont-au-Change in 1788 (Paris, Musée Carnavalet).

For a full discussion of bridges in Robert's work see Hubert Robert 1733-1808 und die Brücken von Paris (exhib. cat., Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, 1991).

Artist Portfolio - Pamela Ayres

Artist: Pam Ayres - Hasting College Hastings, NE

Images of a Scottish Castle - St. Andrews, Fife

St Andrews Cathedral St Andrew's Castle is a picturesque ruin located in the coastal Royal Burgh of St Andrews in Fife, Scotland. The castle sits on a rocky promontory overlooking a small beach called Castle Sands and the adjoining North Sea. There has been a castle standing at the site since the times of Bishop Roger (1189-1202), son of the Earl of Leicester. It housed the burgh’s wealthy and powerful bishops while St Andrews served as the ecclesiastical centre of Scotland during the years before the Protestant Reformation. I'm thinking that this would be great place for drawing and watercolor.....to be in Scotland.

Artist: Winslow Homer - Artists Sketching in the White Mountains

Winslow Homer (1836–1910)
Artists Sketching in the White Mountains, 1868
Oil on panel, 9-1/2 x 15-7/8 inches
Bequest of Charles Shipman Payson, 1988.55. 4

The White Mountains served as a national landscape in the years that followed the Civil War. One of the first regions to engender and exploit a tourist economy in the United States, the towns surrounding the Presidential Range of New Hampshire provided the infrastructure for a generation of artists to capture the view while taking in the fresh air of the country. Painting Mount Washington, the highest peak in the range, came to be considered a rite of passage for artists of every stripe. Homer—ironic in temperament and possessing a keen, self-deprecating sense of humor—took obvious pleasure in depicting himself as last in this queue of plein-air painters as evidenced by the knapsack bearing the inscription “Homer.” Although Homer would continue to paint genre subjects throughout the 1870s, the subtle critique evidenced in Artists Sketching in the White Mountains would eventually lead him to darker, existential dramas.

Artist: Modest Huys - Some landscapes

Zomernamiddagzon

Petite écluse: a lock with a village beyond

Populieren in Maartezon

"Vlasoogst"

Biography

Modest Huys was a Belgian painter of landscapes and portraits. He received advice from Emile Claus and was later a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. Modeste Huys was an enthusiast of anything concerning light and colours and the poet of joyous and happy country life. His works are full of optimistic luminism, translating with delight the most beautiful aspects of an ever-admirable nature. His art glorifies the fertile and plentiful Flanders where the silvery and slithering ribbon of the river Lys flows. Modeste Huys is more particularly the painter of the River Lys and of flax. His works are an hymn for his native country.

The Man Who Planted Trees

A beautiful film by artist Frédéric Back.

The following is commentary on the film by Beck and his biographer.

The Oscar® he won for Crac! allowed Frédéric Back to fulfil his dream of bringing Jean Giono's wonderful story The Man Who Planted Trees to the screen. In more distilled form, its environmental message and philosophy of life reflect the concerns already addressed by Back in his previous films. The seeds that the shepherd plants are the symbol of all our actions, good and bad, which have far-reaching consequences we can scarcely imagine. It is up to us to think and act in accordance with our hopes for the future, and, if possible, to leave behind us a world more beautiful and promising than the one we inherited.

Ghylaine and I went to Paris in October 1982 to meet Aline Giono at Gallimard, and Sylvie Giono-Durbet in Manosque. Nothing was decided at those first meetings. We could make the film, but with authorization for three screenings only. Fortunately, Provence was beautiful, despite the cold and rain. On the Montagne de Lure, we saw mules carrying tree trunks on their backs. At Giono’s farm, a solitary old shepherd was playing the accordion in his house in the rain. Down a winding road, we came upon magnificent rams with twisted horns leading a herd of sheep. The mountain peaks were spectacular and the sheepfolds, like works of art. But it was unmistakable—the barren region described in Giono’s story was now covered with trees and forests. All the shepherds Giono had condensed into the character of Elzéard Bouffier had accomplished something on the scale of his story! There were few shepherds left and it was only when we went back through the causses—the high limestone plateaus around Larzac—that we found the images of Provence we recognized from Giono.

Captivated by Giono’s text, I only rarely managed to sketch out light, evocative images. A too realistic precision kept cropping up, and those drawings all ended up in the wastebasket. I wanted simply to accompany the text, with the images as a way to bring it to the screen and no more, since generosity that seeks no reward contains the secret to finding happiness. With Ghylaine’s encouragement and that of Hubert and Lina, the frames gradually accumulated. Claude Lapierre and Jean Robillard were tireless on the camera and did a superb job. We invited all our friends to screenings to give us their critiques—“before it was too late.” I sent notes to Normand Roger on sounds, birdsong and traditional music so he could design the sound using information that matched the reality of Provence.

Fortunately, that same year, Hubert and I did have another opportunity to go back to L.A. The Disney studios invited us to present The Man Who Planted Trees and meet some of their best-known in-house artists. We visited their studios with Charles Solomon, a writer and animated film critic, and other animator friends. An Oscar always gives a film tremendous leverage in terms of distribution. The Man Who Planted Trees had already won over many hearts to the cause of acting generously to save the forests, but now it had an extra boost! My films have become “classics,” studied in universities and animation schools for their technical, artistic and cultural content. That goes beyond anything I might have hoped for and still surprises me. It shows that politically engaged art is both possible and worthwhile. Long before me, Breugel, Goya and many other talented artists showed this to be true with all the power of their art.

http://www.fredericback.com/boutique/index.en.shtml#3

Francis Towne watercolor landscapes

Lake Albano with Castel Gandolfo (July 1781, "morning light from the left hand"

The Source of the Aveiron, Mont Blanc in the background. 1781

Lake Albano, the sunrise in the Rocca del Papa. 1781

Francis Towne (1739-1816) began his artistic career as a coach painter. He later moved on to landscape painting. His watercolours are very simple but striking. He painted this watercolour in Switzerland, where he stayed on his return to England after a trip to Italy.

According to Harold Barkley" Francis Towne was probably the most original artist working in the water-colour medium in the 18th century. He regarded himself, nevertheless, as primarily a landscape painter in oil and deeply resented a dismissive contemporary description of himself as 'a provincial drawing-master'. His water-colours were virtually unknown for a century after his death, most having remained with him until bequeathed to friends and thus remaining in private collections, apart from his Italian drawings which - as he desired - were given to the British Museum.

Although trained in London with his life-long friend William Pars, his roots lay in Devonshire and he spent the major part of his working life in Exeter, although he exhibited regularly in London and frequently spent long periods there. He was apparently a diffident and unworldly man who was satisfied to cultivate his Devonshire friends and patrons.

It seems likely that he originally used water-colour as an aid in the development of his oil compositions, but by 1777 he was using the medium characteristically, albeit still somewhat tentatively, to record impressions of a tour in Wales. The turning-point of his career as a water-colourist came in 1780, when he paid a visit to his friend Pars in Rome and in the course of his stay there considerably developed his technique. The present drawing belongs to the remarkable series of majestic studies of Alpine scenery made by Towne on his journey home through Switzerland in September 1781. Towne's view owes nothing to the 'Gothick' romanticism of Horace Walpole and his friends thirty years earlier.
He banishes all extraneous 'picturesque' elements such as wayside shrines and ruined bridges. His vision is of the greatest severity and his presentation austere in the extreme. He achieves the expression of his fascination with the geometry of Nature by the most economical means, reducing everything to the simplest terms and achieving a noble monumentality by his skillful arrangement and lighting of inter-reacting planes. This subject reveals Towne's preoccupation with outline and pattern in the highest degree as well as his subtle use of delicate washes to achieve his desired ends.

In due course, with the advent of the vision of Cézanne and of the Cubists a century after his death, Towne’s vision became more widely comprehensible and there is now due appreciation of the originality of his contribution.