European Art and Old Masters

Note

Born in Oslo in 1847, Frits Thaulow found modest success as a painter of marine and coastal subjects under the tutelage of C.F. Sørensen at the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. Following a short tenure in the studio of Hans-Fredrik Gude in Karlsruhe, Germany, Thaulow committed—in large part, for the remainder of his career—to painting landscapes, first in his native Norway and, subsequently, across northern and northwestern France.

Thaulow’s views of the 1880s and 90s reveal a selective commingling of styles then au courant, from French academic Realism to Naturalism—in the manner of artists Léon Augustin Lhermitte and Jules Bastien-Lepage, whose paintings he would have encountered in Paris the previous decade—to Impressionism. A close friend of Monet and brother-in-law of Paul Gauguin (who, by the late 1870s was still painting in an impressionistic mode), he cultivated an approach that exploited the strengths of each movement. Retaining the compositional structure of mid-century Realism, Thaulow explored the relationship between humans and nature à la Naturalism, while embracing the Impressionist preoccupation with color, light, and atmosphere. His carefully studied depictions of canals, riverbanks, and rural hamlets—the bulk of his output across the final two decades of his life—best reflect this synthesis.

Settling in France in 1892, Thaulow executed a spate of characteristic and critically-acclaimed canvases, mostly in and around the villages of Montreuil-sur-Mer (1892–94), Dieppe (1894–98), where he maintained a studio, Quimperle in Brittany (1901) and Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne (1903). The present work likely dates to this fertile period. From an elevated and downward-looking perspective, viewers are transported canal-side. Sharply foreshortened under a cobalt-and-cloud-filled sky, water gently eddies into the middleground of the composition. Flanked by trees and a series of barns and outbuildings on either side, the canal dominates the composition. Figures and a horse-drawn cart are all but enveloped by the landscape—an acknowledgement, perhaps, of the waterway’s importance to the life and livelihood of the village. Hallmarks of Thaulow’s mature style—staccato brushwork, mirror-like reflections, and an intuitive juxtaposition of light and shadow–recommend the scene.