Word: foreground
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...completely lacked the palms, writhing creepers, streams and waterfalls he would later give it. "The big mountain," he wrote to a friend, "grimly secludes itself in an immense circle of volcanic and comparatively barren country." The nearest palms were a hundred miles away. But without foreground vegetation, there was no hope of making the volcano look like a painting -- bringing it into the scheme of heroic Claudean and Turneresque landscape, the motif framed by arches of trees or cliffs in the foreground, with pictorial incidents unrolling back in space toward the distant peak. So, like all landscape painters, he "improved...
...America plunged into hatred and despair by the Civil War. The morning sun rises through the plume of smoke and ash, irresistibly, its disk made lurid but not extinguished by the subterranean fires, its light mirrored in a tranquil lake. Catastrophe will not wipe out nature; in the foreground of the volcanic plain, new plants spring to life. This, as the art historian David C. Huntington once remarked, is about as close as American painting in the Civil War period ever came to the Battle Hymn of the Republic or the Gettysburg Address...