Word: lorrain
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...first artist to develop fully the landscape-as-property theme in Australia was John Glover (1767-1849), who settled in Tasmania at the ripe age of 64. He was a mediocre professional who knew, and sedulously imitated, the work of Claude Lorrain. But in Australia he did the best work of his life, celebrating the pastoral delights of land ownership and commemorating the Aborigines, whose way of life was being inexorably destroyed by white farmers like him. No painter in Australia ever committed himself as wholeheartedly to recording the life of Aborigines as, say, American artist George Catlin...
...19th century. Corot painted 3,000 pictures, the saying went, of which 10,000 have been sold in America. His late work in particular--those silvery, atmospheric nymph-and-willow scenes like Memory of Mortefontaine, 1864, elegiac in tone and populated by rustic figures who descended from Claude Lorrain's shepherdesses--fetched record prices at a time when Impressionism still seemed rather daring to most Americans, and painting posthumous versions of them became quite an industry...
...Corot's career began in the 1820s, at a time when classical landscape--the ideal scene with temples, ruins and mellow boscage, populated by figures out of Ovid's Metamorphoses or Vergil's Georgics--was still very much a part of French art. Its greatest exponents, Nicolas Poussin and Lorrain, were French, and their work still cast a long shadow. But it existed alongside a newer appetite for natural vision, the direct recording of the facts of landscape, whose wellhead was the English artist John Constable...
Cole had no formal training. He learned about landscape painting from theoretical tracts and the early-19th century equivalent of how-to manuals, backed up by a great deal of attentive looking. He couldn't draw the human figure -- but then neither could his hero, Claude Lorrain. His efforts in that direction, as in a huge painting of Prometheus chained to his rock with the eagle flying in for lunch, were risible. Wisely, he kept his Indians and woodsmen and saints in the far distance...
...good luck to be taken on as a student by Thomas Cole, whose slightly stilted allegorical landscapes had made him the most famous American artist of the 1840s. Like Cole, he painted scenes along the Hudson River and in the Catskills, in a manner much indebted to Claude Lorrain: peaceful arcadian vistas with the silver glint of lakes under evening skies. Church's valediction to his dead master, To the Memory of Cole, 1848, with its rose-wreathed cross on a mountainside between two emblems -- the tree stump (death) and the evergreens (posthumous fame) -- carries the Claudean stereotype into America...