Word: motifs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Turner had been to the Alps. Church would go to South America. He made, in fact, two trips, in 1853 and 1857, and discovered his great motif, the volcano of Cotopaxi. He painted it dozens of times, and in the end the effort of grappling with the utterly unfamiliar landscape of the Andes forced him to maturity as a painter. By 1866, when he set down the glittering double-arc rainbow that spans from bare mountain to jungle in Rainy Season in the Tropics, he had attained a rhetorical grandeur of painted space that...
...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...