CARLOS DE HAES (1829-1898)
Dôme de neige des Ecrins (4, 009 m - 13,153 ft)
France (Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes)
In Delfinado, oil on canvas, 1864, Museo del Prado, Madrid
About this painting
In the text of the Prado Museum about this painting, one can read :
"To the left, bordered by bushes and shrubs, a path through which several cows pass and that goes towards the bottom of the valley in which the settlement of a population among the forest mass can be guessed. Closing the composition, the high heights of the Cordillera that runs along the Dauphiné on whose summits persist snow patches that fade into the clarity of a clear sky dotted by some cloud."
The painting recalls a summit of the Ecrins Bar range, possibly the Dôme de Neiges des Ecrins (Ecrins snow dome) rather than the Ecrin bar itself...
The mountain
The Domes de neige des Ecrins (Ecrins snow dome) (4,009 m - 13, 154ft ) is an alpine peak at the foot of the Écrins Bar, at the border between the French departments of Isère and Hautes-Alpes in the Dauphiné region (Delfinado in spanish). The Blanc glacier is surrounded by peaks allowing you to get acquainted with the high mountains before the ascent of this "4000" and acclimatize your body to the altitude. The climb is usually from the Ecrins refuge (3,170 m) and takes three to four hours for trained alpinists. It is a glacial race without technical difficulty, except for the crossing of the summit rimaye, random.
The current climb record is 1 h 57 from the Carle yard (1,874 m), made by Mathéo Jacquemoud in June 2011; it improves the record of Kílian Jornet dating from 2005. The record for round-trip skiing in mountain is 2 h 46 from the meadow of Madame Carle, directed by Steven Blanc in May 2014
The painter
The spanish painter Carlos Sebastián Pedro Hubert de Haes was noted for the Realism in his landscapes, and was considered to be the "first contemporary Spanish artist able to capture something of a particularly Spanish 'essence' in his work". He was cited along with Jenaro Perez Villaamil and Aureliano de Beruete as one of the three Spanish grand masters of landscape painting, the latter of which was his pupil.
In the 1850s, Haes was involved in the rise of the Realist school of landscape. Coincidentally his landscape and wildlife paintings of the Monasterio de Piedra occurred at the time of an academic opening for the Painting School of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, the selection to be made by a landscape competition. In 1857 he became the first professor of landscape painting, the first in Spain to teach painting directly from nature. In 1860, he became an Academic at the Royal Academy. In 1876, he presented at the National Exhibition with La Canal de Mancorbo en los Picos de Europa ("The Canal of Mancorbo in the Picos de Europa") later acquired by the Spanish state to be part of the collection of the Museo del Prado, because of its significance as a realistic Spanish landscape painting.
2018 - Wandering Vertexes...
A blog by Francis Rousseau