CARLOS DE HAES ( 1829-1898)
Picos de Europa (2,445 m - 8,022 ft)
Spain (Asturias)
In A canal de Mancorbo en los Picos de Europa,1876, Museo nacional del Prado
About he painting
The place that appears in this painting lies at the foot of mount Andara, on the eastern side of Picos de Europa, above the village of Argüébanes in the Cantabrian county of Liébana. Haes fits the landscape’s geographical features into a clear structure of diagonal lines that brings out the stony peak rising from the back of the canal at the center of the composition, and flanked by the slopes of the two foothills in the foreground. The peak projects a shadow on the left foothill, that contrasts with the brightly illuminated face of the right one.
The Picos de la Europa (2,445 m - 8,022 ft) is a mountainous massif located in the north of Spain that belongs to the central part of the Cantabrian mountain range. Although not very extensive, its proximity to the sea makes it lavish in geographic features of great interest. Currently, the Picos de Europa National Park is the second most visited national park in Spain.
This limestone formation extends through Cantabria, León and the Principality of Asturias, and its heights stand out, in many cases above 2500 m, because of how close they are to the Cantabrian Sea, because at its northernmost point they are only a short distance away. 15 kilometers from the sea.
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.
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2019 - Wandering Vertexes...
A blog by Francis Rousseau
