AORAKI / MOUNT COOK (2) BY CHARLES BLOMFIELD

CHARLES BLOMFIELD (1848-1926) 

Aoraki / Mount Cook (3,724m - 12, 218ft) 

New Zealand

 In Mount Cook  from the Lake Pukaki, oil on canvas 

The mountain 

Aoraki / Mount Cook (3,724m - 12, 218ft)  is the highest mountain in New Zealand. Its height since 2014 is listed as 3,724 m since December 1991, due to a rockslide and subsequent erosion. It lies in the Southern Alps, the mountain range which runs the length of the South Island. A popular tourist destination, it is also a favourite challenge for mountain climbers. Aoraki / Mount Cook consists of three summits, from South to North the Low Peak (3,593 m or 11,788 ft), Middle Peak (3,717 m or 12,195 ft) and High Peak. The summits lie slightly south and east of the main divide of the Southern Alps, with the Tasman Glacier to the east and the Hooker Glacier to the southwest.The mountain is in the Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park, in the Canterbury region. The park was established in 1953 and along with Westland National Park, Mount Aspiring National Park and Fiordland National Park forms one of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The park contains more than 140 peaks standing over 2,000 metres (6,600 ft) and 72 named glaciers, which cover 40 percent of its 700 square kilometres (170,000 acres).

Aoraki is the name of a person in the traditions of the Ngāi Tahu iwi; an early name for the South Island is Te Waka o Aoraki (Aoraki's Canoe). In the past many believed it meant "Cloud Piercer",  Historically, the Māori name has been spelt Aorangi, using the standard Māori form.

Aoraki / Mount Cook has been known to Maori since their arrival in New Zealand some time around the 14th century CE. The first Europeans who may have seen Aoraki / Mount Cook were members of Abel Tasman's crew, who saw a "large land uplifted high" while off the west coast of the South Island, just north of present-day Greymouth on 13 December 1642 during Tasman's first Pacific voyage. The English name of Mount Cook was given to the mountain in 1851 by Captain John Lort Stokes to honour Captain James Cook who surveyed and circumnavigated the islands of New Zealand in 1770. Captain Cook did not sight the mountain during his exploration.
Following the settlement between Ngāi Tahu and the Crown in 1998, the name of the mountain was officially changed from Mount Cook to Aoraki / Mount Cook to incorporate its historic Māori name, Aoraki. As part of the settlement, a number of South Island placenames were amended to incorporate their original Māori name. Signifying the importance of Aoraki / Mount Cook, it is the only one of these names where the Māori name precedes the English.

The painter

Charles Blomfield  was a New Zealand decorator, artist and music teacher born in London, England.

A widow, Blomfield's mother brought her family to New Zealand in the 1860's intending to settle in Northland as part of a settlement called Albertland. On arrival in Auckland they decided not to proceed on Northland to become farmers but to pursue urban trades in Auckland. The family remained in Auckland after that and many of the descendants of the various children still reside in the Auckland area.

Charles Blomfield lived in Freeman's Bay - 40 Wood Street, in a house built by his brother and allegedly made out of the timber from one large Kauri tree. As well as an exhibiting easel painter Blomfield worked as a sign-writer and interior decorator; for this trade he maintained studios in shops at various times. These were usually on Karangahape Road, one of these was shared with his daughter who made a living painting floral pieces which she also exhibited at the Auckland Society of Arts.

Blomfield travelled throughout the centre of the North Island on several occasions in the 1870s and 80s creating many landscape paintings of the New Zealand countryside, often for sale to visitors to New Zealand.  He painted several times Mount Manaia and under different angles (see the painting already posted).He was fortunate to viewas well the famed Pink and White Terraces several times and paint them before they were destroyed by the eruption of Tarawera in 1886. His meticulous sketches and finished paintings are some of the main records of them (see above).  For the remainder of his life he was probably able to rely on new versions of his classic views of them to supplement his income.

His paintings are widely regarded as the epitome of 19th century New Zealand landscape art, although his work, like many of his contemporaries, fell out of fashion during the 20th century, only to be re-evaluated in the 1970s. He was unable to come to terms with developments in art and remained staunchly conservative and hostile to 'modern art'. In his later years he found himself increasingly sidelined by the artistic circles in Auckland which he had previously shone in and was probably embittered by this.

Blomfield died at his residence in Wood Street in 1926. He was survived by several children. One of his brothers, William, was a noted newspaper cartoonist.

KIYANJA / MOUNT BAKER BY VITTORIO SELLA

VITTORIO SELLA (1859-1943) 

Kiyanja or Mount Baker (4,844m- 15,892 ft) 

Uganda

1. In Mount Baker from the west,  1906,The Duke of the Abruzzi expedition 

2 In Mount Baker from Edward Peak,1906,The Duke of the Abruzzi expedition 

3. In Mount Baker, Lake on the west, 1906, The Duke of the Abruzzi expedition 

The mountain 
Kiyanja  or Mount Baker   (4,844m- 15,892 ft) is a mountain in the Rwenzori Mountains National Park in Uganda, 2.8 kilometres (1.7 mi) from the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is the sixth highest mountain in Africa. Together with Mount Stanley and Mount Speke, it forms a triangle enclosing the upper Bujuku Valley. The nearest peak is Mount Stanley, which is 2.26 kilometres (1.40 mi) to the west. The mountains lie within an area called "The Mountains of the Moon".
Like all peaks in the Ruwenzori Range, Mount Baker has multiple jagged peaks along a ridge. The highest is Edward Peak. The ridge line of Mount Baker was first reached in January 1906 by the Austrian mountaineer Rubert Grauer accompanied by two British missionaries, H. E. Maddox and H. W. Tegart. In February of that year and again in April, the same rocky point was reached by an English expedition, including Alexander F. R. Wollaston, A. B. Wosnam, and M. Carruthers. The highest point of Mount Baker was finally climbed in June by an expedition led by the Duke of the Abruzzi, with Vittorio Sella  which climbed all peaks of the other five highest mountains of the Rwenzori (photo above)
The Bakonjo name for the mountain seems to have been (and currently is) "Kiyanja". On his June 1891 expedition into the Ruwenzori, Franz Stuhlmann observed the peak and named it either "Semper" or "Ngemwimbi".  The Duke of the Abruzzi renamed the mountain after Samuel Baker, a 19th-century British explorer who in 1864 was the first European to sight and visit Lake Albert, just northeast of the Ruwenzori Mountains, and who had reported to glimpse "great mountainous masses away in the distance, to the south of Lake Albert."

The artist
Vittorio Sella is a mountain italian climber and photographer who took his passion for mountains from his uncle, Quintino Sella, founder of the Italian Alpine Club.  He accomplished many remarkable climbs in the Alps, the first wintering in the Matterhorn and Mount Rose (1882) and the first winter crossing of Mont Blanc (1888) and Les Rouies (1900).
He took part in various expeditions outside Italy:
- Three in the Caucasus in 1889, 1890 and 1896 where a summit still bears his name;
- The ascent of Mount Saint Elias in Alaska in 1897;
- Sikkim and Nepal in 1899;
- Possibly climb Mount Stanley in Uganda in 1906 during an expedition to the Rwenzori;
- Recognition at  K2   in 1909;
- In Morocco in 1925.
During expeditions in Alaska, Uganda and Karakoram, he accompanied the Duke of Abruzzi, Prince Luigi Amedeo di Savoia.
Sella continues the practice of climbing into his old age, completing his final attempt in the Matterhorn at the age of 76; a climb he had to interrupt the rise following an accident in which one of his guides injured. He died in his hometown during World War II.  His photographic collection is now managed by the Sella Foundation.
His photos mountain are still  considered today to be among the finest ever made.
Jim Curran believes that "Sella remains probably the greatest photographer of the mountain.  His name is synonymous with technical perfection and aesthetic refinement. "
The quality of the pictures of Vittorio Sella is partly explained by the use of a view camera 30 × 40 cm, despite the difficulty of the transportation of such a device, both heavy and fragile in places inaccessible; to be able to transport it safely, he had to make special pieces that can be stored in saddle bags.  His photographs have been widely distributed, either through the press or in the galleries, and were unanimously celebrated; Ansel Adams, who was able to admire thirty-one in an exhibition that was organized at Sella American Sierra Club, said they inspired him "a religious kind of sense of wonder."  Many of his pictures were taken in the mountains for the very first time in the History, which give them a much artistic, historical  but also scientific value ; for example, one could measure the decline in the Rwenzori glaciers in Central Africa.

CIRQUE D'ESTAUBÉ BY THEODORE ROUSSEAU

THEODORE ROUSSEAU (1812-1867)

Cirque d'Estaubé (1,800m - 3,280ft)

France (Occitanie) 

In the Pyrenees (Vue du Cirque d'Estaubé  en été ?), oil on paper laid on canvas,

 Portland Art Museum 

The cirque 
Le cirque d'Estaubé  (1800m- )est un cirque naturel des Pyrénées dans le département des Hautes-Pyrénées. Sa ligne de crête définit en partie la frontière franco-espagnole. Il protège une petite plaine, le plã d'Ailhet, au fond de la vallée d'Estaubé.  Les Principaux sommets de la crête  sont
le pic Rouge de Pailla (2 780 m) ;le grand Astazou (3 071 m) ; le pic de Tuquerouye ou pic de Tuquerouge (2 819 m) ; le pic de Pinède (2 860 m) ; le pic Blanc (2 828 m) ; le pic de la Canau (2 766 m) ; le soum de Port Bieil (2 846 m) ; les pics d'Estaubé (2 810 m).

The painter 

Etienne- Pierre-Théodore Rousseau was a French painter of the Barbizon school.  Not to be confused with Henri Rousseau (called Le Douanier), he was born in Paris, of a bourgeois family and received  at first a business training, but soon displayed aptitude for painting.  The influence of classically trained artists was against  Rousseau and its paintings had to wait until 1848 before to be presented adequately to the public.

In 1848, Rousseau took up his residence in the forest village of Barbizon, and spent most of his remaining days in the vicinity. He was now able to obtain fair sums for his pictures (but only about one-tenth of their value thirty years after his death), and the number of his admirers increased. He was still ignored by the authorities, for while Narcisse Virgilio Diaz was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1851,  Rousseau was left undecorated at this time, but was nominated and awarded the Cross soon afterwards. 

At the Exposition Universelle of 1853, where all Rousseau's rejected pictures of the previous twenty years were gathered together, his works were acknowledged to form one of the best of the many splendid groups there exhibited. But, after an unsuccessful sale of his works by auction in 1861, he contemplated leaving Paris for Amsterdam or London, or even New York. Rousseau's pictures are always grave in character, with an air of exquisite melancholy. They are well finished when they profess to be completed pictures, but Rousseau spent so much time developing his subjects that his absolutely completed works are comparatively few. He left many canvases with parts of the picture realized in detail and with the remainder somewhat vague; and also a good number of sketches and water-color drawings. His pen work in monochrome on paper is rare. There are a number of good pictures by him in the Louvre, and the Wallace collection contains one of his most important Barbizon pictures. There is also an example in the Ionides collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

THE THREE SISTERS (OREGON) BY ELIZA BARCHUS

ELIZA BARCHUS (1857-1959)

 The Three Sisters :  

South or Charity (3,158.5 m - 10,363 ft)

Middle or Hope (3,063.7 m - 10,052 ft) 

North or Faith (3,075.3 m - 10,090 ft) 

United States of America (Oregon) 

In Three Sisters, ca. 1890, oil on canvas, Portland Art  Museum 

The mountains 
The Three Sisters are volcanic peaks that form a complex volcano in the U.S. state of Oregon. They are part of the Cascade Volcanic Arc, a segment of the Cascade Range in western North America extending from southern British Columbia through Washington and Oregon to Northern California. Each more than 10,000 feet (3,000 m) in elevation, they are the third, fourth and fifth-highest peaks in Oregon. Located in the Three Sisters Wilderness at the boundary of Lane and Deschutes counties and the Willamette and Deschutes national forests, they are about 10 miles (16 km) south of the nearest town, Sisters. Diverse species of flora and fauna inhabit the area, which is subject to frequent snowfall, occasional rain, and extreme temperature variation between seasons. The mountains, particularly South Sister, are popular destinations for climbing and scrambling.
Although they are often grouped together as one unit, the three mountains have their own individual geology and eruptive history. Neither North Sister (also called Faith) nor Middle Sister (also called Hope )has erupted in the last 14,000 years. South Sister (also called Charity)  alst erupted about 2,000 years ago and might erupt in the future, threatening life within the region. After satellite imagery detected tectonic uplift near South Sister in 2000, the United States Geological Survey improved monitoring in the immediate area.
The Three Sisters area was occupied by Amerindians since the end of the last glaciation, mainly the Northern Paiute to the east and Molala to the west. They harvested berries, made baskets, hunted, and made obsidian arrowheads and spears. Traces of rock art can be seen at Devils Hill, south of South Sister. The first Westerner to discover the Three Sisters was the explorer Peter Skene Ogden of the Hudson Bay Company in 1825.

The painter 
Eliza Barchus was an American landscape painter who lived in Portland for most of her life.
After taking art lessons from another landscape painter, Will S. Parrott, Barchus sold her first painting in 1885. Between then and 1935, she produced thousands of oil paintings and reproductions of subjects such as Mount Hood, Yellowstone Falls, Muir Glacier, and San Francisco Bay.
Barchus, who had won medals at Mechanics Fairs in Portland in the late 1880s, drew national attention in 1890, when one of her large canvases of Mount Hood was displayed at the National Academy of Design exhibition in New York City. In 1901, several of her works were shown at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, and in 1905 she won a gold medal at the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland for oil paintings of Pacific coast scenery.
Widowed in 1899, Barchus supported herself and her family for decades largely by selling or trading her art. Several years after her death at age 102, the Oregon Legislative Assembly named her "The Oregon Artist". Many art collections in Portland and elsewhere include examples of her work.

BEN CRUACHAN BY THOMAS MILES RICHARDSON II

THOMAS MILES RICHARDSON II (1813-1890) 

Ben Cruachan (1,126 m- 3,964 ft)

United Kingdom (Scotland) 

  In Ben Cruachan, Loch Etive, 1836, watercolour and gouache, with graphite and gum arabic on brown paper, Portland Art museum 

The mountain 

Ben Cruachan (1,126 m- 3,964 ft) is the highest point in Argyll and Bute, Scotland. It gives its name to the Cruachan Dam, a pumped-storage hydroelectric power station located in a cavern inside the mountain, Cruachan! is the battle cry for Highland clans Campbell and MacIntyre. It is the high point of a ring of mountains, known as the Cruachan Horseshoe, that surrounds the power station reservoir. The horseshoe includes a further Munro (Stob Diamh), a Corbett (Beinn a' Bhuiridh), and several subsidiary summits.

 The painter 

Thomas Miles Richardson  was an English landscape-painter whose first notable picture was a ‘View of Newcastle from Gateshead Fell,’  purchased by the Newcastle corporation. In 1816 he began to illustrate with aquatints his brother's ‘Collection of Armorial Bearings … in the Chapel of St. Andrew, Newcastle-upon-Tyne’ which was published in 1818, and followed in 1820 by a larger work dealing with the church of St. Nicholas. In 1833 and 1834 he was engaged on a work on the ‘Castles of the English and Scottish Borders’ which he illustrated with mezzotints. These publications remained unfinished. Richardson became well known as a contributor to London exhibitions from 1818, when he sent his first picture to the Royal Academy, and was elected a member of the New Watercolour Society. His work was represented in public galleries at South Kensington, at Dublin, and at Liverpool.

MOUNT ASHIGARA / 足柄山 BY TSUKIOKA YOSHITOSHI / 月岡 芳年

TSUKIOKA YOSHITOSHI / 月岡 芳年 (1839-1892)  

Mount Ashigara / 足柄山  (1,215m- 3,978ft) 

Japan 

In Ashigarayama no tsuki u (Moon over Mount Ashigara), 1889.

The mountain 
Mount Ashigara (足柄山) (1,215m- 3,978ft) , also known as Mount Kintoki (金時山), is the northernmost peak of the Hakone caldera, on the border of Kanagawa and Shizuoka prefectures, in the Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park in Japan. Ashigara is not a remnant of the collapse of the old Hakone volcano itself, but rather a parasitic cone growing from its flank.
Mount Ashigara is the legendary birthplace of Kintarō.
The kanji of the mountain's name mean "Leg Handle Mountain"

The artist
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (月岡 芳年) also named Taiso Yoshitoshi (大蘇 芳年) was a Japanese artist.
He is widely recognized as the last great master of the ukiyo-e genre of woodblock printing and painting. He is also regarded as one of the form's greatest innovators. His career spanned two eras – the last years of Edo period Japan, and the first years of modern Japan following the Meiji Restoration. Like many Japanese, Yoshitoshi was interested in new things from the rest of the world, but over time he became increasingly concerned with the loss of many aspects of traditional Japanese culture, among them traditional woodblock printing.
By the end of his career, Yoshitoshi was in an almost single-handed struggle against time and technology. As he worked on in the old manner, Japan was adopting Western mass reproduction methods like photography and lithography. Nonetheless, in a Japan that was turning away from its own past, he almost singlehandedly managed to push the traditional Japanese woodblock print to a new level, before it effectively died with him.
His reputation has only continued to grow, both in the West, and among younger Japanese, and he is now almost universally recognized as the greatest Japanese artist of his era.

LAGAZUOI PAINTED BY GEORGE INNESS

 GEORGE INNESS (1825-1884) 

Lagazuoi (2,835m- 9,301ft) 

Italy

 In Apezzo Pass, Titian's House, 1876, oil on canvas,  Portland Art Museum

The mountain

Lagazuoi  (2,835m- 9,301ft) is a mountain in the Dolomites of northern Italy, about 18 kilometres (11 mi) southwest by road from Cortina d'Ampezzo in the Veneto Region. It is accessible by cable car and contains the Rifugio Lagazuoi, a mountain refuge situated beyond the northwest corner of Cima del Lago. The mountain range is well known for its wartime tunnels and First World War mine warfare. The extensive tunnels were built by the Italian troops trying to wrest control from Austro-Hungarian troops who also built tunnels. The tunnels are now open as a de facto museum.

The painter 

 George Inness was one of the most influential American artists of the nineteenth century, often called "the father of American landscape painting"  . He was influenced, in turn, by the Old Masters, the Hudson River school, the Barbizon school, and, finally, the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose spiritualism found vivid expression in the work of Inness's maturity (1879–1894). Although Inness’s style evolved through distinct stages over a prolific career that spanned more than forty years and 1,000 paintings, his works consistently earned acclaim for their powerful, coordinated efforts to elicit depth of mood, atmosphere, and emotion. Neither pure realist nor impressionist, Inness was a transitional figure who intended for his works to combine both the earthly and the ethereal in order to capture the complete essence of a locale. A master of light, color, and shadow, he became noted for creating highly ordered and complex scenes that often juxtaposed hazy or blurred elements with sharp and refined details to evoke an interweaving of both the physical and the spiritual nature of experience. In Inness’s words, he attempted through his art to demonstrate the "reality of the unseen” and to connect the "visible upon the invisible."

Within his own lifetime, art critics hailed Inness as one of America's greatest artists. Inness is best known for his mature works that not only exemplified the Tonalist movement but also displayed an original and uniquely American style.

MOUNT ST HILARION BY DAVID BOMBERG

DAVID BOMBERG (1890-1957) 

Mount St Hilarion (732 m - 2,401 ft)

Cyprus

 In Mount St Hilarion- Cyprus, oil on canvas, 

The hill

Mount St Hilarion (732 m - 2,401 ft)  is the name of the hill where the Saint Hilarion Castle was built. it  lies on the Kyrenia mountain range, in Cyprus. This location provided the castle with command of the pass road from Kyrenia to Nicosia. It is the best preserved ruin of the three former strongholds in the Kyrenia mountains, the others being Kantara and Buffavento.

The castle is not named after St. Hilarion, active in Palestine and Cyprus in the 4th century. It was named after an obscure saint, who is traditionally held to have fled to Cyprus after the Arab conquest of the Holy Land and retired to the hilltop on which the castle was built for hermitage. 

Starting in the 11th century, the Byzantines began fortification. Saint Hilarion formed the defense of the island with the castles of Buffavento and Kantara against Arab pirates raiding the coast. Some sections were further upgraded under the Lusignan rule, who may have used it as a summer residence. During the rule of Lusignans, the castle was the focus of a four-year struggle between Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and Regent John d' Ibelin for control of Cyprus.

The painter 

David Garshen Bomberg  was an English painter, and one of the Whitechapel Boys. He was one of the most audacious of the exceptional generation of artists who studied at the Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks, and which included Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, C.R.W. Nevinson and Dora Carrington.[  Bomberg painted a series of complex geometric compositions combining the influences of cubism and futurism in the years immediately preceding World War I; typically using a limited number of striking colours, turning humans into simple, angular shapes, and sometimes overlaying the whole painting a strong grid-work colouring scheme. He was expelled from the Slade School of Art in 1913, with agreement between the senior teachers Tonks, Frederick Brown and Philip Wilson Steer, because of the audacity of his breach from the conventional approach of that time.

Whether because his faith in the machine age had been shattered by his experiences as a private soldier in the trenches or because of the pervasive retrogressive attitude towards modernism in Britain Bomberg moved to a more figurative style in the 1920s and his work became increasingly dominated by portraits and landscapes drawn from nature. Gradually developing a more expressionist technique, he travelled widely through the Middle East and Europe.
From 1945 to 1953, he worked as a teacher at Borough Polytechnic (now London South Bank University) in London, where his pupils included Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Philip Holmes, Cliff Holden, Edna Mann, Dorothy Mead, Gustav Metzger, Dennis Creffield, Cecil Bailey and Miles Richmond. David Bomberg House, one of the student halls of residences at London South Bank University, is named in his honor.

MOUNT HOOD / WY'EAST BY ALBERT BIERSTADT

ALBERT BIERSTADT (1830-1902)

Mount Hood  / Wy 'east (3,429m - 11, 249ft)
United States of America (Oregon) 

 In Mount Hood, 1869, oil on canvas,  Portland Art Museum

About this Painting

In Mount Hood, Bierstadt characteristically exaggerates the height of the mountain and includes several landscape elements that could not be viewed from a single site along the Columbia River Gorge. For example, Mount Hood is painted as though seen from the northern shore of the Columbia River and Multnomah Falls, but the profile of the mountain is actually the one seen from Portland, and featured in a Childe Hassam painting nearby. The drama and monumentality of the far West, as a metaphor, was more important to Bierstadt than geographic accuracy.

In Notice from he Portland Art Museum 

The mountain 

 Mount Hood (3,429m - 11, 249ft) called Wy'east by the Multnomah tribe, is a potentially active stratovolcano in the Cascade Volcanic Arc of northern Oregon. It was formed by a subduction zone on the Pacific coast and rests in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It is located about 50 miles (80 km) east-southeast of Portland, on the border between Clackamas and Hood River counties. In addition to being Oregon's highest mountain, it is one of the loftiest mountains in the nation based on its prominence.

The height assigned to Mount Hood's snow-covered peak has varied over its history. Modern sources point to three different heights: 11,249 feet (3,429 m), a 1991 adjustment of a 1986 measurement by the U.S. National Geodetic Survey,  11,240 feet (3,426 m) based on a 1993 scientific expedition,and 11,239 feet (3,425.6 m) of slightly older origin. 

The peak is home to 12 named glaciers and snowfields. It is the highest point in Oregon and the fourth highest in the Cascade Range. Mount Hood is considered the Oregon volcano most likely to erupt, though based on its history, an explosive eruption is unlikely. Still, the odds of an eruption in the next 30 years are estimated at between 3 and 7 %, so the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) characterizes it as "potentially active", but the mountain is informally considered dormant.

The painter 

Albert Bierstadt was a German-born American painter. He was brought to the United States at the age of one by his parents. He later returned to study painting for several years in Düsseldorf. At an early age Bierstadt developed a taste for art and made clever crayon sketches in his youth. 

In 1851, he began to paint in oils. He became part of the Hudson River School in New York, an informal group of like-minded painters who started painting along this scenic river. Their style was based on carefully detailed paintings with romantic, almost glowing lighting, sometimes called luminism. An important interpreter of the western landscape, Bierstadt, along with Thomas Moran, is also grouped with the Rocky Mountain School.

Despite his popular success, Bierstadt was criticized by some contemporaries for the romanticism evident in his choices of subject and his use of light was felt to be excessive. 

In 1882 Bierstadt's studio at Irvington, New York, was destroyed by fire, resulting in the loss of many of his paintings. By the time of his death on February 18, 1902, the taste for epic landscape painting had long since subsided. Bierstadt was then largely forgotten. He was buried at the Rural Cemetery in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Interest in his work was renewed in the 1960s, with the exhibition of his small oil studies. The subsequent reassessment of Bierstadt's work has placed it in a favorable context.

Bierstadt's theatrical art, fervent sociability, international outlook, and unquenchable personal energy reflected the epic expansion in every facet of western civilization during the second half of the nineteenth century.

Bierstadt was a prolific artist, having completed over 500 paintings during his lifetime. Many of these are held by museums across the United States.

PUY DE LA TACHE BY CAMILLE COROT

CAMILLE COROT  (1796-1875) 

Puy de la Tache (1,629m - 5,344 ft) 

France (Auvergne) 

About the painting
This painting by Corot entitled  Montagnes d'Auvergne is probably the Puy de la Tache (Puy of the Task) not to be confused with Puy de la Vache  (Puy of the Cow) also painted by Corot in his series untitled Montagnes d'Auvergne. Those attributions, however, must be taken with care, nothing more like an Auvergne volcano than another Auvergne volcano !

The mountain 
The Puy de la Tache (1,629m - 5,344 ft) is located in the Massif Central in the Puy de Dôme department. and is part of the Chaine des Puy. which are ancient volcanoes.  It dominates the pass of the Cross Morand. A short walk back and forth from the pass allows you to climb to the top. No difficulty apart steep slope in places but the climb is done without any problem. Nice view of Lake Guéry and many other volcanoes when the sky is clear. You can also extend the hike by following the ridges and climbing on several other volcanoes.

The painter 

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875), French landscape and portrait painter as well as a printmaker in etching,  is a pivotal figure in landscape painting.  His vast output simultaneously refers the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipates the plein-air innovations of Impressionism.

Camille Corot, no doubt attracted by the mythical aspect of Monte Soratte, painted it several times during his first stay in Italy between 1825 and 1830.  Three of these representations are published in this blog today; although all painted  between 1826 and 1827, they are very different from each other, they were painted at different times of the year ant different hours of the day as he used to do.  The first presented here, apparently painted during summertime, has an almost Cézanian appearance !

Indeed, with his parents' support, Corot followed the well-established pattern of French painters who went to Italy to study the masters of the Italian Renaissance and to draw the crumbling monuments of Roman antiquity.  A condition by his parents before leaving was that he paint a self-portrait for them, his first.  During  his stay in Italy, Corot completed over 200 drawings and 150 paintings !   

Corot learned little from the Renaissance masters (though later he cited Leonardo da Vinci as his favorite painter) and spent most of his time around Rome and in the Italian countryside.  The Farnese Gardens with its splendid views of the ancient ruins was a frequent destination, and he painted it at three different times of the day, like Monte Soratte.  The training was particularly valuable in gaining an understanding of the challenges of both the mid-range and panoramic perspective, and in effectively placing man-made structures in a natural setting.   He also learned how to give buildings and rocks the effect of volume and solidity with proper light and shadow, while using a smooth and thin technique.  

In his aversion to shocking color, Corot sharply diverged from the up-and-coming Impressionists, who embraced experimentation with vivid hues.

The works of Corot are housed in museums in France and the Netherlands, Britain, North America and Russia.

2018 - Wandering Vertexes...

by Francis Rousseau 

CHAPMAN'S PEAK BY DOUGLAS TREASURE

DOUGLAS TREASURE (1917 -1995) 

Chapman's Peak (592 m- 1,909 ft)

South Africa

 In  Boats in Hot bay with Chapman's peak in the mist, watercolour, 1950 

The mountain 
Chapman's Peak (592 m- 1,909ft ) is the name of a mountain on the western side of the Cape Peninsula, between Hout Bay and Noordhoek in Cape Town, South Africa. The western flank of the mountain falls sharply for hundreds of metres into the Atlantic Ocean, and a spectacular road, known as Chapman's Peak Drive, hugs the near-vertical face of the mountain, linking Hout Bay to Noordhoek.  Chapman's Peak is named after John Chapman, the pilot of an English ship becalmed in today's Hout Bay in 1607. The skipper sent his pilot ashore to find provisions, and the name was recorded as Chapman's Chaunce.
Chapman's Peak Drive was hacked out of the face of the mountain between 1915 and 1922, and at the time was regarded as a major feat of engineering.  The road was closed in the 1990s, after a rockfall caused a death and a subsequent lawsuit,  and was reopened  in 2005 as a toll road.

The painter 
Douglas Treasure obtained his formal training at the Port Elisabeth School of Art. A commercial art career included extensive experience as a illustrator, designer, visualiser and finally art director of a major company. During this time his love of watercolour landscape painting flourished, and in 1973 he retired from advertising in order to become a full-time professional painter. Douglas Treasure is the only South African represented in best selling British Author Ron Ransom's new book, Watercolour Impressionists. His works are represented in private collections in England, America, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Australia and Argentina.

AKNA MOUNTES BY NASA MAGELLAN MISSION

NASA MAGELLAN MISSION (1989-1994) 

Akna Mountes (6,000 m / 6km - 19, 685ft / 3, 72mi)

VENUS

The mountain
Akna Montes are a mountain range on Venus centered at 68.9°N, 318.2°E and stretching 830 km long. It is culminating at 6,000 m / 6km -  19, 685ft / 3, 72mi). The Akna range is a north-south trending ridge belt that forms the western border of the elevated smooth plateau of Lakshmi Planum. The Lakshmi plateau plains are formed by extensive volcanic eruptions and are bounded by mountain chains on all sides. The plains appear to be deformed near the mountains. This suggests that some of the mountain building activity occurred after the plains formed. On the Magellan radar image  (above) of the northern portion of the Akna Montes, the round feature is the crater Wanda.

The mission
Magellan was launched on May 4, 1989, at 18:46:59 UTC by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration from KSC Launch Complex 39B at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis during mission STS-30. Once in orbit, the Magellan and its attached Inertial Upper Stage booster were deployed from Atlantis and launched on May 5, 1989 01:06:00 UTC, sending the spacecraft into a Type IV heliocentric orbit where it would circle the Sun 1.5 times, before reaching Venus 15 months later on August 10, 1990.
Originally, the Magellan had been scheduled for launch in 1988 with a trajectory lasting six months. However, due to the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986, several missions, including Galileo and Magellan, were deferred until shuttle flights resumed in September 1988. Magellan was planned to be launched with a liquid-fueled, Centaur-G upper-stage booster, carried in the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle. However, the entire Centaur-G program was canceled after the Challenger disaster, and the Magellan probe had to be modified to be attached to the less-powerful Inertial Upper Stage. The next best opportunity for launching occurred in October 1989.
Further complicating the launch however, was the launching of the Galileo mission to Jupiter, one that included a fly-by of Venus. Intended for launch in 1986, the pressures to ensure a launch for Galileo in 1989, mixed with a short launch-window necessitating a mid-October launch, resulted in replanning the Magellan mission. Weary of rapid shuttle launches, the decision was made to launch Magellan in May, and into an orbit that would require one year, three months, before encountering Venus.
On August 7, 1990, Magellan encountered Venus and began the orbital insertion maneuver which placed the spacecraft into a three-hour, nine minute, elliptical orbit that brought the spacecraft 295-kilometers from the surface at about 10 degrees North during the periapsis and out to 7762-kilometers during apoapsis
On September 9, 1994, a press release outlined the termination of the Magellan mission. Due to the degradation of the power output from the solar arrays and onboard components, and having completed all objectives successfully, the mission was to end in mid-October. The termination sequence began in late August 1994, with a series of orbital trim maneuvers which lowered the spacecraft into the outermost layers of the Venusian atmosphere to allow the Windmill experiment to begin on September 6, 1994.

EL COTACACHI VOLCANO BY RAFAEL TR0YA

RAFAEL TROYA (1845-1920)

El Cotacachi (4,944 m-16,220 ft)

Ecuador

 In El Cotacache.Vista tomada de Chorlaví (Pva. de Imbabura), 1913 ,

Archivo Histórico del Banco Central del Ecuador, Quito. Colección Bertha Troya de Pazmiño, Quito

The mountain 
Cotacachi (4,944 m-16,220 ft) is a dormant volcano in the Western Cordillera of the northern Ecuadorian Andes, in the west of Imbabura Province, above the city of Cotacachi. It has a summit elevation of 4,944 m (16,220 ft) above sea level and its highest elevations are capped with snow.
The summit of Cotacachi is located within the Cotacachi Cayapas Ecological Reserve. It was first climbed on 24 April 1880 by Edward Whymper, Jean-Antoine Carrel and Louis Carrel.[2]

The painter 
Rafael Troya (1845-1920) was an Ecuadorian painter born, the son of the painter Vicente Troya. Being a teenager, he is taken to the Colegio de la Compañia de Jesus in Quito, but he soon abandons the clerical career to dedicate himself to what was his true vocation: painting. With the painter Luis Cadena, he learns the technique of colors. In 1872, he definitely choose the landscape and accompanied  Reis and Stübel on their study trips in Ecuador on Nature and Archeology. Troya becomes the portraitist of nature, painting compositions full of color and life. In 1890 he came back in the capital of Imbabureña, and decided to be completely dedicated to his art. There he made several masterpieces, such as the paintings on the Apostles, which today are admired in the Ibarra Cathedral, the Ibarra Foundation, preserved in the Hall of the city of Ibarra; Allegory of love, panoramic view of Ibarra; The earthquake of Imbabura, and several religious canvases that are conserved in some churches of Quito, in the church of Caranqui and in the Museum of the Central Bank of Quito. In his paintings, green and bluish tones predominate, characteristic of his native land. He painted a lot of mountains of the Andes and  the most famous volcanoes of the Cordillera.

_______________________________
2018 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau

MOUNT CHOCORUA PAINTED BY ASHER BROWN DURAND

ASHER BROWN DURAND (1796-1886)

Mount  Chocorua (1,061m - 3,480 ft)
United States of America (New Hampshire)  

In  Chocorua Peak,  oil  on canvas, 1855, RISD Museum

About this painting 

Asher B. Durand spent the summer of 1855 in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, staying at North Conway, near Mount Chocorua. It was the first return to the region in many years for this senior and most admired painter of the American landscape. The stark view of Mount Chocorua, a summit known for its sheer precipices, was unusual for Durand, who often enlivened his landscapes with small figures. He also avoided the dramatic potential of weather, concentrating instead on the mountain’s harsh profile. Conscious of the uniqueness of the American landscape, Durand published advice to younger painters that same year. In his “Letters on Landscape Painting” he urged them to work directly from nature and to “go not abroad” but concentrate instead on indigenous resources and the scenery of their native land.

The painter 

Asher Brown Durand was an American painter of the Hudson River School. His main interest changed from engraving to oil painting about 1830 with the encouragement of his patron, Luman Reed. During 1837, he accompanied his friend Thomas Cole on a sketching expedition to Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks Mountains and soon after he began to concentrate on landscape painting. He spent summers sketching in the Catskills, Adirondacks, and the White Mountains of New Hampshire, making hundreds of drawings and oil sketches that were later incorporated into finished academy pieces which helped to define the Hudson River School.

Durand is remembered particularly for his detailed portrayals of trees, rocks, and foliage. He was an advocate for drawing directly from nature with as much realism as possible. Durand wrote, "Let [the artist] scrupulously accept whatever [nature] presents him until he shall, in a degree, have become intimate with her infinity...never let him profane her sacredness by a willful departure from truth."

Like other Hudson River School artists, Durand also believed that nature was an ineffable manifestation of God. He expressed this sentiment and his general opinions on art in his essay "Letters on Landscape Painting" in The Crayon, a mid-19th century New York art periodical.

The mountain 
Mount Chocorua (1,061m - 3,480 ft) is a summit in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the easternmost peak of the Sandwich Range. Although the range is not outstanding for its elevation, it is very rugged and has excellent views of the surrounding lakes, mountains, and forests. Mount Chocorua's bare summit can be seen from almost every direction and can be identified from many points throughout central New Hampshire and western Maine.
It is believed that Chocorua was the name of a Native American man in the 18th century, although no authentic records of his life exist. The usual story is that in about 1720 Chocorua was on friendly terms with settlers and in particular the Campbell family that had a home in the valley now called Tamworth. Chocorua was called away and left his son in the care of the Campbell family. The boy found and drank a poison that Mr. Campbell had made to eliminate troublesome foxes, and Chocorua returned to find his son had died. Chocorua, distraught with grief, pledged revenge on the family. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Campbell returned home one afternoon to find his wife and children had been slain. Campbell suspected Chocorua and pursued him up the mountain that today bears his name. Chocorua was wounded by a shot from Campbell's rifle. Before Campbell could reach Chocorua, he uttered a curse upon the white settlers and their homes, livestock, and crops, and leapt from the summit to his death. There are at least three other versions of the legend of Chocorua...
Mount Chocorua is a popular destination for hikers. Although it is under 3,500 feet (1,100 m) in elevation, its bare and rocky summit commands excellent views in all directions. Since most trails begin at much lower elevations, a hike to the summit is a strenuous exercise. There are many trails up the mountain, and they can be quite crowded during the summer months. Especially popular are the Piper Trail (4.2 miles (6.8 km) each way from the east), the Champney Falls Trail (from the north), and the Liberty Trail (from the southwest).

PUEBLO PEAK PAINTED BY WILLIAM VICTOR HIGGINS

WILLIAM VICTOR HIGGINS (1884-1949)

Pueblo Peak  (2,631m - 8,632ft)

United States of America (Oregon / Nevada) 

In Taos, New Mexico, 1921, oil on canvas, RISD Museum

The mountain 
Pueblo Peak (2,631m - 8,632ft) to Pueblo Mountain is the highest point of the Pueblo Mountains, a remote mountain range in the United States located mostly in southeastern Oregon and partially in northwestern Nevada. Most land in the Pueblo Mountains is managed by the federal Bureau of Land Management.
While there is no designated wilderness area in the Pueblo Mountains, traveling in the mountains can be very challenging. The Desert Trail runs through the mountains; however, it is not a developed hiking trail. The route is simply marked by rock cairns that serve as guideposts. The cairns were built as a cooperative venture between the Bureau of Land Management, the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, and the Desert Trail Association (a private organization). The Desert Trail Association publishes a topographic map for hikers that gives directions for orienteering from cairn to cairn.
Cattle and sheep grazing in the Pueblo Mountains began when the first ranches were established along the eastern edge of the mountains in the mid-1860s.
Miners were among the first to explore the Pueblo Mountains. There are at least 18 locations where mining took place in the past.
Wind power is now being explored in the Pueblo Mountains. The test allowed a private wind energy company to install, operate, and maintain two meteorological poles.

 The painter 
William Victor Higgins was an American painter and teacher, born at Shelbyville, Indiana. He studied at the Art Institute in Chicago and at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts.
In Paris he was a pupil of Robert Henri, René Menard and Lucien Simon, and when he was in Munich he studied with Hans von Hayek.  He was an associate of the National Academy of Design. Higgins moved to Taos, New Mexico in 1913 and joined in 1917 the Taos Society of Artists  founded  two years before by Joseph Henry Sharp, W. Herbert Dunton, Eanger Irving Couse et Oscar Edmund Berninghaus.
In 1923 he founded The Hartwood Foundation with Louise Harwood and Bert Phillips. He then painted a lot of works representing the mountains range surrounding the city of Taos and especially the Pueblo Mountains.

During the Depression, he was commissioned to paint a mural inside the Taos County Courthouse financed by the PWAP, titled Moises, El Legislador.

SGOR GAOITH (CAIRNGORMS) BY DAVID BOMBERG

DAVID BOMBERG (1890-1957) 

Sgòr Gaoith (1,118 m (3,668 ft)

 United Kingdom (Scotland) 

In the Cairngorms, late summer , oil on canvas, Tate, London

The mountain 

Sgòr Gaoith (1,118 m (3,668 ft) is a mountain in the western massif of the Cairngorms, and is separated from the Braeriach massif by the broad valley of Glen Einich. The second-highest summit of the mountain is Sgoran Dubh Mòr (1,111 m), which lies 1.3 km away due NNE along the summit ridge. The eastern side of Sgòr Gaoith is girded by steep cliffs which plunge down to Loch Einich; the western side is composed of heather slopes and a number of shallow corries.

The Cairngorms are a mountain range in the eastern Highlands of Scotland, consisting of high plateaux at about 1000–1200 m above sea level, above which domed summits. Many of the summits have tors, free-standing rock outcrops that stand on top of the boulder-strewn landscape. The edges of the plateaux are in places steep cliffs of granite and they are excellent for skiing, rock climbing and ice climbing. The Cairngorms form an arctic-alpine mountain environment, with tundra-like characteristics and long-lasting snow patches.
The range lies in the Scottish council areas of Aberdeenshire, Moray and Highland, and within the counties of Aberdeenshire, Inverness-shire and Banffshire.

The painter 

David Garshen Bomberg  was an English painter, and one of the Whitechapel Boys. He was one of the most audacious of the exceptional generation of artists who studied at the Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks, and which included Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, C.R.W. Nevinson and Dora Carrington.[  Bomberg painted a series of complex geometric compositions combining the influences of cubism and futurism in the years immediately preceding World War I; typically using a limited number of striking colours, turning humans into simple, angular shapes, and sometimes overlaying the whole painting a strong grid-work colouring scheme. He was expelled from the Slade School of Art in 1913, with agreement between the senior teachers Tonks, Frederick Brown and Philip Wilson Steer, because of the audacity of his breach from the conventional approach of that time.

Whether because his faith in the machine age had been shattered by his experiences as a private soldier in the trenches or because of the pervasive retrogressive attitude towards modernism in Britain Bomberg moved to a more figurative style in the 1920s and his work became increasingly dominated by portraits and landscapes drawn from nature. Gradually developing a more expressionist technique, he travelled widely through the Middle East and Europe.
From 1945 to 1953, he worked as a teacher at Borough Polytechnic (now London South Bank University) in London, where his pupils included Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Philip Holmes, Cliff Holden, Edna Mann, Dorothy Mead, Gustav Metzger, Dennis Creffield, Cecil Bailey and Miles Richmond. David Bomberg House, one of the student halls of residences at London South Bank University, is named in his honor.

FUJIYAMA / 富士山 (n°4) BY HOKUSAI

                                               KATSUSHIKA HOKUSAI (1760–1849) 

Fujiyama / 富士山 (3, 776 m -12,389 ft)

Japan

Asakusa Honganji temple in the Eastern capital, n°4 from the series 

36 Views of Mount Fuji (1830- 32),  woodblock print, ink and color on paper, 1930 edition, 

About the 36 Views of Mt Fuji 
Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (富嶽三十六景 Fugaku Sanjūrokkei) is a series of landscape prints　created by the Japanese ukiyo-e artist Hokusai (1760? - 1849).
The series depicts Mount Fuji from different locations and in various seasons and weather conditions. The original thirty-six prints were so popular that Hokusai expanded the series by ten.
The earliest impressions appear faded when compared to the versions usually seen, but are closer to Hokusai's original conception. The original prints have a deliberately uneven blue sky, which increases the sky's brightness and gives movement to the clouds. The peak is brought forward with a halo of Prussian blue. Subsequent prints have a strong, even blue tone and the printer added a new block, overprinting the white clouds on the horizon with light blue. Later prints also typically employ a strong benigara (Bengal red) pigment, which lent the painting its common name of Red Fuji. The green block colour was recut, lowering the meeting point between forest and mountain slope.


The artist
Katsushika Hokusai (葛飾 北斎)  was a Japanese artist, ukiyo-e painter and printmaker of the Edo period. He was influenced by such painters as Sesshu, and other styles of Chinese painting. Born in Edo (now Tokyo), Hokusai is best known as author of the woodblock print series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (富嶽三十六景 c. 1831) which includes the internationally recognized print, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, created during the 1820s.
Hokusai created the "Thirty-Six Views of Mt Fuji " both as a response to a domestic travel boom and as part of a personal obsession with Mount Fuji. In this series, Mt Fuji is painted on different meteorological conditions, in different hours of the days, in different seasons and from different places.


The mountain 
This is the legendary Mount Fuji or Fujiyama (富士山).
It is located on Honshu Island and is the highest mountain peak in Japan at 3,776.24 m (12,389 ft). Several names are attributed to it:  "Fuji-san", "Fujiyama" or, redundantly, "Mt. Fujiyama". Usually Japanese speakers refer to the mountain as "Fuji-san".  The other Japanese names for Mount Fuji,  have become obsolete or poetic like: Fuji-no-Yama (ふじの山 - The Mountain of Fuji), Fuji-no-Takane (ふじの高嶺- The High Peak of Fuji), Fuyō-hō (芙蓉峰 - The Lotus Peak), and Fugaku (富岳／富嶽), created by combining the first character of 富士, Fuji, and 岳, mountain.
Mount Fuji is an active stratovolcano that last erupted in 1707–08. Mount Fuji lies about 100 kilometres (60 mi) south-west of Tokyo, and can be seen from there on a clear day.
Mount Fuji's exceptionally symmetrical cone, which is snow-capped several months a year, is a well-known symbol of Japan and it is frequently depicted in art and photographs, as well as visited by sightseers and climbers.
Mount Fuji is one of Japan's Three Holy Mountains (三霊山) along with Mount Tate and Mount Haku. It is also a Special Place of Scenic Beauty and one of Japan's Historic Sites.
It was added to the World Heritage List as a Cultural Site on June 22, 2013. As per UNESCO, Mount Fuji has “inspired artists and poets and been the object of pilgrimage for centuries”. UNESCO recognizes 25 sites of cultural interest within the Mt. Fuji locality. These 25 locations include the mountain itself, Fujisan Hongū Sengen Shrine and six other Sengen shrines, two lodging houses, Lake Yamanaka, Lake Kawaguchi, the eight Oshino Hakkai hot springs, two lava tree molds, the remains of the Fuji-kō cult in the Hitoana cave, Shiraito Falls, and Miho no Matsubara pine tree grove; while on the low alps of Mount Fuji lies the Taisekiji temple complex, where the central base headquarters of Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism is located.



VESUVIUS PAINTED BY CLAUDE-LOUIS CHATELET

CLAUDE-LOUIS CHATELET (1753-1795)

 Mount Vesuvius (1, 281m - 4,203 ft current)

Italy

In  Vue du Vésuve et de la Baie de Naples, Oil on canvas, 1781, Private collection 

The mountain 

Mount Vesuvius (1,281 meters- 4,203 ft current) is one of those legendary and mythic mountains  the Earth paid regularly tribute. Monte Vesuvio in Italian modern langage or Mons Vesuvius in antique Latin langage is a stratovolcano in the Gulf of Naples (Italy) about 9 km (5.6 mi) east of Naples and a short distance from the shore. 

It is one of several volcanoes which form the Campanian volcanic arc. Vesuvius consists of a large cone partially encircled by the steep rim of a summit caldera caused by the collapse of an earlier and originally much higher structure.

Mount Vesuvius is best known for its eruption in AD 79 that led to the burying and destruction of the Roman antique cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and several other settlements. That eruption ejected a cloud of stones, ash, and fumes to a height of 33 km (20.5 mi), spewing molten rock and pulverized pumice at the rate of 1.5 million tons per second, ultimately releasing a hundred thousand times the thermal energy released by the Hiroshima bombing. At least 1,000 people died in the eruption. The only surviving eyewitness account of the event consists of two letters by Pliny the Younger to the historian Tacitus.

Vesuvius has erupted many times since and is the only volcano on the European mainland to have erupted within the last hundred years. Nowadays, it is regarded as one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world because of the population of 3,000,000 people living nearby and its tendency towards explosive eruptions (said Plinian eruptions). It is the most densely populated volcanic region in the world.

Vesuvius was formed as a result of the collision of two tectonic plates, the African and the Eurasian. The former was subducted beneath the latter, deeper into the earth. As the water-saturated sediments of the oceanic African plate were pushed to hotter depths in the earth, the water boiled off and caused the melting point of the upper mantle to drop enough to create partial melting of the rocks. Because magma is less dense than the solid rock around it, it was pushed upward. Finding a weak place at the Earth's surface it broke through, producing the volcano.

he area around Vesuvius was officially declared a national park on June 5, 1995. The summit of Vesuvius is open to visitors and there is a small network of paths around the mountain that are maintained by the park authorities on weekends.

There is access by road to within 200 metres (660 ft) of the summit (measured vertically), but thereafter access is on foot only. There is a spiral walkway around the mountain from the road to the crater.

The first funicular cable car on Mount Vesuvius opened in 1880. It was later destroyed by the 1944 eruption. "Funiculì, Funiculà", a famous Neapolitan song with lyrics by journalist Peppino Turco set to music by composer Luigi Denza, commemorates its opening. 

The painter 
The french artist Claude-Louis Châtelet,  died guillotined May 7, 1795, is a painter, draftsman and engraver French. He first distinguished himself by his contribution to the monumental work edited by the influential farmer general Jean-Benjamin de La Borde, Topographical Tables of Switzerland, commented by Baron Zurlauben around 1776. Then he became one of the favorite painters of Queen Marie-Antoinette, who commissioned him a number of illustrations of albums depicting the Trianon and its gardens, albums offered by the Queen to her distinguished visitors.
Châtelet is also known for many animated landscapes of Italy and England.
The paintings and drawings of Claude-Louis Châtelet reveal a technique, a talent and a style of a high degree of accomplishment. The characters animating the landscapes blend with charm and poetry in an atmosphere where dense foliage and fertile nature contrast with the geometric mastery of buildings and architectural elements. The games of light and shadow give these paintings a spatial depth and a perspective in which the gaze is lost, going from one group of characters to another and lingering on stair steps or some sumptuous abode. without having breathed the scent of a nature always present and reassuring. This painter, because of his short existence and his political engagements, has left posterity too limited a production to be retained by the history of art as an important figure in the painting of the eighteenth century French. However, his style and mastery, his connections and his talent, could have made, like Hubert Robert, one of the most eminent and endearing painters of this century, if only he had dedicated all his energy to the nobility of his art.

SNEEUBERG & TAFELBERG BY HUGO NAUDE

HUGO NAUDÉ ( 1869-1938) 

Sneeuberg (2,026 m - 6, 647 ft)
Tafelberg (1,969 m- 6,460 ft)

South Africa 

 In  Cederberg mountains range, oil on canvas, 1910, Private collection 

The mountain 
The Sneeuberg (2,026 m - 6, 647 ft)  is a mountain  located in the Cederberg mountains range, South Afirca, the highest point of the Cederberg mountains, the second one being Tafelberg (1,969 m- 6,460 ft) which should not be confused with the Table Mountain in Cape Town.
The Cederberg mountains and nature reserve are located near Clanwilliam, approximately 300 km north of Cape Town. The mountain range is named after the endangered Clanwilliam cedar (Widdringtonia cedarbergensis), which is a endemic tree of the area. The mountains are noted for dramatic rock formations and San rock art. The Cederberg Wilderness Area is administered by CapeNature.
The dominating characteristic of the area is sharply defined sandstone rock formations (Table Mountain Group), often reddish in colour. This group of rocks contains bands of shale and in recent years a few important fossils have been discovered in these argillaceous layers. The fossils are of primitive fish and date back 450 million years to the Ordovician Period.

The painter
Hugo Naudé was South Africa’s pioneer impressionist painter. He received his professional art education at the Slade School of Fine Art in London (1889 -1890) and the Kunst Akademie in Munich (1890 -1894) and spent a year amongst the Barbizon painters in Fontainebleau near Paris.
Born and raised in the Boland town of Worcester, Naudé became South Africa’s first professional artist, establishing “Cape Impressionism”, an adaptation of European Impressionism, in conjunction with the artists Pieter Wenning, Nita Spilhaus, Ruth Prowse and Strat Caldecott. After his European training, Naudé had to adapt to the sunlit brilliance of the African landscape and as “plein-airste” gradually loosened the bonds of his formal training - pioneering a truly South African style which has been maintained by a second and third generation of artists.
When Hugo Naudé returned to South Africa in 1896, after 6 years of formal art training and study in Europe (1889-1895) he initially tried to establish himself as a portrait painter for which he had received expert training from the great Franz von Lenbach in Munich. The prevailing artistic climate proved this idea to have been too optimistic, and thus began a gradual transition in subject matter from portrait to landscape.

THE SAINTE VICTOIRE (3) BY PAUL CEZANNE

PAUL CEZANNE (1839-1906)

The Montagne Sainte Victoire (1, 011m - 2, 216 ft)

France (Provence Alpes Côte d'azur) 

 In La Sainte-Victoire vue de la colline des Lauves, 1902-1906,  watercolour, Private collection 

The mountain

Mont Sainte-Victoire (1,011 m-3,316ft)  also called Mont Venturi is a limestone massif in the South of France, in the region Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur. Located east of Aix-en-Provence, it has experienced international fame, due to the more than 80 works  Paul Cézanne did  on it. 

It hosts many hikers, climbers and nature lovers, and is a major element of Aix landscape.

The range of the Sainte-Victoire is 18 kilometers long and 5 kilometers from large, following a strict east-west orientation. It is located on the Bouches-du-Rhône and Var, and in the towns of Puyloubier, Saint-Antonin-sur-Bayon, Rousset, Châteauneuf-le-Rouge, Beaurecueil, Le Tholonet Vauvenargues, Saint-Marc-Jaumegarde, Pourrières, Artigues and Rians.

 The Sainte-Victoire, as the range of the Sainte Baume, can be considered a special case among the Alpine ranges for the various stages of the formation of its relief associated geological history as well as that of the old Pyrenean-Provençal chain than that of the Western Alps (which have succeeded it).

Indeed,  from the former Sainte-Victoire mountain, contemporary of the dinosaurs of the Cretaceous, it remains today  only the fold Bimont, said Chaînon des Costes Chaudes, the last vestige resulting from tectonic movements and characteristics of the stacks of  Pyreneo-Provençal phase during the Eocene. Later during the Oligocene, breaking  of the anticlinal fold of Sainte-Victoire, which resulted from the uplift of the first great Alpine reliefs, is causing a surge that help explain the current form of the mountain, which appeared 15 million years BCE.

According to a recent study, the Sainte-Victoire is still growing ! The company ME2i  has indeed conducted a satellite survey between 1993 and 2003 providing evidence that during this period the western end of the Sainte-Victoire was uplift of 7 mm per year.

The massif is a ensemble of 6525 ha classified since 1983.

The Painter  

The mount Sainte-Victoire appears to have been the subject of a true love story with  the  painter Paul Cezanne. He painted  this subject more than 80 times, in oil paintings, watercolors and drawings!

Aix-en Provence (France) painter Paul Cezanne still remains closely linked to his hometown. His studio in Les Lauves remains a place to visit, as if the painter was coming back from one second to the other.  But the eternal bond is undoubtedly the series of paintings he did of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire. A hobby, a passion, a thread in the painter's work that took place in the latter part of his life, between 1882 and 1906 when he died in Aix. History  says that the painter had contracted a nasty pneumonia during a working session on the mountain. This is what can be called 'die on stage'.

Cézanne had a considerable influence on the art of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. Acknowledged master of his time, he attended during stays in Paris between 1862 and 1882, the Impressionist band: Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir (who also ended his life in the Provencal brightness), Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley and others. He participated in the Impressionist adventure while keeping his personality: it is the time of the shock of the en plein air, easels in the grass, looking for natural light and emotion.

The influence of the Aix painter is recognized in the history of art since it would be the cause of the Cubist movement embodied in 1906 by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. The first historically so called Cubist painting ' Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' would, a true artistic shock shown by Picasso in 1907 (one year after the death of Cézanne) is today one of the masterpieces of the MoMA in New York.

It is the search of volumes around which leads to the appearance of geometry in landscapes or still lifes of Cézanne.In 20 years, Cézanne pushes his style to express the emotion of the landscape, suggesting the wind, involving movement just like if we can breathe the air of the scene. In his first paintings pf the Sainte Victoire,(in the 1880’s)  he expresses the giant aspect of the mountain that dominates the area with his characteristic e way of painting at the time, with a juxtaposition of linear brushstrokes and a range of soft, natural colors.  In the last paintings of the Sainte Victoire, view  from Les Lauves,  between 1904 and 1906, he shows shots less accurate brushes allowing the shape of the mountain emerge from the canvas like an apparition. That is the whole intention of the artist, show nature as it is without fail to convey emotion.

_______________________________
2018 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau 

GUNUNG KERINCI BY ERNEST DEZENTJE

ERNEST DEZENTJE (1885-1972) 

Gunung Kerinci  (3,805 m - 12,484 ft) 

 Indonesia (Sumatra)

The mountain 

Guning Kerinci (3,805 m - 12,484 ft) or  Peak of Indrapura  is a volcano in Sumatra island of Indonesia. It is surrounded by the lush forest of Kerinci Seblat National Park. 

Kerinci is  one the more active Indonesian volcanoes, with nearly annual phreatic eruptions. 

In 2004, Kerinci erupted and continues to spew clouds of sulphurous smoke, with plumes reaching as high as 1,000 m (3,281 ft) above the summit. In 2009, Kerinci erupted again and followed by June 2, 2013 eruption with 600 m (1,969 ft) spewed black smoke.  There is farmland in the area, and a tea plantation on its southern slope, Kerinci, being located in an Indonesian national park, and perhaps out of respect for its frequent growlings as well, sits in an area that is sparsely populated by Indonesian population-density standards.

Based on research in 1973, the 'Kecik Wok Gedang Wok' people are recognized as the first tribe to settle at a plateau around Mount Kerinci 10,000 years ago. Today, the Kecik Wong Gedang Wok people are limited due to assimilation with the Proto-Malay tribes which came later. There are around 135 dialects used only along the valley. This makes ethnographic analysis difficult to conduct.

The painter
The ‘Indisch’- Indonesian landscape painter Ernest Regnard Leonce Dezentjé was an autodidact.  His career  (mostly local) began when first president of the Republic of Indonesia, Soekarno (1901-1970), - who declared the independence of the country in 1945, felt in love with his painting and decided to make him the  "court painter".  Dezentje was then labelled an impressionist of the early Indonesian School, being considered by critics and young artists as a  typical establishment artist.  Along his eminently nationalistic themas the mountains and volcanoes of Indonesia took a important place.

THE MATTERHORN BERG BY HERBERT PONTING

HERBERT PONTING (1870-1935) 

The Matterhorn berg (1,600 m - 5,200 ft) 

Antarctica (Victoria Land)

In  The Matterhorn  Berg ant Mount Erebus in the background, Antarctica, photo,  1911

The mountain 
The Matterhorn  (1,600 metres - 5,200 ft) is a peak, surmounting the north wall of Taylor Valley, Antarctica, between Lacroix Glacier and Matterhorn Glacier. It was so named by Griffith Taylor of the British Antarctic Expedition under Robert Falcon Scott, 1910–13, because of its resemblance to the Matterhorn, the famous Swiss mountain.[1]
Matterhorn Glacier (77°41′S 162°27′E) is a small alpine glacier on the edge of the north wall of Taylor Valley, just west of the Matterhorn, in Victoria Land. Named after the Matterhorn by U.S. geologist T.L. Pewe, who visited the area in December 1957.

The photographer 
Herbert George Ponting, FRGS  was a professional photographer. He is best known as the expedition photographer and cinematographer for Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova Expedition to the Ross Sea and South Pole (1910–1913). In this role, he captured some of the most enduring images of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.
During the 1911 winter, Ponting took many flash photographs of Scott and the other members of the expedition in their Cape Evans hut. With the start of the 1911–12 sledging season, Ponting's field work began to come to an end. As a middle-aged man, he was not expected to help pull supplies southward over the Ross Ice Shelf for the push to the South Pole. Ponting photographed other members of the shore party setting off for what was expected to be a successful trek. After 14 months at Cape Evans, Ponting, along with eight other men, boarded the Terra Nova in February 1912 to return to civilization, arrange his inventory of more than 1,700 photographic plates, and shape a narrative of the expedition. Ponting's illustrated narrative would be waiting for Captain Scott to use for lectures and fundraising in 1913.