SCHNEEKOPPE (1) PAINTED BY CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH

CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH (1774-1840)

Schneekoppe or Sněћka or Śnieżka (1,603m - 2,259ft) 

Poland - Czech Republic border 

 In The Risengbirge, 1810, oil on canvas, Private collection  

The mountain 

Schneekoppe (1,603m  - 2,259ft) in German or Sněћka in Czech or Śnieżka in Polish, is a mountain on the border between the Czech Republic and Poland, the most prominent point of the Silesian Ridge in the Krkonoše mountains. Its summit is the highest point in the Czech Republic, in the Krkonoše and in the entire Sudetes range system.

The first historical account of an ascent to the peak is in 1456, by an unknown Venetian merchant searching for precious stones. The first settlements on the mountain soon appeared, being primarily mining communities, tapping into its deposits of copper, iron and arsenic. The mining shafts, totalling 1.5 kilometres (0.93 mi) in length, remain to this day.

The first recorded German name was Riseberg ("giant mountain", cf. Riesengebirge, "Giant Mountains"), mentioned by Georg Agricola in 1546. Fifteen years later the name Riesenberg appears on Martin Helwig's map of Silesia. The German name later changed to Riesenkoppe ("giant top") and finally to Schneekoppe ("snow top", "snowy head").

In Czech, the mountain was initially called Pahrbek Sněžný. Later Sněžka, with the eventual name Sněžovka, meaning "snowy" or "snow-covered", which was adopted in 1823. 

An older Polish name for the mountain was Góra Olbrzymia, meaning "giant mountain".

The first building on the mountaintop was the Chapel of Saint Lawrence (Laurentiuskapelle), built ca. 1665–1681 by the Silesian Schaffgotsch family to mark their dominion, serving also as an inn for a brief period of time. The territory including the mines were the property of the Schaffgotsch family until 1945. The so-called Prussian hut was built on the Silesian (now Polish) side in 1850, followed by the Bohemian hut on the Bohemian (now Czech) side in 1868, both built with the purpose of providing lodging. The Prussian hut was rebuilt twice after fires (1857 and 1862), and the (after 1945) "Polish hut" was finally demolished in 1967. The Bohemian hut fell into disrepair after 1990 and was demolished in 2004.

A wooden weather station was built on the mountaintop ca. 1900, being the only weather station in Central Europe remaining intact after World War II. It was demolished in the 1980s.

One side of the mountain is in the Czech Republic; the other belongs to Poland. The area is very popular in summer with tourists from the Czech Republic, Poland, and Germany who enjoy hiking in the alpine environment one of a kind to this location.

On the Polish side a disc-shaped observatory and restaurant was built in 1974, a weather station and the St. Lawrence Chapel. On the Czech side are the remains of the Bohemian hut, a post office, and a chairlift station, connecting the peak with the town of Pec pod Sněžkou at the base of the mountain.

Although the mountain is the highest natural peak of Czech Republic, the actual highest point is the top of the television transmitter on Praděd, reaching 1,652 metres (1,491+162 m). If the Polish observatory is taken into account, Sněžka peaks at 1,620 metres.

In 2004 a new post office and observation platform replaced an old post office and the remains of the Bohemian hut, which was closed since the 1980s.

In March 2009 the Polish observatory suffered serious damage to the upper disc as a result of extreme weather and structural failure. The upper disc's floor broke. Fast response from Technical University of Wrocław saved the remaining disc from taking any further damage. The restaurant and meteo offices were reopened soon after the construction team had finished clearing the debris and securing what was left of the observatory. After detailed expertise it was decided that no further damage should occur and the building was restored to its previous state. Actually, the upper disc was restored to its 1974 design (with contemporary improvements), skipping certain "improvements" made in 1980s and 1990s which were suspected to contribute to the structural failure of March 2009.

Old chairlift to the top of Sněžka was replaced by a new cable car system. Since February 2014, the four-person cabins in two sections export 250 visitors per hour from the Czech city Pec pod Sněžkou.

The painter 
Caspar David Friedrich was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, considered as the most important German artist of his generation. He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins. His primary interest as an artist was the contemplation of nature, and his often symbolic and anti-classical work seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. Friedrich's paintings characteristically set a human presence in diminished perspective amid expansive landscapes, reducing the figures to a scale that, according to the art historian Christopher John Murray, directs "the viewer's gaze towards their metaphysical dimension".
Friedrich was born in Pomerania, where he began to study art. He studied in Copenhagen until 1798, before settling in Dresden. A disillusionment with materialistic society was giving rise everywhere in Europe. This shift in ideals was often expressed through a reevaluation of the natural world, as artists such as Friedrich, J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) and John Constable (1776–1837) sought to depict nature as a "divine creation, to be set against the artifice of human civilization".
Friedrich's work brought him renown early in his career, and contemporaries such as the French sculptor David d'Angers (1788–1856) spoke of him as a man who had discovered "the tragedy of landscape". Nevertheless, his work fell from favour during his later years, and he died in obscurity, and in the words of the art historian Philip B. Miller, "half mad". As Germany moved towards modernisation in the late 19th century, a new sense of urgency characterized its art, and Friedrich's contemplative depictions of stillness came to be seen as the products of a bygone age. The early 20th century brought a renewed appreciation of his work, beginning in 1906 with an exhibition of thirty-two of his paintings and sculptures in Berlin. By the 1920s his paintings had been discovered by the Expressionists, and in the 1930s and early 1940s Surrealists and Existentialists frequently drew ideas from his work. The rise of Nazism in the early 1930s again saw a resurgence in Friedrich's popularity, but this was followed by a sharp decline as his paintings were, by association with the Nazi movement, interpreted as having a nationalistic aspect.  It was not until the late 1970s that Friedrich regained his reputation as an icon of the German Romantic movement and a painter of international importance.
Friedrich was a prolific artist who produced more than 500 attributed works. In line with the Romantic ideals of his time, he intended his paintings to function as pure aesthetic statements, so he was cautious that the titles given to his work were not overly descriptive or evocative. It is likely that some of today's more literal titles, such as The Stages of Life, were not given by the artist himself, but were instead adopted during one of the revivals of interest in Friedrich. Complications arise when dating Friedrich's work, in part because he often did not directly name or date his canvases. He kept a carefully detailed notebook on his output, however, which has been used by scholars to tie paintings to their completion dates.

THE WATZMANN PAINTED BY CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH

CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH (1774-1840)  

Watzmann (2,713m - 8,901ft) 

Germany

 In  The Watzmann, oil on canvas 1824-25 , Berlin State Museum 

The mountain 

The Watzmann (2,713m - 8,901ft) is a mountain in the Bavarian Alps south of the village of Berchtesgaden. It is the third highest in Germany, and the highest located entirely on German territory. Three main peaks array on a N-S axis along a ridge on the mountain's taller western half: Hocheck (2,651 m), Mittelspitze (Middle Peak, 2,713 m) and Sьdspitze (South Peak, 2,712 m).

The Watzmann massif also includes the 2,307 m Watzmannfrau (Watzmann Wife, also known as Kleiner Watzmann or Small Watzmann), and the Watzmannkinder (Watzmann Children), five lower peaks in the recess between the main peaks and the Watzmannfrau.

The entire massif lies inside Berchtesgaden National Park.

The Watzmann Glacier is located below the famous east face of the Watzmann in the Watzmann cirque and is surrounded by the Watzmanngrat arête, the Watzmannkindern and the Kleiner Watzmann. The size of the glacier reduced from around 30 hectares (74 acres) in 1820 until it split into a few fields of firn, but between 1965 and 1980 it advanced significantly again and now has an area of 10.1 hectares (25 acres). Above and to the west of the icefield lie the remains of a transport-bomber that crashed in October 1940.

Amongst the other permanent snow and icefields the Eiskapelle ("Ice Chapel") is the best known due to its easy accessibility from St. Bartholomä. The Eiskapelle may well be the lowest lying permanent snowfield in the Alps. Its lower end is only 930 metres high in the upper Eisbach valley and is about an hour's walk from St. Bartholomä on the Königssee. The Eiskapelle is fed by mighty avalanches that slide down from the east face of the Watzmann in spring and accumulate in the angle of the rock face. Sometimes a gate-shaped vault forms in the ice at the point where the Eisbach emerges from the Eiskapelle. Before entering there is an urgent warning sign that others have been killed by falling ice.

In the east face itself is another icefield in the so-called Schöllhorn cirque, called the Schöllhorneis, which is crossed by the Kederbach Way (Kederbacher-Weg). The cirque and icefield are named after the Munich citizen, Christian Schöllhorn, who was the first victim on the east face. On 26 May 1890 he fell at the upper end of the icefield into the randkluft and was fatally injured. Another small nameless snowfield is located several hundred metres below the Mittelspitze also in the east face.

The painter 

Caspar David Friedrich was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, considered as the most important German artist of his generation. He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins. His primary interest as an artist was the contemplation of nature, and his often symbolic and anti-classical work seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. Friedrich's paintings characteristically set a human presence in diminished perspective amid expansive landscapes, reducing the figures to a scale that, according to the art historian Christopher John Murray, directs "the viewer's gaze towards their metaphysical dimension".

Friedrich was born in Pomerania, where he began to study art. He studied in Copenhagen until 1798, before settling in Dresden. A disillusionment with materialistic society was giving rise everywhere in Europe. This shift in ideals was often expressed through a reevaluation of the natural world, as artists such as Friedrich, J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) and John Constable (1776–1837) sought to depict nature as a "divine creation, to be set against the artifice of human civilization".

Friedrich's work brought him renown early in his career, and contemporaries such as the French sculptor David d'Angers (1788–1856) spoke of him as a man who had discovered "the tragedy of landscape". Nevertheless, his work fell from favour during his later years, and he died in obscurity, and in the words of the art historian Philip B. Miller, "half mad". As Germany moved towards modernisation in the late 19th century, a new sense of urgency characterized its art, and Friedrich's contemplative depictions of stillness came to be seen as the products of a bygone age. The early 20th century brought a renewed appreciation of his work, beginning in 1906 with an exhibition of thirty-two of his paintings and sculptures in Berlin. By the 1920s his paintings had been discovered by the Expressionists, and in the 1930s and early 1940s Surrealists and Existentialists frequently drew ideas from his work. The rise of Nazism in the early 1930s again saw a resurgence in Friedrich's popularity, but this was followed by a sharp decline as his paintings were, by association with the Nazi movement, interpreted as having a nationalistic aspect.  It was not until the late 1970s that Friedrich regained his reputation as an icon of the German Romantic movement and a painter of international importance.

Friedrich was a prolific artist who produced more than 500 attributed works. In line with the Romantic ideals of his time, he intended his paintings to function as pure aesthetic statements, so he was cautious that the titles given to his work were not overly descriptive or evocative. It is likely that some of today's more literal titles, such as The Stages of Life, were not given by the artist himself, but were instead adopted during one of the revivals of interest in Friedrich. Complications arise when dating Friedrich's work, in part because he often did not directly name or date his canvases. He kept a carefully detailed notebook on his output, however, which has been used by scholars to tie paintings to their completion dates.

EQUINOX MOUNTAIN PAINTED BY ROCKWELL KENT

ROCKWELL KENT (1882-1971) 

Equinox Mountain (1,170 m- 3,840 ft) in 1919-25 

Vermont - USA

The mountain
Equinox Mountain (1,170 m- 3,840 ft) is located in Bennington County, Vermont, United States, in the town of Manchester. The mountain is the highest peak of the Taconic Range, and the highest point of Bennington County. It is one of thirteen peaks in Vermont with a topographic prominence over 2,000 feet (610 m), ranked third behind Mansfield and Killington. Equinox is the second highest peak in southern Vermont, after Stratton Mountain.

A small, abandoned Cold War-era NORAD radar station can be seen near the summit. The site is now used for two-way communications including the Vermont State Police, and  radio stations.

An abandoned, now collapsed tunnel boring dating to the mid-1960s would have provided access to a subterranean cryonics receptacle for humans placed in low-temperature suspension. The tunnel project site is located on the northwest slope of the peak near the 2,800-foot (850 m) level. A private Vermont-based firm, Renew, Inc., had planned to preserve the bodies of several prominent high-IQ individuals for future reawakening. The project was hastily abandoned due to fraud allegations.

The Charterhouse of the Transfiguration monastery is situated on the slopes of the mountain. Equinox Mountain can be climbed by several different hiking trails.

Adjacent to the larger Equinox Mountains is Little Equinox, where two wind farms have previously operated. One wind turbine was installed in 1981 and three more in 1982, making Little Equinox Mountain the site of one of the first wind farms in the United States. These turbines, an early-generation design by WTG Systems of Buffalo, New York, were mounted on 80-foot (24 m) truss towers and had a nominal peak output of 350 kW. The turbines, however, were plagued with mechanical issues, and by the mid-1980s all four were out of service, standing idle on the mountain from 1985 through 1989.

Green Mountain Power began operating the site in 1988, erecting a wind measurement tower and removing the four old turbines. It installed two U.S. Windpower 100 kW turbines in 1990, which ran for four years making electricity. Green Mountain Power removed its turbines and measurement tower in 1994. The company now owns the Searsburg Wind Farm in Searsburg, Vermont.

Endless Energy Corporation, a wind farm development company based in Maine, has expressed interest in the site for a modern wind farm. They have conducted wind measurements as well as environmental studies of Little Equinox Mountain. To build a wind farm in Vermont, the developer needs to go through the Public Service Board's Section 248 application process.

The Taconic Range ridgeline continues to the north from Equinox Mountain as Mother Myrick Mountain and south as Red Mountain; it is flanked to the west by Bennetts Ridge and Bear Mountain, also of the Taconic Range, and to the east by the western escarpment and plateau of the Green Mountains, across the Batten Kill valley. The southeast side of Equinox Mountain drains into the Batten Kill, thence into the Hudson River, and into New York Harbor. The northwest side of Equinox drains into the Green River, a tributary of the Batten Kill.

Reference

- Peakbagger.com

- Equinox Mountain in Wikipedia 

The painter

Rockwell Kent, artist, author, and political activist, had a long  and varied career. During his lifetime, he worked as an architectural draftsman, illustrator, printmaker, painter, lobsterman, ship's carpenter, and dairy farmer. Born in Tarrytown Heights, New York, he lived in Maine, Newfoundland, Alaska, Greenland, and the Adirondacks and explored the waters around Tierra del Fuego in a small boat. Kent's paintings, lithographs, and woodcuts often portrayed the bleak and rugged aspects of nature; a reflection of his life in harsh climates.

Kent had an unusually long and thorough training as an artist. He was a student at the Horace Mann School in New York City and subsequently studied architecture at Columbia University, toward the end of which he felt a strong inclination toward painting and took up the study of art under William Merritt Chase at the Shinnecock Hills School. He studied later at the New York School, under Robert Henri and Kenneth Hayes Miller, and finally as an apprentice to Abbott Thayer at Dublin, New Hampshire. Henri encouraged him to go to Monhegan Island where Kent painted on his own. He was absorbed in the awesome power of the environment; nature's timeless energy and contrasting forces influenced his work throughout his lifetime. His early and lasting relationship with the sea was portrayed again and again in his work.

The graphic art tradition in which Rockwell Kent worked was not that of the Post-Impressionist or abstract International style, but rather an older and somewhat English style. Hogarth, Blake, Constable, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the British illustrators were his artistic antecedents. His work is most frequently identified with that of the American Social Realists and the great muralists of the 1920s and 1930s. 

His experience as a carpenter and builder and his familiarity with tools served him well when he took up the graphic process. His blocks were marvels of beautiful cutting, every line deliberate and under perfect control. The tones and lines in his lithography were solidly built up, subtle, and full of color. He usually made preliminary studies- old-mater style- for composition or detail before starting on a print. Nothing was vague or accidental about his work; his expression was clear and deliberate. Neither misty tonalities nor suggestiveness were to his taste. He was a highly objectified art - clean, athletic, sometimes almost austere and cold. He either recorded adventures concretely, or dealt in ideas. His studio was a model of the efficient workshop: neat, orderly, with everything in its place. His handwriting, the fruit of his architectural training, was beautiful and precise. 

When Kent died of a heart attack in 1971, The New York Times described him as "... a thoughtful, troublesome, profoundly independent, odd and kind man who made an imperishable contribution to the art of bookmaking in the United States."  Richer, more accurate accounts of the scope of the artist's influential career as a painter and writer have since superseded this cursory summing-up of an American life. Retrospectives of the artist's paintings and drawings have been mounted, most recently by The Rooms in St. John's, Newfoundland, where the exhibition Pointed North: Rockwell Kent in Newfoundland and Labrador was curated by Caroline Stone in the summer of 2014. Other recent exhibitions include the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery and Owen D. Young Library at St. Lawrence University (Canton, New York) in the autumn of 2012; the Farnsworth Art Museum (Rockland, Maine) during the spring through autumn of 2012; the Bennington Museum in Vermont during the summer of 2012; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the spring through summer of 2012. An exhibition marking the centennial of Kent's time in Winona, Minnesota, took place there in 2013. Among the many notes of increasing awareness of Kent's contributions to American culture is the reproduction of one of Kent's pen-and-ink drawings from Moby Dick on a U.S. postage stamp, part of the 2001 commemorative panel celebrating such American illustrators as Maxfield Parrish, Frederic Remington, and Norman Rockwell.

Noted American and Canadian writers in recent years have found much gold to mine in Kent's improbable personal and public life. The year he spent in Newfoundland, for example, is fictionally (and very loosely) recalled by Canadian writer Michael Winter in The Big Why, his 2004 Winterset Award-winning novel. And certain qualities of the protagonist of Russell Banks's 2008 novel The Reserve are inspired by aspects of Kent's complex personality. Kent's work also figures in Steve Martin's 2010 novel An Object of Beauty and is the subject of a chapter in Douglas Brinkley's 2011 history The Quiet World: Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom: 1879–1960.

The Archives of American Art is the repository for Kent's voluminous correspondence.

Source: 

- Short Biography byPlattsburgh State Art Museum 

MOUNT PILATUS (TOMLISHORN) PAINTED BY ALBERT GOODWIN

ALBERT GOODWIN (1884-1932)

 Mount Pilatus or Tomlishorn (2,128 m - 6,982 ft)

Switzerland

As seen from Stanstadt, Lucerne 

The mountain 

Mount Pilatus  is overlooking Lucerne in central Switzerland. It is composed of several summits of which the highest (2,128 m) is named Tomlishorn. Another summit named Esel (2,119 m) lies just over the railway station. Jurisdiction over the massif is divided between the cantons of Obwalden, Nidwalden, and Lucerne. The main peaks are right on the border between Obwalden and Nidwalden.

A few different local legends about the origin of the name exist. One claims that Mount Pilatus was named so because Pontius Pilate was buried there; a similar legend is told of Monte Vettore in Italy. Another is that the mountain looks like the belly of a large man, Pilate, lying on his back and was thus named for him. The name may also be derived from "pileatus," meaning "cloud-topped."

A medieval legend had dragons with healing powers living on the mountain. A chronicle from 1619 reads: 'as I was contemplating the serene sky by night, I saw a very bright dragon with flapping wings go from a cave in a great rock in the mount called Pilatus toward another cave, known as Flue, on the opposite side of the lake'. 

Nowadays, dragon has been replaced by fortified radar (part of the Swiss FLORAKO system) and weather stations on the Oberhaupt summit, not open to the public view and used all year round.

Climbing

The top can be reached with the Pilatus railway, the world's steepest cogwheel railway, from Alpnachstad, operating from May to November (depending on snow conditions), and the whole year with the aerial panorama gondolas and aerial cableways from Kriens. Both summits of Tomlishorn and Esel can be reached with a trail. Mount Pilatus has the longest summer toboggan track in Switzerland (0.88 miles or 1,350 m) and the biggest suspension rope park in Central Switzerland.

During the summer, the "Golden Round Trip" — a popular route for tourists — involves taking a boat from Lucerne across Lake Lucerne to Alpnachstad, going up on the cogwheel railway, coming down on the aerial cableways and panorama gondolas, and taking a bus back to Lucerne.

Numbered amongst those who have reached its summit are Conrad Gessner, Theodore Roosevelt, Arthur Schopenhauer (1804), Queen Victoria and Julia Ward Howe (1867).

Reference 

- Mont Pilatus website 

The painter 

Albert Goodwin was a English landscape painter well known for his watercolours. His work shows the influences of Turner and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

After leaving school he became an apprentice draper. His exceptional artistic ability was recognized at an early age and he went on to study with the Pre-Raphaelite artists Arthur Hughes and Ford Madox Brown - the latter predicting that he would become "one of the greatest landscape painters of the age". At the age of 15 his first painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy. He became an associate member of the Royal Watercolour Society (RWS) in 1876. He was championed by famed art critic John Ruskin who took him on a tour of Europe, where he made many sketches from nature which were later turned into watercolours. During his lifetime he traveled extensively throughout Britain and Europe, and visited many other countries.

Although the Pre-Raphaelites were not primarily landscape painters, their views on ‘truth to nature’, and their practice of working directly from nature for the landscape settings of their pictures, inevitably influenced most contemporary landscape painters in the 1850s and 1860s; and in his Notes on Prout and Hunt, Ruskin quite rightly described Goodwin’s work as having been ‘founded first on strong Pre-Raphaelite veracities…’. 

Goodwin was, in fact, extremely fortunate in being taught by Brown, who is by far the most original and interesting of the landscape painters associated with the Pre-Raphaelite circle; however, despite Brown’s devotion to the concept of truth to nature, and working sur le motif, his landscapes are, in the final analysis, strangely artificial – reminiscent of the magical realism of Palmer’s Shoreham period rather than the naturalism of Constable, Cox or De Wint. Similarly, Goodwin’s landscapes are invariably infused with a poetic charm that raises them above mere description; indeed, one critic complimented him for having that ‘peculiar faculty of painting a natural scene with an undercurrent of supernatural feeling’. 

Goodwin was a prolific artist, producing over 800 works and continuing to paint well into his eighties. His wide variety of landscape subjects reflected his love of travel and show the influence of Turner, with whom he felt a strong affinity. In later works he developed experimental techniques such as using ink over water color to achieve atmospheric lighting effects. His works are also an important record of social history.

Reference 

- Albert Goodwin  biography in Artrenewal.org

GLARAMARA PAINTED BY JOHN CONSTABLE

JOHN CONSTABLE (1776-1837) 

Glaramara (783m - 2,569 ft)   

United Kingdom

 In  View toward Glaramara, 1806- V & A museum. London 

The mountain 

Glaramara is a fell in the English Lake District in Cumbria. It is a substantial fell that is part of a long ridge that stretches for over six kilometres from Stonethwaite in Borrowdale up to the important mountain pass of Esk Hause. The summit of Glaramara at 783 m (2,569 ft) is the central point of this ridge, which separates the valleys of Langstrath and Grains Gill. However, the ridge has two additional fells, numerous subsidiary tops and several small tarns making its traverse an appealing and challenging walk.
The fell's unusual and pleasant-sounding name, previously only applied to the summit rocks, has now been accepted as the name for the whole fell. Like many fells of the district the name comes from a series of Old Norse words which in this case is translated as “Hill with the mountain hut by a chasm”.
The direct ascent of the fell is usually started from the Borrowdale road midway between Rosthwaite and Seatoller. From here it is possible to ascend on either of the ridges to the east or west of Combe Gill, the east ridge being the best because it allows for the climbing of Rosthwaite Fell and its subsidiary summit of Dovenest Top (632 m). On this route two other tops of Glaramara, Combe Door Top (676 m) and Combe Head (735 m), are passed over. Both of these are Nuttalls. Combe Head gives fine views down into Combe Gill and from here it is short climb to the twin summits of Glaramara.
Reference :
 - Wikipedia  

The painter

John Constable was an English Romantic painter. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for his landscape paintings of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home—now known as "Constable Country"— which he invested with an intensity of affection. "I should paint my own places best", he wrote to his friend John Fisher in 1821, "painting is but another word for feeling".
His most famous paintings include Wivenhoe Park of 1816, Dedham Vale of 1802 and The Hay Wain of 1821. Although his paintings are now among the most popular and valuable in British art, Constable was never financially successful. He did not become a member of the establishment until he was elected to the Royal Academy at the age of 52. His work was embraced in France, where he sold more works than in his native England and inspired the Barbizon school.
Constable quietly rebelled against the artistic culture that taught artists to use their imagination to compose their pictures rather than nature itself. He told Leslie, "When I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the first thing I try to do is to forget that I have ever seen a picture".
Constable was never satisfied with following a formula. "The world is wide", he wrote, "no two days are alike, nor even two hours; neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of all the world; and the genuine productions of art, like those of nature, are all distinct from each other."  Constable painted many full-scale preliminary sketches of his landscapes to test the composition in advance of finished pictures. These large sketches, with their free and vigorous brushwork, were revolutionary at the time, and they continue to interest artists, scholars and the general public. The oil sketches of The Leaping Horse and The Hay Wain, for example, convey a vigour and expressiveness missing from Constable's finished paintings of the same subjects. Possibly more than any other aspect of Constable's work, the oil sketches reveal him in retrospect to have been an avant-garde painter, one who demonstrated that landscape painting could be taken in a totally new direction.
Constable's watercolours were also remarkably free for their time: the almost mystical Stonehenge, 1835, with its double rainbow, is often considered to be one of the greatest watercolours ever painted.[21] When he exhibited it in 1836, Constable appended a text to the title: "The mysterious monument of Stonehenge, standing remote on a bare and boundless heath, as much unconnected with the events of past ages as it is with the uses of the present, carries you back beyond all historical records into the obscurity of a totally unknown period."
The sketches themselves were the first ever done in oils directly from the subject in the open air. To convey the effects of light and movement, Constable used broken brushstrokes, often in small touches, which he scumbled over lighter passages, creating an impression of sparkling light enveloping the entire landscape.
Reference 
 - John Constable website

MONTE SORATTE PAINTED BY CAMILLE COROT

CAMILLE COROT  (1796-1875)

 Le Mont Soracte or Monte Soratte (691 m - 2,267 ft)

Italy

1. Vue du mont Soracte, 1826, Collection privée, France  

2. Le mont Soracte 1826-27,  Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich, Germany 

3. Le mont Soracte 1826- 27, Musée d'art et d'histoire, Genève, Switzerland

The mountain 

Monte Soratte (latin: Mons Soracte or Sorax after Plinus the Elder) is a mountain ridge in the province of Rome, Italy.  The highest summit is 691 m (2,267 ft) above sea-level. The ridge is part of a 444-hectare (1,100 acre) Natural Reserve housing a variety of vegetation and fauna. It is also characterized by the so-called Meri, pits which can be up to 115 metres (377 ft) deep. 

Mount Soratte is part of the Apennines range.  It appears like a narrow, isolated limestone ridge with a length of 5.5 km (3.4 mi) and six peaks.  Located some 10 km (6.2 mi) south east of Civita Castellana and c. 45 km (28 mi) north of Rome, it is the sole notable ridge in the Tiber Valley. The nearest settlement is the village of Sant'Oreste.  Saint Orestes or Edistus, after whom the settlement is named, is said to have been martyred near Monte Soratte.

The area was used by the ancient Italic tribes (Sabines, Capenates, Faliscans and Etruscans) for the cult of the God Soranus or Dis Pater who became later Pluto.  Mount Soratte was mentioned by Horace ("Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte?" Carm. i. 9), and Virgil, who stated that Apollo was its guardian deity.

The hermitage of St. Sylvester is just below the summit.  According to a legend, its church was founded by Pope Sylvester, who had taken refuge there to escape Constantine's persecution.  The church houses 14th and 15th century frescoes.  Four other hermitages are situated on the ridge.

Goethe mentioned the peak in Italian Journey, his diary of his travels through Italy from 1786–1788. : "Soracte stands out by itself in magnificent solitude. Probably this mountain is made of limestone and belongs to the Apennines."

References:

- Natural reserve of Mount  Soratte

- Freschi di San Silvestro

- The Hirpi Sorani and the Wolf Cults of Central Italy

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.   During winter, he spent time in a studio but returned to work outside as quickly as weather permitted (the second Monte Soratte painting, with its grey light, was probably painted during winter. The intense light of Italy  particularly during summer time, posed considerable challenges to Corot  : "This sun gives off a light that makes me despair. It makes me feel the utter powerlessness of my palette." He learned to master the light and to paint the stones and sky in subtle and dramatic variation.

Of him Claude Monet exclaimed in 1897, "There is only one master here—Corot. We are nothing compared to him, nothing."  His contributions to figure painting are hardly less important; Degas preferred his figures to his landscapes, and the classical figures of Picasso pay overt homage to Corot's influence.

Historians have divided his work into periods, but the points of division are often vague, as he often completed a picture years after he began it. In his early period, he painted traditionally and "tight"—with minute exactness, clear outlines, thin brush work, and with absolute definition of objects throughout, with a monochromatic underpainting or ébauche.  After he reached his 50th year, his methods changed to focus on breadth of tone and an approach to poetic power conveyed with thicker application of paint; and about 20 years later, from about 1865 onwards, his manner of painting became more lyrical, affected with a more impressionistic touch. In part, this evolution in expression can be seen as marking the transition from the plein-air paintings of his youth, shot through with warm natural light, to the studio-created landscapes of his late maturity, enveloped in uniform tones of silver. In his final 10 years he became the "Père (Father) Corot" of Parisian artistic circles, where he was regarded with personal affection, and acknowledged as one of the five or six greatest landscape painters the world had seen, along with Hobbema, Claude Lorrain, Turner and Constable. In his long and productive life, he painted over 3,000 paintings.

Though often credited as a precursor of Impressionist practice, Corot approached his landscapes more traditionally than is usually believed.  Compared to the Impressionists who came later, Corot's palette is restrained, dominated with browns and blacks ("forbidden colors" among the Impressionists) along with dark and silvery green.  Though appearing at times to be rapid and spontaneous, usually his strokes were controlled and careful, and his compositions well-thought out and generally rendered as simply and concisely as possible, heightening the poetic effect of the imagery.  As he stated, "I noticed that everything that was done correctly on the first attempt was more true, and the forms more beautiful."

Corot's approach to his subjects was similarly traditional.  Although he was a major proponent of plein-air studies, he was essentially a studio painter and few of his finished landscapes were completed before the motif.  For most of his life, Corot would spend his summers travelling and collecting studies and sketches, and his winters finishing more polished, market-ready works.  For example, the title of his Bathers of the Borromean Isles (1865–70) refers to Lake Maggiore in Italy, despite the fact that Corot had not been to Italy in 20 years.  His emphasis on drawing images from the imagination and memory rather than direct observation was in line with the tastes of the Salon jurors, of which he was a member.

In the 1860s, Corot became interested in photography, taking photos himself and becoming acquainted with many early photographers, which had the effect of suppressing his painting palette even more in sympathy with the monochromic tones of photographs. This had the result of making his paintings even less dramatic but somewhat more poetic, a result which caused some critics to cite a monotony in his later work. Théophile Thoré wrote that Corot "has only a single octave, extremely limited and in a minor key; a musician would say. He knows scarcely more than a single time of day, the morning, and a single color, pale grey."  Corot responded: "What there is to see in painting, or rather what I am looking for, is the form, the whole, the value of the tones...That is why for me the color comes after, because I love more than anything else the overall effect, the harmony of the tones, while color gives you a kind of shock that I don’t like. Perhaps it is the excess of this principal that makes people say I have leaden tones."

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

References

- Corot Biography 

- Corot on Web museum 

- Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot/Wikipedia page