BEN NEVIS PAINTED BY SIDNEY RICHARD PERCY

 SIDNEY RICHARD PERCY (1821-1886) 

Ben Nevis (1,344 m - 4, 118 ft)

Great Britain - Scotland

In Carn Dearg and Ben Nevis from Achintee 

The mountain 

Ben Nevis  (1,344 m - 4, 118 ft)  in Scottish Gaelic: Beinn Nibheis is the highest mountain in the British Isles, located in Scotland, at the western end of the Grampian Mountains in the Lochaber area of the Scottish Highlands, close to the town of Fort William.
The mountain is a popular destination, attracting an estimated 100,000 ascents a year, around three-quarters of which use the Pony Track from Glen Nevis. The 700 metre - 2,300 ft cliffs of the north face are among the highest in Scotland, providing classic scrambles and rock climbs of all difficulties for climbers and mountaineers. They are also the principal locations in Scotland for ice climbing.
The summit, which is the collapsed dome of an ancient volcano, features the ruins of an observatory which was continuously staffed between 1883 and 1904. The meteorological data collected during this period are still important for understanding Scottish mountain weather. C. T. R. Wilson was inspired to invent the cloud chamber after a period spent working at the observatory.
The first recorded ascent of Ben Nevis was made on 17 August 1771 by James Robertson, an Edinburgh botanist, who was in the region to collect botanical specimens. Another early ascent was in 1774 by John Williams, who provided the first account of the mountain's geological structure. John Keats climbed the mountain in 1818, comparing the ascent to "mounting ten St. Pauls without the convenience of a staircase".  The following year William MacGillivray, who was later to become a distinguished naturalist, reached the summit only to find "fragments of earthen and glass ware, chicken bones, corks, and bits of paper". It was not until 1847 that Ben Nevis was confirmed by the Ordnance Survey as the highest mountain in Britain and Ireland, ahead of its rival Ben Macdhui.
The summit observatory was built in the summer of 1883, and would remain in operation for 21 years. The first path to the summit was built at the same time as the observatory and was designed to allow ponies to carry up supplies, with a maximum gradient of one in five.  The opening of the path and the observatory made the ascent of the Ben increasingly popular, all the more so after the arrival of the West Highland Railway in Fort William in 1894.  Around this time the first of several proposals was made for a rack railway to the summit, none of which came to fruition.
In 2000, the Ben Nevis Estate, comprising all of the south side of the mountain including the summit, was bought by the Scottish conservation charity the John Muir Trust.

The painter 
Sidney Richard Percy had his greatest success painting landscapes of grazing cattle, typically set against backgrounds of distant mountains and cloudy skies. The prevailing hues of his landscapes are earth tones and soft greens, accentuated by a variety of pastel hues. The detail in his work is part of its appeal, and "it was remarked that his rocks and stones were sufficiently accurate to have served as illustrations to the writings of Sir Roderick Murchison, the popular 19th-century geologist." Llyn-y-Ddinas, North Wales, one of his more popular works on the internet, displays these qualities. He also painted landscapes of farm fields, wheel-rutted country roads, and the occasional boat scene on a lake. Although he generally painted in oils, a number of small watercolors on cardboard exist, typically unsigned, that are his work. The family, and his son the painter Herbert Sidney Percy in particular, referred to these as "potboilers", meaning that they were quickly, and often crudely executed, yet easily and cheaply sold "to put food on the table" when working on larger, more time-consuming oils for exhibition, or commissions. Many of these watercolor "potboilers" were done in the field, and then brought back to the studio to refer to when executing a more formal oil on canvas.
Sidney Richard Percy was extremely popular during the early part of his career, which for a short time brought him a fair amount of income. Among his patrons during this time was Prince Albert the Royal consort who in 1854 gave Percy's landscape of A view of Llyn Dulyn, North Wales, which had just been exhibited at the Royal Academy, as a gift to his wife Queen Victoria. This painting still hangs today in the Royal Collection. Unfortunately Sidney Richard Percy outlived his popularity, and the art world was more excited about impressionism and other styles than landscapes when he died. Today though, his work is much sought after, and his better paintings bring much higher prices in auction than any of those of his brethren in the Williams family.
When the Athenaeum in 1886 (i. 592) ran an obituary for Sidney Richard Percy they called him, "the well-known and popular painter, founder of the so-called School of Barnes . . ." Although depending on the context of what is meant by the so-called Barnes School, this is a bit of an injustice to his father Edward Williams, whom it might be argued is the founder of the Barnes School of painters, but it illustrates the popularity that Sidney Richard Percy held with the art-buying public of his day.

MOUNT LAFAYETTE PAINTED BY ALBERT BIERSTADT

ALBERT BIERSTADT (1830-1902) 

Mount Lafayette (1,600m - 5,249 ft) 

United State of America 

The Mountain 

Mount Lafayette (1,600m - 5,249 ft)  is a mountain at the northern end of the Franconia Range in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, United States. It is located in the town of Franconia in Grafton County. It is on the New England Fifty Finest list of the most topographically prominent peaks in New England. The upper portion of the mountain is located in the alpine zone, an area where only small vegetation exists due to the harsh climate.

The mountain is named to honor General Lafayette, a French military hero of the 18th century who fought with and significantly aided the Continental Army and was loved and adopted by George Washington during the American Revolutionary War. Lafayette re-visited New Hampshire and all the other states in an extremely popular, triumphal tour during 1824-1825, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Mount Lafayette is the highest point in the Franconia Range, a line of peaks along the east side of Franconia Notch. It is the sixth highest peak in New Hampshire and the highest outside of the Presidential Range. It is the second most prominent peak in the state. On the western side, its lower slopes lie inside Franconia Notch State Park. The remainder of the mountain lies within the White Mountain National Forest. The summit marks the western border of the Pemigewasset Wilderness Area within the WMNF.

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.

In 1858 he exhibited a large painting of a Swiss landscape at the National Academy of Design, which gained him positive critical reception and honorary membership in the Academy.  At this time Bierstadt began painting scenes in New England and upstate New York, including in the Hudson River valley. A group of artists known as the Hudson River School portrayed its majestic landscapes and craggy areas, as well as the light affected by the changing waters.

In 1859, Bierstadt traveled westward in the company of Frederick W. Lander, a land surveyor for the U.S. government, to see those landscapes.  He continued to visit the American West throughout his career.

During the American Civil War, Bierstadt paid for a substitute to serve in his place when he was drafted in 1863. He completed one Civil War painting Guerrilla Warfare, Civil War in 1862, based on his brief experiences with soldiers stationed at Camp Cameron in 1861.

Bierstadt's painting was based on a stereoscopic photograph taken by his brother Edward Bierstadt, who operated a photography studio at Langley's Tavern in Virginia. Bierstadt's painting received a positive review when it was exhibited at the Brooklyn Art Association at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in December 1861. Curator Eleanor Jones Harvey observes that Bierstadt's painting, created from photographs, "is quintessentially that of a voyeur, privy to the stories and unblemished by the violence and brutality of first-hand combat experience."

In 1860, he was elected a member of the National Academy; he received medals in Austria, Bavaria, Belgium, and Germany.[ In 1867 he traveled to London, where he exhibited two landscape paintings in a private reception with Queen Victoria. He traveled through Europe for two years, cultivating social and business contacts to sustain the market for his work overseas.

As a result of the publicity generated by his Yosemite paintings, Bierstadt's presence was requested by every explorer considering a westward expedition, and he was commissioned by the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad to visit the Grand Canyon for further subject matter.

Bierstadt's technical proficiency, earned through his study of European landscape, was crucial to his success as a painter of the American West. It accounted for his popularity in disseminating views of the Rockies to those who had not seen them. The immense canvases he produced after his trips with Lander and Ludlow established him as the preeminent painter of the western American landscape. 

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.

Several mountain paintings by Bierstadt are published in this blog.  To find them, go to his name in the column on the right and just click on his name.

Sources: 

- Wilson, James Grant; Fiske, John, eds. (1900). "Bierstadt, Albert". Appletons' Cyclopedia of American Biography. New York: D. Appleton.

- Reynolds, Francis J., ed. (1921). "Bierstadt, Albert". Collier's New Encyclopedia. New York: P.F. Collier & Son Company

SCHRECKHORN PAINTED BY JOHN SINGER SARGENT

JOHN SINGER SARGENT  (1856-1925)

Schreckhorn (4,078 m -13,379 ft)

Switzerland

 The MET, New York 

The mountain 

The Schreckhorn (4,078 m -13,379 ft)   is the highest peak located entirely in the canton of Berne Eastern Bernese Oberlands Alps, between Grimsel and the Fiescher and Eismeer Glaciers.  It forms with Lauteraarhorn an impressive double-summit. The Schreckhorn is the northernmost Alpine four-thousander and the northernmost summit rising above 4,000 metres in Europe, considered as  the most rugged and hardest 4.000 meter mountain in the Bernese Alps. 

This mountain is hard to approach, regardless from which side. In this point we can compare Schreckhorn with mountains like Aiguille Verte or La Dent Blanche.

The first ascent was on 16 August 1861 by Leslie Stephen, Ulrich Kaufmann, Christian Michel and Peter Michel. Their route of ascent, via the upper Schreck Couloir to the Schrecksattel and then by the south-east ridge, was the normal route for the following fifty years, but is now seldom used.

The peak had been attempted several times before this, most notably by the Swiss naturalist Joseph Hugi in 1828 (the Schreckhorn's Hugisattel is named after him) and the guided party of Pierre Jean Edouard Desor (a Swiss geologist) in 1842. 'The ambition of hoisting the first flag on the Schreckhorn, the one big Bernese summit which was untrodden, was far too obvious for us to resist', Desor later wrote, but they climbed a secondary summit of the Lauteraarhorn by mistake.

The first ascent by the south-west ridge (AD+) – the normal route by which the Schreckhorn is climbed – was made by John Wicks, Edward Branby and Claude Wilson on 26 July 1902. They decided to climb the very steep ridge without the help of local guides and succeeded in reaching the summit. The north-west ridge (the Andersongrat, D) was first climbed by John Stafford Anderson and George Percival Baker, with guides Ulrich Almer and Aloys Pollinger on 7 August 1883.

The painter 

John Singer Sargent  was an American artist who  created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings. His oeuvre documents worldwide travel, from Venice to the Tyrol, Switzerland, Corfu, the Middle East, Montana, Maine, and Florida.

He was trained in Paris prior to moving to London. Sargent enjoyed international acclaim as a portrait painter, but  in later life he expressed ambivalence about the restrictions of formal portrait work, and devoted much of his energy to mural painting and working en plein air. He lived most of his life in Europe.  Each destination offered pictorial stimulation and treasure.  Even at his leisure, in escaping the pressures of the portrait studio, he painted with restless intensity, often painting from morning until night.  His hundreds of watercolors of Venice are especially notable, many done from the perspective of a gondola. His colors were sometimes extremely vivid and as one reviewer noted, "Everything is given with the intensity of a dream." In the Middle East and North Africa Sargent painted Bedouins, goatherds, and fisherman. In the last decade of his life, he produced many watercolors in Maine, Florida, and in the American West, of fauna, flora, and native peoples.

With his watercolors, Sargent was able to indulge his earliest artistic inclinations for nature, architecture, exotic peoples, and noble mountain landscapes. And it is in some of his late works where one senses Sargent painting most purely for himself. His watercolors were executed with a joyful fluidness.   His first major solo exhibit of watercolor works was at the Carfax Gallery in London in 1905. In 1909, he exhibited eighty-six watercolors in New York City, eighty-three of which were bought by the Brooklyn Museum. Evan Charteris wrote in 1927: 'To live with Sargent's water-colours is to live with sunshine captured and held, with the luster of a bright and legible world, 'the refluent shade' and 'the Ambient ardours of the noon.'

Although not generally accorded the critical respect given Winslow Homer, perhaps America's greatest watercolorist, scholarship has revealed that Sargent was fluent in the entire range of opaque and transparent watercolor technique, including the methods used by Homer. 

2016 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau