MOUNT SNOWDON BY RICHARD WILSON

RICHARD WILSON  (1714-1782)
Mount Snowdon (1, 085 m -3,560 ft) 

United Kingdom (Wales)

In Mount Snowdon from Llyn Nantlle, oil on canvas, 1765-66,Walker Art Gallery

The mountain 
Mount Snowdon (1, 085 m -3,560 ft),Yr Wyddfa in welsh, is the highest mountain in Wales and the highest point in the British Isles south of the Scottish Highlands. A 1682 survey estimated that the summit of Snowdon was at a height of 1,130 m - 3,720 feet ; in 1773, Thomas Pennant quoted a later estimate of 1,088 m- 3,568 ft above sea level at Caernarfon. Recent surveys give the height of the summit as 1,085 m -3,560 ft. The name Snowdon is from the Old English for "snow hill", while the Welsh name – Yr Wyddfa – means "the tumulus" or "the barrow", which may refer to the cairn thrown over the legendary giant Rhitta Gawr after his defeat by King Arthur. As well as other figures from Arthurian legend, the mountain is linked to a legendary Afanc (water monster) and the Tylwyth Teg (fairies). Mount Snowdon is located in Snowdonia National Park (Parc Cenedlaethol Eryri) in Gwynedd. It has been described as "probably the busiest mountain in Britain", with approximately 444,000 people having walked up the mountain in 2016.  It is designated as a national nature reserve for its rare flora and fauna. The rocks that form Snowdon were produced by volcanoes in the Ordovician period, and the massif has been extensively sculpted by glaciation, forming the pyramidal peak of Snowdon and the Arêtes of Crib Goch and Y Lliwedd. The cliff faces on Snowdon, including Clogwyn Du'r Arddu, are significant for rock climbing, and the mountain was used by Edmund Hillary in training for the 1953 ascent of Mount Everest.
The summit can be reached by a number of well-known paths, and by the Snowdon Mountain Railway, a rack and pinion railway opened in 1896 which carries passengers the 4.7 miles (7.6 km) from Llanberis to the summit station.

The Painter 
Richard Wilson RA was an influential Welsh landscape painter, who worked in Britain and Italy. With George Lambert he is recognised as a pioneer in British art of landscape for its own sake and was described in the Welsh Academy Encyclopedia of Wales as the "most distinguished painter Wales has ever produced and the first to appreciate the aesthetic possibilities of his country".  In December 1768 Wilson became one of the founder-members of the Royal Academy. A catalogue raisonné of the artist's work is published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
From 1750 to 1757 Wilson was in Italy, and became a landscape painter on the advice of Francesco Zuccarelli. Painting in Italy and afterwards in Britain, he was the first major British painter to concentrate on landscape. He composed well, but saw and rendered only the general effects of nature, thereby creating a personal, ideal style influenced by Claude Lorrain and the Dutch landscape tradition. John Ruskin wrote that Wilson "paints in a manly way, and occasionally reaches exquisite tones of colour".  He concentrated on painting idealised Italianate landscapes and landscapes based upon classical literature, but when his painting, The Destruction of the Children of Niobe (c.1759–60), won acclaim, he gained many commissions from landowners seeking classical portrayals of their estates. Among Wilson's pupils was the painter Thomas Jones. His landscapes were acknowledged as an influence by Constable, John Crome and Turner.

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 

LE MONT HOFFMANN PEINT PAR THOMAS COLE

THOMAS COLE (1801-1848)
Mont Hoffmann (3,307 m)
Etats Unis d'Amérique (Californie)

In View of Schroon Mountain, Essex County, New York, After a Storm , oil on board, 1898,

 160 cm x 99 cm, Cleveland Museum of Art

A propos de ce tableau

Grand défenseur de la nature sauvage américaine, Cole a déclaré : « Nous sommes toujours ici dans l' Eden » dans son Essai sur le paysage américain, publié deux ans avant de peindre cette vue des Adirondacks. L'artiste a esquissé la scène au début de l'été, mais lorsqu'il a créé le tableau dans son atelier, il l'a rendu avec l'éclat spectaculaire de couleurs automnales. Un tel choix avait probablement des connotations nationalistes ; il a un jour proclamé que l'automne était « une saison où la forêt américaine surpasse le monde entier en beauté ». Cole a inclus deux autochtones dans le feuillage du premier plan droit du tableau. À cette époque, les Adirondacks étaient encore le foyer de nombreux Amérindiens longtemps après que la plupart aient été expulsés de force des terres à l'est du fleuve Mississippi. Tout en continuant à vivre, chasser et pêcher dans la région, ces peuples algonquins et iroquois ont été contraints d'adapter considérablement leur existence au milieu de la colonisation et des industries forestières, minières et touristiques qui en découlèrent.

La montagne
Le mont Hoffmann (3,307m ) est un sommet de la Sierra Nevada, aux États-Unis.- dans le comté de Mariposa, en Californie, au sein de la Yosemite Wilderness, dans le parc national de Yosemite. Dans Un été dans la Sierra, paru en 1911, John Muir indique avoir randonné jusqu'au sommet du « mont Hoffman » le 26 juillet 1869-. Thomas Cole le surnomme Schrroon Mountain dans ce tableau. 

Le peintre
Thomas Cole, est un artiste américain, considéré comme le fondateur de la Hudson River School, école de peinture qui s'épanouit aux États-Unis dans la seconde moitié du A9^e siècle. Les œuvres de Cole et ses amis se caractérisent par leur rendu réaliste et minutieux des paysages américains, notamment des régions sauvages, et témoignent à la fois de l'influence du romantisme et du naturalisme.  Cole fut avant tout paysagiste, il se consacre également à la peinture allégorique. La plus célèbre de ces allégories est un ensemble de cinq toiles, Le Cours de l'Empire (ou Destin des Empires), qui retrace l'évolution d'un même lieu de l'état sauvage à la naissance de la civilisation, son développement son déclin et sa mort. Cole a été inspiré par la lecture de l'Histoire de la décadence et de la chute de l'Empire romain d'Edward Gibbon, publié entre 1776 et 1778. L'œuvre se trouve dans la collection de la Société d'Histoire de New York.  En 1827, Cole ouvre un studio dans une ferme à Cedar Grove dans la ville de Catskill, état de New-York. Il exécutera une grande partie de son œuvre dans ce lieu. En 1828, Cooper lui commande un paysage inspiré de ses romans, « sans les feuilles d’automne » du Paysage avec une scène du Dernier des Mohicans dont il juge l'effet trop voyant. Entre 1829 et 1832, il effectue un premier séjour en Europe, visitant notamment Londres, Paris et l'Italie. À Londres, il est attiré par les œuvres des paysagistes Turner et Constable. À Paris, il découvre les paysages classiques du 17e siècle et sera influencé par les œuvres de Claude Lorrain. En 1836, Cole épouse Maria Bartow, une des nièces de son propriétaire, faisant de Catskill son lieu de résidence principal. La jeune femme avait alors 23 ans et lui 35. Cole, qui s'intéressait également à l'architecture à une époque où cette profession était moins réglementée qu'aujourd'hui, participe au concours organisé en 1838 pour la construction du siège de l'exécutif à Columbus. Son projet obtint la troisième place et le monument final est une synthèse entre les projets des trois premiers lauréats. Le premier fils du couple, Theodore Alexander Cole, est né le 1er janvier de cette même année. L'année suivante naît Mary Bartow Cole, le 23 septembre 1839. Cole effectue alors un second séjour européen, d-e 1841 à 1842, accumulant les dessins et les esquisses dont il tirera les tableaux peints plus tard dans son studio de Catskill. Il exerce une influence significative sur ses pairs, notamment sur Asher Brown Durand, Jasper Francis Cropsey et Frederic Edwin Church. Ce dernier fut d'ailleurs son élève de 1844 à 1846. 

 ______________________________________

2024 - Gravir les montagnes en peinture
Un blog de Francis Rousseau

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