Van Gogh’s Landscapes—Agrarian Beauty and Life’s Renewal

In Memory of Micala Hicks Siler (1978-2020)
Devoted Wife and Mother, Humanitarian, West Point Graduate and Soldier

“Van Gogh & European Landscapes” Exhibit Entry (March-September 2022)
Dayton Art Institute; Dayton, Ohio

This day dawned for us in Dayton, Ohio, while on a cross-country road trip to the East Coast and where we enjoyed the fellowship of longtime friends from the Siler and Hicks families who visited Palouse Colony Farm in 2018. Micala served as founding director of A Family for Every Orphan which has found caring homes for children in need inside their countries of origin in eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia. Since we are exploring sites of interest along the way during our trip, a chance viewing of the Dayton Art Institute’s website this week reported on a special exhibit of masterful paintings by prominent 19th century European landscapists. It included works from Vincent van Gogh’s acclaimed Wheatfield series—the great artist’s last creations. Although I had read about his remarkable life, I had never seen one of van Gogh’s landscapes in person so took advantage of our stay to do so.

Although Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) never met famed “painter of peasants” Jean Millet (1814-1875), he was familiar with the artist since working enthusiastically as a young man in his uncles’ print-dealer firm at The Hague. In 1875 van Gogh attended an 1875 Paris exhibition of Millet’s larger works which greatly impressed him. Van Gogh also studied religious prints by socially conscious Gustave Doré (1832-1883) and agrarian works by Jules Breton (1827-1906) like The Blessing of the Wheat and The Gleaner. He came to speak of Millet and Breton in the same breath as kindred spirits whose art he called “the voice of the wheat,” and found the form of a sheaf an “enchanting symbol” of the infinite.

A profound intellectual and prolific correspondent despite mental and physical ailments, van Gogh read Zola, Dickens, and the classics, studied Delacroix and Rembrandt, and acquired engravings by Millet and other artists. Soon after deciding to become an artist in 1880, he read Alfred Sensier’s influential biography, Le Vie et L’Oeuvre de Jean-François Millet. The young artist found revelatory meaning in its portrayal of Millet akin to his own search for meaning through a consilience of faith and art in the natural world. In van Gogh’s Noon: Rest from Work, after Millet (1890), poet Allen Braden viewed the revolutionary artist’s depiction of Ruth and Boaz “serene in their exhaustion” and a kind of noble statement “…on the balance / between art and whatever is perfectly ordinary.”

Jean-François Millet, The Gleaners (1857)
Oil on canvas, 33 x 44 inches
Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Wikimedia Commons

Through his older contemporaries’ romanticized depictions of peasant endeavor, van Gogh saw the primal values of stoic faith, dignified simplicity, and honorable toil. His supremely passionate landscapes and portraits are devoid of complicated narratives. Rather, van Gogh chose commoners and the commonplace to show forth the everyday glories of faces, fields, and flowers in ways never before expressed. These views he enveloped in exaggerated colors from light lemon to orange, Prussian blue, Veronese green, and other seasonal shades of that anticipated Modernism. Few Impressionists apart from Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), however, had painted peasants, and his “Independent” version represented serious regard for the sufferings of the poor which he understood to foreshadow the emerging era’s granulation of the individual.

Pissarro found the self-reliant ways of rural cooperatives to offer the most practical means of cultivating humanity. This relationship is seen in the laboring souls depicted with hopeful, well-tended terrains of blue greens, russets, and pale yellows of in his masterpieces The Harvest (1882) and The Gleaners (1889). Summer, from the Four Seasons series (1872-1873) painted for the dining room of his patron Achille Arosa, shows three approaching peasants in the center of the canvas who are dwarfed by a prodigious field of dappled bundles and standing grain beneath an immense blue sky. In contrast to traditional allegorical themes, Pissarro’s painting is without religious or other cultural symbolism in testimony to exquisite vernacular beauty.

Pissarro met van Gogh in Paris in 1887 and encouraged him to brighten his somber palette. Amidst the Provençal mistral winds in June 1888, van Gogh passionately painted a group of at least nine “Harvest” paintings which provided opportunity to experiment with technique and color. He worked quickly in the vicinity of Arles, often reveling in the heat of day, “just like the harvester, …intent only on the reaping,” and blended striking hues of gold, copper, and bronze with yellow, red, and brown. In a letter to his brother and abiding benefactor Theo the following June, van Gogh expressed special interest in the patchwork of green and yellow grain fields surrounding the town.

Vincent van Gogh, Wheat Field with a Reaper (1889)
Oil on canvas, 28 ⅖ x 36 ½ inches
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; Wikimedia Commons

While still in Provence the following July, van Gogh painted the lush expressionistic masterpiece Wheat Field with a Reaper that gleams with a swirling sea of grain in impastoed layers of yellow-orange with white highlights seen in many of his later Saint-Rémy paintings. A benevolent sun stands against a sky of aquamarine and seems to radiate from the canvas. The view is from the upper story of the building where van Gogh had sought recovery from depression and obsession, and shows the field’s gray-white boundary wall but without any sense of confinement. The painting was one among his final Harvest (Wheat Fields) ensemble of a dozen double-square, horizontal works that joined numerous other previously completed agrarian scenes including the masterpiece of harmonic yellows, creams, and greens featured in the Dayton exhibit, Field with Wheat Stacks.

The impassioned visionary wrote of its “vague figure toiling away… in broad daylight with a sun flooding everything with a light of pure gold,” as a modernist expression of “sacred realism” with calm, religious hope in the face of death. In describing another of his 1889 paintings, Evening: The End of Day, van Gogh made explicit reference to the influence of Millet’s Return from the Fields coupled with Breton’s verse “Return to the Fields” (which had been dedicated to Millet): “…The peasant twice browned / By the twilight and suntan / Forehead bathed in the pale light / Makes his way home, his labor done.”

The harmonious interweaving of van Gogh’s “ideal” religious faith and “real life” agrarian experience represented the mature spirituality the troubled artist had long been seeking. Art and religion—the lodestars of his life, converged in the fields beneath before him. Struggling to contain such revelation amidst the mundanity of daily affairs, he also realized its significance to art. Van Gogh’s embrace of a divinized nature celebrating spiritually aesthetic force swelled beyond his pastor father’s severe Protestant didacticism to embrace both humanity and the natural wonder of crops and trees and sky. He perceived the mission of preacher and painter alike to express the creative force evident in the humble truths of Christ’s parables and the expressive powers of form and color. Such grace pervades nature and everyday community experience without need for miracles, material possessions, or complicated doctrine.

Millet had become his “father” and “eternal master,” van Gogh had written to Theo in 1884, and had offered insight into his own motivation: “Painting peasant life is a serious business, and I for one would blame myself if I didn’t try to make pictures that could give rise to serious reflections in those who think seriously about art and life.” Van Gogh likened his sketches and studies to the sowing of seeds by a farmer but, “I long for harvest time” he explained to his brother, and labored over final works on canvas with knife and brush.

Van Gogh’s association of grain and sheaves with life suggested humanity’s vulnerability and resiliency. The passionate reds and golds of his art are composed in balanced synthesis with the greenery and browns of verdant earth. He complemented these colors by mysterious orange and blue tones of the cosmos—a palette strikingly seen in his The Resurrection of Lazarus (1890). Despite the susceptibility of grain to ruin from fire and wind, or harvest with scythe and sickle, the fields serenely endured as tangible evidence of incomparable beauty, fecundity, and energy of the divine order.

Vincent van Gogh, Field with Wheat Stacks (1890)
Oil on canvas, 28 ⅖ x 36 ½ inches
Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland

Van Gogh expressed these beliefs to his sister, Wilhelmina, from Saint-Rémy in the summer of 1889: “What else can one do, when we think of all the things we do not know the reason for, than go look at a field of wheat? The history of those plants is our own; for aren’t we, who live on bread, to a considerable extent like wheat, at least aren’t we forced to submit to growing like a plant without the power to move, by which I mean in whatever your imagination impels us, and to being reaped, when we are ripe, like the same wheat?” The comment foreshadowed the artist’s increasing vexation and demise in the face of his own troubled soul’s harvest. The reaper as death fulfilled the sower’s purpose in the grand mysterious cycle of life and death seen in van Gogh’s beatified landscape where the finite and infinite coalesce.

The farmer motif is a profound and vital expression of life’s purpose, with figures cast differently from the plodding toilers in Millet’s paintings. Van Gogh’s harvesters are proud and purposeful workers whose faces shine with the luminous golden light that surrounds them and the grain. Reapers go forth blending into the contoured fields, gathering wheat and clutching sheaves as if holy ritual to feed heart and soul. Farmers, fields, and firmament are seen in throbbing, vital wholeness. Some of his magnificent harvest compositions like soothing imperial yellow and lavender Sheaves of Wheat and one in the magnificent Dayton exhibit, Field with Wheat Stacks (July 1890), present arrangements of nodding bundles and piles of stalks as if tender family portraits.

The softer palette of van Gogh’s later works was influenced by his high regard for the paintings of Impressionist leader Claude Monet (1840-1926). In popular discourse such works have been considered objects of enjoyment more than understanding, but plein air landscapes by Monet and Pissarro are more than passive depictions of location and light. Impressionistic views often show “fields of vision” selected for particular forms like sheaves, rows, and stacks of powerful meaning for artist and viewer.        

Arles
Harvest at La Crau with Montmajour (June 1888) — VGM, Amsterdam
Haystacks in Provence (June 1888) — K-MM, Otterlo
Summer Evening in Arles (June 1888) — Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland
Wheat Field (June 1888) — Private Collection
Wheat Field with the Alpilles Foothills (June 1888) — VGM, Amsterdam
Arles: View from the Wheat Fields (June 1888) — Musée Rodin, Paris
Wheat Field with Stacks (June 1888) — Private Collection
Wheat Field with Sheaves (June 1888) — Honolulu Museum of Art
Harvest in Provence (June 1888) — Israel Museum, Jerusalem
The Sower (at Sunset) (June 1888) — K-MM, Otterlo

Saint-Rémy
Wheat Field with Reaper and Sun (June 1889) — K-MM, Otterlo
Wheat Field with Cypresses (June 1889) — MMA, New York
Evening Landscape with Rising Moon (July 1889) — VGM, Amsterdam
Wheat Field with Cypresses (September 1889) — National Gallery, London
Wheat Fields with Reaper at Sunrise (September 1889) — VGM, Amsterdam
Peasant Woman Binding Sheaves (September 1889) — VGM, Amsterdam
Reaper with Sickle (September 1889) — VGM, Amsterdam
The Reaper, after Millet (September 1889) — Private Collection
The Thresher, after Millet (September 1889) — VGM, Amsterdam
The Sheaf-Binder, after Millet (September 1889) — VGM, Amsterdam
Wheat Field with Cypresses (September 1889) — Private Collection
Wheat Field Behind Hospital (December 1889) — VMFA, Richmond
Noon: Rest from Work (January 1890) — Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Auvers-Sur-Oise
Wheat Fields with Reaper, Auvers (June 1888) — Toledo Museum of Art
Wheat Fields near Auvers (June 1890) — Belvedere Gallery, Vienna
Peasant Woman Against Wheat (June 1890) — Private Collection
Wheat Field under Clouded Sky (July 1890) — VGM, Amsterdam
Wheat Fields at Auvers under Clouded Sky (July 1890) — Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh
Wheat Field with Crows (July 1890) — VGM, Amsterdam
Field with Wheat Stacks (July 1890) — FB, Riehen/Basel
Wheat Field with Cornflowers (July 1890) — FB, Riehen/Basel
The Fields (July 1890) — Private Collection
Wheat Fields with Auvers in Background (July 1890) — Private Collection
Sheaves of Wheat (July 1890) — Dallas Museum of Art 

Van Gogh Wheat Field Series Paintings, 1888-1890
FB: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland
K-MM: Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands
MMA: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Agrarian Landscapes as Serious Art

Jacob Ruisdael (1629-1682) was born to a prominent Haarlem artist family and became the preeminent landscapist of the Dutch Golden Age. His sweeping canvases included numerous coastal and Scandinavian mountain scenes, and twenty-seven views of grain fields also survive as paintings and drawings. In works like Wheat Fields (c. 1670), Ruisdael’s composition features a low horizon crowned with characteristic sweeping sky. In the foreground a traveler approaches a woman and child along a road leading between fields of ripened grain as if the awesome forces of nature dwarf humanity’s presence and manifest the inherent spirituality of creation.  The paintings of influential French artists Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) and Claude Lorrain (c. 1600-1665) also significantly contributed to recognition of landscapes as aesthetically and morally serious subjects even if referencing scenes from classical antiquity and the Bible. Poussin’s allegorical Summer (1660) shows a harvest scene with Ruth and Boaz instead of Ceres. The work of Ruisdael, Poussin, and Lorrain became well known in their lifetimes and would significantly influence the painting of the English Romantics, French Barbizon school, and American Hudson River artists.

Jacob Ruisdael, Wheat Fields (c. 1670)
Oil on canvas, 38 ⅜ x 51 ¼ inches
Metropolitan Art Museum, New York; Wikimedia Commons

Flemish painter David Teniers became one the foremost masters of the country scenes and clothed his field workers in the subtle earth tones favored by Brueghel and later artists like Millet. His canvases imparted the humanity of rural life with individuals even in worker groups and crowds painted with distinguishable characteristics. Teniers’ art became so synonymous with peasant genre that for the next century and beyond the name Teniers was a pseudonym for rustic views. The prolific painter married into the Brueghel family in 1637 when he wed Anna Brueghel, daughter of Jan Brueghel the Elder. (Peter Paul Rubens, her legal guardian following the death of Anna’s father, served as witness at the wedding.) In the 1660s Teniers acquired a rural retreat, Drij Toren (Three Towers), at Perk in the Flanders countryside and often used the area as a backdrop for more Arcadian idylls, likely inspired by the bucolic writings of Virgil and Horace. Among his most notable of his many summer paintings are The Reaping (c. 1644), Peasant Kermis (c. 1665), and stately View of Drij Toren at Perk, with David Teniers’ Family (c. 1660), which shows a brigade of peasants harvesting grain beyond the family’s graceful pose.

Nicolas Poussin, Summer—Ruth and Boaz (1660)
Oil on canvas, 46 x 63 inches
The Louvre, Paris; Wikimedia Commons

Throughout the eighteenth century many of his paintings served as patterns for tapestries and other creations. Michel Picquenot (1747-1808) and other French engravers executed splendid reproductions of his works as seen in Picquenot’s extensive “cabinet” series. (The term referred to a room of curiosities in a château or country house.) For Du Cabinet de Mr. Poullian (1780), Picquenot likely based his ambitious recreation on one of Teniers’ many gaudy harvest festival paintings. The foreground shows feasting, dancing to a bagpiper, and other peasant revelry presumedly on the grounds of a tavern or inn. In the distance a small group of harvesters bind and shock a remaining stand of grain.

Brueghel’s Renaissance Beauty and Blisters (Part I)

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s sixteenth century masterpiece The Harvesters (1565) provides vivid commentary on the Old World division of labor. The vibrant panorama is one of five in the acclaimed Renaissance artist’s ambitious Seasons series of wide, high diagonal foregrounds that allow viewers to perceive vast distances. The work teems with life and hot summer harvest bounty likely set in “Peasant Brueghel’s” native northern Brabant district of central Belgium. A group of men wield scythes in a dense stand of wheat almost as high as they stand, followed by women who pile the stalks into sheaves which some carry toward a clearing. In the distance a team of oxen pulls a wagon piled high with grain to the farmstead to await threshing. The field’s proximity to a church suggests these communal endeavors are hallowed tasks, while field hands also cluster in the shade of pear tree to rest, frolic, and eat bread and porridge. The grand work is also an allegorical depiction of Proverbs 10:5—“He who gathers in summer is a prudent son, but he who sleeps in harvest is a son who brings shame.” Flemish threshers also banded together by the thousands in this time to cross the Channel and work the later English harvest. They brought their folksongs with them, including one derived from a Medieval Latin hymn with a cadence guided by the swinging of their scythes. The tune’s doggerel verses were retranslated again by English hearers as “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” 

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Harvesters (1565)
Oil on wood, 45⅞ x 62⅞ inches
Rogers Fund, Metropolitan Art Museum, New York; Wikimedia Commons

Brueghel (1525-1569) began his career as an engraver, and his landscape Rustic Efforts (Solicitudo Rustica) shows the influence of his earlier travels to Italy in 1552-1553. Before this time, Brueghel, like most other artists of the age, used landscapes as backdrops for religious figures or other representations. The idea of depicting grand open spaces for their own sake stimulated uneasy prospects in the minds of viewers accustomed to perceiving wilderness and grand vistas as fearsome. While Petrarch’s idea of ascending a mountain simply for “the view” largely remained a radical notion in the sixteenth century, Brueghel’s art humanized such perspectives in ways that marked the emergence of a new approach that would popularize landscapes. Rustic Efforts—sometimes translated Country Concerns, presents a grand agrarian vista of Flemish vitality that directs the viewer from two harvesters in the lower right-hand corner upwards to a primal forest far in the distance, and across waterways teeming with trading vessels to steeply thrusting mountains on the left side. Between the scythers and the mountains is a broad verdant plain with a universe of tiny villages, a gristmill and churches, and farm workers and livestock who share the fields with the Brueghel’s puffy trees. One’s eyes return to the two harvesters, one of whom is pounding his scythe on a small anvil, who might well be thinking with pride, “We make all this possible.”

Known for realism in a day of artistic formalism, Brueghel offers a faithful if restrained record of agrarian life in its many manifestations—joy and fatigue, beauty and blisters, to impart the sense that peasants were ciphers for timeless humanity. Among his revolutionary artistic innovations is the sympathetic portrayal of ordinary people with all their foibles and prosaic chores amidst backdrops of natural grandeur.

The Garden of Earthly Delights and The Miracle of the Wheat Field

Some medieval theologians and parish priests saw divine intervention in agrarian fortunes and used familiar harvest experience to acquaint parishioners with higher truths revealed in the Scriptures. The faithful heard sermons about Jesus’ parables of the sower, wheat and tares, mustard seed, and leaven—all four found in Matthew 13, in which the temporal realm of crops and barns and harvests represented profound spiritual happenings and fates. These and other parables were subjects of an extensive series of engravings by French artist Léonard Gaultier (1561-1641). The influential Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516) depicted such allegories in complex paintings of detailed fantasy also known for his use of colorful impasto. Among the best known of some sixteen surviving Bosch triptychs are the masterful The Garden of Earthly Delights and The Path of Life. Both works are held by Madrid’s Museo del Prado and may have been used as altarpieces usually opened to glorious effect on feast days. They were likely painted between 1500 and 1505 in the time when Old World conceptions of humanity’s place on earth was giving way to new understandings made possible by Columbus’ trans-Atlantic discoveries.

Heironymus Bosch, The Path of Life Center Panel, The Haywain ( c. 1505)
Oil and tempura on wood; 53 x 79 inches (tryptich)
Museo del Prado, Madrid; Wikimedia Commons

The centerpiece of The Path of Life, known as The Haywain, is flanked by an image of Eden on the left and the Last Judgement to the right to provide a visual narrative sequence rich in detail of humanity’s fate apart from vigilant faith. The heavily laden hay wagon dominates the view of workers too busily engaged in the affairs and frivolity of daily life to consider Christ’s overview from the clouds above. Wagon and passengers are pulled toward destruction by a team of infernal beings while others eat, drink, and be merry. Bosch derived the conception from Jesus’ explanation of the Parable of the Tares of the Field in Matthew 13:37-39 which concludes, “…the harvest is the end of the age; and the reapers are the angels.” Bosch’s visionary art influenced the Brueghels, David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690), and others whose own styles marked the emergence of the Northern Renaissance.

Works by the notable Flemish artist pair Joachim Patinir (c. 1480-1524) and Quentin Massys (1466-1530) evidence imaginative spatial variety with agrarian settings in service to biblical narratives popular in the late medieval and Renaissance. Patinir, for whom story was as indispensable as setting composed the landscapes while Massys painted the more detailed human figures in the foregrounds. These elements are seen in their most ambitious paintings of apocryphal The Miracle of the Wheat Field, also known as Rest on the Flight into Egypt, which are comprised of scenes during the Holy Family’s escape from King Herod. Mary asked a peasant farmer to tell the pursuing Roman soldiers—portrayed as dullards, that they had long since the mature grain would cause the pursuers to think too much time has passed to continue. The farmer can be seen speaking to the soldiers, and because he had helped the fugitives, the field appears miraculously transformed into a crop of ripened bounty visible on the right side of the several versions attributed to Patinir’s worship and painted between 1515 and 1524.

Georges Trubert and Simon Bening, The Flight into Egypt (c. 1485 and c. 1530)
Tempera colors with gold leaf on wood (showing the “Miracle of the Wheat” in background)
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Used by permission.

Patinir and Massys’s renderings evoke compassion for the sufferings of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus, and are remarkable for the detailed harvest scenes showing teams of field workers with their tools and livestock, other tillage operations like plowing and harrowing, and the remarkable height and appearance of landrace grains. Because neither Patinir, Massys, nor their Northern Renaissance contemporaries like Simon Bening (c. 1483-1561) and Georges Trubert (1469-1508) had ever visited the Holy Land, such immense panoramas appear more colorfully exotic with towering blue-green mountains and verdant valleys than actually exist in the Low Countries. Trubert, a French illuminator, is known for panels enhanced by intense red-oranges, lapis azures, deep garnet, and other dramatic colors. Patinir’s oil panels are also more imaginatively composed and with naturalistic depth than other paintings of the time, and mark the emergence of European landscape art as a distinct genre imbuing place with as much significance as people. But only in the early eighteenth century would landscape art acquire the modern sense of depicting the countryside for its own sake.

Golden Age Artists

Artistic expression of agrarian experience over the centuries has varied like the seasons. Medieval fatalism shown in the solitary religious renderings of agrarian toil gave way to the colorful renderings of joyful communal harvest and other farming endeavor. Greater appreciation of peasant ways emerged during the Renaissance was reflected in new styles of art and literature. The lavish sixteenth century canvases and detailed drawings of Brueghel and his popular imitators show lively scenes with mowers, binders, gleaners, and carters working concurrently. The division of tasks would have normally been done in a sequence, but the scene allows the artist to more naturally depict peasants as real persons who frolic and dine as well as reap and rake. As if storytelling through paint, Brueghel and his successors show workers again proliferating throughout the countryside as had been the case prior to the calamitous fourteenth century of plague and want.

Considerations of more favorable peasant experience through the harvest motif diminish, however, in seventeenth century European art and literature. The German peasant revolts and regional wars across Europe unleashed after the Reformation—often shown as menacing depictions of workers with upraised sickles and scythes, led genteel patrons of the arts to commission calmer representations of country life. The peasantry had become a force to be reckoned with, or at least redirected in energy in order to advance social tranquility and stability. Art that engendered public order and upper class privilege rather than cultural angst led to serenely bucolic works notable for the peculiar absence of rural residents. Yet without these laborers tending the very herds and fields shown in such paintings, no bounty would sustain the population.

John Constable, after Jacob Ruisdael (1648), The Wheatfield (1818); Print Collectors Quarterly 7:2 (February, 1917)

Harvest time canvases by Dutch Golden Age master Peter Paul Rubens often show more livestock than people, while some Jacob van Ruisdael’s paintings and drawings like The Wheatfield (1648)—meticulously studied and copied by John Constable, depict bountiful fields tended by unseen hands. In van Ruisdael’s somber View of the Grainfields (c. 1670), the view is illumined by moonlight, a hint of hope in an otherwise shadowy landscape, with a distant cathedral hinting at reliance upon divine grace. The appearance of landscapes and certain plants and creatures might well foster artist intentions to inspire and illuminate. To be sure, Calvinist sermons heard by Dutch Masters may well have influenced their worldviews. But there is much to suggest from studying primary documents, period literature, and the paintings themselves that artists and those who first viewed their works saw real and imagined landscapes as sources of natural beauty and love as much as reflections for spiritual edification.

Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition and Agrarianism (Part 2 of 2)

Reconciliation and The Threshing Machine

 Among the World Columbian Exposition’s most magnificent paintings was Russian master Grigoriy Myasoyedov’s monumental Time of Toil—The Reapers, identified at the fair as Harvest-Time. Nearly nine feet wide and covering forty-five square feet of canvas, the expansive painting and gilded wood frame may have been the largest at the exhibition, and appropriately dominated one of the Palace of Fine Arts’ four large halls as a gesture of cultural goodwill from Tsar Nicholas II’s personal collection. One marvels not only at such immense treasures, but at the time, expense, and labor needed for crating and secure global transport. Harvests and other agrarian scenes painted by artists with personal experience in farming like John Linnell and Parisian Albert Gabriel Rigolot (1862-1932), who had instructed Evans and the “Utah Missionaries,” depicted the new order in realistic scenes that were at once natural and humane.

Grigoriy Myasoyedov, Time of Toil—The Reapers (detail, 1887), Wikimedia Commons

Linnell’s Storm at Harvest, which was exhibited at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, and Rigolot’s The Threshing Machine, painted that same year but not shown in Chicago, both exemplified prospect of an emerging cultural consilience in the aftermath of what agricultural historians term the Second Agricultural Revolution. (The first took place with medieval farmers’ introduction of crop rotations to increase soil fertility and grain yields.) To be sure, the workers in Rigolot’s painting appear too intent on their duties to sing harvest folksongs, which probably could not have been heard above the din of the thresher anyway. But as with the group scenes in the 1870s Harvest Time pictures by William Hahn and William Rogers, they still work together. In Rigolot’s canvas a woman helps to feed a similar stationary thresher, and the team likely eats together, converse throughout the day, and are probably grateful for the mechanical marvel that spares so many weeks of toilsome flailing. The scene is vibrant from the artist’s admirable talent for rendering the soft, hazy effects of summertime heat, and balances a spirit of innovation with the adjacent timbered farmhouse and barn where as many animals are seen as in any Barbizon painting.

Albert Gabriel Rigolot, The Threshing Machine; Loiret (1893), Wikimedia Commons

Similar views are in Albert Kappis’s many German harvest works like Farmyard Threshing Machine (1885) which shows no less than twenty people—men and women feeding the enormous wooden Dreishmaschine while children play among chickens, turkeys, and geese. One can almost hear the whine of pulleys and belts as an elderly man stokes the engine’s fire with a shovelful of coal. The overall wholesomeness of paintings by Linnell, Rigolot, and Kappis reveal a hopeful oeuvre in which agrarian landscapes with agricultural innovations need not represent contradictory values, but complementary ones. Their works also represented an important middle way between the aesthetic tensions of an age that divided critics and commoners into rural and urban, traditional and progressive, mystical and visionary.

Albert Kappis, Farmyard Threshing Machine (1885), Columbia Heritage Collection

 

World’s Fair Journalism and Sculpture             

Popular Iowa journalist and novelist Alice French (1850-1934), who authored many stories under the pen name Octave Thanet, visited the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 for two “Sketches of American Types” Scribner’s Magazine articles, illustrated by Pennsylvanian A. B. Frost 1851-1928), “The Farmer in the North” (March, 1894) and “The Farmer in the South” (April, 1894). Frost was colorblind which may have enhanced his notable use of grayscale for photorealistic art as seen in A New England Type, his tender Scribner’s depiction of a young girl in a harvest field who appears to deliver a lunch pail to an elderly worker.

French’s approach as a local colorist emphasized rural custom and dialect in sentimental prose that described various farm folk she found visiting the fair:

Sunshine seemed to fit her; for she was a comfortable and ample presence in holiday black, brightened by the red rose in her bonnet and the pink on her comely cheeks. She listened to a monotone of complaints of the crowd and the weather and the restaurant fare...; she was sympathetic but she was unflinchingly cheerful. I perceived that here was one of those homely saints who hide their halo under a zest for laughter…. I know she bakes the wedding-cake for the rural brides, and has fifty sensible, homespun remedies for sickness, and comes to watch with the very sick, and helps babies come into the world, and is a sturdy comforter and provider to the rural clergy.

…All the classes and divisions of the American farmer were at the great Fair. There was the prosperous farmer of the New England states, and the equally prosperous farmer of Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa; there was the tenant-farmer of the South, who may not prosper, but is always sure of cornmeal, pork, and molasses as long as his planter landlord does not go bankrupt; and the unprosperous farmers farther West, with their mortgaged farms and their discontent. Nor did it take any especial gift of discrimination to pick them out, the one from the other.

A. B. Frost, A New England Type, Octave Thanet, “The Farmer in the North” (Scribner’s Magazine; March, 1894)

Chicago’s Columbian Exposition also showcased important agrarian sculpture including Jean-Alexandre Republican France allegorical statue and the stunning life-size bronze, The Mower (1884 plaster, 1894 bronze) by English sculptor W. Hamo Thornycroft (1850-1925). Member of a distinguished London family of sculptors, Thornycroft became the leading figure in the New Sculpture movement of the 1890s that sought to animate the staid poses of classical statuary through more natural and contemporary representations of the human form. The Mower shows a shirtless young “countryman” clasping a scythe to his right side and holding his left arm akimbo with laced work boots and bib strap. Inspiration for the work came from a countryside excursion he took by boat along the Thames in 1882 when he saw a figure who brought to mind lines from the pastoral poem Thyrsis (1866) by Matthew Arnold (1822-1888):

   Too rare, too rare, grow now my visits here!

   But once I knew each field, each flower, each stick;

   And with the country-folk acquaintance made

  By barn in threshing-time, by new-built rick.

Where are the mowers, who, as the tiny swell

Of our boat passing heav’d the river-grass,

Stood with suspended scythe to see us pass?—

They are all gone, and thou art gone as well.

Right: W.  Hamo Thornycraft, Agriculture, Institute of Chartered Accountants, London (c. 1893)

Thornycroft’s masterpiece was probably the century’s first life-size statue of an everyday rural laborer—an unprecedented representation in both style and subject for class-conscious Victorian England. In an 1885 lecture to students at the Royal Academy, he explained how sculpture could benefit from new technologies like photography and “scientific exactness,” but that art served a higher purpose: “Science teaches man how to make use of the forces and laws in nature and shows their perfect consistency and harmony. But it is by means of Art that the ever-changing and evanescent forms and effects in nature, which are constantly before man and which astonish and perplex, can alone be arrested & permanently expressed. Art can thus interpret nature to man and teach him to perceive her beauty.”

Thornycraft’s innovative approach and adulatory commentary on his work by British art critic Edmund Gosse secured his reputation as a key figure in the transition of Western sculpture from the Neoclassical style of the 1800s to the twentieth century Modernism of Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) and his followers. Inspired by images of the Roman goddess Libertas, France’s stalwart republican figure of Marianne and America’s Columbia emerged in the nineteenth century as important symbols of national culture and aspiration. Both were commonly depicted with crowns of cereal grain and in other ways associated with rural folk and values.

Adolph Weinman, Cereals (1908), Vermont Marble North Pediment, Department of Agriculture Whitten Building, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

W. Clark Noble, Sheaf of Wheat (c. 1900), National Gallery of Art

Among America’s foremost Neoclassical sculptors of the time were Adolph Weinman (1870-1952), a native of Karlsruhe, Germany; Lithuanian-born Victor David Brenner (1871-1924), and W. Clark Noble (1858-1938) of Maine. Weinman had immigrated to the United States in the 1880s and studied at Cooper Union in New York with Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Philip Martiny. Weinman’s lyrical designs brought numerous state and federal art commissions ranging from medallions and the “Mercury dime,” to monumental stone friezes. Among his finest works in Washington, D. C. is Cereals (1908), a massive pediment sculpture crowning the Department of Agriculture Whitten Building’s north entrance. Carved from Vermont marble, Cereals shows two figures surrounded by sheaves of grain and corn husks who hold a title shield and is Weinman’s tribute to the agricultural bounty of his adopted homeland.

Brenner is best known for his design of the “Lincoln penny” that featured a profile of the president based on an iconic Mathew Brady photograph. Released in 1909 to commemorate the centennial of Lincoln’s birth, Brenner’s familiar design also featured a curved wheat stalk flanking each side of the image symbolizing America as a land of plenty. Brenner also created the Neoclassical bronze and granite public sculpture A Song of Nature (1918) that is a contributing property to Pittsburg’s Schenley Farms Historic District. After his ship captain father died at sea, Clark Noble moved with his mother to her father’s farm in Maine where he became fascinated by the beauty of natural forms in livestock and crops. He studied anatomy and art in Boston and London before opening a studio in Newport, Rhode Island, and later in New York where he won many commissions for monumental works. His Sheaf of Wheat (c. 1900) is a masterfully carved modern interpretation of this elegant primitive form.

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To view the first post of this 2-part blog series, click here.

Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition and Agrarianism (Part 1 of 2)

Artistic Tradition and Innovation

Ideas began circulating in cities across the United States in the late 1880s about prospects to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of America and to showcase the country’s economic progress in 1893. New York, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Chicago, and other cities vied for the honor which was awarded by Congress to Chicago, the Midwest trading crossroads long associated with agriculture. A colossal granite statue of Ceres twelve feet tall bearing a wheat sheaf and cornucopia, flanked by a similar sixteen-ton figure representing Industry, stood atop the entry the recently constructed Chicago Board of Trade Building in tribute to the sources of nineteenth century regional prosperity. (Thought to have been lost when the building was demolished in 1929, both sculptures were found in a woodland preserve west of the city in 1978 and returned to their original site in 2005).

Left: Agriculture—Ceres (1885); Chicago Board of Trade Building

Right: Louis St. Gaudens, Ceres (c. 1914), Union Station, Washington, D. C.

The substantially unimproved Jackson Park area of some 600 acres southeast of the city center along Lake Michigan was selected as the site for the grand fair. Following two years of ambitious planning and building, the World’s Columbian Exposition hosted an opening day crowd on May 1, 1893 estimated to be between 300,000 and a half-million. Among other attractions, visitors would be treated for the first time to Quaker Oats, Shredded Wheat, Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix, and other consumer products that premiered at the event. President Cleveland presided at the ceremony which was attended by Alexander Graham Bell, Susan B. Anthony, William Jennings Bryan, and other notable national leaders and foreign dignitaries.

Some 400 buildings were erected in the “White City” of shimmering if ephemeral staff-stucco and limestone which were arranged around an impeccably landscaped lagoon with statues and fountains that resembled a bustling Mediterranean seaport. Director of Decoration and American artist-sculptor Francis Davis Millet (1848-1912) suggested use of white for the exposition’s most prominent building exteriors, and also contributed murals to the Fine Arts Building and other structures. Many of Millet’s works were influenced by his extensive European travels and based on classical themes. His mural Thesmophoria depicted the ancient Greek festival that honored Demeter by celebrating the abundance of grain and fertility of the earth.

Francis Davis Millet, Thesophoria (1894-1897), Wikimedia Commons

Featuring a grand Corinthian arcade nearly one-third mile along Lake Michigan, the grandiose Manufacturers and Liberal Arts Building was the largest structure to have ever been built to that time, and provided forty-four acres of exhibit space. Among the exposition’s most impressive Neoclassical buildings were the three grand pavilions of the Palace of Fine Arts along the east shoreline which exhibited some 2500 works of art from sixteen nations on 200,000 square feet of wall space. The international organizing committee’s decision that countries could only send works by living artists raised serious concern from U. S. representatives who made specific mention of strong public interest in the rustic art of Jean-François Millet and Jules Breton, John Constable and John Linnell, and other European painters. Allowance was made, therefore, for American galleries and private collectors to loan over 100 additional masterpieces.

The Art Palace also served as the meeting place for the American Historical Association’s annual conference in July where historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932) delivered his seminal lecture, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” declaring that while the nation’s frontier experience had essentially come to a close, "The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward” explained the country’s development and, to a great extent, its identity. The same might be said of popular artistic and literary themes of the period. The Exposition’s ambitious World Congress Auxiliary convened scholars from around the globe at new The Art Institute of Chicago building to exchange ideas on a wide array of topics affecting societies at the close of the century.

Midwest author Hamlin Garland presented a paper on “Local Color in Fiction” at a modern literature panel and reinforced an emerging critical appreciation for stories like his about rural America. Adjacent to the Fine Arts Palace, an expansive outdoor performance area featured such stellar guest maestros as Antonín Dvořák, who had composed his famed New World Symphony in honor of the Columbian anniversary, and Russian folk chorale conductor Eugenie Lineff. Peculiar circumstances had led the renowned Czech composer and his family to summertime residence in tiny Spillville, Iowa, where he noted “endless acres of field and meadow” that inspired further symphonic works that year.

Technology Meets Aesthetics

On the opposite, southwestern side of the lagoon from the Columbian Exposition’s Fine Arts Pavilion rose the magnificent Agricultural Building and adjacent Machinery Hall (Implement Annex). These imposing structures housed what an August, 1893 issue of Farm Implement News lauded as “the latest and most improved machinery finished and decorated like objects of art and placed like jewels in the most attractive settings.” Displays festooned with colorful flags, bunting, and posters featured John Deere & Company’s celebrated “Columbian Peace Plow”—with moldboard and share cast from old weaponry to render swords literally beaten into plowshares, the “Largest Wagon in the World” from the Moline (Illinois) Wagon Company, and most elaborate of all, the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company’s centerpiece exhibit. It featured reapers and objects chronicling the company’s famed founder’s rise from Virginia farmer-inventor to head of the world’s largest manufacturer of harvesting equipment.

World’s Columbian Exposition Fine Arts Palace, The World’s Columbian Exposition Illustrated (Chicago: James B. Campbell, 1893)

Approximately twenty-seven million visitors attended during the six-month quadricentennial celebration. Palace of Fine Arts and Agricultural Building exhibits brought into rare proximate focus growing contrasts in perspectives on American cultural life and progress. McCormick’s gospel of reaper plenty furthered ambitions of the company’s evangelistic salesmen who throughout the decade of the ‘90s expanded to a vast network of offices throughout North America and formed a worldwide force of affiliates in Europe and Russia, South Asia, and Latin America that sought to convert the sickle and scything masses to the new mechanized order. Journalist Herbert Casson (1869-1951) wrote admiringly of the changes wrought by recent improvements in agricultural mechanization by McCormick and others, and suggested new emphasis on commercial incentives for manufacturers and growers alike: “Farming for a business, not for a living—this is the motif of the New Farmer. He is a commercialist—a man of the twentieth century. He works as hard as the Old Farmer did, but in a higher way. He uses the four M’s—Mind, Money, Machinery, and Muscle; but as little of the latter as possible.”

Stunning assemblies of paintings, etchings, and sculpture greeted visitors to the Arts Palace where throngs waited patiently in long lines for admission to two main entry courts and a central rotunda that contained works by artists from the United States and Canada, Germany, Russia, and Spain. Prominent American representations on agrarian themes included Harvesting on the Meadow by Alice Barber Stephens, Guy Rose’s stoic End of Day, Tonalists Edwin Evans’ Grain Fields, and Bruce Crane’s The Harvest Field. (The latter was on loan to the exposition from Andrew Carnegie.) The American Tonalist style of the 1880 and ‘90s generally featured landscapes characterized by neutral atmospheric gray, blue, and brown hues. Such “tones” were evident in agrarian scenes by the Barbizon masters who had been using dark colors to emphasize shadow and mood.

Bruce Crane (1857-1937) and Edwin Evans (1860-1946) both studied in France where Evans, a native of Lehi, Utah, had been a founding member of the Latter-Day Saints French Art Mission with Lorus Pratt, John Hafen, and John Fairbanks. In the spirit of John Hafen’s observation that talent is “a duty we owe our Creator,” the group studied at the Académie Julian in Paris, a popular studio school for foreigners, to develop their mural painting skills for church structures. They took regular trips to the French countryside where Evans painted Grain Fields in 1890, which was awarded honorable mention three years later in Chicago.

German artists Rudolf Lehmann (1819-1905) and Ernst Henseler (1852-1940) were among the few artists with two paintings selected for display at the Chicago fair. A native of East Brandenburg (in present Lubuskie, Poland), Henseler was known for realistic depictions of country life based on summer visits to his Prussian homeland and by 1893 had taught for a dozen years at Berlin’s prestigious Museum of Decorative Arts. One of the most significant German works exhibited was The Roller Mill (1875) by Adolph von Menzel (1815-1905). Although Menzel’s painting shows a factory interior rather than a rural landscape, his freer style and deep colors capture the figures’ intense motion, and the painting is a landmark in the emergence of a European Realism that would profoundly influence a new generation of artists including Ilya Repin and Edgar Degas.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Harvesters (1873), Wikimedia Commons

A sense of fulfillment in labor is also expressed other agrarian paintings from Europe on display at the World’s Columbian Exposition like George Mason’s serene Harvest Moon, Pierre-Emmanuel Damoye’s Breton Wheat Field, and Jules Jacques Veyrassat’s cheery Last Load of Wheat. Landscapes by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Claude Monet gave many Americans their first exposure to Impressionism. The three French artists had been principal organizers of the inaugural Impressionist exhibition just ten years earlier in Paris where Renoir had presented Harvesters (1873). The painting is remarkable not for the hedonistic colors and softly blurred forms commonly associated with Impressionism, but for the peculiar arrangement of the subject matter. Rather than placed near the middle of the canvas, three field workers are to the right of a central pathway that divides the grainfield from a vegetable patch. Two black-clad women stroll down the trail seemingly indifferent to their surroundings. Old emotions once inspired by such agrarian themes are now directed to new appreciation of light and shape. Yet Renoir, who more commonly painted cityscapes and voluptuous females, also famously decried used of the metric system for its replacement of human measures like the foot and league with arbitrary standards. Yet the promise of industry so prominently displayed at the Columbian Exposition also stirred suspicions elsewhere abroad in John Ruskin and William Morris. This would contribute an important stream to the development of Modernism. 

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To view part 2 of this blog series, click here.