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Comparison with Lowry | My visual analyses of Impressionist works |
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One
particular group of artists seemed to favour the depiction of seascapes
was the Impressionists. The
Impressionists were a group of French painters who wanted to create a
brand new style of art, and are quoted as being a major influence to
Lowry. Impressionism involved painting an ‘impression’ of something on
canvas rather than concentrating on photographic quality. A
number of links can be made between the works of the major Impressionists
and Lowry’s, and although he was born years after them, it is possible
to see similarities in their working styles. Among
the ‘elite’ Impressionists was Claude Monet. Born in Paris in 1840, he
spent two years in the military after spending most of his early life
caricaturing in his home town of Le Havre, before later moving on to
landscape painting. Monet’s work inspired other artists, such as Edouard
Manet, who adopted an impressionist approach around 1873. |
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| ‘The Sea at FeCamp’ (right ) by Monet is a good example of an impressionist seascape. Here, Monet has used brush strokes to render the directions of the sea and the waves hitting the rocks beneath a pale grey sky. The colours used generally are very cool to capture the feel of the cold sea, but shades of red, orange and yellow brush strokes can be seen to make up the rocks. This has been pointed out in my rendition of this piece. |
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Despite the fact
that in his piece ‘Fishing boats at Lytham’ Lowry used a warmer
colour scheme and the sea is less ferocious, similarities can be drawn
between it and Monet’s seascape. Immediately, it can be seen that the
sky has been rendered in a similar way – clouds have been portrayed as
quite thick by the use of heavy brush strokes, and bright sky can be
seen directly above the horizon line. However, Monet’s piece does not
depict the sea in the same way as Lowry’s. |
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Perhaps a piece
that represents the sea in a similar way to Lowry would be ‘Sea at
Dieppe’(right) by Eugene Delacroix, a French Romantic painter who had a
large influence on the Impressionist revolution. The reflections of the
boats in the background can clearly be seen in the water, and the use of
horizontal wavy brush strokes to recreate the sea are not too far away
from Lowry’s technique in his piece Seascape. |
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Sea at Dieppe |
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| The atmosphere created in this piece is quite calming, caused by a fusion of both relatively warm and cool colours. The upper half of it uses a sky blue and a light grey to create a cool atmosphere, whilst the use of lighter colours such as pale yellow recreate the reflection of the sun shining on the sea and some of the clouds. Lowry’s ‘Seascape’ has used a similar technique to create the effect that the sea is warm whilst the sky is cool, in his use of orange-red for the sea and grey-blue for the sky. | |
