: The red sash, 1881

$9,500

William Lamb Picknell [1853-1897]
American
The red sash, 1881
Oil on canvas
26 x 20 inches
Signed at lower right : ‘WLP / 1881’

 

Out of stock

William Lamb Picknell [1853-1897]
American
The red sash, 1881
Oil on canvas
26 x 20 inches
Signed at lower right : ‘WLP / 1881’

Marking type: Writing/etching within the paint.
Location: Lower right front.
Text: ‘[illegible]’.

 

William Lamb Picknell [1853-1897]

An orphan, Picknell, born in Hinesburg, Vermont on 23 October 1853, was raised by an uncle in Boston, who urged him to develop his artistic talents. This led to a stay in Italy (1872-74), including some time in Rome where George Inness agreed to accept him as a student. From there he continued his studies in Paris under Jean-Léon Gérôme. During student breaks he was able to discover Brittany and he fell under the influence of Robert Wylie, a leading figure at Pont Aven. In 1876 Picknell’s painting A Breton Farm was accepted at the Paris Salon; he would continue to exhibit there for the rest of his life.

The Phoenix Art Museum has Picknell’s picturesque Pont-Aven Harbor (1879). He exhibited for the first time at the National Academy of Design in 1879 when he submitted Land of Kerren, Finistère. His Road to Concarneau (Corcoran Gallery of Art), given an Honorable Mention at the Salon of 1880, is for William H. Gerdts the prime example of the “Glare aesthetic,” in which broad surfaces of strong local color reflect blinding light; it was one way to define form, devised in the seventeenth century in Holland. Even more blinding is the wide road in Road to Nice (1896; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts). The same museum has Picknell’s On the Borders of the Marsh (1877-80), a sort of “takeoff” of Hugh Bolton Jones’s exact same view, called Edge of the Moor, Brittany (1877; Private collection). Sadakichi Hartmann described Picknell’s version: “a November day in a Brittany field, with the characteristic gnarled trees, overgrown with ivy and mistletoe, and the broad earthen fences peculiar to that region . . . most vigorous in its treatment. . . .” In 1882 Picknell returned to Boston and began to spend summers at Annisquam on Cape Ann (1883-91). There he worked with Hugh Bolton Jones, Lewis Henry Meakin, Robert Vonnoh and others. His painting called Wintry March (1885) is in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. From about the same year is Sand Dunes of Essex, Massachusetts (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), an impressive panorama.

Picknell became an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1891, then traveled to California and to Provence with Henry Mosler and Meakin. Picknell exhibited at the National Academy, at the Pennsylvania Academy and at the Society of British Artists in London. In his subtle art, Picknell carefully observed the nuances of nature’s palette and captured its various spectacular lighting effects. He used a palette knife and expressive brushwork but despite this vigorous technique, he achieved convincingly naturalistic landscapes, often highly illuminated, in panoramic formats. Critics of the time admired his bold execution, comparing it to Courbet’s. The haphazard quality of Picknell’s compositions convinces the viewer that he depicted actual locations. Picknell is represented by another canvas in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Morning on the Loing at Moret (ca. 1895), quite similar to the Metropolitan Museum’s Banks of the Loing (ca. 1897). Both feature a dazzling, sunny sky and a tow path to the side of the river. After the death of his three-year-old son, Picknell became ill himself and died of heart failure at the age of forty-three at Marblehead, Massachusetts, on 8 August 1897. The City Art Museum of St. Louis held a retrospective exhibition that December.

Sources:
Sadakichi Hartmann. A History of American Art. 2 vols. Boston: L. C. Page and Co., 1902, pp. 85-87; Emerson, E. W. “An American Landscape Painter.” Century Magazine 40 (September 1901): 710-713; Boyle, Richard J. American Impressionism. Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1971, pp. 117-118; Quick, Michael. American Expatriate Painters of the Late Nineteenth Century. Dayton, OH: Dayton Art Institute, 1976, pp. 25-27, 124; Burke, Doreen Bolger. American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. III. New York: 1980, pp. 145-146; Sellin, David. Americans in Brittany and Normandy 1860-1910. Phoenix Art Museum, 1982; Jacobs, Michael. The Good and Simple Life: Artist Colonies in Europe and America. Oxford, UK: Phaidon Books, 1985, pp. 58-63; Weber, Bruce and William H. Gerdts. In Nature’s Ways: American Landscape Painting of the Late Nineteenth Century. Exh. cat. West Palm Beach, FL: Norton Gallery of Art, 1987, pp. 10-11, 65, 99; Sellin, David. The Art of William Lamb Picknell: 1853-1897. Exh. cat. Washington, DC: Taggart and Jorgensen Gallery, 1991.

Submitted by Richard H. Love and Michael Preston Worley, Ph.D.