Autumn in Art: Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it!

“Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love – that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one’s very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”

(Letter to Miss Lewis, Oct. 1, 1841, George Eliot, George Eliot’s Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals)

Georgia O’Keeffe, Lake George – Autumn, 1922

Two Octobers ago I wrote a post called “Different Faces of Autumn” and it was a little selection of autumn themes in art. This year I decided to do something similar. I gathered a few intersting paintings by different painters and all of them have something autumnal in them whether it’s the autumn foliage or pumpkins, autumnal colours, word ‘autumn’ in the painting’s title etc. The first painting here is Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Lake George – Autumn” from 1922. The painting shows the Lake George in Warren County, New York. O’Keeffe’s husband, the famous artist and photographer Alfred Stieglitz, had a family house by the Lake George and that is why Georgia had an opportunity to spend her holidays by the lake. The horizontally elongated shape of the canvas is further emphasised by the composition which consists of four horizontal layers of motives; the thin layer of the sky in the far distance, the mountains, the blue lake and the lush trees with autumnal foliage in the foreground. Every motif is simplified and almost abstracted because O’Keeffe never wanted to portray reality or nature realistically with all its details.

Jean-Francois Millet, Autumn Landscape with a Flock of Turkeys, 1872-73

From O’Keeffe’s vibrancy through Millais’ melancholy, in this next painting called The gloomy and foreboding mood of Jean-Francois Millet’s painting “Autumn Landscapes with a Flock of Turkeys” is a stark contrast to O’Keeffe’s playful, nearly abstract, and vibrant portrayal of the Lake George in autumn and Millais’ lyrical and melancholy mood in “Autumn Leaves”. Millet painted this during his stay in the village of Barbizon. He wrote to his patron Frederic Hartmann on the 18 February 1873 that his painting for the dealer Durand-Ruel was almost finished, and he even included a brief description of the painting: “It is a hillock, with a single tree almost bare of leaves, and which I have tried to place rather far back in the picture. The figures are a woman seen from behind and a few turkeys. I have also tried to indicate the village in the background on a lower plane.” The tall tree with bare branches, its last leaves being carried off by the wind of change, turkeys walking aimlessly around the field, a mysterious shrouded figure of a woman, the bleak, earthy brown tones; all of this gives a heavy, autumnal mood to the painting. There is a slight worm’s eye view so the gloomy sky and the tree appear even more threatening and sublime.

Winslow Homer, Pumpkin Patch, 1878

Winslow Homer’s watercolour “Pumpking Patch” is a simple scene from everyday life which shows children in a pumpkin patch. Homer painted many watercolours with scenes from countryside life and these artworks bring to life the day to day activities; women gathering eggs or picking apples, milk maids, shepherdesses, reapers, or just children playing. In this watercolour we see a similar composition to O’Keeffe’s painting; the painting is composed of three horizontal layers; the sky, the haystacks and grass. There is a young boy carrying a pumpking across the pumpkin patch and some children on the left are seen sitting down and chatting. One bird in the sky. Just a peaceful countryside scene from a watercolour master that Homer was.

Camille Pissarro, Autumn, Poplars, Éragny, 1894

Pissarro’s painting “Autumn, Poplars, Eragny” brings to mind the views that I see from the window of the train when I am going to my university lectures. Landscapes of meadows, woods, fields, houses and villages, all pass by my eyes swiftly but they awaken artistic feelings inside me because they bring to mind all the simple yet delightful landscapes painted by Impressionists. The clouds in the baby blue sky are smiling and the sun is casting its warm lightness on the trees and the grass. The green leaves on the branches seem to be competing with the yellow and brown ones. Some trees are completely covered in yellow leaves while some are still green; nothing speaks more of autumnal transience than seeing the leaves on the trees change colour until there are no more leaves left on the branches.

Egon Schiele, Autumn Tree, 1911

Schiele’s approach to painting nature was similar to his approach when it came to painting portraits. For him painting a tree was not just painting a portrait of a tree, painting nature was a way of capturing emotional states. The trees, so thin and so fragile, and almost bare, with their long almost skeletal branches, growing from the wet, barren soil, standing still againsts the gusts of the cold autumn wind, they are symbolic of human isolation and loneliness. Schiele’s portrayal of autumn is this drab, cold November autumn when things are staring to be sad and grey. I wrote more about Schiele’s autumn trees in the post here.

Eliot Hodgkin, Large Dead Leaf No. 2, 1966

Eliot Hodgkin, a less known English artist, painted this interesting painting called “Large Dead Leaf No. 2” in 1966 and I think it fits nicely into this little selection of autumn themed paintings. The date is pretty recent considering the nineteenth century paintings in this post. Hodgkin loved to paint still lives of objects from nature such as fruit, vegetables, flowers, and leaves, and he approached his motives in the similar way that Georgia O’Keeffe did; he noticed the little things that most people wouldn’t and his painting style shows this precise observation and curiosity. Just look at how he approached this dead leaf, which some have suggested is a sycamore leaf but I am not sure. The dead autumn leaf is twisting from dryness and Hodgkins captures all its nuances of brown colour and tiny veins. It’s almost an exercise in mindfulness. Here is what the artist said about his approach in 1957: “In so far as I have any conscious purpose, it is to show the beauty of natural objects which are normally thought uninteresting or even unattractive: such things as Brussels sprouts, turnips, onions, pebbles and flints, bulbs, dead leaves, bleached vertebrae, an old boot cast up by the tide. People sometimes tell me that they had never really ‘seen’ something before I painted it, and I should like to believe this… For myself, if I must put it into words, I try to look at quite simple things as though I were seeing them for the first time and as though no one had ever painted them before.”

I hope you enjoyed this little selection of autumn in art! Naturally, there are many many other autumn themed paintings which are gorgeous and interesting but this is just my selection for this year.

Georgia O’Keeffe – Lake George with White Birch

From 1918 to 1934 the American painter Georgia O’Keeffe and her husband, the established New York photographer, artist and art-promoter Alfred Stieglitz would spend some time every year, mostly summers, in Stieglitz’s family house north of the Lake George Village in Warrren County, New York. With few interesting exceptions (such as her paintings of the New York Skyscrapers in her Precisionist phase), O’Keeffe’s oeuvre consists mostly of paintings of nature and motives from nature. It is easy to see why she would find inspiration in the trees, the sky, flowery meadows, mountains, hills and barns, and the lake George itself.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Lake George with White Birch, 1921

My favourite painting from her Lake George series is the one above called “Lake George with White Birch”, painted in 1921. I love it so much that I even have a print of it on my wall. The colours are so groovy and autumnal to me. I also love the composition; even though the Lake George is the main motif, it is actually hidden. Every other motif in the paintings takes our focus away from that little area of blue water. The purple mountains in the background and the rolling blue skies above them are so vibrant and exciting. The tall tree in the foreground is painting in a very beautiful, warm shade of green, and then there is the birch tree from the title; a delicate white creature with orange-yellowish leaves. All the colours blend out softly and yet stand out at the same time. To me, this painting, these colours, represent the groovy aspect of autumn when nature is screaming with vibrancy and abundancy. Only in autumn leaves on the same tree can be yellow, orange, red and green all at once.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Lake George – Autumn, 1927

The other paintings from the Lake George series are all vibrant and beautiful, each in their way. “Lake George – Autumn”, painted in 1927, shows an array of truly autumnal colours. The trees in the foreground are painted in fiery shades of red, yellow and orange hues. My other favourite is the painting “Lake George – Autumn” from 1922. I love its deep, rich yet subtle autumnal shades; the red, brown and dark green foliage on the trees in the foreground appears as soft and feathery as a cloud. The blueness of the lake stands as a beautiful contrast to these deep burgundy shades. “Lake George Reflection”, painted in 1921-1922, shows a whole different side to the Lake George. It is hard even to tell in which season it was painted because the candy-like colours look out of this world. It’s almost hard to tell which side is showing the real lake and which the reflection, what is real and what is not.

O’Keeffe was a Mid-West girl, having been born in Sun Prairie, Winsconsin, but her life path took her to both to the Wild West and to the East Coast, and everywhere she went O’Keeffe found motives worthy of exploration. A simple flower would be of much inspiration to O’Keeffe, how inspiring then would a whole lake be and the surrounding landscape and the trees with the changing foliage throughout the seasons.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Lake George – Autumn, 1922

The encounter between Georgia O’Keeffe and Stieglitz happened almost as an accident. Early in 1916, Georgia O’Keeffe sent a letter accompanied with ten of her charcoal drawings to her friend and former classmate Anita Pollitzer who then, without Georgia’s permission, proceeded to share these with the famous photographer Alfred Stieglitz, at the time also known for being the promoter of modern art. Stieglitz was amazed by O’Keeffe’s charcoal drawings and he instantly wanted to share them with the world. And he did, by ehxibiting them in his famous avant-garde gallery. O’Keeffe was living in Canyon, Texas at the time and the two started exchanging letters.

By 1918 Stieglitz had arranged for O’Keeffe to come and live in New York; he would take care of the financial aspects and O’Keeffe could simply focus on her art. Stieglitz was married and more than twenty years her senior but that didn’t stop their relationship from blossoming. They eventually married in December 1924 and O’Keeffe, as expected for her independent and strong-willed character, didn’t utter the customary “love, honor and obey.” O’Keeffe was a strong and independent person and a true individualist, but her artistic career and her relationship with Stieglitz are interconnected and it is hard not to talk about it while talking about her art. After all, he is the person who recognised her talent and the first person who exhibited her artworks publically. After Stieglitz’s death in 1946 Georgia visited the place one last time to bury his ashes under a pine tree near the shore and this shows just how significant and imbued with symbolic meaning the place and the summers spent there were for the couple.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Lake George Reflection, 1921-1922

There are different ways to look at O’Keeffe’s hollidays in the Lake George Village. Some might look at it as a tedious while others think the quiet, peaceful times spent there helped in shaping her as an artist. In was during those fleeting summer hollidays, in the quietness of the meadows, orchards, in the serene presence of the velvety blue Lake George that O’Keeffe started to be more attuned to the colours, sounds and scents of nature and this is when she first started trying out her later famous closely-cropped portraits of large flowers. In a letter to her friend Sherwood Anderson in 1923 O’Keeffe wrote: “I wish you could see the place here – there is something so perfect about the mountains and the lake and the trees – Sometimes I want to tear it all to pieces – it seems so perfect – but it is really lovely – And when the household is in good running order – and I feel free to work it is very nice.“