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Lot Essay
Poppies resonate throughout late nineteenth century painting and poetry. They were of course widely recognized as the source for opium, the drug over which wars were fought. For the Romantics, Keats, Coleridge and De Quincey they stood, metaphorically, for escape from the here and now into a world of dreams – one that took visual form in the work of Rossetti and the Symbolists. For Garstin and his Impressionist forbears however, the vivid vermilion dots that were scattered across a field in midsummer had no such hallucinogenic properties. Rather, they helped accentuate the colour and tone of surrounding meadow grass – to make it ‘live’. Monet famously established the subject in the 1870s and 80s with views of poppy fields at Argenteuil and Vétheuil, by which time British and American Impressionists were also painting summer meadows enlivened by spots of red. By the time Garstin positioned himself on the grassy Cornish slopes there were even attempts to bring plein air Naturalism and Symbolism together, notably in Frank Bramley’s Sleep, (unlocated) and Gotch’s Death, the Bride (Alfred East Gallery, Kettering), both shown the previous year.
While this charmed world was not for him, there is nothing prosaic about Garstin’s maid as she makes her way towards the little town. A small oil panel Newlyn from ‘The Meadow’, showing the same cluster of buildings, confirms the location of the present work.
Garstin was the most widely travelled member of the Newlyn School, having worked in South Africa as a journalist and painted in the South of France, Spain and Tangier, before settling in Penzance in the late summer of 1886. Forbes recalled this ‘distinguished’ Irishman’s arrival and the ‘delightful wit and fine artistic instinct’ with which he charmed the group. As a writer and critic he had his own opinions on the advanced tendencies in French art. Forbes may well have been recalling Garstin’s views expressed in 1884, that although Manet was wanting in ‘taste’, there was a ‘delicious brightness and happiness’ in the work of the French painter – ‘he lets in air and light’. This is likely to have been in accord with Forbes’s own opinions.
However, although Garstin developed his own ‘modern life’ naturalism in the late 1880s, lack of success, coupled with an ever present wanderlust led him to embark on an expedition across the Canadian prairies to Vancouver in the summer of 1891 when he painted the Northern Lights. He may well have seen the success of other ‘artist-travellers’ like Alfred East and Frank Brangwyn who obtained contracts from London dealers to visit exotic parts of the world. There is no doubt that such challenges refreshed the eye and undoubtedly contributed to the freshness of Garstin’s own vision. By 1896, when he was painting Poppies he must have recognized that the Newlyn heyday was passing and the era of great heroic canvases produced for the municipal galleries of the north, was coming to an end. There was no such reversal of fortune for the vivid plein air recording of Poppies. The light is going, the moon is rising as Garstin’s young woman makes her way to the village and at this point only, the petals glow like fiery torches to light the grassy slope.
KMc.
While this charmed world was not for him, there is nothing prosaic about Garstin’s maid as she makes her way towards the little town. A small oil panel Newlyn from ‘The Meadow’, showing the same cluster of buildings, confirms the location of the present work.
Garstin was the most widely travelled member of the Newlyn School, having worked in South Africa as a journalist and painted in the South of France, Spain and Tangier, before settling in Penzance in the late summer of 1886. Forbes recalled this ‘distinguished’ Irishman’s arrival and the ‘delightful wit and fine artistic instinct’ with which he charmed the group. As a writer and critic he had his own opinions on the advanced tendencies in French art. Forbes may well have been recalling Garstin’s views expressed in 1884, that although Manet was wanting in ‘taste’, there was a ‘delicious brightness and happiness’ in the work of the French painter – ‘he lets in air and light’. This is likely to have been in accord with Forbes’s own opinions.
However, although Garstin developed his own ‘modern life’ naturalism in the late 1880s, lack of success, coupled with an ever present wanderlust led him to embark on an expedition across the Canadian prairies to Vancouver in the summer of 1891 when he painted the Northern Lights. He may well have seen the success of other ‘artist-travellers’ like Alfred East and Frank Brangwyn who obtained contracts from London dealers to visit exotic parts of the world. There is no doubt that such challenges refreshed the eye and undoubtedly contributed to the freshness of Garstin’s own vision. By 1896, when he was painting Poppies he must have recognized that the Newlyn heyday was passing and the era of great heroic canvases produced for the municipal galleries of the north, was coming to an end. There was no such reversal of fortune for the vivid plein air recording of Poppies. The light is going, the moon is rising as Garstin’s young woman makes her way to the village and at this point only, the petals glow like fiery torches to light the grassy slope.
KMc.