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Lot Essay
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A relatively late landscape, with very fine colour in the trees, from this artist chiefly known for his genre subjects. Redgrave gave a lecture to the Associated Arts Institute in 1868 entitled The Treatment of Subject in Painting, where he dealt with Ruskin's dictum to artists to go to Nature 'rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing'. Antithetical to this 'lidless eye' of literal fidelity, Redgrave explained that his own paintings were inspired by poetic feeling: 'some peculiar effect of sunshine or of gloom, or of mist, of sunset, or of twilight, which makes it strike us with a sense of its beauty, or of its fitness for the painter's art.... It may even be... some mere incident of season or of industry,... or higher still, some association that strikes a chord of feeling in the artist's mind.... Now the painter must treasure up the incident or feeling that awoke this sense of pleasure in the scene - and must reproduce it on canvas - an act of memory.... Nay, the most poetical phases of landscape are of all the most fleeting.'
A relatively late landscape, with very fine colour in the trees, from this artist chiefly known for his genre subjects. Redgrave gave a lecture to the Associated Arts Institute in 1868 entitled The Treatment of Subject in Painting, where he dealt with Ruskin's dictum to artists to go to Nature 'rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing'. Antithetical to this 'lidless eye' of literal fidelity, Redgrave explained that his own paintings were inspired by poetic feeling: 'some peculiar effect of sunshine or of gloom, or of mist, of sunset, or of twilight, which makes it strike us with a sense of its beauty, or of its fitness for the painter's art.... It may even be... some mere incident of season or of industry,... or higher still, some association that strikes a chord of feeling in the artist's mind.... Now the painter must treasure up the incident or feeling that awoke this sense of pleasure in the scene - and must reproduce it on canvas - an act of memory.... Nay, the most poetical phases of landscape are of all the most fleeting.'