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Lot Essay
Throughout her long career, landscape painting remained an important creative outlet for Mary Swanzy. Drawing inspiration from the many different countries she visited over the years—from the South of France and the West of Ireland, to the islands of the South Pacific and Eastern Europe—her visions of the landscape combine a vivid sense of place with her own highly personal view of her surroundings.
In The Storm, the countryside is imbued with a powerful sense of energy, the modest dwelling and outbuildings at the heart of the picture seeming to sink into the terrain as it undulates and ripples, while dark, ominous clouds roll in over the mountains in the distance, bringing with them an unsettling atmosphere and crackling tension. The entire canvas is filled by Swanzy’s dynamically layered, multicoloured brushwork, in which soft, cloud-like passages of pigment merge and overlap one another, lending the composition a rich sense of texture. There are echoes of Paul Cezanne’s visions of the Provencal landscape in the compositional structure of the scene, the towering profile of the nearby mountain recalling his famous depictions of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Swanzy had first encountered Cezanne’s paintings while a student in Paris, most likely during her visits to Gertrude Stein’s famous salons during the opening decade of the twentieth century. Her engagement with the circle around Stein had opened the young Irish artist’s eyes to the radical pioneers of modernism, as well as the contemporary debates surrounding its development, though it took several years for the impact of these styles to filter through fully to her painting. In The Storm, the landscape appears to expand upon Cezanne’s example, its rhythmic, curvilinear forms and heightened colour palette filling the scene with an almost expressionist tenor, that seems to reflect the power and force of the oncoming storm.
In The Storm, the countryside is imbued with a powerful sense of energy, the modest dwelling and outbuildings at the heart of the picture seeming to sink into the terrain as it undulates and ripples, while dark, ominous clouds roll in over the mountains in the distance, bringing with them an unsettling atmosphere and crackling tension. The entire canvas is filled by Swanzy’s dynamically layered, multicoloured brushwork, in which soft, cloud-like passages of pigment merge and overlap one another, lending the composition a rich sense of texture. There are echoes of Paul Cezanne’s visions of the Provencal landscape in the compositional structure of the scene, the towering profile of the nearby mountain recalling his famous depictions of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Swanzy had first encountered Cezanne’s paintings while a student in Paris, most likely during her visits to Gertrude Stein’s famous salons during the opening decade of the twentieth century. Her engagement with the circle around Stein had opened the young Irish artist’s eyes to the radical pioneers of modernism, as well as the contemporary debates surrounding its development, though it took several years for the impact of these styles to filter through fully to her painting. In The Storm, the landscape appears to expand upon Cezanne’s example, its rhythmic, curvilinear forms and heightened colour palette filling the scene with an almost expressionist tenor, that seems to reflect the power and force of the oncoming storm.