Painting the seasons

As a prelude to the oncoming change of season, Robin Stemp looks at a variety of works in which autumn and winter has been represented.


Of the English winter Edward Thomas wrote in 1906: ‘The end of the night is still, and the frost steals upon the world like moonlight from underground’. In Thomas’ word picture the land is turned upside down, the light seeming to come from unexpected quarters. In late autumn the fields are suddenly lit with gold, as the late, low sun catches for an instant the cropped corn stalks which lie at an angle after harvest. It is as if an electric light has been turned on and the land is illuminated from beneath the soil. It lasts only for an instant, then it is gone, but it is these moments of light emanating from and illuminating the unexpected, which give the cold months their essential beauty. Even if one thinks hard it is difficult to bring to mind many paintings which are expressively about the autumn and of the autumn as subject, rather than an addition to a work which is principally about a place. In this instance it is feelings more than topographical exactness which help to present the spirit of weather and time of year.

Jo Skinner – Autumn, 1988. Watercolour. 14” x 17”

Jo Skinner never sets out to paint the autumn, but every year the ‘sheer orangeness’ of the season makes her stop to look and record. In her watercolour of trees standing over a particular stretch of water in Suffolk there is twice the orange; one in the air and one reflected in the water. Backlit, there is a theatricality which is irresistible. A jazz ballet of light and colour. Skinner, in her desire to communicate, paints from the heart, and in so doing she makes a bid to illustrate not only a small river in Clare, seen in October, but one which stands for an autumn which is universal.

Autumn is the most problematic of all the seasons to render in paint, defeated as it is by its own extravagant beauty. The sheer overpowering exhilaration of the colours, the great vibrant reds, oranges, browns and yellows, set against the good weather background of blue sky and green grass, make it almost impossible to reproduce without tipping over into the worst kind of ‘Come to Britain’ calendar work. Kyffin Williams, who has painted his native Wales in all weathers, has a theory that it is this proximity of green with the russet browns which is at the root of the trouble. An autumn scene, he feels, is most successfully seen either across water or a ploughed field, where the browns are rich and dark, verging at times on black. “It all comes down to the fact that brown and green do not go together …” The Group of Seven in Canada painted the autumn and with them the greens are misted to grey …”

If the autumn is considered in terms of a slow glide downhill towards the end, then the atmosphere will be melancholic, soulful. In laying the ghosts of a past summer, the countryside is preparing for a death which will, in time, become a new life. The autumn is a transitory corridor of time, a no-man’s land leading from the verdant to the sparse, the full-blown to the bare. Like spring it lends itself to metaphorical allusion, as in Millais’ Autumn Leaves at Manchester City Art Gallery. In this, Millais shows the spirit of the season, while presenting it as part of an activity. Significantly, while summer and winter can be suggested by some sprightly activity – a field with cricketers spells out S-U-M-M-E-R – come October and most occupations outdoors will be dismantling, clearing away, tidying up. Millais shows four young girls engaged in building a bonfire; two are artistically throwing leaves on to the pyre, a third is standing by pensively holding what one supposes is a rake and the fourth and youngest is eating an apple. The atmosphere is sentimental, melancholic, a symbolic attendance of youth on the dying of the year. A death underlined by the black clothes of the two elder girls. The four, in autumnal colours, with hair to match, stand in a landscape with a darkening horizon. It is getting late, and the light is lemonade, the grass is veiled in smoke, or else partially hidden. Mannered, studiedly atmospheric and sentimental, it does convey a sense of the end of things, the symbolic burning of summer’s glad rags.

Geoffrey Fawcett Wilson – Studley Royal, October 1988. Watercolour. 10” x 13”

In Geoffrey Fawcett Wilson’s Studley Royal, October the greens are muted to a yellowy grey, the trees behind the temple are a deep smoky grey and the two greys cleverly contain the remaining area of russet brown. In this the artist notes down the end of the pyrotechnic display recorded earlier by Jo Skinner. In Skinner’s work the water was on fire, in Wilson’s there is a calm acceptance that this is the end of the show. Skinner’s is a dance before dropping asleep, exhausted, Wilson shows us the sleep about to take over. In Woolwich Farm, Autumn the season is beginning, the greens are turning and in both cases there is a very English restraint. The artist is in control of what he sees, using the ‘difficult’ brown within the greens. Skinner loses her heart to the sheer bravura extravagance of the scene, approaching the subject from the opposite side, and in both instances the artistic nail is hit firmly on the head.

Geoffrey Fawcett Wilson - Woolwich Farm, Autumn, 1988, watercolour. 13” x 19”

Julia Ball - September Field, 1988. 10” x 15”

After rain, the light on the Fens is extraordinary. Newly purged the air is light and, mirrorlike, it reflects both land and sky, one rebounding off the other. In the Fens the skyline is geometrically straight, ruled against the sky which towers over the landscape beneath which, the land, being made up of mud and water, sparkles. In autumn the colours are not shown in foliage so much as in the earth, the dykes and ditches, and the fields which lie in dollops of freshly turned mud, black as treacle. Julia Ball’s September Field is a love letter to a particular part of the Fen, with the earth catching and retaining for an instant, the fast moving autumn light overhead. A flick, flick, flick of red, yellow, blue, each colour outdoing the other in speed and intensity.

Mary Potter – Early Morning in Regent’s Park, 1946. Oil. 22” x 28”

‘The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free’, wrote Igor Stravinsky, and the more a landscape , or cityscape is loved, looked at, worked over, the more liberties in paint the artist can take. Mary Potter, who knew London intimately but left it in 1951 for Suffolk which she loved, is at her best when working within a small, well-researched sphere. In Early Morning in Regents Park 1946, the mist obscures the view, bringing the grass down to a hazy, overall parchment. The ground is hard, the figure sweeping (?) digging(?) has the air of one abstracted, absorbed in his work. His concentration, which invades the whole scene, is about to be shattered by the oncoming sun. At the time the light is hidden but soon the sun will muscle out from the low cloud and animate the view in fitful bursts of light. The air is still and cold, the staccato bare branches of the tallest tree are echoed in the uprights of the park railings which run diagonally across the bottom of the picture. The opposite is achieved in Ivon Hiitchens’ The Leaning Tree, 1932. Here all is languor. Not the languorous grace of summer, but an ennui brought on by the invading damp. The water is still, indolent and hardly bothering to reflect the overhanging trees, which cross, in nonchalant elegance over its surface. The definite season is not explained, but the air is chilly and tired, drizzled in mist. His greys and greens meet in a no-man’s land of pale khakis and off-white.

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Ivon HItchins – The Leaning Tree, 1932. 20” x 38½”. Reproduced courtesy of Austin/Desmond Fine Art

The seasons are felt differently in cities. In town we are as alive to the changing weather – but at one remove. The heat of summer hits us from a pavement. Birds sing in small walled gardens, and pigeons flop and croon in trees labelled and catalogued as exhibits in the Botanic Gardens. Autumn is a mist in the street, an autumn light is underlined by lit windows in the houses opposite, traffic hums in a different key, forsaking the dusty rush of summer, and the bus changing gear at the traffic lights has its strangulated harshness softened by a slush of rain water in the gutter. Atkinson Grimshaw whose best season began in October and ended in March, is the doyen, still, of the autumn and winter seen in town. He was the painter of the particular relationship of those living in close proximity with bricks and mortar, and each other. In his dark streets, inhabited by a lone figure, or a carriage, neighbours are at once intrusive and comforting. Gaslight and moonlight compete in an uneasy alliance.

Snow in towns is a nuisance, a slushy death trap for the elderly. In back gardens it has been painted a million times. The most seductively attractive subject, it is the easiest to do badly. One false move and it is ready to adorn the top of a chocolate box. In the country the old cliché likening snow to a blanket is apt. Like a blanket its very familiarity makes it a comforting image, and one which is easy to take for granted; its familiarity causing the painter problems. To paint the snow is to paint not so much the actual substance as the light surrounding it (not as fatuous a remark as might at first seem). Jo Skinner, in common with many others, finds it a source of endless fascination: “The light bounces off the snow onto the undersides of branches… colour never repeated at any other season.” There is a Lewis Carroll reversal of roles, of nothing being what it appears to be. The light, like Ben Travers’ fat women, comes from all directions. In winter sounds change, familiar noises are sharper, cutting through the air, too cold to hold them back.

Annette Walker – Winter Landscape, 1988. Oil. 24” x 19”

In Annette Walker’s Winter Landscape the scene is her native Sweden and in this she mixes warm and cold colours to great effect. The landscape beyond the charmed circle of tree trunks is warm in feel, with a rhythmic sweep, but round the water it is static and cold. It is pattern making, but more than merely decorative. Reminiscent of Paul Nash, it is unmistakably feminine - Nash with a pretty face. There is optimism in this painting. In Nash, the song of autumn is a sad one, and winter even more so. In his war paintings his trees stand to attention or, having been blasted out of the ground, lie awkwardly at ease along the waterlogged trenches. In Nash the seasons are a counterpoint used to underline his ironic view of life. They are overwhelming, ever-present, and he can, with economy, convey the heat, cold, the arrival of spring, or the dampness of a drab November afternoon, the silence of a snow covered field. In Geoffrey Fawcett Wilson’s Braisty Farm the snow is wrapped tight over the Yorkshire Dales, in one continuous whole. In Alan Munro Reynold’s Winter: January Hills the snow is rough, worn down, the air above unremittingly, bone snappingly cold and, as in the Potter, the verticals are perfunctory. The sun is high, the brightness is misleading, soon it will drop out of sight, and now it is for decoration only. It can offer little warmth. All is dead and yet even in death there is a life of sorts, and movement in the sun, which whirls through the air in a frozen vortex.

Geoffrey Fawcett Wilson – Braisty Farm, 1988. Watercolour. 13” x 10”

Alan Munro Reynolds - Winter: January Hills, 1954, watercolour and body colour. 19½” x 24½”. Reproduced courtesy of Austin/Desmond Fine Art

Wassily Kandinsky referred to the painter as a ‘hunter’. Or a detective, looking for clues which will in turn lead him/her to the truth. Joan Eardley’s obsessive curiosity, her passionate involvement with a small area of land on the east coast of Scotland, resulted in a series of paintings in which it would seem that the artist was part of the scene, at one with the weather – preferably stormy. The essence of her greatness was her curiosity, as well as her involvement. She knew her subject intimately, therefore she was interested enough to learn more, and this in turn brought about more knowledge – and the ability and desire to make unexpected discoveries.


Ths article was originally published in th October 1989 issue of The Artist


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