Landscape with Farmhouses

Charles Ginner 04/03/1878 - 6/01/1952

Summary

A thickly painted rural landscape depicting farmhouses amongst fields and trees. The scene is viewed from above, with a very high horizon, looking down on a farmhouse in the foreground; to the rear of the house, is a large field, which forms a separation between another farmhouse. The landscape is scattered with dense green trees, and just visible in the far left foreground is a grazing horse. Everything in the painting is surrounded by a dark outline, which gives it quite a decorative effect. The location of the painting is believed to be Gollick Park Farm, Clayhidon, a village in the Blackdown Hills on the Somerset/Devon border, in a letter from Mr K Wakeling to author Wendy Baron dated 3 July 1985. Ginner studied in Paris and was familiar with the most advanced developments in French art. A founder of the Camden Town Group with Sickert, he rarely painted from nature after his very early years but in the studio from meticulously detailed squared up sketches in the manner taught by Sickert. He also used a small home-made view-finder when searching in nature for a subject. Ginner's palette was strongly influenced by Van Gogh and Gauguin whose work he would hve seen at the ground-breaking exhibition, 'Manet and the Post-Impressionists' in 1910 and on subsequent visits to Paris with Harold Gilman. Ginner treated his approach to paint as that of a sculptor to marble writing: 'only out of sound and solid pigment (can a) good surface and variety be got, and durability in ages to come'.

Display Label

Channel Crossings English and French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism from the collection of Manchester Art Gallery This display looks at the allure and excitement of French art for a generation of English and Scottish painters emerging from the claustrophobia of late Victorian painting. Breaking with the Classical rigours of the Academy and the Salon, the artists who came to be known as the Impressionists painted naturalistic scenes with loose and quickly applied brushwork to convey the effects of light and the natural colours of shadows which had previously been rendered with blacks and browns. They explored the French countryside where they learned how to paint directly en plein air closely studying the changing effects of the seasons. Making regular visits to or studying in Paris, English and Scottish artists were in turn enthralled by these painterly discoveries. The new method of painting they then applied to the English landscape, to still lifes, portraits and interiors. Painters of the New English Art Club like George Clausen, John Singer Sargent and Philip Wilson Steer combined the subject matter of late Victorian genre scenes with the new style. Works by these artists and others are here shown alongside a few choice examples of French Impressionism from the collection and by the fore-runners of Impressionism; Eugène-Louis Boudin, Charles Daubigny and Johan Jongkind. While the English artists went to France the French painters and their dealers, such as Paul Durand-Ruel, escaped the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 and went to London. Their paintings were seen in England and some were even bought by Manchester collectors. In the Edwardian era newer developments in French art inspired English and Scottish artists on their cross-Channel trips and via a series of influential London exhibitions. The high-keyed colour and bold lines of the Post-Impressionist paintings of Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh were now huge influences on the artists of the Camden Town Group such as Harold Gilman and Charles Ginner. Later still Matthew Smith was to take his inspiration directly from Henri Matisse under whom he studied in Paris.