Landscape with Figures

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Landscape with Figures

United States, 1923
Paintings
Oil on canvas
45 3/16 x 50 3/16 in. (114.78 x 127.48 cm)
Mr. and Mrs. William Preston Harrison Collection (25.6.5)
Not currently on public view

Curator Notes

During the early 1920s Costigan’s characteristic themes and painting style emerged....
During the early 1920s Costigan’s characteristic themes and painting style emerged. In his most important canvases of this decade, such as Landscape with Figures, he depicted a peasant mother with a child and goats or other farm animals walking through a forest glade. Costigan used his wife, Ida Blessin (b. 1894), an accomplished sculptress, and their five children as models. Despite financial problems, which must have made life on the farm difficult, Costigan idealized rural life, conveying in his pictures a quiet, pastoral peacefulness. Removed from nearby New York City, Orangeburg became Costigan’s Barbizon. Despite the calm, soothing quality of his subjects, Costigan’s paintings of the 1920s were alive with energy, created by his almost incessant movement of pigment and flickering color. Landscape with Figures is a superb example of Costigan’s work with its heavily encrusted surfaces, at times almost one-eighth inch thick. With a palette knife and the fullest of brushes he created impastoed passages that appear to be woven skeins of dripped pigment. His palette is equally charged: flecks of brilliant white, red, orange, magenta, yellow, green, dark blue, and brown emerge from a generally pale blue tonality. While the overall palette of Landscape with Figures is slightly sweeter than usual for this period, his paintings of the 1920s always glow with a variety of intense, warm hues. Costigan’s treatment is a late and extreme manifestation of American impressionism, characterized not only by a decorative quality but by a vigor of paint and light. This flickering of light and paint suggests an atmosphere alive with the movement and spirit of nature. The source for this transcendental mood-as well as a decorative quality-may have been one of Costigan’s favorite paintings, The Hermit, 1908, by JOHN S. SARGENT, which Costigan often studied at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Both artists presented alandscape in which rich foliage and sunlight animate the scene and make it difficult to distinguish the figures from their setting. The figures literally as well as metaphorically become one with nature.
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About The Era

The late nineteenth century witnessed a growing cosmopolitanism and sophistication in American culture....
The late nineteenth century witnessed a growing cosmopolitanism and sophistication in American culture. Great riches were amassed by railroad tycoons and land barons, and along with this came the desire for a luxurious standard of living. Collectors filled their homes with European as well as American works of art. American artists, generally trained abroad, often painted in styles that were indistinguishable from their European counterparts.
Most Americans who studied abroad did so in the European academies, which promoted uplifting subject matter and a representational style that emphasized well-modeled, clearly defined forms and realistic color. Academic painting served American artists well, for their clients demanded elaborate large-scale paintings to demonstrate their wealth and social positions. With an emphasis on material objects and textures, academic artists immortalized their patrons’ importance in full-length portraits.
Academic painting dominated taste in Europe throughout the century. But in the 1860s impressionism emerged in France as a reaction to this hegemony. By the 1880s this “new painting” was still considered progressive. Mary Cassatt was the only American invited to participate in the revolutionary Paris impressionist exhibitions. Despite her participation and the early interest of several other American painters, few Americans explored impressionism until the 1890s. Impressionist painters no longer had to choose subject matter of an elevated character but instead could depict everyday scenes and incidents. Nor did impressionists have to record the physical world with the objective detail of a photograph. Artists were now encouraged to leave their studios and paint outside under different weather conditions. American impressionists used the new aesthetic to capture the charm and beauty of the countryside and the city as well as the quiet delicacy of domestic interiors.
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Bibliography

  • About the Era.
  • Cikovsky, Nicolai J.; Michael Quick.  George Inness.  Los Angeles:  Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1985.
  • Fort, Ilene Susan and Michael Quick.  American Art:  a Catalogue of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Collection.  Los Angeles:  Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991.