Day Nineteen: Landscape by Edward Mitchell Banister
Hello and welcome to day 19 of 100 days of Tonalism.
Painted after - Landscape by Edward Mitchell Banister , Study by M Francis McCarthy - Size 5x7, Oil on wood panel
Today's study is of: 'Landscape' by Edward Mitchell Banister.
I knew little about Bannister until doing the narration for today's video. He appears to be a very interesting man. One thing is for sure, his paintings are very fine. Apparently Bannister was an African American, a fact I was unaware of till tonight. While this is an interesting fact given the times he lived and worked in, it's really beside the point of his art.
Yesterday, I mentioned that I was going to address some of the ways that a painting can be defined as Tonalist. I had in the
started discussing the inclusion of figures in the landscape and how that automatically generates narrative content in the painting. I'll continue on that theme today with the idea that many Tonalist painting eschew figures and. how that is one of the defining traits of Tonalism.
There are many Tonalist painters that included figures in their work. Foremost among them was George Inness. His paintings almost always contained small to very small figures. Some could argue that these figures were crucial to the compositions. but I'd tend to disagree. In the case of Inness I feel that he was still clinging to the traditions that came before him in which figures were not just present but prominent. Landscapes without figures take on a more synthetic/abstract quality as I wrote in blog post seventeen, Landscapes without animal or human figures have far less narrative content.
To sum up. Many Tonalist painters have figures in their work, but Tonalism was one of the first art movements to portray the pure landscape and for that reason I see the absence of figures to be a defining trait.
Cheers,
M Francis McCarthy
A bit about: 'Landscape' by Edward Mitchell Banister. As I've said, I left off with Ed's 'man' on the path. This painting was also a challenge in that the shadowed group of trees on the left was nearly black in the reference that I had. I had to wing it there.
The painting has a very strong, almost abstract composition and I almost chose not to do it for that reason. After I finished the study I felt okay with the paintings structure and feel that I got some good insight into Edward's stylististic and compositional achievement.
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Original painting, Edward Mitchell Bannister, woodcutter on path