10th Anniversary Prize Commission for Landscape Artist of the Year

One of the artists who has applied for the next series of Landscape Artist of the Year - by the deadline for entries of 3rd May 2024 - will win a £10,000 commission.

Last week Sky Arts announced the organisation which will receive the commission and the  location of the 10th Anniversary Prize Commission for the next series of Landscape Artist of the Year has been announced.

• The Courtauld Gallery will be the recipient of the £10,000 Prize Commission - meaning the winner will have their commission painting hung in the Courtauld. (You can see online versions of paintings in the Courtauld Collection - but always best to visit to see the real thing and appreciate its impact)
• The location for the Commission will be the South of France

Following in the footsteps of famous painters like Monet, Cezanne and Van Gogh, the winning artist will travel to the south of France to create a work inspired by one of the most famous coastlines in the word.

At this point I'll just insert my sketch of Monet's painting of Antibes in the 'old' Courtauld Gallery!

My sketch of Monet's painting of Antibes in the Courtauld Gallery

plus Cezanne's landscape painting of Mont St. Victoire - also in the Courtauld

The Montagne Saint-Victoire (c.1887) by Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)

oil on canvas

Samuel Courtauld Trust: Courtauld Gift 1932

I've also tried drawing the landscape in the south of France like Van Gogh and have certainly visited a number of places which he drew - and a number of places where he drew from.

If you want to get more insight into what that Commission trip might involve - just take a look at this article for Architectural Digest - An Art Lover’s Road Trip Through the South of France. I've done all of it apart from the last bit - and it is a location which provides masses of inspiration. 

Applications close on Friday 3rd May and the filming starts in June.
You can read more about how to enter via my blog post Call for Entries: Landscape Artist of the Year Series Ten

Who painted this? #66

This week's "Who Painted This (and the rest!) #66 is a painting has a tease in the title. 

That's because you should be able to work out what the title might be if you study the painting very carefully - and if you right click and open in a new tab you'll get a slightly larger version. 

HOWEVER there are a number of paintings which use that title - by completely different artists. I'd never realised quite what a popular theme this is until I started this post!

The other part of the tease is where I saw and photographed it (in London) is not where it normally lives! That's because it was 'on loan'.

Below you can find 

• The details of how to participate in this art history challenge  
• the rules of the challenge 
• the answer to last week re. Who Painted this #64 
• the names of all the people who got most or all of the answer correct
• who provided the best answer last week - which gives you an idea of what a good answer looks like

Your answers will be published next Sunday - before the next challenge.

How to participate in "Who painted this? #66

Tell me the story of this painting as best you can!

These are the for how "Who painted this?" works.

This is about using brains not technology - so please do NOT "cheat".

Briefly, in your comment ON THIS POST you must tell me ALL or as many of the following as you can:

• the title of the artwork
• the name of the artist who created this artwork
• the date it was created
• the media used
• where it lives now
• how you know all this eg how did you do your search
• anything else you can find out about the artwork and/or artist - tell its story!

The Winner of this week's challenge is the first identifiable person (i.e. no anonymous guesses) who, in my judgement, is 

• the first person to get to the answer by fair means 
• AND provides the best quality answer in terms of added details about the artwork and artist

Remember also

• no use of Google image search or Tineye to find the image allowed 
• this is a traditional web search of images using words only plus "hit the books" time
• I don't publish the comments until next week's post.

Comments on this blog post will only be published once a week - on the following Sunday.

(You wouldn't believe how many spam comments I'm having to identify and delete each week because of this challenge!!)

NOTE: You can find out more about the background to "who painted this?" and  THE RULES for participating in this challenge. on the Who Painted This? page at the top of the blog menu https://makingamark.blogspot.com/p/who-painted-this.html

Who Painted This #65?

Pommes et oranges by Paul Cézanne
Vers 1899
Huile sur toile; H. 74,0 ; L. 93,0 cm.
Legs du comte Isaac de Camondo, 1911
Musée d'Orsay 

The challenge last week was to work out which of the paintings of apples and oranges by a well known painter this one is - and where it is and other relevant details! 

Recommended Read: Hockney on Abstraction and Cezanne's Drawings

David Hockney has written an article for The Art Newspaper called Why abstraction has run its course

It's well worth a read - because yet again Hockney highlights some issues which make you think again about what you know and have seen.

This is the exhibition of Cezanne's Drawings - which he references in the article. 

I've always been a huge fan of Cezanne's watercolours - more so than his other paintings. 

The article certainly made me stop and think and go and look at Cezanne's watercolours again.....

I have just received the very beautiful catalogue from MoMA on Cézanne’s drawings. It’s an excellent book I can recommend to anybody. All the pencil drawings of the small sculptures that he made and owned have a great grasp of chiaroscuro, but I notice that in all the watercolours of still-lifes, landscapes and skulls, he takes away the shadows. They are ravishingly beautiful. I know I am the only one saying all this, but I firmly believe my observations are true. My friend Charlie in New York had sent me the catalogue and seen the show. I then told him about the shadows and what I had observed, and it made him go back to see it again.

Paul Cézanne. Forest Landscape. 1904–06.
Pencil and watercolor on paper, 18 5/8 × 23 5/8″ (47.3 × 60 cm).
Private collection

Paul Cézanne. Still Life with Cut Watermelon (Nature morte avec pastèque entamée). c. 1900. Pencil and watercolor on paper, 12 3/8 × 19 1/8″ (31.5 × 48.5 cm).
Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel. Beyeler Collection.
Photo: Peter Schibli

This led in turn to me taking a closer look at the exhibition which has just finished at MoMA in New York. 

• This is the Catalogue of Cezanne's Drawings. You can read an extract from the catalogue online
• This is a video of the Exhibition of Cezanne's Drawings

More articles, images and videos about the exhibition include:

• Installation images - 96 images Plus you can see more images from the exhibition via a MoMA Query
• A Guide to Cézanne’s Mark-Making and Materials - Explore the artist’s visual vocabulary through a detailed look at his techniques.
• Kiko Aebi on Paul Cézanne’s Foliage - A watercolor from the turn of the 20th century straddles the line between abstraction and representation.

VIDEO: Painting the Modern Garden

One of the new initiatives by Museums during the Lockdown has been better promotion of the Exhibitions on Screen films made in the past in association with different art galleries and museums.

This week the Royal Academy of Arts has posted a video related to its 2016 Exhibition about Painting The Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse.

Joaquin Sorolla, Louis Comfort Tiffany, 1911. Oil on canvas, 150 x 225.5 cm.
On loan from the Hispanic Society of America, New York, NY. Photo
© Courtesy of The Hispanic Society of America, New York;

Back in 2016, we filled our Main Galleries with all the vibrant colours of the garden, as we traced its many forms through a period of great social change and innovation in the arts.
Discover the paintings of some of the most important artists of the early twentieth century exploring the theme, including Renoir, Cezanne, Pissarro, Manet, Sargent, Kandinsky, Van Gogh, Matisse, Klimt and Klee.

A 90 minute DOCUMENTARY was made about ‘Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse’. 

• This video is available FOR FREE via the link above and YouTube (see small version below)
• both sources of the video provide HD resolution if desired.

Originally released in cinemas, this ‘Exhibition on Screen’ film takes us back to our landmark exhibition, ‘Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse’, examining the role gardens played in the evolution of art from the early 1860s through to the 1920s.

One page on the RA website Video: Inside the Artists’ Gardens provides

• access to videos of the gardens of various artists 
• these can be watched full screen 
• via the above page or via a YouTube playlist associated with the exhibition

Both are available at 1080 HD - but you have to choose this.

Using the work of Monet as a starting point, this landmark exhibition (30 Jan–20 April 2016) examines the role gardens played in the evolution of art from the early 1860s through to the 1920s. In this video series we take you into the gardens of artists such as Claude Monet, Pierre Bonnard and Emil Nolde.

The documentary video is also available via Seventh Art Productions

Review - Cezanne Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery

I recommend you see the new Cezanne Portraits exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery if you can.  I wasn't expecting to like it as much as  I did. 

It's very much a historic one-off exhibition. It's the very first time

• over 50 of his portraits have been gathered together for exhibition in one place. 
• his portraits have been seriously exhibited since he died and the retrospective in the Paris Salon d’Automne of 1907, the year after his death which influenced both Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, amongst others.

It's also a splendid and significant exhibition occupying almost all of the ground floor exhibition space at the National Portrait Gallery - the same space occupied by the exhibitions for the Lucian Freud retrospective and Picasso's Portraits.

Interestingly, it opens in London 111 years - almost to the day - after he died in 1906.

The last self-portrait (1898-1900) by Cezanne
oil on canvas, 641mm x 533mm
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The exhibition opened to the public at the NPG  today and continues until 11 February 2018. So lots of time to see it - however this one is undoubtedly going to be a blockbuster (see below) - so don't hang around to book tickets.

• It's come from Paris (Musée d'Orsay 13 June - 24 September 2017) 
• When it leaves London it goes to the National Art Gallery in Washington - West Building, Main Floor, March 25 – July 1, 2018

I saw it twice yesterday - in the morning at the PV and then again in the afternoon at the Friends Preview - which was packed.

The Portraits include two of (left) his gallerist Vollard and (right) the art critic Geffroy

The morning was a briefing. I listened to Nicholas Cullinan tell how this exhibition started out some six years ago during the tenure of his predecessor Sandy Nairne.

Then listened to the curator of the exhibition, John Elderfield, provided an excellent tour and explanation of the exhibition. (He's the Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, following his tenure from 2003 to 2008. He's also now the Adler Distinguished Curator of European Art and Lecturer 19th- and 20th-Century European Art at Princeton).  

RECOMMENDED READ: John Elderfield has written an article for Apollo Magazine - Cézanne’s radical portraiture by John Elderfield

He also highlighted the help that the online Cezanne catalogue raisonnée published in 2014 had been in preparing the exhibition (and incidentally it's fascinating!)

Elderfield's aim has been to:

• give a sense of progression in Cezanne's painting processes from beginning to end. 
• models at the beginning are largely family, lovers and very close friends. Towards the end of his life he paints people around where he lives in Provence. His wife and son by this stage are living in Paris.
• his use of the knife seems to diminish after the criticisms at the Salon in 1876
• his palette changes and lightens after 1872 when he moves to Auvers to be near Pissaro and learn about painting plein air and how to paint landscapes
• his portrait production drops - before recovering later in life
• highlight the complementary pairs of paintings and the series of paintings - different versions of the same subject (eg of himself, his wife Hortense, his uncle - but also of his gardener at the end of his life)

Cezanne Portraits exhibition in Paris, London and Washington

A major "once in a lifetime" exhibition of Cezanne's Portraits will tour major galleries in Paris, London and Washington in 2017 and 2018.

• The exhibition opens at the Musée d'Orsay from 13 June 2017 - 24 September 2017
• Cezanne Portraits then opens in the Wolfson and Lerner Galleries at the National Portrait Gallery in London on 26 October 2017 until 11 February 2018
• and finally travels to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC from 25 March - 1 July 2018.

The exhibition is being curated by

• John Elderfield, Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York
• Mary Morton, Curator and Head of Department, French Paintings, National Gallery of Art and 
• Xavier Rey, Director of Collections, Musée d'Orsay.

Self Portrait in a Bowler Hat, 1885-86 by Paul Cézanne.
Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen.
Photo: Ole Haupt; 

The self portrait of Cezanne (above) has previously been unseen in the UK.

This will be the first time that the National Portrait Gallery has ever staged a major show entirely devoted to Cezanne's Portraits. The exhibition brings together for the first time over 50 of Cézanne's portraits from collections across the world, including works never before on public display in the UK. The paintings are drawn from museums and private collections in Brazil, Denmark, France, Japan, Russia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Up until now, Cezanne's portraiture has received surprisingly little attention, so we are thrilled to be able to bring together so many of his portraits for the first time to reveal arguably the most personal, and therefore most human, aspect of Cézanne's art.Dr Nicholas Cullinan, Director, National Portrait Gallery, London

The exhibition will:

• consider the chronological development of Cézanne's portraiture 
• changes that occurred with respect to his style and method will be examined
• explore the special pictorial and thematic characteristics of Cézanne's portraiture and 
• review his creation of complementary pairs and multiple versions of the same subject. 
• discuss the extent to which particular sitters influenced the characteristics and development of his practise.

Facts about Cezanne and his portraits

• born in 1839; died in 1906
• Generally categorised as a prominent Post-Impressionist painter
• Widely recognised as a very influential artist in the 19th century. He influenced the art of Cubists, Fauvists, and successive generations of avant-garde artists. 
• Both Matisse and Picasso called Cézanne 'the father of us all.'
• He painted:
• almost 200 portraits during his career
• 26 self-portraits
• 29 portraits of his wife Hortense Fiquet

You can also find out more about Cezanne (and his landscapes and still life paintings) on my website About Paul Cezanne.

This overview of Cezanne's life and art provides a compendium of links to more information about:

• Cezanne's paintings, drawings and sketchbooks;

• museums and art galleries, exhibitions and websites where you can see his work;

• the places Cezanne painted in Provence

• books and articles about his artwork and his life and other resources for improving your knowledge of Cezanne, his unique approach to painting and his views on art (and society).