From “Gustave Caillebotte: The Yellow Fields at Gennevilliers” in The impressionists at Argenteuil by Paul Hayes Tucker:
“Vibrant fields of yellow and orange daffodils stretch across the foreground of this dramatically composed view of the plains of Gennevilliers across the river from Argenteuil….
“Their proximity to one another makes their bold colors and the impasto of their petals particularly pungent. Shimmering with light, they recede sharply into the distance between fresh green fields on either side. Prefiguring abstract shapes that Kazimir Malevich would devise thirty years later, these assertive geometric forms rise high on the picture plane to end considerably above the midpoint of the scene.
“At the horizon we encounter the only vertical accents in the landscape: a band of trees that proceed from the left edge of the canvas to a point above the junction of the orange and yellow fields. There the trees become more distinguishable as a series of poplars that continues out of view on the right. Above this orderly arrangement of forms hangs a sky that has been subjected to an equally rigorous geometric sensibility and made into a strict, virtually uninterrupted rectangle. No cloud disturbs its surface, extending the expansiveness that the fields suggest.”
From “This Fevers Me” by Richard Eberhart in The Language of Spring: Poems for the Season of Renewal, selected by Robert Atwan:
This fevers me, this sun on green,
On grass glowing, this young spring.
The secret hallowing is come,
Regenerate sudden incarnation,
Mystery made visible
In growth, yet subtly veiled in all,
Ununderstandable in grass,
In flowers, and in the human heart,
This lyric mortal loveliness,
The earth breathing, and the sun.
The young lambs sport, none udderless.
Rabbits dash beneath the brush.
Crocuses have come; wind flowers
Tremble against quick April.
Violets put on the night’s blue,
Primroses wear the pale dawn,
The gold daffodils have stolen
From the sun….
Hello!
This is the second of two posts featuring daffodils with yellow flower petals and rich red-orange trumpets. The first post — where I also explain the use of “red” to describe daffodil trumpets — is Yellow Daffodils with Red and Orange Trumpets (1 of 2).
These photos were all taken in the same general area, where fringe flower bushes provided background to the daffodils. Since the shrubs hadn’t started revealing their pink or purple fringies yet, the tiny oval leaves — in shades of dark blue-green — created a uniform color and texture that contrasted nicely with the yellow and orange (or do I mean “red”?) of the daffodils.
Whilst slinking around on the internet looking for some preambles for this post, I came across the quotation above about the painting “The Yellow Fields at Gennevilliers” by Impressionist artist Gustave Caillebotte (image borrowed from List of Paintings by Gustave Caillebotte) — which, conveniently for me, is a painting of yellow and orange daffodils:
The quotation introduced me to the term impasto — where paint is piled on thickly to create physical textures on the canvas, so that someone looking at the painting will see both the raised textures and the shadows beneath them, whose intensity will vary depending on their viewing angle or the available light. To get a better look at the texture Caillebotte created, click the image to see a larger version.
I liked this painting because it seems to represent the natural conditions I prefer for taking photos of flowers: overcast days with plenty of bright light filtered through the clouds, creating consistent shadow detail across the scene while still enabling the saturated, often glowing, colors to catch the eye. I also think the impasto effect combined with separate ramps of color leading from the painting’s foreground simulates how we would see this scene in real life: rich with color, emphasized with texture, and enhanced to simulate depth by the lines that converge at the horizon. Just like a photograph, a painting like this is a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional scene: the artist uses different techniques and effects to trigger our brains to transition from two to three dimensions and lead us to consider the painting as symbolic of something real. We don’t normally think through these things when observing a painting or photograph; but we can still deconstruct them to understand the techniques that have been used.
When processing photographs — whether done in the camera, using presets or filters on photo sharing sites, or through enhancements made with photo-editing software — we try to blend both the documentary nature of photography with our sense of an experience that the photograph represents. Here, for example, is one of the photographs from the galleries below, before I’ve made any adjustments (other than removing dust or spots)…
… where, as you can see, the dynamic (or tonal) range of the image is narrow, leading — most apparently — to very little color differentiation between the yellow flower petals and the orange trumpets.
A photograph taken with a modern camera may start like this, as a relatively flat representation of a scene — something that roughly corresponds to the negatives produced by film cameras in terms of the potential for a finished image. This is even more true if the camera is set to take RAW images (where additional image detail is captured but you would seldom consider the image finished as taken); and is still true with image formats like JPG, where the camera tries to balance the colors and tones for you, resulting in a rather bland appearance overall. To state this as a stretched analogy to Caillebotte’s painting: it’s like the first layer of color the painter lays down, before painting additional layers and colors to simulate greater texture and depth.
Here we have the finished version of this image…
… where I’ve created more depth by: reducing color and texture in the background; adding a bit of color to the blue-green daffodil leaves in the foreground; and — most importantly — adding contrast, color, and texture to the flower petals, since the flowers are the subject of the photograph and the difference in color between the petals and the trumpets is a distinctive feature.
Here are the two images side-by-side, for comparison.
Gustave Caillebotte and his brother Martial were both interested in photography, so it’s likely true that their relationship influenced both Gustave’s paintings and Martial’s photography — a fascinating subject on its own that might lead towards a better understanding of how the two art forms blended in photography’s early history. If you’d like to read more about that, see In the Private World of the Caillebotte Brothers, Painter and Photographer — which describes an exhibition featuring art from each brother, and speculates on this two-way influence.
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
How I love daffodils! All beauties, but the top picture is especially fine.
Thanks! I liked it too — those daffs were strikin’ a pose!