Pastoral Landscapes In Henri Matisse's The Joy Of Life

834 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: What were the influences for the impressionist era

From 1905 to 1906 Henri Matisse completed the Le Bonheur de Vivre or The Joy of Life, one of the most famous works of fauvism, that demonstrated Matisse's want to change the common pastoral landscape found since antiquity by strong contour lines and fauvist colors. Matisse living through impressionism saw the need and desire for art to be pushed past the boundaries of the pre conceived notions of what was aesthetically pleasing, which had barely been change since the founding of art. In The Joy of Life, Matisse paints a pastoral landscape, a quiet and peaceful scene of the country with a new twist. This piece had bright gay colors and showed a change of human form through line.
In this painting, Matisse shows leisurely outdoor activities, a scene that has been replicated for more than a hundred years. Here he challenges the common composition, which was used by masters of art such as Giovanni Bellini and Titian. In this overwhelmingly large piece he combines all the previous pastoral landscapes from art history into one cohesive piece (Arnason). The piece has an overall sensual and erotic effect brought on by the voluptuous figures, and the almost pulsating background of trees, done in bright fauvist colors. The trees frame the painting and the small groups of people within. The woman on the far left with her arms up and hands cross behind her neck is a common pose which he thought to have adopted from Cezanne, an impressionist painter who very much inspired Matisse (Picasso and Matisse) The viewer's eye then travels around the painting to a couple embracing and then people dancing. The latter grouping became the inspiration for Matisse's The Dance paintings. Within the trees on the far right is a Shepard playing a flute to his ...

... middle of paper ...

...ternal reality and given the new engagement of revealing the artist's experience of reality by the colors pure chromatic intensity. (Arnason) Matisse in this painting uses color to show differences among nature and people unlike the paintings prior to him where differences were shown throw chiaroscuro and minute details. Although fauvism was one of the shortest periods in all of art history you can still see an echo of its high key colors for many periods after its ending.
For hundreds of years prior to the creation of The Joy of Life landscapes with nudes doings leisurely activities were being painting; however, none were done in the style that Matisse painted his figures. (Kramer) Matisse painted this scene in heavy contour lines as thick as ones thumb. He reduces the figures and the landscape to its simplest form by removing chiaroscuro and fine details.

Show More
Related

  • Visual Analysis Bouuerau

    546 Words  | 2 Pages

    Contextual Theory: This painting depicts a portrait of life during the late 1800’s. The women’s clothing and hair style represent that era. Gorgeous landscape and a leisurely moment are captured by the artist in this work of

    Read More

  • Wayside Madonna

    948 Words  | 2 Pages

    The painting is organized simply. The background of the painting is painted in an Impressionist style. The blurring of edges, however, starkly contrasts with the sharp and hard contours of the figure in the foreground. The female figure is very sharp and clear compared to the background. The background paint is thick compared to the thin lines used to paint the figures in the foreground. The thick paint adds to the reduction of detail for the background. The colors used to paint the foreground figures are vibrant, as opposed to the whitened colors of the Impressionist background. The painting is mostly comprised of cool colors but there is a range of dark and light colors. The light colors are predominantly in the background and the darker colors are in the foreground. The vivid color of the robe contrasts with the muted colors of the background, resulting in an emphasis of the robe color. This emphasis leads the viewer's gaze to the focal part of the painting: the figures in the foreground. The female and baby in the foreground take up most of the canvas. The background was not painted as the artist saw it, but rather the impression t...

    Read More

  • Fagonard And The Swing Essay

    1458 Words  | 3 Pages

    Fragonard was a product of the late Rococo period in the early eighteenth century a period that consisted of pastoral images of both men and women participating in games, having lunch together or a passionate scene between two people. Rococo created for the rich of France, consisted mainly of two types gallant and libertines. Fragonard’s paintings were mostly gallant which represented love as a playful game. This can be seen in his two paintings Blindmans Buff (fig. 1) and The Swing (fig. 2). These included interactions with figures in the paintings that suggested courtship; in this case it would be the pastel colors that he used which created a more playful look for the figures. In his 1775 version of The Swing (fig. 2) Fragonard presented a vision of nature and shows tremendous growth from his previous work painted during his second trip to Italy. This version is less erotic compared to his previous version of The Swing (fig. 3). The Swing (fig. 2) bares many similarities to some of his other works none more than Blindmans Buff (fig. 1) that was painted at the same time as The Swing. Both paintings shared various similarities and featured playful scenes of love.

    Read More

  • Georges Seurat - Hi Painting

    1600 Words  | 4 Pages

    ... study for the overall concept they appear rather as abstract patterns. The shadows of the figures were very carefully modeled. The light- dark contrasts of the shadows make them seem actually real. The spatial quality is only established through the relations between the sizes of the objects. The painting is not based on a geometrical, box like space. The perspective centre is on the right, despite the fact that the composition is laid in rows parallel to the picture frame. At the same time a paradoxical foreshortening from right to left is evident. The girl fishing with the orange dress and her mother are on the same level, that is, actually at equal distance. In its spatial contruction, the painting is also a successful construction, the groups of people sitting in the shade, and who should really be seen from above, are all shown directly from the side. The ideal eye level would actually be on different horizontal lines; first at head height of the standing figures, then of those seated. Seurats methods of combing observations which he collected over two years, corresponds, in its self invented techniques, to a modern lifelike painting rather than an academic history painting.

    Read More

  • The Ghost’s Appeal: Man’s Interest in the Superficial in Toulouse-Lautrec’s At the Moulin-Rouge

    1167 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...illed with interesting scenes, people, and ideas, has a distinct theme that emerges by looking at both the women and their male counterparts. From their similarities to actresses to their depiction as ghosts, Toulouse-Lautrec’s women are superficial. It is the men’s obsession with this, however, that reveals the work’s complete theme. Namely, that it is the outward grandeur of a woman that charms men. This point is brought close to home as the viewer realizes that he joins the men in the painting with the same curious interest in the superficial. Toulouse-Lautrec’s masterpiece brings the theme of superficiality’s appeal full-circle by engulfing both the subjects and the audience.

    Read More

  • Henri Matisse:Goldfish

    1236 Words  | 3 Pages

    Henri Emoile Matisse was born in Le Cateau in northern France on December 31, 1869. The son of a middle class family, his first career was in the law field. However, an appendicitis attack in 1890 rendered him bedridden, and with much time on his hands, he began to study the art of painting. To help alleviate his boredom, his mother bought him a paint box, and thus began his new passion: painting. In 1893, the work of Matisse was noticed by Gustav Moreau, (1826-1898) French painter, who developed a distinctive style in the Symbolist mode. Matisse displayed his work for the first time in 1896 at the ‘Salon de la Societe Nationale’. In 1903, Matisse was exposed to the pointillist paintings of Henri Edmond Cross and Paul Signac. Pointillism was a late 19th-century method of painting, consisting of depositing small dots or strokes of pure color on the canvas. Seen from a distance, these “points” blend and give the effect of a different color and heightened luminosity. The style, a development of impressionist color theories, was originated by the French painters Georges Seurat and Paul Signac.

    Read More

  • Art Analysis Of Claude Monet: The Art Of Art

    849 Words  | 2 Pages

    We can see a clear representation of the impressionist that tended to completely avoid historical or allegorical subjects. In this painting, Monet’s painted very rapidly and used bold brushwork in order to capture the light and the color; include relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes. An insistence on what Monet called “a spontaneous work rather than a calculated one” – this in particular accounts for the sketchy and seemingly unfinished quality of the Impressionist paintings. In the texture, he played with the shadow and light and created variation in tone, he employs patches of depth and surface. The light in the painting come from back to the windmill, it is a light shines softly behind the houses and the windmill. He was shown each brushstroke in the painting. Balance is achieved through an asymmetrical placement of the houses and the most important the

    Read More

  • Henri Matisse

    2595 Words  | 6 Pages

    The iconography of the picture could represent art in the view of the fauvists. Fauvists wanted to be free from tradition and natural colors. They wanted to be free to explore their world of colors as they saw fit. Fauvists and expressionists did not like to be held to strict rules when it came to painting. It could be that Le Bonheur de Vivre was a state in which they where trying to reach, but in reality could get never get there. On the other hand, could it be a place where they could only reach in their dreams? Critics have struggled with the interpretation of Matisse’s painting since the first display. That may have been Matisse’s meaning after all.

    Read More

  • Vincent van Gogh, Houses at Auvers, 1890

    615 Words  | 2 Pages

    This painting consists of three parts, with curving lines distinctly separating each of the parts. The foreground details a brick house with a thatch roof and a person walking along a path, the mid-ground depicts houses further away and the undulating greenery, and the background highlights the break between earth and sky with the tree line. The main objects in the Houses at Auvers are blocky houses, with a path cutting through the landscape and a person on the path. This...

    Read More

  • Cultural Influence Of The French Culture

    1084 Words  | 3 Pages

    His approach was an organized, discipline, and theoretical painting base of knowing stories, and the style was line rather than color. The reason I picked the painting is because it does capture my attention of how messed up it is that these men would capture women and rape them. But in today society you see in the news every day in America they’re capture of women getting kidnap, rape and it captures my mind of how messed up this is. Nicolas is showing us these events that happen and you see this stuff in movies. The painting sends a message a powerful message by the emotion, color and theoretical. This painting is so historic they made a movie based on the painting in 1962 and 2006. Next is regarded as France finest artist is a women named Louise Mollin (1610-1696). Her painting “Still Life with Cherries, Strawberries, and Gooseberries” a famous painting that created a perfect balanced, simple composition and focusing the attention on the objects. The sizes, shapes and texture of the fruit and container form international contrasts. Her painting turns out to be simple but yet elegant and change the way of art. The colors of the fruit and bold and focuses just on the fruit other than having a painting doing something with war, death, and story behind it. This has change art and you can see in today painting something simple can grasp anyone

    Read More

  • Henri Matisse's The Dessert: Harmony In Red

    477 Words  | 1 Pages

    Henri Matisse, 1869-1954 was a French artist; who was not only a painter, but also a sculptor and a printmaker. He is best known as the leader of the fauvist movement, along with André Derain. The fauvist movement lasted a short period of time, it began in 1898 and ended in 1908, the movement got it’s name from the French expression, Les Fauves, which is translated to: The wild beasts. A few well-known artists, such as, Van Gogh, Paul Cezanne and Gauguin, largely influenced Matisse’s paintings. One of Matisse’s most famous paintings and which I’ll be writing about is, The Dessert: Harmony in Red.

    Read More

  • Analysis of Olive Trees by Vincent Van Gogh

    714 Words  | 2 Pages

    Like many of Van Gogh’s paintings, Olive Trees commences as a landscape and expands into a complex work, disclosing influences from other times and places. Using the color theory and separated brushstrokes of the Impressionists, the movement and vivid colors of the Romantics, and lighting and composition inspired by Millet, Van Gogh achieves the potency and significance that characterizes his work. Van Gogh’s paintings can’t possibly be mistaken for those of another artist of his time because, despite the fact that all of his means have criterion, his end results do not.

    Read More

  • Women In Art Essay

    1561 Words  | 4 Pages

    Their intellectual horizons which were previously limited to light poetry or novels, have grown to include the vast fields of painting and music…I refer not here to those who, mistaking the vocation of their sex, are filled with the desire to be painters in the same manner as men. Even if the noisy, over familiar atmosphere of the studio itself were not essentially antipathetic to the codes of decency imposed on women, their physical weakness, and their shy and tender imagination would be confused in the presence of the large canvases, and of subjects either too free or too restricting, such as those which normally for...

    Read More

  • The Fauvism Art Movement

    673 Words  | 2 Pages

    Fauve’s art were different in each other of their own exclusive ways, but they all have the same origin, different feelings but same structure. They all did different mediums as well; for an example like I said they used art to express music, literature, and an emotional vision of the world from their perspective. Artist like Henri Matisse and André Derain with many more artists’ art was bright colored, exciting, attractive, and vividly expressed within their hands. They used communicative colors like red to show pain and hurt or blood or even the items that within the painting that describes the mood. Or another example could be Henri Matisse 'The Open Window, Collioure', 1905; he used his colors wisely and intensely. Most of the artist used oil, oil on canvas, and paint. Each piece of art work was used to perfection. ...

    Read More

  • How Does Matisse And Gauguin Use Their Paint Works

    1280 Words  | 3 Pages

    The artist's direct expertise of his subjects, his emotional response to nature, and his intuition were all additional necessary than educational theory or elevated material. My work isn't much like the work of the movement. However, what it does have in common is the use of patterns and composition as well as colour. For Matisse, the beautifying nature of a work of art was a vital piece of this way. His comprehension of the improving was inspired largely from Middle Eastern artworks, and specifically, from the woven artworks and calligraphy he found in northern

    Read More

More about Pastoral Landscapes In Henri Matisse's The Joy Of Life

Open Document