Bloomsbury and France by Caws Mary Ann; Wright Sarah Bird;

Author:Caws, Mary Ann; Wright, Sarah Bird;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1999-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, The Thames (1859).

Bridges, boats, and harbors were a congenial subject. The Bloomsbury artists knew Charles Camoin’s Quatre Bateaux dans le port de Cassis (1928; see “Painters in Cassis: 1925–1929,” page 202), which is tranquil in the same way as Vanessa Bell’s paintings of boats and bridges. Her 1911 painting, A Bridge—Paris (see “Painters in France, 1910–1921”) echoes the architecture of Maurice Vlaminck’s Le Pont, bought by Clive Bell in 1910. In her painting The Harbour, St.-Tropez, the masts rise toward the sky, their vertical lines as clear and unblurred as those in James McNeill Whistler’s The Thames (1859). She was trained in the tradition of Whistler, and this painting hangs at Charleston. Roger Fry believed Whistler’s work lacked an underlying design, but Vanessa and Virginia Woolf disagreed with his criticism. In 1905, Virginia wrote of Whistler: “Oh Lord, the lucid colour—the harmony—the perfect Scheme. This is what matters in life.”12 By contrast, in Roger Fry’s delightful Boats in a Harbor: La Ciotat (see color insert), of which a study also hangs at Charleston, the small oval boats are almost like children’s shoes in the blue bay, while the sails reach toward the pink-orange sky. They cut across bridges and crop off the foreground in a reminder of the Oriental technique of which Whistler often wrote and which he practiced.

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