While every artist surely has his or her favorite time of year, the rich colors of autumn are difficult to ignore. Though the last flush of brightness unfortunately soon results in fallen leaves and shorter, colder days, the coming and going of autumn has nonetheless inspired many great painters to depict the season in their own unique ways.
Mary Cassatt’s Autumn and Lydia
Mary Cassatt’s 1880 Autumn features the American-born French Impressionist’s older sister Lydia, who often posed for Mary’s work. Mary and Lydia were quite close, and Lydia’s death in 1882 from complications due to Bright’s disease deeply affected Mary and caused her to become creatively blocked during her period of mourning. At the time of the painting of Autumn, however, Mary was enjoying a successful alliance with the Impressionists in Paris, including joining them in their independent exhibitions. Her sister had also traveled from Pennsylvania to France to be with Mary while Mary pursued her burgeoning art career.
Cassatt’s Autumn is a solemn yet colorful work, with Lydia on a park bench appearing to be lost in thought. The change of season is clear as summer greens give way to the burnished colors of fall, and Cassatt uses her impressionistic technique to meld Lydia with the autumnal foreground. Lydia’s expression is compelling as well; she seems preoccupied and surely troubled by her failing health, perhaps even perceiving how her own life was then entering its final autumn phase.
John William Godward’s Autumn
John William Godward was a British Neoclassicist painter who came of age toward the end of the 19th century, when Classicism in art was being challenged by more modern schools. Godward was increasingly distressed by this changing of the artistic guard and his troubled mental state led his eventual suicide in 1922. He was an artist of unquestionable technical finesse, however, as seen in his 1900 painting entitled Autumn.
Godward was one of the "beauty painters" who portrayed lovely women in leisurely or decorative poses, generally with a Greco-Roman backdrop. In his personification of the autumn season, he chose a female figure who brings thoughts of harvest to mind as she picks ripe grapes in a gown of russet-orange and sage green.
Franklin Carmichael’s October Gold
Franklin Carmichael was an Ontario-born member of the Canadian Group of Seven, and like his Seven colleague A.Y. Jackson (painter of The Red Maple), produced several striking portraits of autumn. Carmichael also worked in the same studio as Canadian artist Tom Thomson, who had a great influence on the Group of Seven's original members until Thomson’s untimely death in 1917.
Carmichael’s 1922 October Gold is a finely-composed interplay between golden and orange leaves darkened by cool blue-gray hints of impending frosts. Carmichael’s work in conjunction with the Group of Seven asserted that the Canadian landscape was more than worthy of being depicted in art, just as Canada itself had begun to develop its own distinct national identity.
Emily Carr’s Autumn in France
Another well-known Canadian artist who would become an honorary member of the Group of Seven was Emily Carr. Born in British Columbia in 1871, Emily initially studied art in San Francisco then made her way to London and Paris.
Carr’s brightly vivid landscape Autumn in France is from 1911 and shows the influence of the post-Impressionist artists Carr surely encountered during her European sojourn. The color scheme is bold and flooded with yellow, and the energy of the strokes shows an increasing confidence. The painting also marks a pivotal juncture in Carr’s life. By November of 1911 Carr had returned to Canada, where she would soon resume her artistic studies of her native region and the indigenous groups of the Pacific Northwest, taking what she had learned abroad and truly making it her own.
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