Winter brings more gray into our days, and some of us may find the dark clouds and lack of light depressing. But even on the darkest days there’s color, if we look closely. Recently, I sat in a cafe on a wet and windy gray day, watching the twilight sky turn, not to a rainbow but to marble in the subtlest of grays, blues, and even purples.
Perhaps if I’d pondered longer, I might have experienced what writer Walt Whitman had when he wrote “A Winter Day on the Sea-Beach”:
“Even this winter day—grim, yet so delicate-looking, so spiritual—striking emotional, impalpable depths, subtler than all the poems, paintings, music, I have ever read, seen, heard. (Yet let me be fair, perhaps it is because I have read those poems and heard that music.)”
Poets and artists can help us fully realize the beauty of the season as they attune themselves to the nuances of nature and make great art. Great artists spend hours outside in all seasons and all weather, observing and sketching the light hitting the land, knowing that the light show that they had just seen will never again be repeated. These artists took their newfound wisdom and “plein-air” (created outdoors) sketches to recreate the most marvelous landscape paintings.
One such artist was Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci, who understood nature and the seasons well. In his notebooks, he detailed the colors and subtle changes that we might not notice, such as that snow is often not white, for instance:
“Since white is not a colour but is capable of becoming the recipient of every colour, when a white object is seen in the open air all its shadows are blue. ... And if that white object should neither reflect the green of the fields which stretch out of the horizon nor yet face the brightness of the horizon itself, it would undoubtedly appear of such simple colour as the atmosphere showed itself to be.”
Leonardo spent countless hours seeing how light affects objects. He wrote, “When the trees are stripped of their leaves they look grey in colour.”
A Bleak Midwinter
America’s preeminent landscape artist Thomas Cole taught Hudson River School painter Church (1826–1900), who delighted in capturing aspects of the changing landscape. Sketching a variety of terrains, Church honed his observational skills in plein-air oil paintings.He’d often visit remote and sometimes exotic places to paint: from the Catskills of the Hudson River Valley near his home and the Berkshires of Massachusetts to Jamaica, Colombia, and even to the North Atlantic between Labrador and Greenland, to name a few places.
Church’s prolific plein-air sketches were the keystones of his popular landscape paintings. He'd often start a painting in his Olana studio (southwest of Hudson, New York), building up the composition from his numerous plein-air studies, then completing the work in his New York City studio.
Much of Church’s inspiration came from the Hudson River Valley, including his home Olana. In his plein-air sketch “View from Olana in the Snow,” we can see how he quickly captured the tones of a cold day. We can also see the muted blue of the distant mountains that Leonardo mentioned in his notebooks that differs from the deep blue seen in summer.
In the bleak midwinter Frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone; Snow had fallen, snow on snow, Snow on snow, In the bleak midwinter.
A Warm Winter Sunset
Of the 19th-century American artists, one expert in the late 20th century rated Hudson River School artist Mignot (1831–1870) as highly as Church. Many of Charleston-born Mignot’s paintings were discovered in 1996, resulting in the late reappraisal of his work.Mignot’s parents emigrated from France after the Bourbon Restoration. He brought a continental flair to his paintings, having studied art in Europe, including with Dutch painter Andreas Schelfhout’s studio in The Hague, Netherlands. Schelfhout especially loved to paint winter scenes.
In 1857, Mignot traveled to Ecuador with Church. “One critic wrote, ‘The really distinctive quality of [Mignot’s] genius appears to us to have been developed by his visit to South America ... which gave rise to some of his finest and most original productions, and seems to have had a permanent influence in defining and developing his style,’” according to art historian Katherine Manthorne in her book “The Landscapes of Louis Rémy Mignot: A Southern Painter Abroad.”
In “Winter, Sunset,” Mignot immortalized the fleeting sun, setting on a frigid evening. He depicted a fiery sun in stark contrast to the snow-capped land, effectively conveying the otherworldly light of the evening sun before the twilight hours. See how the ice and snow reflects the sunset in an array of muted tones that will soon disappear. Tree skeletons hint at the once verdant land, and in the background, a church reminds us, perhaps, that these are all God’s creations.
Late lies the wintry sun a-bed, A frosty, fiery sleepy-head; Blinks but an hour or two; and then, A blood-red orange, sets again.
Delight in Winter’s Color
Let’s leave our country’s landscape for a moment and explore the surprising colors of the desolate Arctic in Church’s painting “Aurora Borealis.” Here, the snow and pack ice mirror the sky’s electric light show, albeit in muted tones. In the foreground, a dogsled team sprints to rescue a shipwrecked schooner trapped in the icy ocean.
Church had seen the atmospheric phenomena in New York City, where in 1859, an aurora borealis filled the Northern Hemisphere as far south as Cuba. Having traveled to the North Atlantic between Greenland and Labrador to sketch icebergs, Church had a good idea of the Arctic light. However, he created the painting in his studio, from plein-air sketches that a friend of his, physician and explorer Isaac Israel Hayes, had drawn.
In the painting, Church rendered the schooner United States that Hayes commanded on an Arctic expedition in July 1860. Completing the painting during the Civil War, Church’s painting symbolizes more than climatic phenomena. According to the Smithsonian website, the auroras during the Civil War were seen by many as signs from God, particularly “of the high moral stakes attached to a Union victory.”
Blow, blow, thou winter wind, / Thou art not so unkind.
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