"End of the Harvest", Charles Angrand, c. 1892–1905
Charles Angrand (French, 1854-1926)
Charcoal on cream laid paper, 49.1 x 63.5 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund 1999.
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This drawing's unusual technique reflects the ideas of the French painting movement known as Pointillism or Divisionism. Its most famous practitioner, Georges Seurat (1859–1891), developed a technique of applying color in short strokes or dots. Seurat's friend Charles Angrand was influenced by this method, and both artists developed a related technique for their drawings. In the sheet shown here, Angrand used a black, manufactured charcoal stick on a paper textured with tiny ridges. The highest of these ridges hold the charcoal, but the paper shows through in the small spaces between them. This creates the effect of a soft, diffuse evening light that dissolves the curved shapes of haystacks and turns the landscape into an expansive abstraction of nature.
The artist Paul Signac, a friend of Angrand, described the artist's drawings as "poems of light."
-The Cleveland Museum of Art
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Source and download: https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1999.49