Brief Report

This sketchy pointillist picture was completed in a single short session which probably lasted not much longer than an hour. Metzinger used a commercially available pre-primed board. With a few dry brush-strokes in blue paint he sketched the contours of horizon, house and tree (fig. 6). Next he systematically applied regularly juxtaposed large brightly coloured impasto brush-strokes. The white ground was heavily integrated into the effect of the finished picture, and appears ubiquitously between the painted areas. In general, the paint was applied in a single layer. Only in a few places was a second layer applied, in order to correct either the hue or the direction of the brush stroke (fig. 8). Contradicting our classical view of Neo-impressionism, Metzinger did not use exclusively pure colours, but also blends. The mosaic-like character of the large, evenly composed brush-strokes can be found with increasing frequency in Metzinger’s work around 1906. The painting Landscape with Tree also belongs to this period. Since then, however, the appearance of the picture has changed drastically as a result both of natural aging processes and deliberate restoration measures. In addition to the fact that the board was cropped when mounted on a cradled laminated panel, leading to a reduction in the picture area, the overall effect of the colours and of the picture as a whole has undergone a major change due to years of accumulated dirt. The exclusively protein-bound ground has proved to be particularly sensitive to deposits of dirt, so that the originally white hues have been replaced by an undifferentiated light-to-mid grey (figs. 9, 10). The extent to which the actual contrasts and colour of the depiction has been influenced as a result is strikingly illustrated by a reconstruction of the pristine appearance on the basis of investigation of the material (fig. 14).

Jean Metzinger
Landscape with Tree, c. 1906, oil on cardboard, 22.0 x 27.5 cm, WRM Dep. 847

Jean Metzinger

born on 25 June 1883 in Nantes,
died on 30 November 1956 in Pari

Brief report with complete data as downloadable pdf-file

Further illustrations:

Fig. 02

Verso


Fig. 03

Raking light


Fig. 04

UV fluorescence


Fig. 05

Detail of signature, presumably stamped


Fig. 06

Detail of the blue underdrawing lines marked with red arrows


Fig. 07

Detail of the brushstrokes in raking light, the red arrows in the inset mark the direction of the brushstrokes


Fig. 08

Detail of the paint application with clear corrections in the
coloration and shape (marked with red arrows)


Fig. 09

Detail of the sky, where the effect of the greying of the ground is particularly drastic: the white and yellow
brush-strokes originally stood out dark against the white ground, but today appear paler, so the effect is the reverse
of what it was


Fig. 10

The red arrow marks a detail of the ground that can still be seen in its pristine unsoiled white beneath a place where
the paint has flaked: microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)


Fig. 11

Microscopic photograph of the cross-section of the ground in UV fluorescence (stimulation filter 350-380 nm) and in
incident light, pure white layer, consisting overwhelmingly of zinc white and protein binding


Fig. 12

Reconstruction based on results of analysis (executed by Mareike Lintelmann)