Brief Report

This landscape-format painting on a canvasboard, an artists’ board pasted with cloth (Fr. carton toile), in the standard F 6 size shows a cliff on which bushes and pines are growing. To the left, the view opens out to the sea and a pale sky. An arc in the right foreground, cropped by the right-hand and bottom edges, could be the balustrade of an exposed viewpoint. The picture was painted over a rejected composition which was reduced by chemical and mechanical means; this first picture was painted in portrait format and depicted a different motif (figs 5, 6, 10, 11). Van Rysselberghe integrated the colour fields of the rejected composition into the present loosely painted work, in which, depending on the motif, he varied the brushwork and density of the paint application from fairly thin and semi-transparent in the rocky foreground to strikingly impasto in the clouds. The sequence of paint applications can be read off easily in the stratigraphy of the colour fields. Thus the sea had already been executed and the sky at least laid-in when the cliff and the trees were added; the outlines of the cliffs were clearly embedded in the wet paint of the sea. The painting has been preserved in its unvarnished state and evinces a predominantly very matt surface.

Theo van Rysselberghe
Pines in Monaco, 1917, oil on canvasboard, 33.0 x 40,5 cm, WRM Dep. FC 703

Theo van Rysselberghe

born on 23 November 1862 in Gent,
died on 13 December 1926 in Saint-Clair, France

Brief report with complete data as downloadable pdf-file

Further illustrations:

Fig. 02

Verso


Fig. 03

UV fluorescence


Fig. 04

Raking light


Fig. 05

X-ray


Fig. 06

X-ray with mapping of the colour fields of the first composition  (rotated through 90° anti-clockwise)


Fig. 07

Detail, monogram and date


Fig. 08

Detail under raking light, directional brushstrokes


Fig. 09

Grey-green ground with conspicuously coarse white pigments,  microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)


Fig. 10

Edge of the ground on the turnover edge; the pale, thin layer that barely fills the pores is followed by the actual grey-green ground itself, microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)


Fig. 11

Detail, colour fields of the first composition integrated into the present picture


Fig. 12

Reduced brown colour field from the lay-in of the first picture, microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)


Fig. 13

Detail, transition from grey-green ground to painting; impression of a fastening device(?) left in the wet paint layer, microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)


Fig. 14

Impressions left by a house-fly proboscis in the paint-layer (arrows), microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm) with scanning electron microscope image for comparison