Umbrella Pine in a French Landscape

Artist May Guinness (1863 - 1955)

Datec. 1928

MediumOil on canvas

DimensionsFramed: 83.3 x 65.1 x 6 cm
68.5 x 50.2 cm

ClassificationsPaintings

Credit LineCollection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery. Purchased, 1992. © The Estate of May Guinness.

Object number1819

DescriptionDespite studying Cubism between 1922-1925, May Guinness' adherence to its formal methods were short lived; her love of colour and expression eventually won out and in later years she reverted to a more expressive manner of working.

May Guinness travelled widely, moving frequently between Dublin and Paris but also visiting Spain, Palestine and Greece. This painting is most likely a view of Spain, which the artist visited in 1924. This work is a typical example of her series of Spanish paintings, and the style used dates it to the late 1920's. May Guinness frequently created paintings based on earlier sketches and she exhibited many Spanish landscapes at the gallery 'La Renaissance', in Paris in 1930. Although she favours the use of bright colours, she does not use impasto like the Fauve painters of the early twentieth century, she instead uses thinly diluted paint, which she applies in a somewhat sketchy manner. The landscape is worked in the secondary tones of purple, orange and green offset by black. The warm orange tones of the sky are picked up on the trunk of the tree, which dominates the foreground of the composition and contrasts with the purple of the distant mountain. All the objects in the landscape are sketchily delineated, the curving lines, which she uses, add to the vigorous atmosphere of this image.

(Catalogue Entry [25]: A Century of Irish Painting - Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, 1997, pp. 149)

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