441. Harvest

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441. Harvest

Ştefan Popescu

1872, Finţeşti, Buzău - 1948, Bucureşti

Estimate:

EUR 2.500 - 3.500

Sold

EUR 2.750

oil on wood, 26 x 35 cm, 35x26, signed lower right, in brown, "Şt. Popescu"

Material / Carats

ulei pe lemn

In his memoirs and writings on the specificity and nature of his native country, Ştefan Popescu remarked: "The landscape is a mild one here... The Romanian soul has remained gentle and patient, yet melancholic or sad... Melancholy and doina songs are particularly typical of his nature. And perhaps contemplative love of nature senses that landscapes occupy such an important place in our painting. Our soul is lyrical, not epic...". "Harvest" renders in a romantic manner the ideas and impressions expressed by an artist’s words. Its composition emanates luminosity, melancholy and colour, using warm shades to capture the atmosphere of summer afternoons. The theme approached is that of work in the fields at harvest time - a recurring theme in the painter's earlier works. The present one is a precursor attempt for one of the more complex paintings from his youth, found in the 1911 "Artistic Youth" publication. The artist captures the industriousness and dedication of the characters in the work performed at the harvest, presenting a suggestive close-up of the two peasant women collecting ears of wheat, as though placing that which reverberates throughout the fields under a magnifying glass. In the golden fields we see haystacks and peasant women, dressed in plain, traditional clothes, involved in the collecting of wheat. The field is painted as a sea of colour reflecting in the serenity of the sky. There is also the forest, a bright, deep green one, demarcating the expanse of wheat like a solid rock. With the undulating line and the sparse arrangement of the elements that make up the painting, Ştefan Popescu gives the viewer a taste of the picturesque captured in a veracious dialogue with reality and the nature of the Romanian lands.

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