Sunday, December 9, 2012

Edward Steichen


Best known for his iconic photographs, Edward Steichen also experimented with landscape painting. He destroyed many of his canvases, and these tonalist nocturnes are are some of the surviving works.
Steichen used delicate washes of thinned oil colour, one over another, to create an opalescent effect and a mood of poetic reverie reminiscent of Whistler and George Innes.
This effect does not come across well in reproductions.
Steichen was born in Luxembourg and immigrated to the US as an infant in 1881. He died in 1973 at the ripe old age of 93.


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