The Start of a New Season for the Art Market

The changing of the seasons was a subject that the Breughel family of painters returned to often. Whilst Pieter Brueghel the Younger produced many painting series depicting the four seasons, it was his father, Pieter the Elder, who gave us perhaps the most iconic depiction of a season ever painted, his deep winter Hunters in the Snow. The Harvesters is from the same Labours of the Months series showing country people engaged in seasonal tasks. This painting depicts the end of summer in September, with apples being picked and golden fields of wheat being scythed and bundled for the winter ahead.

Although this painting does not usually feature on lists of the greatest autumnal paintings, it does deserve a mention. Sir Thomas Lawrence was the preeminent portraitist in Britain after the deaths of Reynolds and Gainsborough and, picking up where they left off and over the next forty years, he painted the British aristocracy with great verve. He was also particularly adept at depicting colourful landscape vignettes behind his sitters. This is one of his earliest major works, a significant royal commission at that, painted when he was just 20 years old. The subject is Queen Charlotte, the wife of George III. Sittings commenced on 28th September 1789 and from the first moments painter / sitter relations were fractious. There were tussles over what costume the Queen should wear and Lawrence’s suggestions that the Queen should listen to music or make conversation with her daughters to ‘give animation to her countenance’ were met with predicable disapproval.

As the weeks wore on, the Queen refused to sit for him and Lawrence had to complete the portrait in his studio. Once it was completed, the King refused to make payment and the portrait stayed with Lawrence until his death. It is now amusing to think of this precocious young artist and the elderly Queen sparring with each other at Windsor as the leaves outside, so brilliantly evoked by Lawrence, turned red and orange with the passing of autumn.

Perhaps the quintessential autumn painting, this is a work by John Everett Millais, a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Painted relatively early in his career, this picture displays some of the key artistic doctrines of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, most pointedly the close study of nature. Millais has painstakingly observed and reproduced each turning leaf and, according to John Ruskin, achieved the first ‘perfectly painted twilight’. There are, however, departures from Pre-Raphaelite strictures. Millais’ painting does not have any particular social or moral message or theme, nor does it illustrate a passage from history of literature. Rather, it is a prime example of art for art’s sake, a beautiful and ambiguous evocation of the changing seasons that, for many, acted as a precursor to the Aesthetic Movement of the later 19th Century.