Honoring Antoine Chintreuil's "The Coast," by Mary Gow

Honoring Antoine Chintreuil’s “The Coast,” watercolor by Mary Gow

I love gestural drawing and painting – and especially admire the work of Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, and Vincent Van Gogh.

Have you ever heard of impressionist painter, Antoine Chintreuil, born in 1814 in Paris, France?

I thought I’d paint a quick semi-abstract landscape today. Here’s a watercolor I derived from Chintreuil’s “The Coast,” which he painted from about 1850 to 1857.

For this sickly, solitary, poor painter, a former pupil of Corot, the Ile-de-France was the occasion of delicate poems in which Redon rightly distinguished “that tender and gentle genius which reveals itself in a simple manner and in such a discreet form and whose profound and passionate reserve is echoed only in a number of select souls.”

(Impressionism, 1973, published by Chartwell Books, Inc., p. 45).