작품 상세

Marie François Firmin-Girard (French, 1838-1921) Le remorqueur Oil on canvas 18-1/8 x 24 inches (46.0 x 61.0 cm) Signed lower right: Firmin-Girard PROVENANCE: Private collection, Pennsylvania. Although not as well known today as Monet, Renoir and Pissarro, the academically-trained Impressionist Firmin-Girard enjoyed considerable commercial and critical attention during his lifetime for his luminous landscapes, genre subjects and paysages animés. Although he had been a student of Gerome in Paris, Firmin-Girard soon began embracing the challenges to traditional painting posed by Manet and the Impressionists. His work began exploring images of contemporary life, and most importantly, endorsed formal innovations drawn from the influence of Japanese art. In the present work, for example, he adopts a more oblique angle of perspective on his primary subject, which is distinctive of Japanese prints. Moreover, the subject of this scene is a tugboat pulling a vessel upriver--a quite recent innovation in French commerce. One of the hallmarks of Firmin-Girard's style also found in this painting is his penchant for allowing forms to dissolve in a haze of light, particularly the shapes in the middle and background, which tends to flatten the picture plane according to the Japanese convention.