1898
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
End of the Harvest is a 1898 by Charles Angrand, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a field of stubble after the last wheat is cut, drawn in black charcoal. Angrand didn’t use brushes. He pressed a thick charcoal stick onto rough paper so the tiny ridges caught the dust, making soft gray patches that look like late-afternoon light. The dots and dashes you notice up close melt into shadows when you step back. Look up the technique called *impasto*—it’s about thick paint, but Angrand did the same idea with charcoal.
This drawing's unusual technique reflects the ideas of the French painting movement known as Pointillism or Divisionism. Its most famous practitioner, Georges Seurat (1859–1891), developed a technique of applying color in short strokes or dots. Seurat's friend Charles Angrand was influenced by this method, and both artists developed a related technique for their drawings. In the sheet shown here, Angrand used a black, manufactured charcoal stick on a paper textured with tiny ridges. The highest of these ridges hold the charcoal, but the paper shows through in the small spaces between them.…
The artist Paul Signac, a friend of Angrand, described the artist's drawings as "poems of light."
Read the full account in the museum source.
Charles Angrand was a French artist who gained renown for his Neo-Impressionist paintings and drawings. He was an important member of the Parisian avant-garde art scene in the late 1880s and early 1890s.
See the richer artist page
