1840
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Landscape with Figure in Foreground is a 1840 by Cornelius Varley, a Romanticism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a figure standing in a landscape with hills and trees. This painting is interesting because it shows Varley's skill at drawing outdoors. He was self-taught and liked to draw what he saw in nature. Check out the technique of chiaroscuro to learn more about how artists like Varley used light and dark to create depth in their work.
Primarily self-taught, Varley played a significant role in the development of open-air drawing practice in 19thcentury England. He relished the opportunity to engage directly with natural phenomena and made numerous sketches of the English landscape. Raised by his uncle who was a watchmaker, Varley combined his artistic interests with his exposure to science, and in 1809 invented a "graphic telescope," a drawing instrument loosely derived from the camera obscura. Varley’s drawings were more than mere transcriptions of nature, however. This drawing illustrates a stanza of Samuel Roger’s…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Cornelius Varley, FRSA (21 November 1781 – 2 October 1873) was a British painter, mostly in watercolour, printmaker and optical instrument-maker. He invented the graphic telescope and the graphic microscope.
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