Arts 1301 - the Orange Trees

Maria C. Zapata

Prof. Maria Jose Leyva

ARTS 1301

11/12/15

The Orange Trees

Artist: Gustave Caillebotte, French, 1848-1894

Date: 1878

Medium: Oil in canvas

Dimensions: 61 x 46 in.

Location: The Audrey Jones Beck Building – 222 Beck Galleries

1. Elements of Art:

• Lines:  In this case, diagonal lines are used to emphasize direction. Probably the most important line of this art piece is the one found on the sidewalk, and those lines present a curve form. There are several lines in this painting: the trees, the chairs, the legs of the gentleman, “the tree pots”, etc.
• Light:  Since this image is representing a sunny day, there is light and shadows implied on this picture. You can see the shadow of the tree on the pavement, and both the lady and the gentleman are resting under the shadow of the tree. But, you can also see the light on the rest of the picture. In the trees painted in the back, there is also shadow from the sunlight.
• Color: The colors of this piece are very intense, but cool. There is a lot of green in this picture representing the nature. The color on the trees varies by the light (lighter green is touched by the sunlight, and darker green is in the shadow part of the tree). The flowers on the grass are red, and the grass is green which are complimentary colors.
• Texture: We can find implied texture on this piece, the texture of the trees, the pavement, and the grass… I sense it as a smooth texture.
• Shape: the picture is made to appear three-dimensional to your eye, the shape is organic, because most of the drawing represents nature, and nature has different shapes in all its creations.  The figures are beautiful.
• Space: The picture is our size, it projects into our space visually, and the artist creates depth with atmospheric perspective.

1. Principals of Art:

• Emphasis: The emphasis of the work is the lady with the children, the lines are pointing at her.
• Scale and Proportion: The elements of the piece are related to one another size wise, there are larger objects and smaller objects to show the depth of the picture (front elements being larger that the elements located in the back of the picture). It has a good size to me.
• Balance: This is a balanced picture, it has the same amount of objects in both sides, and it is also asymmetrical. There is use of light and shadow as mentioned before; there are straight and curved lines, and the artist uses complementary colors as well.
• Rhythm: The rhythm on this piece unifies the work, the repeated elements would be trees, chairs, grass fields, and they create a subtle pattern.

1. Media and Technique:

• Painting: It was an oil paint, which gives a lot of time for the artist to make changes compared to other paints. This paint can give the picture a tonal depth, but it had an opaque tone. Even though I did not know if the paint was supposed to look like that, or if it had any changed through time, oil paints are supposed to get yellow and dark as they age but this happens after almost four hundred years. The paint still looked very colorful to me.

1. Modes of Analysis:

• Iconographic Analysis: This art piece was done in the 19th century were women were still not completely free, for that reason I believe the artist paints the woman by itself taking care of the children, while the husband is reading the paper and sitting. On that century women still were seeing as the “workers” of the house.