Autumn Landscape visual analysis
By: Tiffany-Jolie Missembe
Louis Comfort Tiffany’s "Autumn Landscape" depicts a forest during a late afternoon, in the midst of autumn. This piece was created between 1923-24 in New York, New York and it's currently in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the American Gallery. Tiffany worked with other art mediums such as ceramics and mosaics, but by the late 1890s he specialized in stained glass which he is most known for. He created this masterpiece with the Leaded Favrile glass, which was his own creation that he patented in 1894. During the late 19th century, colored glass was making a revival due to the overwhelming amount of churches being built. Stained glass gradually made its way into a secular setting with mostly biblical subjects and naturalistic themes. The genre of this piece is landscape, which we know by the natural scenery depicted such as the forest, the mountains, and the river. I chose "Autumn Landscape" to discuss my visual analysis because the first art piece that made me want to start channeling my creativeness was stained glass in my church growing up.
The first aspect of this landscape I would like to discuss is the color. The greens, blues, purples, reds, oranges, and yellows come together to create a setting so whimsical and enchanting. Tiffany used mottled glass for the dusky sky; confetti glass to generate the shifting colors of the foliage; ripped glass is used for the pool in the foreground. When he decided he wanted to add more depth and richer color to the mountains, he applied layers of glass to the back of the window, which is a technique known as “plating”. The different intensities throughout the landscape draw focus to the river, foliage, mountains, and sky. The blend of baby, cerulean, and electric blue make the river in the foreground one of the first places that our eyes are drawn to. The use of oranges and reds on half of the trees and yellows and greens on the other half in the foreground and middleground helps depict the transition from summer to autumn. Overall, the use of the chosen colors is to create a sense of movement and progression throughout the landscape.
Luminosity is something that is important to mention while still close to the subject of color. The first thing that someone observing the landscape might notice is the sun because of the way it contrasts with the dark mountains. The sun in the image gives the illusion that it is supplying brightness to the entire forest. Tiffany created the landscape like that on purpose to make it all the more realistic.
In "Autumn Landscape" there are a lot of factors that contribute to the depth. In the foreground of the image, there are a few trees that are used to create scale for the other trees behind it so we can clearly see that some are bigger than the rest. Tiffany uses vertical lines as a tool to show how tall the trees are and horizontal lines to illustrate depth throughout the landscape. Sizing is another tool that is used to depict depth in this piece. The foreground holds the largest objects in the landscape, the dark olive tree and the rocks, but as you move to middle ground you notice that everything progressively has gotten smaller especially the river. The green used to illustrate the algae on top of the rocks also creates depth for the river as it goes from dark to light the closer it gets to the water. It’s almost as if the rocks are guiding the river toward the background. By the time you're in the background, you notice the river and the mountains have been scaled down to appear smaller than the trees in the foreground. In the background, the setting is dark purple but in the foreground and middle ground the setting is made up of light greens, yellows, oranges, and reds. This is to show how the sun has finished setting in that back of the forest but there is still time in the foreground.
After writing this essay, a quote by Ernst Gombrich comes to mind, "One never finishes learning about art. There are always new things to discover. Great works of art seem to look different every time one stands before them. They seem to be as inexhaustible and inpredictable as real human beings". Before I started writing I had no idea what I was going to write about, but the more I looked at the landscape the more complex it became. There were so many new concepts I learned while writing this essay and appreciating the piece. I think Gombrich was absolutely right in his analysis because I just experienced art being more unpredictable than a real person for the first time in my life.