An original 1880s oil painting, R.A. Cruikshank, A Peasant Girl, Capri.This delightful oil painting, shimmering with warmth and light, depicts a local girl on the Italian island of Capri. Painted around the 1880s by the Scottish artist R.A. Cruikshank, the view shows the island's whitewashed buildings and ancient olive trees set against the rugged, towering backdrop of Monte Solaro. The parched foreground is almost luminous, and the sky a brilliant blue. But it is the figure of the peasant girl that is the focus of the composition, harmonised with her surroundings and ennobled by her monumental stature.In the 19th century, various artists depicted peasant life—and peasant portraits—in a realistic manner that elevated and dignified the subject, such as French naturalist painter Jules Breton (1827–1906), Hague School artist Jozef Israëls (1824–1911) and Daniel Ridgway Knight (1839–1924), an American painter working in France. Growing out of the Realism of artists such as Gustave Courbet, the unique achievement of Naturalism, at its height in the 1870s and 1880s, was perhaps to fuse the ideology of Realism with the techniques and effects of Romantic landscape painting.Cruikshank's attraction to Capri was shared by many artists of the period, including Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830–1896), John William Waterhouse (1849–1917) and John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), who were all drawn by the island's remarkable light, as well as a kind of Orientalist fascination with the local people and culture. The English painter Frank Hyde (1849–1937) is best known for his works of Capri and in the late 1870s he purchased a villa, or the former Santa Teresa monastery, at Anacapri. In 1914 he wrote an article titled 'The Island of the Sirens' in which he recalled that 'There were no shops in those days, nor roads… There were only two or three hotels in the island; Pagano's, where the artists congregated, still bears evidence on its walls in the form of sketches of the many eminent men who have at one time and another made a sojourn there.'Hyde continues with a heady evocation of the island which captures the allure of its landscape to artists: '...how delightful it used to be in the early morning before the heat of the day made itself felt to wander over the mountain, climbing over boulders under whose shady recesses grow bunches of mauve cyclamen, maiden-hair fern, and bee-orchid. Flowers abound everywhere, masses of yellow ginestra making a conspicuous feature in the landscape… from the summit of Solaro, facing the Gulf of Salerno, you look down a sheer precipice of nearly two thousand feet into a turquoise and emerald sea, and if you are an artist you grow crazy with the longing to paint it, and when you try it is only to realise what a hopeless task it is to attempt to reproduce those tender peacock blues and greens, and the liquid gold of those reflections from the sunburnt rocks.' Hyde became friends with Sargent, who famously had a romance with a Capri girl, Rosina Ferrara; Hyde writes 'One's gaze is attracted to the peasant girls in their old-time costumes; their wonderful classical faces, their rich nut-brown colouring and blue-black hair, done up in braids adorned with sprigs of flowering myrtle, or enveloped in sun-faded, yellow handkerchiefs… In those days the artists married these Capri girls, and no wonder!'At the time of painting (the Winsor & Newton canvas dates to around the 1880s), Robert A. Cruikshank was living at Ardbeg in Kilmun, Argyll, on the shores of the Holy Loch, across the water from Greenock. He later lived in Glasgow. He exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy and also the Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts—which was far more enlightened and progressive than the RSA. In 1896 he was on the general committee of the Burns Federation and exhibited two paintings at the Burns Memorial Exhibition at the Royal Glasgow Institute.Significantly, the RGI also played an important role in the development of the artists known as the Glasgow Boys (such as James Guthrie (1859–1930) and John Lavery (1856–1941)), whose most intense period was the decade between 1880 and 1890, when some of their most bold and innovative paintings were created. The RGI's early acceptance of the French painters of the Barbizon School and the younger men like Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848–1884) had a profound effect upon the young Glasgow artists. The influence of this contemporaneous work in Glasgow can clearly be seen in the work of R.A. Cruikshank. The Glasgow artists all shared an admiration for naturalism and painting en plein air, and their interest in Impressionism and the flattened forms of Japanese prints represent the beginnings of modernism in Scottish painting. In Cruikshank's depiction of the Capri girl we see the prominent brushstrokes and the interplay of light and shade on colour caught in tonal blocks characteristic of the Glasgow Boys.Presented in a smart later gilt wood Victorian-style frame. with accompanying historic dealer’s label.All artworks come with a Certificate of Authenticity and—if it is a collection artwork—its accompanying collection text or artist biography. Signed: Signed lower left. Inscribed: Inscribed lower left. Height: 34cm (13.4″) Width: 24cm (9.4″) Condition: In excellent condition. Colours are clean and bright, and paint is fully intact. Ageing to the verso as shown. The later frame is also in excellent condition.Please see photos for detail. Presented: In a later gilt wood Victorian-style frame (51.5 x 41.5cm). with separate accompanying historic dealer’s label.
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