Cleveland Museum of Art

End of the Harvest

Date

c. 1892–1905

Medium

charcoal on cream laid paper

Culture

France, 19th century

Department

Drawings

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

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. This creates the effect of a soft, diffuse evening light that dissolves the curved shapes of haystacks and turns the landscape into an expansive abstraction of nature. The artist Paul Signac, a friend of Angrand, described the artist's drawings as "poems of light."

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