A time to reflect on the changing of the seasons from growth to decay.
Each year is a cycle of life that repeats.
Mother Nature bears the fruits of her labor, celebrating life in a festival of colour before the long winter months set in.
It’s as if nature is reminding us that life is to be enjoyed, that there is so much to be grateful for, and that we can look forward to renewal again in the spring.
Artists through the centuries have been inspired by the beauty and melancholy of autumn.
Here are 40 beautiful paintings of the season of red and gold along with quotes from poets and writers.
And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question ‘Whither?’ Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost
Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love – that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one’s very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.George Eliot
The Sussex lanes were very lovely in the autumn . . . spendthrift gold and glory of the year-end . . . earth scents and the sky winds and all the magic of the countryside which is ordained for the healing of the soul.Monica Baldwin
There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky, which through the summer is not heard or seen, as if it could not be, as if it had not been!Percy Bysshe Shelley
Autumn Days
Yellow, mellow, ripened days,
Sheltered in a golden coating;
O’er the dreamy, listless haze,
White and dainty cloudlets floating;
Winking at the blushing trees,
And the sombre, furrowed fallow;
Smiling at the airy ease,
Of the southward flying swallow.
Sweet and smiling are thy ways,
Beauteous, golden Autumn days. Will Carleton
Autumn wins you best by this its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.Robert Browning
You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen.Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house.Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks
Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn–that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness–that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.Jane Austen, Persuasion
The tints of autumn…a mighty flower garden blossoming under the spell of the enchanter, frost.John Greenleaf Whittier
It was one of those days you sometimes get latish in the autumn when the sun beams, the birds toot, and there is a bracing tang in the air that sends the blood beetling briskly through the veins.P.G. Wodehouse
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run John Keats, Complete Poems and Selected Letters
Just as a painter needs light in order to put the finishing touches to his picture, so I need an inner light, which I feel I never have enough of in the autumn.Leo Tolstoy
Give me juicy autumnal fruit ripe and red from the orchard,Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems
All-cheering Plenty, with her flowing horn, Led yellow Autumn, wreath’d with nodding corn.Robert Burns, Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns
Such days of autumnal decline hold a strange mystery which adds to the gravity of all our moods.Charles Nodier, Smarra & Trilby
The goldenrod is yellow,
The corn is turning brown…
The trees in apple orchards
With fruit are bending down. Helen Hunt Jackson
The gold and scarlet leaves that littered the countryside in great drifts whispered and chuckled among themselves, or took experimental runs from place to place, rolling like coloured hoops among the trees.Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christabel
the fallen leaves in the forest seemed to make even the ground glow and burn with lightMalcolm Lowry, October Ferry To Gabriola
Every season hath its pleasures;
Spring may boast her flowery prime,
Yet the vineyard’s ruby treasures
Brighten Autumn’s sob’rer time. Thomas Moore
In Heaven, it is always AutumnJohn Donne
Methinks I see the sunset light flooding the river valley, the western hills stretching to the horizon, overhung with trees gorgeous and glowing with the tints of autumn — a mighty flower garden blossoming under the spell of the enchanter, frost.John Greenleaf Whittier, Tales and Sketches
The leaves were more gorgeous than ever; the first touch of frost would lay them all low to the ground. Already one or two kept constantly floating down, amber and golden in the low slanting sun-raysElizabeth Gaskell, North and South
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And every year there is a brief, startling moment
When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and
Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless
Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air:
It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies;
It is the changing light of fall falling on us. Edward Hirsch, Wild Gratitude
Beautiful places, beautiful people, beautiful clothes—Francois Flameng loved to paint them all.
Born in an art studio in Paris in 1856, Flameng may have known from an early age that he was destined to be an artist.
Indeed, in many ways, he had everything going for him.
Paris was the center of the art world and his father was a celebrated engraver who had once wished to be a painter.
All of his father’s regrets were channeled into making his son a success.
Specializing in history painting and portraiture, Francois Flameng became a professor at the Académie des Beaux-Arts—the premier institution of fine art in France.
If you’d like to add a little atmosphere as we view a gallery of Flameng’s work, press play.
Many of his studies in Italy are rich in architectural detail in the most vivid light and color.
Flameng would often use a camera lucida to create an optical superimposition of his subject.
Allowing him to duplicate key points of the scene on the drawing surface, it would aid in the accurate rendering of perspective.
Once he had the sketch to ensure proportion and perspective were correct, he would paint rapidly yet with such fine detail that within an hour he had what took most artists four hours to complete.
I have always thought that portraits ought to be arranged as pictures.Francois Flameng
Flameng said that fashions and hairstyles changed so often that the exact likeness captured in a portrait was gone within a few short years.
Therefore, he said, portraits should aim to be pleasant works of art that one would purchase to adorn the wall of a drawing room, even if it were not a portrait of one’s own image.
Flameng found that he learned as much about the social aspects of his work as he did the actual practicing of his art.
Making sittings more agreeable for models he had to learn their tastes and habits, likes and dislikes.
That way, he could encourage them to pose in ways that reflected their personality and remain in one position for a long time without noticing it as much.
Of equal importance to remaining true to his artistic integrity was producing a work that was pleasing to the subject and also to her friends and acquaintances.
When subjects disagreed with his choice of arrangement or style of composition, he would use all his skill to gradually encourage her to see his point of view without contradicting or offending, always admitting she was right, but gently helping her drop her own preconceived mental image.
Even the ordinary woman is a thousand times more worthwhile to paint than the ordinary man. But women are never ordinary.Francois Flameng
Flameng painted the colors and pageantry of war.
But he was no stranger to its violence.
At age 14, he was playing with fellow students at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, when a bombshell exploded in the courtyard.
It was a gift from the Prussians to mark the onset of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and it prompted him to enlist.
Accepted in the ambulance corps, when Paris fell to the Prussians, he saw seven children killed under the window of his father’s house in Montparnasse.
A portrait painter should not only be endowed with talent, but also possess the qualities of a philosopher, of an observer, of a psychologist, and be provided with inexhaustible patience.Francois Flameng
Francois Flameng didn’t only paint beauty.
Renowned for his paintings that showed some of the horrors of the First World War, he was an accredited documenter for the War Ministry and named honorary president of the Society of Military Painters.
Flameng’s war paintings were derided by many critics for being too realistic and not including heroic drama.
Skagen is a village in the northernmost part of Denmark.
From the late 1870s until the turn of the century, a group of Scandinavian artists descended on Skagen every summer.
It was the light that drew them.
A translucent light that merged the sea and the sky—especially during the evening “blue hour”.
Influenced by the “en plein air” techniques of French Impressionist painters like Claude Monet, they broke away from traditions taught at the academies and developed their own unique styles.
The long beaches stretched for miles and miles …
Listen to Claude Debussy’s haunting Clair de Lune as we travel back in time to late 19th-century Skagen through the eyes of the Skagen Painters.
Nor moon nor stars were out.
They did not dare to tread so soon about,
Though trembling, in the footsteps of the sun.
The light was neither night’s nor day’s, but one
Which, life-like, had a beauty in its doubt;
And Silence’s impassioned breathings round
Seemed wandering into sound. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, A Sea-Side Walk
I have loved hours at sea, gray cities,
The fragile secret of a flower,
Music, the making of a poem
That gave me heaven for an hour Sara Teasdale, I Have Loved Hours At Sea
Rendering light with paint in such a way that it makes you feel you are there and you need to squint at the sun’s reflections on the water.
One of the shared interests of the Skagen painters was to paint scenes of their own social gatherings—eating together, celebrating, or playing cards.
As if you could reach out and touch them, Krøyer’s characters are full of movement, full of life.
The group gathered together regularly at the Brøndums Inn in Skagen, which still operates as a hotel today.
Filled with the paintings the artists donated to cover the cost of board and lodging, the Brøndums’ dining-room became the center of their social life.
Can you feel the excitement in the air and hear the clinking of glasses?
Deep in concentration, an after-dinner game of cards continues into the small hours.
Many of the Skagen painters are depicted here enjoying Midsummer Eve celebrations on Skagen beach around a bonfire, traditionally lit to ward off evil spirits believed to roam freely when the sun turned southward again.
The painting includes Peder Severin Krøyer’s daughter Vibeke, mayor Otto Schwartz and his wife Alba Schwartz, Michael Ancher, Degn Brøndum, Anna Ancher, Holger Drachmann and his 3rd wife Soffi, the Swedish composer Hugo Alfvén and Marie Krøyer.
Anna Ancher was the only one of the Skagen Painters to be born and grow up in Skagen.
Her father owned the Brøndums Hotel where the artists stayed during the summer months and she married Michael Ancher, one of the first members of the Skagen colony of artists.
Expressing a more truthful depiction of reality and everyday life, she was a pioneer in observing the interplay of color and natural light.
They love the sea,
Men who ride on it
And know they will die
Under the salt of it Carl Sandburg, Young Sea
Combining realism and classical composition, Michael Ancher painted heroic fishermen and their experiences at sea.
Becoming known as monumental figurative art, his strict training at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts was tempered by his wife Anna’s more naturalistic approach.
Painted in 1885, Michael Ancher’s ‘Will He Round the Point?” (below) earned him and the Skagen colony particular attention since it was sold to King Christian IX of Denmark.
Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for.Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
Life was hard.
A fisherman’s life was not an easy one.
Better to die surrounded by people who would give their life for you.
That’s what close-knit communities were made of.
Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with that there is Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
The Skagen artists also painted each other and their children going about everyday aspects of life—collecting flowers, walking the dog, reading in the shade of the garden or inside the house, meal times with the children, and saying prayers before bed.
How could we begin without first mentioning the granddaddy of all ceiling frescoes that influenced so many others that followed—the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.
Painted by Michelangelo between 1508 and 1512, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel exemplifies High Renaissance art—a period of exceptional creativity during the late 15th and early 16th centuries.
Nine scenes from the Book of Genesis take center stage, of which The Creation of Adam is the best known, deservedly enjoying an iconic status equaled only by Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
Anyone who’s tried to paint a ceiling at home will know it’s back-breaking work. All that looking up. But imagine painting that way for 4 years solid!
Contrary to popular belief, Michelangelo didn’t lie on his back but painted in a standing position.
The work was carried out in extremely uncomfortable conditions, from his having to work with his head tilted upwards.Giorgio Vasari (1511 - 1574)
The ceiling rises to 44 ft (13.4 m) above the main floor, so, what does a 16th-century sculptor, painter, architect, poet, and engineer do to reach such lofty heights?
You guessed it—he designed his own scaffold. But instead of building from the floor up, he saved on wood by making a flat platform on brackets built out from holes in the wall near the top of the windows.
Besides his own heavenly creations, Michelangelo would inspire later artists like Austrian Paul Troger (1698 – 1762), whose illusionistic ceiling frescoes are notable for their dramatic vitality of movement and light color palette.
Here are 8 examples of heavenly baroque frescoes from 18th-century Austria.
1. Melk Abbey, Austria
Melk Abbey is a Benedictine abbey originally founded in 1089 overlooking the town of Melk in Lower Austria.
Today’s Baroque abbey was built between 1702 and 1736.
2. Herzogenburg Monastery, Austria
The Augustinian Herzogenburg Monastery in Lower Austria was founded in 1112 by Augustinian Canons, and refurbished in the Baroque style in 1714.
3. Sonntagberg Basilica, Austria
Sonntagberg Basilica is a baroque church in Lower Austria, Built between 1706 and 1732, Pope Paul VI gave it the title Minor basilica in 1964.
4. Altenburg Abbey, Austria
Altenburg Abbey is a Benedictine monastery in Lower Austria. It suffered numerous invasions and attacks, and was destroyed by the Swedes in 1645.
The present Baroque abbey replaced the earlier Romanesque structure, and is said to be one of the finest in Austria.
5. Seitenstetten Abbey, Austria
Originally founded in 1112, Seitenstetten Abbey is a Benedictine monastery in Lower Austria that was lavishly refurbished in the 18th century in the Baroque style.
6. Jesuit Church, Austria
Also known as the University Church, the Jesuit Church is a two-storey, twin-tower church in Vienna, Austria. It was remodeled using Baroque principles in the early 18th century.
The first church in the Austrian market town of Maria Taferl was built around a shrine to the Holy Mother, which is the origin of the town’s name.
7. Maria Taferl Basilica, Austria
Built between 1660 and 1710, the baroque Maria Taferl Basilica features ornate gold leaf decoration and the frescoed ceiling shown below.
8. Göttweig Abbey, Austria
Göttweig Abbey is a Benedictine monastery near Krems in Lower Austria.
Founded in the 11th century, the abbey burned down in 1718 and was rebuilt on a grander, more lavish scale.
The fresco decorating the imperial staircase (shown below) is considered a masterpiece of Austrian Baroque architecture.
Art is not what you see, but what you make others seeEdgar Degas.
And “make us see” is what he does with exquisite aplomb. He renders the beauty of fleeting movement, of ballerinas in mid-performance, with a luminous quality. But he also captures the human side of ballerinas, in their simplest, most intimate moments—warming up, stretching at the bar, practicing positions, or talking in the dressing room.
At the ballet, Degas found himself. It satisfied his penchant for classical elegance and put to use his rigorous academic training from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris—one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious fine art schools.
He frequented the Palais Garnier—the home of the Paris Ballet and Opera, lurking in the wings and foyer hoping to befriend the influential patrons who might gain him access to the private world of ballerinas.
Mimed poetry, dream made visible.
Degas’s paintings of ballet performances capture the essence of what makes ballet special—the balance, poise, and precision of movement. A contemporary critic called ballet “mimed poetry, dream made visible.”
Degas became a familiar sight for the young ballerinas—some poor, dreaming of becoming the princesses of the stage. One said he “used to stand at the top or bottom of the many staircases . . . drawing the dancers as they rushed up and down.” He noticed everything—from the most difficult of choreographed sequences to the smallest errors—making notes as he went.
In later life, Degas became a recluse, believing that “the artist must live alone, and his private life must remain unknown“. His eyesight was failing him and he spent his last years, almost blind, wandering the streets of his beloved Paris.
He wrote to a friend,
with the exception of the heart, it seems to me that everything within me is growing old in proportion, and even this heart of mine has something artificial. The dancers have sewn it into a bag of pink satin, pink satin slightly faded, like their dancing shoes.
Like the dancing shoes, Degas himself faded away in September 1917, but his work lives on in brilliant color.
Listen to Steven Gutheinz as we marvel at the dancers of Degas.
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James Tissot (1836 – 1902), was a French painter and illustrator.
He painted scenes of Paris and London society—and especially fashionably dressed women.
Click here to continue learning about James Tissot
Born in Nantes, France, his father was a drapery merchant and his mother designed hats. Their involvement in the fashion industry influenced his artistic flair for painting the finer details of women’s clothing.
Tissot enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts to study in the studios of Hippolyte Flandrin and Louis Lamothe—both known for their decorative art skills. It was here that Tissot became acquainted with Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet and James Whistler.
In 1863, Tissot found the niche that would bring him critical acclaim and wealth: portraits depicting modern life.
He moved to London in 1871, where he quickly developed his reputation for painting elegantly dressed, fashionable women.
The Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists quotes Edmond de Goncourt in 1874 as writing that Tissot had ‘a studio with a waiting room where, at all times, there is iced champagne at the disposal of visitors”.
Tissot’s popularity among wealthy British industrialists gave him an income usually reserved for the top strata of society.
a studio with a waiting room where, at all times, there is iced champagne at the disposal of visitorsPhilip J. Waller.
Tissot painted elegant ladies from high society in enchanting everyday scenes. Vote for your favorites from this list of 20 beautiful Tissot paintings.