Provenance

James F. Ballard, St. Louis

Nellie Ballard White, Connecticut, 1931

Private Collection, gift from the above, 1972

Emil Carlsen, a celebrated painter of still lifes, landscapes, and seascapes, did not achieve recognition and true success until the later part of his life. At the apex of his career in 1921, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, held the largest and most significant exhibition of his work, featuring seventy-four paintings. Born in Copenhagen on 19 October 1853, Carlsen was predominantly self-taught, having learned to draw from a cousin. He trained as an architect, a profession that he abandoned shortly after moving to Chicago in 1872. Following the popular practice of artists seeking new inspiration, Carlsen relocated to Paris in 1875 but after sixth months left for New York, where he acquired a studio. It was during this brief jaunt to Europe that he first encountered the still-life paintings of Jean-Baptiste Chardin, one of his most prominent influences. Carlsen returned to Paris in 1884 and the following year exhibited a painting at the Paris Salon that was well received. His time spent abroad spurred an important aesthetic change in his painting, brightening his palette, most likely in response to the paintings of the French Impressionists.

During the last thirty years of his life, Carlsen was invited to participate in many important exhibitions. In 1911 he established his relationship with William Macbeth, the leading New York art dealer who also exhibited “The Eight” and “The Ten.” Macbeth granted Carlsen several solo exhibitions, in which his paintings brought prices competitive with those garnered by his colleagues, the leading American Impressionists Childe Hassam, John Twachtman, and Julian Alden Weir. He summered in Connecticut at his family home in Falls Village, where he kept a studio and often painted with Weir.

Marsh Landscape is an expansive scene in which the sweeping sky dominates the composition, creating an unbound atmosphere in which the viewer is barely conscious of the canvas edges. Combining intricate surface textures with a subdued palette, Carlsen created a landscape that is both detailed and modern. As evidenced in Marsh Landscape, the artist was “habitually a close student of all natural sensibilities” and “love[d] best the hours when there [was] tranquility of light unbroken by sharp transitions and sudden contrasts.” ^[1] Free of distracting vertical elements such as trees or figures, Marsh Landscape can be viewed as an abstraction that is two-thirds sky and one-third land, a proportion that was frequently used by Carlsen, especially in his seascapes. His cloud patterns, which often resemble light emanating through slashes in a backdrop, were quite progressive for the time.

Two important seascapes by Carlsen, The Open Sea of 1909 (Metropolitan Museum of Art) and The Open Sea of about 1910–20 (Pfeil Collection), exhibit the artist’s unique handling of sky, also evident in Marsh Landscape. Although these two works differ compositionally from Marsh Landscape in that their foregrounds are water, not land, the sky in all three paintings displays the intricate surface texture that Carlsen achieved through his repetitive application and subsequent scraping of paint. The critic and artist Elliot Clark eloquently describes Carlsen’s skies as sunlight “sift[ing] through upward-moving clouds that float languidly in summer airs.”^[2]

Although his palette resembles that of the American Impressionists, Carlsen was unique in his distribution of color. In Marsh Landscape the veins of water in the right half of the foreground form the triangular pattern of a rake that appears to be clawing through the marshy earth. Carlsen instills life in the barren mauve tones of the soil by layering mint green along the horizon line and throughout the foreground. Lacking any evidence of civilization, Marsh Landscape exudes serenity and stillness, portraying nature in its purest form. As the noted art critic and founder of America’s first modern art museum Duncan Philips has stated, it is “with feelings of welcome relief [that] we may seek refuge in the cool sanctuary of Emil Carlsen’s art.”^[3]

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Emil Carlsen taught at the National Academy of Design from 1906 to 1909 and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1912 to 1918. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Design in 1906 and also belonged to the Salmagundi Club, the Society of American Artists, and the National Arts Club, among other associations. Carlsen’s paintings are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Academy of Design Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the San Diego Museum of Art.