item details
Overview
Adolphe Appian (born Jacques Barthelemy Adolphe Appian) was a French landscape painter and etcher. He was born in Lyon and changed his name to Adolphe Appian at the age of fifteen. This coincided with his enrolment at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts at Lyon, an art school which specialised in training to decorate fabrics by the local silk industry. Later he opened a studio in Lyon and worked as a graphic designer. He travelled to Paris to finish his studies and after he had exhibited a painting and a charcoal drawing in the Paris Salon in 1853, he became friends with the leading Barbizon School artists, Camille Corot and Charles-Francois Daubigny, who greatly influenced his style. At the beginning of his career. he painted atmospheric pictures in a monochromatic palette of the riverside of the Rhone and the south of France. In 1870 he changed his style to use brilliant and striking colour in his paintings but he still continued to make charcoal drawings as well as small etchings of landscapes in the Barbizon style.
Although Appian was based in the heart of the Barbizon country near Fontainebleau from the mid-1850s, from 1871 until the early 1890s he often visited the Mediterranean coast to inspire his landscapes. Here he depicts a serene landscape, a view across a small pond to a small, rather primitive and rustic looking wooden and stone well, where a man in silhouetted form is turning a water-wheel with the aid of a stick. This is a very unusual subject for Appian, who generally preferred natural features to man-made structures. Bordighera is on the Italian coast between Monaco and San Remo.
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art September 2017