Semaphore of the Beg-Meil, Brittany 1904

This is Maxime Maufra’s "Semaphore of the Beg-Meil, Brittany," painted with oil, probably en plein air, capturing a moment, an impression, a feeling. Look at the cloudscape, rendered with short, broken brushstrokes of muted blues, grays, and whites, giving a sense of a breezy day. The materiality of this painting is all about texture. The paint is applied thickly, almost scrubbed onto the canvas in places, creating a rough, tactile surface. Notice the way the light hits the crests of the waves and the tops of the dunes, catching the impasto and making the surface shimmer. There's a real physicality to the medium here, a sense of the artist wrestling with the paint to capture the essence of the scene. Take that blob of creamy white paint near the horizon line, it's not just a highlight, it’s a record of a gesture, a moment in time. Maufra reminds me of other landscape painters, like Courbet, who were also interested in capturing the raw, untamed beauty of nature. Art is never created in a vacuum, it’s always part of an ongoing conversation, an exchange of ideas and influences across time.