托马斯·科尔风景《卡茨基尔山的黎明》高清图片

作品简介

巍峨群山在氤氲的晨光中显出深色剪影，水色天穹在地平线处晕染着贝壳般的粉晕——这抹霞光占据了画面三分之二的高度。晨光斜照在画布下缘那些倒伏扭曲的枯树上，两株细瘦树干沿左侧构图线向上伸展，其中一株折断处参差不齐，青翠的叶片在天空中勾勒出精致的轮廓。

地势陡然下陷，形成蜿蜒在苍翠山峦间的幽谷。晨雾如流动的轻纱般萦绕谷底。山色由近处深沉的土绿与褐黄，渐次转为远方柔和的鹿褐色。一弯浅黄色的初阳正从左侧最近的山巅探头，远处峰顶云气升腾，几缕蜜桃色的云絮漂浮在湛蓝天幕之上。

艺术家用黑色颜料在画面下部中央的断枝上题署："T. Cole 1826"。Hulking mountains are mostly backlit against a watery blue sky edged with shell pink along the horizon, which comes about two-thirds of the way up this horizontal landscape painting. Light falls across felled and gnarled trees along the bottom edge of the canvas. Two thin trunks, one of them broken to a jagged point, rise along the left edge of the composition with their green leaves outlined against the sky. The land dips steeply away into a valley wending between forested mountains. Fog has settled along the valley like a river of mist. The mountains lighten from dark, earthy green and brown close to us to muted fawn-brown in the distance. A sliver of pale-yellow sun peeks over the summit of the nearest mountain, which is to our left. Clouds kick up over the distant mountaintops, and a few wisps of peach-colored clouds float across the blue sky above. The artist signed and dated the work in black paint on a branch on the ground in the lower center, “T. Cole 1826.”

1826年春，托马斯·科尔结识了博学多识的巴尔的摩收藏家小罗伯特·吉尔摩。这位眼光独到的鉴赏家很快委托他创作一幅描绘卡茨基尔山屋酒店的风景画——这座知名酒店可俯瞰哈德逊河谷全景。经过整个夏季的实地写生，并与委托人反复商讨创作主题后，科尔于12月初完成《卡茨基尔山的黎明》，并在圣诞节当天将画作送达巴尔的摩。据艺术家自述，这幅作品呈现的是从弗莱山(特拉华河东源头的山峰)远眺的日出胜景。

科尔选取了一个极具胆识的高视点构图：观者仿佛凌空而立，眼前群峰叠嶂，晨光中的薄雾在谷地流转升腾。前景布满盘错的灌木、虬曲的枯树，以及悬于崖边的嶙峋怪石。这里展现的绝非驯化的田园风光，而是杳无人迹的原始荒野。

吉尔摩收到画作后立即致信科尔："此作笔法精妙，尽得自然真趣。我在山间曾目睹无数类似景致，虽描绘难度极高，但您完美捕捉了旭日初现峰顶时，山谷雾气升腾的刹那。"

作为科尔首幅完整展现原始荒野的杰作，同时记录其与早期重要赞助人关系的珍贵文献，《卡茨基尔山的黎明》堪称19世纪美国风景画发展的里程碑。这幅作品不仅孕育了科尔后期杰作的艺术基因，更预兆了其弟子弗雷德里克·埃德温·丘奇在1850-60年代创作的伟大荒野画卷。

In the spring of 1826, Thomas Cole met Robert Gilmor Jr., a highly knowledgeable and sophisticated Baltimore collector, who soon commissioned a view of Catskill Mountain House, a popular hotel overlooking the Hudson River Valley. After a summer spent sketching and painting in the area and corresponding with his patron concerning the selection of a new subject, Cole completedSunrise in the Catskillsin early December and had it delivered to Baltimore on Christmas Day. According to the artist, the painting shows sunrise from Vly Mountain, a peak near the eastern headwaters of the Delaware River.

Cole chose a daringly elevated vantage point for the work, one where the viewer is poised looking out at several other mountains and at valleys filled with mist shining in the morning light. The foreground is filled with tangled bits of underbrush, contorted and fallen trees, and rough outcroppings of rock precariously situated at the slope's edge. This is not a tamed and cultivated portion of the American landscape but a remote, wild area with no evidence of human presence.

Upon receiving the picture, Gilmor wrote immediately to Cole: "It is extremely well painted, with great truth of nature. I have seen a thousand such scenes when in the mountains, and though the task was a very difficult one, yet you have perfectly succeeded in rendering the mists of the valley rising as the sun began to peep over the summits of the mountains."

As Cole's first fully expressed wilderness painting and a document of his relationship to his important early patron,Sunrise in the Catskillsis a pivotal work in the story of 19th-century American landscape painting, containing the seeds of Cole's later masterpieces and anticipating the great wilderness pictures of his pupil Frederic Edwin Church in the 1850s and 1860s.