Setting Sun On The Dune Of Beg-meil By Thomas Alexander Harrison - Brittany

Oil on canvas, signed lower left. Dimensions without frame 40 x 60 cm, with frame 54 x 72 cm.

A painter of light, Harrison specializes in sea scenes. We feel through his painting the pleasure this man had in looking at the ocean.

Thomas Alexander Harrison (1853-1930). After studying in 1871-1872 with Georges W. Pettit at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, his hometown, Harrison participated for six years as a draftsman on a government cartographic expedition along the Pacific coast. It was in 1879 that he left the United States to settle in France, accompanied by his two brothers, themselves painters, Birge Harrison (1854-1929), student of Luc-Olivier Merson, and Butler Harrison ( died in 1886). Student of Gérôme and Bastien-Lepage. Alexander Harrison quickly stood out for his works on somewhat anecdotal subjects but conducive to remarkable studies of light. However, the painter soon devoted himself almost exclusively to the sea with great success. He is sometimes considered the leader of American painters in Paris and opened a workshop to prepare his compatriots for the Universal Exhibition of 1889, at which he obtained a medal. He received the Legion of Honor the same year. A member of numerous juries and artistic committees, Harrison exhibited at the Secessions in Vienna, Munich and Berlin and was among the most influential foreign artists in Paris. In 1893, the State acquired the Salon de la Société nationale des Beaux-Arts of La Solitude, which combines a nocturnal lake landscape with a poetic nude. The painter discovered Brittany very soon after his arrival in France. The aspiration to represent large spaces encouraged Harrison to frequent the bay of Concarneau rather than Pont-Aven. It is in Beg-Meil, above all, that the artist finds material for his studies of light and colors. The large beaches which separate the tip of Beg-Meil from Bénodet are ideal for boundless contemplation. We know that the painter is close to the young Marcel Proust, and that he frequented him in Beg-Meil. The future author of In Search of Lost Time actually came there for several summers in a row in the mid-1890s, in the company of the composer Reynaldo Hahn. Both a model for the character of the painter Elstir, and also for certain descriptions of the sea which seem inspired by his paintings, the artist seems to have impressed the writer who remembers him by writing In the Shadow of Young Girls in flowers. In the beautiful navy which entered the Quimper collections, and perhaps painted at Beg Meil, Harrison chose the nocturnal to evoke, once again, the infinite nuances of the sea and the sky.