2w ago

Discussion Thread 🤖 Saturday 29 March 2025

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Oh hey there Yarrabyte 🤖
 
There’s this painting I once saw and I can’t find it again. It was a landscape painting of a cliff on a shore and looked very much like the 19th century romanticism oil paintings.
The layout looked a little like John Constable’s paintings of Weymouth bay but it wasn’t grey and overcast. It was glowing with slightly warm yellow light.
The sky was a desaturated yellow sunrise or sunset haze with clouds. The cliff rising behind was a crumbly warm orangey yellow. The incoming small wave was a light warm blue with a rill of white foam and the jagged rocks in the sea(?) were brown. There were a few smaller flat rocks towards the centre at the bottom of the cliff with a scattering of human bones near the larger central one, including a skull or a few skulls. Those were brownish.
It’s driving me nuts because sometimes I think I’ll have narrowed it down to a particular setting or artist and then I find another very similar but not quite the same in a big way. I think this is an entire genre I’ve stumbled on (Romanticism is apparently big on landscapes and there might have been a British movement) so I’m looking for a needle in a haystack.
I could also be chasing a ghost if the image drew from multiple works and was ai 💔
Edit: Hold up now. The texture of the Etretat chalk cliffs is similar and the beaches of Normandy were popular with impressionists. The jagged rocks and the flat angular rocks are also familiar.
I don’t know man. I know nothing about art history and am going by eye, off only a brief look and an unreliable memory
- Looking at pictures now
  Courbet?
  tho I don't remember him ever painting bones. Bones are usually a memento mori
  
  It really did look like a Courbet and I had been looking through his but no luck so far.
  Edit: Oh and it wasn’t the elephant head cliffs of Etretat, more like a rocky strand or a little bay. The shoreline curved inwards at the bottom left (with a rock the small shallow wave gently broke against) and the cliffs rose in the background on the top right.
  I had initially thought Weymouth bay but it also looked a little like the Falaise d’Amont. But with some rocks at shoreline and on the sand. And it was more to the right of this view.
  
  Credit: https://www.lehavre-etretat-tourisme.com/en/things-to-see-and-do/visit/classified-natural-areas/the-amont-cliffs-and-antifer-valley/
  Edit: The Monet isn’t quite the right style (there was a little more definition on details in the mystery painting) but the right sort of layout.
  
  Credit: https://www.meisterdrucke.us/fine-art-prints/Claude-Monet/1034922/Etretat:-the-beach-and-the-Amont-gate-by-Claude-Monet,-1883.html
  The bones were very subtle looking scattered in among a cluster of rocks and at the base of the cliff as if someone had fallen.
  
  or maybe a fisherman lost at sea was washed ashore
  
  I asked and the painting was The Shore Of Oblivion by Eugen Bracht 🙃
  There are apparently 8 versions (I can’t find them all) so maybe one is closer to what I had in my head.
  
  The Shore of Oblivion are an amazing set of paintings! I fucking love them
  
  I tried to find the versions but only could find two.
  Damn, how does someone paint that good.
  
  Yeah there's 8 but only 2 are preserved from what I understand.
  And lots and lots of practice! Painting over old canvas, over and over! Just constantly making paintings that aren't perfect, until you can't paint anymore!
  
  Oh, these ones are cool too! Also staples in the German symbolism movement
  https://www.sensesatlas.com/isle-of-the-dead-five-versions/
  
  Yeah maybe. I wondered that initially, if the larger central ‘rock’ was actually a small overturned boat. But I don’t think so.
  I keep pulling up the mental image and it seems to be more like a flat angular rock with smaller ones around it. And there might have been one more skull.

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