JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

This landscape brings to mind a certain style if not a particular artist, someone working  a lonely, cool-if-not-cold landscape, and although the terrain is certainly representational nothing on the hills seem to be, save for the tree in the foreground. It seems a little in the school of Grant Wood, or 1930’s, or something along those lines.

The image is a detail, and when you pull back a little, there is more a suggestion of time and place:

When I look at the scene in context, it becomes very confusing, because it is sitting in the background of a painting by Giovanni Bellini, which was painted ca. 1500. There is no doubt that this is a Renaissance painting–but for me, seeing this grab of a modernity 400 + years into the future, I wonder what it was that moved Bellini in this way.  

[Source:  a catalog for the sale of the paintings collected by the Bourgeois brothers (which is also a good band name), Catalogue des Tableaux Anciens et Modernes composant la Collection Bourgeois Freres .printed in Cologne, 1904, painting number 3. ]