Art & Exhibitions
At the National Gallery, a Princeteau Beach Scene That’s Too Modern For Its Age
THE DAILY PIC: Radical in 1892, the painting recalls 1960s conservatism.
Blake Gopnik
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I spotted this weirdly lovely painting the other day at the National Gallery in Washington: It is René Pierre Charles Princeteau’s Riders on the Beach at Dieppe, from 1892. (Click on my image to see it enlarged.) I had never heard of the artist and Google turns up little about him–although it seems he was born deaf in 1843, and that this didn’t stop him from getting a fine education then teaching art to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. What struck me at once about his Riders painting is that it’s got the bones of a standard, high-realist Hague School beach scene, but the flesh of something more aggressively modern. Oddly, that makes it look, more than anything, like some kind of deluxe country-club art from the 1960s. I think it’s wonderful that Princeteau achieved such a strange hybrid effect, so early. (Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon)
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