End of the Harvest

c. 1892–1905

End of the Harvest, c. 1892–1905. Charles Angrand (French, 1854–1926). Charcoal on cream laid paper; sheet: 49.1 x 63.5 cm (19 5/16 x 25 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund 1999.49 This drawing's unusual technique reflects the ideas of the French painting movement known as Pointillism or Divisionism. Its most famous practitioner, Georges Seurat (1859–1891), developed a technique of applying color in short strokes or dots. Seurat's friend Charles Angrand was influenced by this method, and both artists developed a related technique for their drawings. In the sheet shown here, Angrand used a black, manufactured charcoal stick on a paper textured with tiny ridges. The highest of these ridges hold the charcoal, but the paper shows through in the small spaces between them. This creates the effect of a soft, diffuse evening light that dissolves the curved shapes of haystacks and turns the landscape into an expansive abstraction of nature. The artist Paul Signac, a friend of Angrand, described the artist's drawings as "poems of light."