Valencia

Description

Somewhere on a trip through Spain, likely in the early decades of the twentieth century, Mathias J Alten set up his easel to catch a city at its most luminous. Valencia was painted in the wake of the extensive European travels that shaped so much of his output, a period when the Michigan-based painter absorbed the light of the Mediterranean and carried it home in canvas after canvas. The result on view here is not a record of streets and buildings so much as a record of heat, glare, and the particular gold that settles over a southern Spanish city in the middle of the day.

About Valencia Mathias Alten Oil Painting Reproduction

The composition works in broad, readable planes: a luminous sky pressing down on architectural or natural forms below, with the eye led through the picture by shifts of colour rather than by outline. Alten was trained in the European impressionist and tonalist traditions, and it shows in how loosely and confidently he lays in his passages of light. There is little interest here in exact topography. What holds the painting together is atmosphere, the sense of standing in a particular place at a particular hour, with the warmth of the stone and the haze of the air rendered through layered, saturated hues.

His brushwork carries the immediacy typical of work done on site, thick in the highlights, thinner and more fluid in the shadows, with visible changes of direction that record the movement of his hand rather than a laboured correction of it. This is a mature example of his travel painting, made at a point in his career when he had settled into a confident, personal handling of colour and no longer needed to prove his technical range. A discerning eye will notice how the sky is built from several distinct tones rather than one flat wash, and how that gradation does much of the work of suggesting depth.

The hand-painted reproduction

ByMuseum reproduces Valencia as a hand-painted oil painting reproduction rather than a printed copy, with a trained artist working directly in oil on artist-grade canvas to match the original palette stroke for stroke. The loaded brushwork, the subtle shifts within the sky, and the overall warmth of the picture are rebuilt by hand, so the surface catches light the way an oil painting should rather than sitting flat under glass. It is a museum quality reproduction intended for a wall that gets real daylight, somewhere the shifting hours will pick out the texture of the paint the way they would with the original, bringing a steady, sunlit mood into a room used every day.

• Hand-painted oil on canvas, not a printed copy
• Available in multiple sizes to suit your wall
• Gallery-ready presentation on arrival
• Certificate of authenticity included
• Painted to order in 2 to 3 weeks, then delivered in 5 to 7 days