Alexander Warshawsky, February Afternoon, Paris

Painting

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Canton Museum of Art

Alexander Warshawsky, February Afternoon, Paris: A snowy street scene in winter, with pedestrians walking under bare tree branches and a pastel-colored background.
Alexander Warshawsky, February Afternoon, Paris

A snowy street scene in winter, with pedestrians walking under bare tree branches and a pastel-colored background.

Name/Title

Alexander Warshawsky, February Afternoon, Paris

Entry/Object ID

2008.21

Description

Warshawsky moved to Paris, France in 1916, where he would spend much of his early career. As an Impressionist, he was interested in capturing fleeting light in shades of pastels. The much-used violet in Impressionist works owe much to a little-known American portrait painter named John Goffe Rand. In 1841, Rand grew frustrated with the messy practice of storing paint in a pig’s bladder, which was the prevailing method for preserving pigments at the time, and invented a more practical and portable option: a collapsible paint tube made of tin. This enabled artists to paint plein air (outdoors), easily transporting their color to outdoor locations to capture impressions of the environment, and in turn led to the production of pre-mixed paint shades in tin tubes, such as Manganese Violet, the first affordable mauve-colored paint that meant artists no longer had to mix red and blue to make purple. The Impressionists so adored the new hue that critics accused the painters of having “violettomania.”