This beautiful early to mid-20th-century oil painting by English artist Alfonso Toft (1866-1964) depicts several tiny figures crossing an expansive open landscape beneath a magnificent cloud-filled sky. Toft was a painter of atmosphere, and this wonderfully understated work encapsulates his approach.
Across the foreground, dark earth and low vegetation are described with loose, broken marks in brown, umber, ochre and green. Beyond, the land gradually dissolves into cooler tones of blue and grey until a distant building appears on the horizon, reduced almost to a silhouette.
And then comes the sky. It occupies perhaps three-quarters of the composition and is unquestionably the painting's true subject. Great formations of cloud rise through pale blue, grey and creamy white, illuminated by a gentle light entering from the right. Toft avoids hard contours, building the atmosphere instead through closely related masses of tone. Cloud merges into cloud, land into distance, until the entire landscape seems suspended within its weather.
It's here that two different generations of British landscape painting meet. Toft had absorbed the freer handling that emerged during the later 19th century. Paint could be broken, abbreviated and suggestive; a distant building need not be meticulously described, and a foreground could be assembled from touches of colour rather than laboriously finished detail. He understood what modern European painting had done to the language of landscape.
Yet emotionally, he remained attached to something much older. Weather, distance, solitude and the overwhelming scale of nature had been central concerns of British Romantic landscape painting earlier in the century. Toft inherited that sensibility and carried it into a more modern painterly language. His technique could loosen, but his instinct remained Romantic.
The tiny figures are important in this respect. One stands almost exactly at the threshold between the darker foreground and the immense distance beyond, while others are little more than marks within the landscape. They establish scale, but they also establish mood. Human life is present, certainly, but it occupies remarkably little space.
There is no dramatic mountain, raging sea or ruined castle here to manufacture sublimity. Toft discovers it instead in an ordinary stretch of open country and the simple experience of standing beneath a very large sky.
Curator Stephen Jones described Toft's finest landscapes as possessing a “pastoral lyricism”, comparing their atmosphere with the poetry of A. E. Housman and the music of Edward Elgar. It is an apt description here. There is no obvious narrative and nothing grandiose has occurred. A few people are crossing the land while clouds gather and disperse above them.
Toft simply makes us feel how small they are beneath the sky.
Signed in the lower left and held in a substantial period-style giltwood frame with richly moulded scrolling foliate ornament, swept corners and an inner leaf-pattern border.
Learn more about Alfonso Toft in our directory.
Medium: Oil on canvas
Overall size: 31” x 24½” / 79cm x 62cm
Year of creation: c. 1930
Provenance: Private collection, UK.
Condition: Cleaned. Areas of fine and settled craquelure, as you would expect. The paint layer is stable. Frame in excellent condition.
Our reference: BRV2335
