Springtime by Louis Aston Knight

Louis Aston Knight  1873-1948 | American 

Springtime

Signed "Aston Knight / Paris" (lower left)
Oil on canvas

A quintessential landscape scene by Parisian-born American artist Louis Aston Knight, this compelling composition demonstrates the artist's mastery of the genre. Son of legendary landscapist Daniel Ridgway Knight, Aston Knight devoted his life to landscape painting much like his father, maintaining the elder’s ideals of expressing the “true to life” splendors of the natural world.

Aston Knight's Springtime is emblematic of this dogma. Here, the artist renders a series of humble countryside buildings along the banks of a tranquil river. Though juxtaposed with man-made structures, the painting is a celebration of the river's fortitude and beauty. Colorful wildflowers spring up along the banks, and Aston Knight renders the reflective surface of the water with a level of realism unmatched by his peers.

Raised and educated in Europe, Aston Knight was surrounded by artists throughout his youth, including such figures as Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonnier, and he gained his first elements of artistic education directly from his father. He later completed his formal artistic studies under the tutelage of the great French Romantic painters Robert Fleury and Jules Lefebvre. Knight's works differed from his father's in that they tended to take a more impressionistic style—a break from the senior’s photographic precision. Louis Aston Knight also rarely included figures in his works, instead focusing on the landscape's more ephemeral qualities. Despite these key idiosyncrasies, both father and son shared an appreciation of nature and man’s role and impact upon it. 

Though Aston Knight did not visit the United States until he was in his thirties, he was a tremendous success both here and in Europe. His paintings even found favor among American presidents. President Warren G. Harding commissioned a work from Aston Knight for the White House, and his successor, President Calvin Coolidge, held a private exhibition of his works at the famed residence. Other paintings by Louis Aston Knight are now housed in the collections of prestigious museums, including the Luxembourg Museum, the Hudson River Museum and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

This particular work was also once housed in a notable estate, the home of prominent Old Western film star Eugene Iglesias. The famous Puerto Rican actor was a prolific collector of fine art, and Louis Aston Knight's Springtime was certainly one of the finest works in his estate.

20th century

Canvas: 25" high x 31 1/2" wide (63.50 x 80.01 cm)
Frame: 37" high x 42 1/2" wide x 3" deep (93.98 x 107.95 x 7.62 cm)

Provenance:
Private collection, Eugene Iglesias, Hollywood, California
M.S. Rau, New Orleans
Private collection, United States
M.S. Rau, New Orleans