ROBERT KEMM (Salisbury, England, 1837 - London, 1895). "A stop on the road, with Granada in the background." Oil on canvas. Signed in the lower lef

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Classics XIX and XX

By Setdart Auction House

May 18, 2021

Set Reminder 2021-05-18 09:30:00 2021-05-18 09:30:00 America/New_York Bidsquare Bidsquare : Classics XIX and XX https://www.bidsquare.com/auctions/setdart-auction-house/classics-xix-and-xx-6961
The next 18th May there will be a 19th and 20th Century Classics Auction at Setdart.com There will be a select repertoire of important artists such as Carlos Cruz Diez, Luis Feito, Joan Miró, Fernando Botero, Josep Llimona, Salvador Dalí among others. Setdart Auction House sofia@setdart.com

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• Lot Description
  ROBERT KEMM (Salisbury, England, 1837 - London, 1895). "A stop on the road, with Granada in the background." Oil on canvas. Signed in the lower left corner. Measures: 101 x 127 cm; 146 x 172 cm (frame). Son of the carver and gilder William Kemm, his love of painting must have awakened very early, as he was only fourteen years old when he was registered in the census as an artist. During his early years Kemm produced two series of 256 watercolors of Wiltshire churches. Following his contemporaries J. Phillip, J. Bagnold Burgess and E. Long, Kemm made a trip to Spain in the years between 1946 and 1946. Long, he made a trip to Spain between 1861 and 1864, visiting Seville and Granada in particular. In the years preceding his first exhibition, Kemm devoted himself mainly to portraiture. His first exhibition at the Royal Society of British Artists took place in 1874. In this first exhibition Kemm already showed all the typical elements of his style, with works on Spanish themes. It is worth mentioning the presentation of several works by Kemm in the exhibition "English Romantic Painters in 19th Century Spain", organized in Zamora by Caja Duero in 1999, from a private Spanish collection. Robert Kemm is represented in the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, the Salisbury Museum, the Wiltshire Archaeological Society, the Sunderland Museum and the Sheffield Museum. During the 19th century, Spain and England maintained a special relationship. The valuable support given by Great Britain to the patriotic fervor against the French invader, led the Spanish to look with sympathy to the British. For their part, British painters and literati descended upon Spain, a country that offered them the quintessence of romantic idealism. Perhaps looking for a natural and more authentic landscape, they traveled to the peninsula, where the Industrial Revolution had not yet degraded the face of the landscape. Progress in communications made Spain an exotic, but at the same time close, destination for young English painters who rejected the industrial bourgeoisie and the poverty of spirit that was plaguing the large and ever-growing cities. In fact, after the War of Independence our country began to acquire an aura of exoticism and extravagance that attracted a good number of English intellectuals and artists. The Moorish Andalusia, the bandit, the obscurantist Church, the handsome bullfighter and the maja, the lady with mantilla, the barefoot children, the beggar full of rags, Cervantes' gitanilla... Paintings like the one we present here bring us closer to the essence of romanticism, to the exaltation of the soul as a response to an era that placed the cloth on the altar of Reason. To achieve this goal, Romantic painters stopped subordinating color to drawing, thus reproducing pictorial motifs with more expressive force and greater naturalism. The brushstroke becomes impetuous, the color reaches its autonomy, the impasto is thicker, etc.
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