Late Afternoon Sun

In August Franzen's Late Afternoon Sun, two laborers pass each other in an open field: one, guiding a horse-drawn plow, turns his head to glance toward a nearer man trudging across the field with the implements of agricultural work, including a long wooden forked pole, resting on his shoulder. The narrow band of plowed furrows interrupting the field's scruffy growth is echoed by a line of white-walled, red-roofed buildings that stretch the full width of the image. Only a few trees breaking the line on the high horizon and the walking man in the foreground counter the horizontal emphasis of the image. Just right of its center, the intersecting lines of tools, plow, and distant sapling create a play of delicate diagonals. Franzen suggests the diffused glowing light of late afternoon through a limited range of saturated gold and green tones relieved only by the soft reds of the distant roofs. Such details as the shadows in the folds of the foremost man's smock are carefully studied and rendered with a delicate, controlled touch. The artist drew rather than painted with the fluid medium of watercolor and used the opaque water-based paint called gouache to add density to the whites of the buildings and the chalky stone emerging from the rough ground just passed by the walking man. Yet the horse's swishing tail and the rapid glance of the plowman, his features obscured by distance, lend Franzen's scene the immediacy of a quickly captured moment.

Franzen painted this work in Grez-sur-Loing, a rural village in the French department (county) of Seine-et-Marne, just southwest of Paris. By 1890, Grez was a busy international art colony that included several Scandinavian artists, among them Franzen's former teacher Carl Larsson (1853–1919). The colony's members painted scenes of everyday peasant life, sometimes infused with understated religious sentiment, and landscapes in which they focused on the careful rendering of the clarifying, diffused light that resulted from the overcast skies common in the region. To capture it, they often painted outdoors, before their subject, rather than in the studio from preparatory sketches, according to traditional methods. Whether Franzen followed this new practice of so-called plein-air painting in creating Late Afternoon Sun is unknown: if so, he almost certainly also relied on sketches, possibly photographs, of the animate subjects he depicts with such care. Consistent with the aesthetics of the Grez colony is the work's focus on light. (Its title, which underscores this, may be a later addition, however.) Downplaying the individuality of the laborers, Franzen concentrates attention on the illumination of forms, the peculiar effects of the low sun as it unifies the colors of the scene, and the choreographed balance of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal elements.

Un regard américain sur Paris (An American Glance at Paris), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venue: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, April 11–October 31, 1997.

The People Work: American Perspectives, 1840–1940 (Le Travail à l'oeuvre: les artistes américains 1840–1940), Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venues: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, March 15–May 25, 2003; Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, June 8–August 17, 2003. [exh. cat.]

Le Passage à Paris: les artistes américains en France, 1860–1930 (Passing through Paris: American Artists in France, 1860–1930), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venue: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, April 1–October 31, 2005. [exh. brochure]

Le Passage à Paris: les artistes américains en France, 1860–1930 (Passing through Paris: American Artists in France, 1860–1930), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venue: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, April 1–October 29, 2006. [exh. brochure]

American Paintings II. New York: Berry-Hill Galleries Inc., 1983. Ill. p. 53 (color).

Bourguignon, Katherine M. and Elizabeth Kennedy. The People Work: American Perspectives, 1840–1940. (exh. cat., Terra Museum of American Art). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 2003. Text pp. 19, 27 (checklist); ill. p. 41 (color).

Bourguignon, Katherine M. and Elizabeth Kennedy. Le Travail à l'oeuvre: les artistes américains, 1840–1940. (exh. cat., Terra Museum of American Art). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 2003. Text pp. 19, 27 (checklist); ill. p. 41 (color).