I have bought newly-made hand cut puzzles before, but this is the only time I have commissioned a cutter to make one using an image they had not previously puzzlefied. It is made by Canadian cutter Mary Lee Smythe, who lives more than halfway across the continent from me. If you have read my review of the puzzle she previously made for me, and the biographical post I wrote about her, you’ll understand why I chose Mary Lee for this commission.

If you haven’t already read that biography, I recommend you follow that link. Mary Lee got into jigsaw puzzle cutting in a surprising way! There is less reason to read my earlier review: My minor quibbles about Balalaika do not apply to this puzzle.

My requests about this puzzle included that it include some colour-line cutting and a few of her favourite whimsies, that it retain the full composition of the painting, and that she add some interest to the tree foliage part of the image. This puzzle not only conforms to those specifications but also fully lives up to the very high cutting expectations I had when I commissioned it. It is a great puzzle!

But I won’t be saying much in this essay about the puzzle itself because, as seems to happen rather frequently for me, I got rather carried away with my research and writing about the image and the painter who made it. I found it to be a very interesting story, so let’s get into that now beginning with why I selected this image. I’ll have a bit more to say about the puzzle itself at the beginning of the assembly walkthrough near the end of this essay.

By the way, as you read this, please keep in mind that I am a big fan of the impressionist and postimpressionist painters. I have bought and assembled many puzzles with their images, which has led to my writing several biographical essays about the artists in this newsletter/blog-archive series. They did indeed initiate a major transformation in the art of oil painting. But it took about 40 years for their innovative techniques to achieve widespread appreciation, and this story is about when they were still largely unknown and unrecognized.

Introduction

I grew up near St. Paul, Minnesota, which is adjacent to Minneapolis. Together, they are known as the Twin Cities. St. Paul has the region’s premier history and science museums, whicl Minneapolis is the home of its major art museums – the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA) and the Walker Art Centre.

The Walker specializes in modern and contemporary art, and the MIA focuses its acquisitions and displays on earlier eras of global art history, including the European old masters. I am sure that has elicited comments about the appropriateness of the institution’s MIA initials from contemporary artists regarding the minor place for their works in its accession budget.

I recall going to the MIA as a child, and I still enjoy going there whenever I make my infrequent visits back to Minnesota to visit my siblings. Besides an opportunity to see works in its collection made by some of the most well-known names in art history (including Lucretia, by Rembrandt), the MIA has two specific works on permanent display by artists who are less renowned now, but which especially intrigue me. Those are Temptation, the painting that is the image for this puzzle, and a life-size sculpture bust by Raffaelle Monti called Veiled Lady).

From every viewing angle of this sculpture the effect is the same – you would swear that you are seeing a real face covered by a flimsy silk veil. The MIA’s explanation for is posted near the sculpture. It reads:

We can’t see through stone, but through tricks of light and polish Raffaelle Monti created the illusion that we can. On his Veiled Lady, the top of the head and shoulders are polished smooth, to reflect light. But where the veil falls across the face, the marble is less polished. It reflects less light, suggesting the texture of fabric. Sculptures of veiled figures peaked in popularity during the 1700s in Italy, an opportunity for sculptors to show their technical mastery over marble. About a century later, Raffaelle Monti and other artists revived this technically demanding tradition.

I could go on and on about my infatuation with this sculpture and its history, including how a similar sculpture by Monti was a big hit when it was exhibited in the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition of 1851. But this posting is about the equally-fascinating painting. You can read much more about Veiled Lady and other sculptures of its kind here.

The painter

Although paintings by late 19^th century Impressionists and post-Impressionists are all the rage now, throughout that century “academic” style paintings were much more popular in France, and William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) was one of the most popular and famous artists in that style He vied with Jean-Léon Gérôme and Alexandre Cabanel to be the highly-paid painters of that era. It probably didn’t hurt that he was the most adept in history at depicting beautiful lifelike women, clothed and unclothed.

Early years and training

\William Bouguereau was the second son in a middle-class La Rochelle merchant family. His natural talent enabled him to attend the École de Beaux-Arts in Paris (where he was a student from 1843-‘50), and also to win a scholarship to do the equivalent of post-graduate study from 1850-’53 at the Villa Medici in Rome, which was also operated by the French national academy. To finance this education, besides his scholarship and support from his parents, he painted commissioned portraits and sold the works he was painted while at the École.

Bouguereau complemented that artistic training by reading and studying classic liturature (in latin), attending anatomical dissections, researching the authentic clothing styles of ancient Greece and Rome, and following the emerging discipline of archaeology. During his three years studying in Rome the Villa Medici served as a base to travel around that country, viewing and copying paintings by Renaissance masters such as Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Titian and Paulo Veronese.

Like his fellow academic painters, Bouguereau believed that the Italian old masters, as well as the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens, had perfected the technique of oil painting about 250 years earlier and that it was impossible to improve it further: They could only endeavor to execute their paintings as well as they did. Copying their works was a ways for artists to assess their own drawing and painting progress.

From those travels Bouguereau also accumulated a large portfolio of detailed drawings of ancient artifacts and colorful landscapes of idyllic hill towns and lake regions for use as arcadian backgrounds in his later paintings. That foundation, as well as his natural talent, perfectly positioned Bouguereau for a career of creating neo-classical paintings with religious, historical, allegorical and Greco-Roman mythological subject matter, and to paint them in the academy’s symbolism-rich and finely detailed, lifelike, highly polished painting style with no evidence of brushstrokes. That was the subject matter and painting style considered by both the academic faculty and deep-pocketed European and North American art connoisseurs to be the most suitable subjects for fine art paintings.

At the National Academy, and especially at the Villa Medici: “Training was demanding and expectations were high for artists in residence, and in response Bouguereau developed the rigorous, almost fanatical working habits that awed colleagues, patrons and critics throughout his career.” (source) His fellow students nicknamed him “Sisyphus” in recognition of his work ethic.

Even before his advanced studies in Rome began, Bouguereau successfully submitted paintings for exhibition at the annual Paris Salons, although his early submissions brought him little attention.

[Long digression about the Paris Salons:

Paris Salons, or just the Salons, were annual government-sponsored exhibitions of the newest works by living artists. They were held every Spring for six to eight weeks. The initial Salon had been held in 1667 under the auspicies of the L'Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, but the political circumstances in France changed somewhat with the French Revolution in 1789 and it became circumspect to drop the word “royal” from the organization’s name.

Initially, the Salon’s were an invite-only kind of event, held at the Louvre and attended by only the wealthy and high-born. That changed under Napoleon Bonaparte who insisted that the Salons be opened up to the general public. Over the years, the size and scale of the Salon exhibitions grew and grew until it became the most important art event in Europe and had to be held in ever-larger venues.

In the 1800s, admittance for an afternoon at the Salon cost 1 franc, (at a time when a typical petit bourgeois family income was 1500-3000 francs per year), and admission was free on Sundays. Besides potential buyers, fellow artists and art critics, the Salons were seeen as affordable and educational entertainment for families. They became a cultural phenomenon that extended far beyond the art world. Up to 450,000 visitors attended the Paris Salon every year.

The Salons were a bastion of traditional artistic values. Exhibitions there was strictly juried to represent only what the jury deemed to be the finest of the paintings that had been submitted for consideration that year. For the jury members that meant that they had to conform to the academic style canon of both subject matter and painting technique (which will be discussed later).

The popularity of the Paris Salons thus enabled the elite Academy to dictate the very definition of what was considered by the public to be the current state-of-the-art and and fashion for painting. In the mid-19^th century, being exhibited at the Salon was nearly the only way that a French artist could establish his artistic reputation, attract patronage and commissions, and sell paintings: Art museums like the Louvre did not exhibit works by living artists. There were not yet any art galleries or art dealers, and and there were no other public art shows like the Salons.

Paintings at the Salons were densely displayed floor-to-ceiling in every room of whatever large facility the event was being held in that year. (That way of displaying paintings is still known as “salon style”. That’s the way paintings and othe artworks are on the walls of my apartment.) Many paintings were submitted, but only a relatively few were accepted. Even so, the Salon’s tall walls were jam-packed with well over 1000 paintings every year.

For artists, that meant there were two challenges: the first was to get accepted for display, and the second was to have their paintings get noticed and appreciated by the public, and especially by the potential buyers and art critics, amidst the jumble of competition.

In 1863 there was a particularly high number of submissions for that year’s Salon, and about 2/3 of the 5000 submissions were rejected despite the fact that the Salon was being held in an especially large and empty venue - the huge Palais de l'Industrie (Palace of Industry) that had been built on the Champs-Elysées for the 1855 Exposition Universelle (world’s fair). The public, and especially the rejected artists, objected and began to call the Academy’s jury selection system government censorship. They appealled to the Emperor Napoleon III to intervene and let the public judge for itself what paintings they liked.

The jury’s selections had indeed been reflecting the Emperor’s personal artistic tastes, which mirrored those of the Academy, but to appease the public outcry his office issued the following statement:

"Numerous complaints have come to the Emperor on the subject of the works of art which were refused by the jury of the Exposition. His Majesty, wishing to let the public judge the legitimacy of these complaints, has decided that the works of art which were refused should be displayed in another part of the Palace of Industry."

More than a thousand visitors a day attended the “Salon des Refusés”. Although the paintings included works by such artists as Claude Manet, James MacNeill Whistler, Camille Pissarro, and Paul Cézanne, many of the paintings shown there had been rejected for good reason, by the standards of that time as well as today. The journalist Émile Zola reported the rooms were full of the laughter of the spectators.

The Emperor did not repeat that experiment, but it did get non-academic artists to begin to think about holding their own art shows to enable the public to judge their work for themselves. In 1873, some of them including Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Camille Pissarro, formed a collective that they called Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc (Anonymous society of painters, sculptors, engravers, etc) to exhibit their artworks independently. They held their first exhibition in 1874, scheduled at nearly the same time as that year’s Salon.

That art show was a financial flop, drawing only 3500 attendees, similar laughter, and almost universally negative reviews from the art critics and few sales, but that was not enough to discourage the artists. They followed it with 7 further exhibitions over the next 12 years. By the third one they were starting gain a few appreciative followers, and they developed momentum from there. That model inspired the founding of other annual art shows that were not limited to the Academic style. Eventually they rivalled the attendance of the official Paris Salons, and two of them continue to this day.

In 1881, because they had become controversial as not representing the full spectrum of French art, the government stopped financially supporting the Paris Salon, although they continued to be held under new leadership (which included William-Adolphe Bouguereau as their president). They used the same jury system and academic style standards for acceptance, but they no longer had the artistic dominance that they once had.

But I’ve gotten pretty far ahead of myself in Bouguereau’s story. When he finished his studies in 1853 and became a full-time artist, the Paris Salon was still the only game in town for selling oil paintings. End of digression about the Paris Salons.]

Subject matter of Bouguereau’s paintings

In 1853, as soon as he returned from his studies in Rome, Bouguereau opened a studio in Paris and submitted some of his previous winter’s canvases for that year’s Salon. They were not only accepted for exhibition, they attracted mostly positive reviews. I mean the first part of that sentence literally – throughout his career Bouguereau never had a painting he submitted turned down by a Paris Salon jury. More importantly, his exhibitions at that year’s Salon brought him a few sales as well as commissions to paint portraits and other styles of paintings.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau immediately became France’s fastest-rising star painter. Only five years later, in 1859 at the age of only 34, he took his first step in climbing the tiered hierarchy of France’s National Order of the Legion of Honour, the country’s highest recognition of civilian accomplishment.

Some of his early paintings were glamorized depictions of historic events, such as:

The above painting was commissioned by the French government. It is 2 metres tall x 3 metres wide (6 ½” x nearly 10’). As you can see, it was political propaganda for Louis Napoleon, who had been elected President of the 2^nd Republic in 1848, but seized further power by force in 1851 and proclaimed himself to be the founding emperor of a new Second French Empire.

Such paintings may have put him in good stead with the Salon jury as well as with the autocratic Emperor, who over the next two decades personally bought several of his paintings, and ordered others to be bought for the national art collection. But the devoutly religious Bouguereau soon realized that there were more satisfying commissions to be had for him from the Church for “historic” paintings of biblical events. And besides those large paintings for churches, no home of a pious French Catholic family was complete without an image of the Madonna and other religious paintings.

Another type of painting that Bouguereau began making very early in his career are called “genre paintings”, which depicted idealized visions of past or present everyday life. In genre paintings, romantization, nostalgia, sentimentality, and even moralizing were not necessarily seen as vices as long as they had the right degree of subtilty. In the mid-19^th century, and even into the 20^th, genre paintings were very popular throughout Europe, and that popularity soon spread to North America (e.g., the paintings of Norman Rockwell).

Genre paintings were quite low on the academic hierarchy of appropriate subjects for fine art, but when they were made with the technical skill of an artist like Bouguereau they were accepted for exhibition at the Salons.

Bouguereau began making genre paintings as early as 1853, when he returned to Paris from his studies at the Villa Medici in Rome. He had been approached by the pioneering art dealer and gallery owner Paul Durand-Ruel who suggested that he make some paintings that were purposely ambiguous as to whether they were religious or secular. For example, an ambiguously titled painting of a mother in peasant garb with a baby could be interpreted by the viewer as being either the Madonna and Jesus, or as a pretty peasant mother with her child. He explained that there was more demand for genre paintings than religious ones, and so ambiguous paintings would be both more saleable and have higher market value.

That was a concept that Bouguereau readily understood. It also gave him an appreciation for the then-new profession of professional art dealer. Marketing and selling can be very time-consuming for an artist. Those were not roles that Bouguereau relished, and he realized that a dealer likely could do those jobs more effectively than he could. For the next ten years, based on a handshake deal, Paul Durand-Ruel served as the sole art dealer for Bouguereau’s paintings. Bouguereau sold through art dealers for the rest of his long career.

The above painting is one in which Bouguereau followed Duran-Ruel’s advice. It had been painted two years earlier in 1851 while he was a student at the Villa Medici in Rome but it had not yet sold. I don’t know what Bouguereau’s original name for it was but the artist almost certainly had intended it to depict Mary (in her trademark blue dress), the baby Jesus, and his older cousin who became John the Baptist. When Duran-Rual arranged for it to be exhibited at the 1855 Paris Exposition it was titled L’Amour fraternel (Fraternal Love) and it sold readily.

(Fourteen years later, after the painting had changed hands a few times between dealers, the prosperous Boston merchant and art collector Thomas Wigglesworth bought it from a New York art dealer. He called it Madonna and Child with John the Baptist. Much later, when the Wigglesworth family donated it to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston they renamed it to the English translation of the secular title it had had when displayed at the Paris Exposition.)

In the mid-1860s, Durand-Ruel’s personal artistic tastes evolved towards the Barbizon school’s modern style of landscape painting, and then to the emerging Impressionist movement for which he became the principle art dealer. In fact, some believe that the public feud between the Impressionists and Bouguereau (discussed below) was merely a publicity stunt instigated by Durand-Ruel.

Adolphe Goupil became Bouguereau’s new principle art dealer, and it was who he introduced the artist’s work to a more international clientele of art collector-speculators. But Durand-Ruel’s original advice about genre paintings being more saleable than religious ones was especially true for those buyers. Throughout his career Bouguereau churned out mother and child paintings whenever he had time between his major works, some of which were clearly religious and others that were ambiguous (including La Tentation (Temptation) the painting used as the image of this puzzle.)

Here is a mother and child genre painting title First Caresses that is less likely to have intended religious meaning, even though she is wearing the Madonna’s characteristic blue dress:

However this next one ambiguously titled L’Innocence is currently shown in an online gallery of Catholic paintings is not at all subtle about its potential for religious meaning, despite the fact that the mother is not wearing a blue dress. A white dress is famously associated with virginity:

Another type of painting that sold very well, and which Bouguereau apparently loved to paint, were neoclassical works depicting persons, events or stories from ancient Greek or Roman mythology. Like religious paintings, they technically fell into the prestigious “historic” category in the academic painting hierarchy – the highest level –which made their validity as fine art above reproach from the Salon jury or conservative critics.

I doubt that the devoutly Catholic William Bouguereau had any qualms about populating his paintings of ancient myths with nudes. They would have been seen as an artistic devise for depicting the immorality of the pagan world of gods and goddesses, nymphs and satyrs. In fact, in the academic symbolism, having nude adults in a painting was tantamount to showing that it was a mythological painting set in the sinful pagan times. (Similarly, having naked slaves and odalisques in orientalist genre paintings conveyed the judgemental European pespective about those cultures.)

But even in the pagan world, everyone in Bouguereau’s paintings was made in God’s image, and to Bouguereau, conveying beauty was the essence of fine art:

In painting, I am an idealist. I see only the beautiful in art and, for me, art is the beautiful. Why reproduce what is ugly in nature?

Here is perhaps Bouguereau’s most famous neoclassical painting:

The oreads were the mountain nymphs, led by the Greek moon goddess Artimis, daughter of Zeus and sister of Apollo. Her Roman equivalent is Diana.

Many academic artists’ neoclassical paintings have a look of staged artificiality about them, and that might also be said about Bouguereau’s The Oreads. But part of Bouguereau’s genius for these kinds of paintings (not all of which included nudes!) was the persuasively realistic way he could envisioned what a mythical story might actually look like if it really were to have happened.

In the above painting you might not be surprised that satyrs could have been fond of peeking at the nymphs when they bathed, but did you know that they were also deathly afraid of drowning? Here is another of his nymphs and satyrs paintings:

In Bouguereau’s time every well-educated person was familiar with the classic Greek and Roman myths. But the Salon attracted viewers of every social class, so when the above painting was shown at the 1873 Paris Salon it was accompanied by this brief verse from the ancient Roman poet, Publius Statius:

Conscious of his shaggy hide and from childhood untaught to swim, he dares not trust himself to deep waters.^[

Based on the amount of acclaim that the painting received from its Paris Salon showing, Nymphs and Satyr was purchased by an American art collector-speculator that year for 35,000 francs – an extremely high price at that time.

However Bouguereau never did find a buyer for his most ambitious self-initiated work ever, La Jeunesse de Bacchus, even though it too received great reviews when it was a centrepiece painting at the 1884 Salon. It was also exhibited at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1889, and Bouguereau toured it to Antwerp and London as one-painting shows. (You can read about those pre-cinema cinematic experiences in my report here about a puzzle which has William Powell Frith’s monumental painting The Railway Station as its image.)

Perhaps it was its size that deterred buyers. The painting is about 3½ metres tall and 6 metres wide (11’ x 20’) and was the largest painting that Bouguereau ever made, although that general scale wasn’t all that uncommon for his major works. Over the years he exhibited 14 paintings at the Paris Salon that were over three metres (10 feet) tall.

Perhaps it was his asking price of 100,000 francs, an outrageous figure in those days, and the fact that he was not open to offers. Until he died in 1905, when it was not on public exhibition La Jeunesse de Bacchus graced the huge studio that he had built on the top floor (even above the servants’ quarters) of his mansion in the Montparnasse district of Paris. My guess is that he didn’t really want to sell it. Bouguereau was immensely proud of this painting, telling others that it was his ultimate masterpiece and crowning achievement.

(Even his descendants have been unable to sell La Jeunesse de Bacchus. It narrowly missed the reserve price the family had set for it when it was included in a 2019 auction at Sotheby’s New York when the bidding “only” went to $18 million USD. Perhaps the descendants don’t really want to sell it either and only offered it for sale to draw atttention to the returning popularity of their illustrious forebearer. Here’s just one of the articles from the New York Times about that episode in the painting’ history .)

In addition to his superb technical painting skills, much of Bouguereau’s genius for paintings seems to have been in the imaginative ways make religious and mythological characters and stories come to life. Except when they were highly stylized, as in Regina Angelorum and The Oreads shown earlier above, his paintings look both beautiful and believable.

Painting primarily in those three styles, religious, genre and neoclassical, as well as the occasional portraits, Bouguereau became one of France’s most sought-after artists. His reputation enabled him to charge the highest prices for his paintings and commissions, and he became quite wealthy. And he held on to that status for a period of nearly five decades! During all that time he never diverged from strict adherence to the academic realism style of painting.

Bouguereau as a teacher

Surprisingly, despite his success as a painter, and certainly not out of financial necessity, in 1875 Bouguereau signed on as a teacher and give seminars at the Académie Julian. It may or may not be of significance that that was shortly after the death of his eldest son from a sudden illness at the age of 15.

Académie Julian was a private art school founded by his close friend and fellow-painter Rodolphe Julian. It grew to become the largest art school in Paris, located in multiple studio locations and accommodating up to 400 students at a time. Académie Julian was a very progressive school by the standards of its time. It had no entrance examination, no limitations on who could enroll, and it charged only moderate fees compared to Paris’ other art academies. It paid its teachers comensurately moderate honorariums, but was still able to attract some of the finest academic painters to its faculty.

One of Académie Julian’s roles was to prepare students for entry into the highly prestigious Académie des Beaux-Arts, which was closely affiliated with the Paris Salons. Another was to serve as a school for artists who could not obtain entry into that school, either because they could not afford its very high fees, were women, or were foreigners who could not pass Beaux-Arts’ grueling French-language-only written and oral entrance exams.

For many years, women students at the Julian school received the same art instruction as the men, including life-drawing with nude models, and they had the same teachers. But their classes were separate from those of the men, and they were charged higher fees. (Perhaps the higher fees were explained by the fact that their voluminous dresses, which were de rigueur at that time, took up more space than men in the crowded teaching classrooms so their class sizes needed to be smaller.)

As for the teachers, some probably needed the financial stability. But like Bouguereau, others became teachers when it would not appear to have been in their direct financial interest to do so. Perhaps it was a way for them to have disciples without having them be around distracting them while they painted. I suppose basically it enabled them to tell admiring aspiring artists: “If you want to learn from me, take my class.” It may also have been a good way for the artists to identify individuals they would want to invite to work for them as paid assistants in their personal ateliers (studio-workshops).

The role of a live modeling art teacher at Académie Julian, as it was at the École de Beaux-Arts, was not everyday instruction. Students would draw or paint together under supervision by school assistants on a daily basis in the schools’ crowded classroom studios, painting the models that the school provided for them. The teachers would come in only once or twice a week to give each of them a critique of their work while the others continued with their painting.

Bouguereau’s and the other teachers’ style of giving critiques is well documented in students’ diaries and memoirs, which have been well-studied by biographers. A critique session for a whole class generally took three or four hours. Although the other students were supposed to continue painting, I suspect that all of their ears were wide open while their peers were being critiqued. On other days, and after hours, they critiqued each other’s work, so the students were well-aware of what they saw as the strengths and weaknesses of their fellow students’ painting techniques. Eavesdropping on the teacher’s observations would have been part of the masterclass.

By all accounts, Bouguereau was a very supportive and popular teacher, and those who wanted both to learn from the best and recieve honest, unvarnished feedback took his classes. His advice often involved adjustments to awkward lines in the composition or suggested modification of the colour pallet. He always ended his critiques with words of encouragement.

According to art historian Fronia E. Wissman in her biographical book Bouguereau, one former student, William Fair Kline, remembered:

Bouguereau’s criticism to everyone [was]: ‘It is good but it is not good enough.’ He would not discourage you, but a thing could always be better. … He was a nice old man.

Another recalled that he always had a calm, soothing voice, and Edmund Wuepel wrote in his journal:

Bouguereau admires in others the very opposite qualities which distinguish his own work. “Faire large et simple” [make it large and simple] is his advice, and anything like imitation of his own style finds little sympathy with him.

Bouguereau could have left teaching at any time to focus on his lucrative painting career, and the better-paying École des Beaux-Arts would certainly have welcomed him onto its own faculty. Instead, he remained with the Académie Julian until shortly before his death in 1905.

Academic oil painting process

Throughout both his student years and his professional artistic career, Bouguereau had a speed of execution and a work ethic that was beyond compare. Paintings with single life-size figures, like the above ones, were painted in as little as eight days, even while working on other paintings at the same time. However that was only after extensive thought before putting brush to canvas. According to art historian Mark Walker in his essay Bouguereau at Work:

This impeccable painting, in which everything is depicted with the utmost care, where the slightest detail is lovingly rendered, was not easily achieved. The material execution was confident and rapid, but the preparations were lengthy and carefully thought out, each subject being weighed and looked at every which way with the help of studies, full size cartoons, and numerous painted sketches.

Painting for Bouguereau was not as much of a team activity as it had been for his heroes Titian, Reubens, and Raphael 250 years earlier. For them, the named master painter was responsible for the composition of paintings attributed to them, and for painting the image’s most challenging features such as the faces, but the works attributed to them were often the product of several artists in their workshops who painted all the supporting elements in the images in accordance to their specialities.

Bouguereau, too, employed assistants for the basic atelier tasks like sizing and stretching the finely-woven linen canvases onto their stretcher frames, applied and sanded and polished the bottom gesso primer paint layer to a porcelain-smooth finish, transferring his charcoal “cartoons” (full-scale preparatory drawings) onto the prepared canvas. It was also they who ground the pigments and mixing them with siccatives (drying agents) and walnut oil (which he preferred to linseed oil because of its clarity) in accordance with the master’s recipes. I presume that they also were the ones who carefully scraped or buffed each paint layer to keep the surface smooth, and who applied and smoothed out the final layers of varnish.

But Bouguereau did all of the of actual oil painting himself, with the possible exception of some architectural elements and other background features. Oil paint is translucent, and painting with it is done in a sequence of many layers. These begin with diluted underpainting layers in warm earth tones, then a series of the transluscent colour layers, and then overpainting with diluted glazing layers to soften hard colour lines.

All of that creates optical depth, and imparts a shimmering glow. The “luminous flesh” that made Bouguereu’s reputation was thus an accumulated effect that had to be slowly built up, and all of it was done by Bouguereau’s own hand. (For more information about Bouguereau’s painting techniques, see the above-noted Bouguereau at Work essay, here, or the books those webpages are based on.)

Bouguereau remained true to that meticulous and laborious style of painting throughout his career. He does not appear to have been tempted to even experiment with the new approaches, such as the loose brushstrokes, vivid colour palettes and painting en plein air of the Impressionists whose rise coincided with his career.

Rise of the Impressionists

The latter half of the 19^th century was a very politically turbulant time in France, and Paris itself experienced both war and revolution (see my research into the background of Monet’s Autumn Effect at Argenteuil, here). The Impressionists, and most of the other avant garde artists who emerged after them, self-identified as artistic revolutionaries. They associated the academic style of painting and the Paris Salon system not just with with being a regretful legacy of conservative artistic fuddie-duddies, but as them being an agencies for defending the political status quo itself.

Their views are echoed by Mark Valen, a contemporary American realist artist who is a Bouguereau critic:

Bouguereau lived during a period of earthshaking change, witnessing the rise of industrialism and the working class, women demanding the vote and inclusion into positions of power, the Franco-Prussian War, the Paris Commune of 1871 and the wave of reprisal killings that took the lives of tens of thousands of Parisian Communards. Yet, in Bouguereau’s paintings there is not the slightest inkling of any of this. And therein lies the problem with an uncritical appreciation of William Bouguereau. It’s as if his meticulously painted Satyrs, winged celestial angels and plump innocent cherubs were intentionally meant to conceal the grinding poverty and growing class conflict of his day – and indeed, that’s exactly the role his escapist canvases filled.

Defenders of Bouguereau will point to his “sympathetic” portraits of the poor, which for the most part are sweet nonthreatening portraits of healthy young peasant girls that reveal nothing about the lives of the dispossessed. Such paintings were popular with Victorians, who preferred grimy reality be covered by a veneer of sentimentality. (source)

The avant garde artists of Bouguereau’s time thought that with the new and rapidly improving invention of photography it was time for their craft to move on – that it was time for painters to explore new ways of depicting truth and reality. They had contempt for the stagnation of the rigid standards of academic painting, and for the fact that the government-supported Paris Salon system had no tolerance for any other styles of painting.

The Impressionists expressed their ideas about what new painting could be both through their choices in subject matter (by painting out-of-favour “low brow” still-lifes and landscapes) and by using novel painting techniques (such as by painting outdoors to capture the ever-changing light and reflections, and by making paintings with bold colours applied with thick and prominent brush strokes, palette knife dabs that jumped out at the viewer loud and proud.)

Bouguereau’s status at the pinnacle of the French art world, as a staunch defender of the conservative academic style, and as a Salon juror (let alone its president from 1881-1990!) made him the personification of all that the avant garde artists were rebelling against. While advocating for their own new styles of painting, the Impressionists very publicly criticized his personal work as being overly slick, artificial, moralistic, and sentimental. One of their criticisms was that the characters in his paintings did not look like real people because they were too damned beautiful!

They even invented new words based on his name to be used as insults. Edgar Degas and his circle are credited with having invented “bouguereauté” (bouguerated) to describe any painting they thought had a finicky, overly finished painting surface. The phrase “studio peasants” referred to Bouguereau’s practice of passing off the same lovely models who posed for him as angels and nude nymphs as authentic rural peasants.

When they were chatting among themselves and with other modernists, the Impressionists acknowledged Bouguereau’s superb drafting, creative composition, technical mastery of the academic style, and work ethic, all while mocking his adherence to a painting style that they considered to be long past its “best before” date. But publicly, they said nothing but what we now call “trash talk” about his paintings.

Their insults were widely reported in the newly emerging mediums of newspapers and magazines, and as mentioned above, there is some question as to whether this war of words was a PR stunt initiated by the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. Then as now, reporters and their editors knew that controversy sells newspapers, and I suspect that reporters baited the Impressionists for for the good quotes which they willingly provided.

William-Adolfe Bouguereau, in turn, did have a rather dismissive attitude towards the work of the Impressionists. He is quoted as having said:

One has to seek Beauty and Truth, Sir! As I always say to my pupils, you have to work to the finish. There’s only one kind of painting. It is the painting that presents the eye with perfection, the kind of beautiful and impeccable enamel you find in Veronese and Titian.

I suspect that those words were a reply to an enquiry about what Bouguereau thought of Impressionist painting after some person told him what they were saying about of his works. Like the Impressionists he probably did appreciate that controversy brought added attention to his paintings. (The phrase “all publicity is good publicity” is widely attributed to the mid-19^th century American showman P.T. Barnum.)

In fact, by personalizing their war against the Salon and academic style as attacks against Bouguereau the Impressionists were reinforcing his reputation as the top academic painter. And during his lifetime, the Impressionists were absolutely no threat to his standing or reputation. He was at the top of the art world from a monetary value of his paintings perspective, and they were near the bottom.

(While many Impressionists are among the most famous 19^th century French painters today, during their lives they were not famous and their paintings sold for only modest prices, destined to be wall decoration for petite bourgeoisie households when they sold at all. Only much later did those same pieces become seen as valuable works of art. Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir did get wealthy and famous during their lifetimes, but that was only because unlike most of their compatriots they lived long lives. The other now-famous avant garde 19th century painters mostly died in poverty (unless they came from wealthy families in the first place.)

Latter stage of his career

In the latter part of Bouguereau’s career the work of the Impressionists and their ilk was gaining popularity among a younger generation. By the 1890s, Paris became the international centre for two entirely different art worlds – the conservative academics and the avant garde modernists.

Bouguereau remained at the top of his world, and commanded top prices for his works, even as fewer and fewer young artists were painting in the academic style. But increasingly, when promising young artists came to Paris from around the world because it was internationally-recognized as being the centre of the art world, it was to live withing the core of modernism and to attend art schools that were defintitely not called “academies”. I wrote a biography of one such young artist from Mexico here.

But for the well-heeled older generation of fine-art collector-speculators, especially a generation of incredibly wealthy American “gilded age” captains of industry, Paris was still the centre of that other art world – the place where the annual Salons were held and Bouguereau was a living “old master”. They, and older people in general, tended to retain a strong preference for academic style paintings into the first few decades of the 20^th century.

As far as I know, academic and impressionist paintings were never exhibited side-by-side during the 19^th century, but I am sure that Bouguereau would have been absolutely confident that if they had been the vast majority of affluent art buyers would have much preferred his style of art. And he probably would have been right.

Although Bouguereau continued to exhibit at the Salon, the artist became less dependent on exhibition there for sale of his paintings except for his very large self-initiated works. Increasingly, his moderate-size paintings were either commissioned or were sold through or to international art dealers, sometimes while the paintings were still incomplete in his studio.

Throughout his life, aside from his side gigs as a teacher and as a Salon juror and later its president, Bouguereau was a very diligent painter, completing 20 or more easel oil paintings including at least one mammoth work every year. His Catalogue Raisonne lists 828 known paintings. He lived nearly to the age of 80, and even in his final years he continued his lifelong routine of waking up at dawn six days each week and began drawing and painting, typically working on several works intermittently. Unless other duties obliged, he would stay at it without rest except for a single meal break at about 3:00, and then he woulld resume drawing and painting until nightfall. Near the end of his life he said:

Each day I go to my studio full of joy; in the evening when obliged to stop because of darkness I can scarcely wait for the next morning to come . . . if I cannot give myself to my dear painting I am miserable.

Below is the last painting that he exhibited at the Paris Salon. That was in the Spring of 1905. Officially the standards for selection of paintings for exhibition there were the same as they had always been, but I suspect that by that time acceptance of any painting submitted by Bouguereau was automatic. Personally, while it’s named subject matter makes it consistent with the Salon’s neoclassical standards, and the painting itself is still porcelain-smooth, I think that it shows Impressionist influences.

Guillaume-Adolphe Bouguereau died of heart disease on August 19, 1905, in his long-time summer home and studio in La Rochelle, the town where he had been born.

Postscript

Throughout his career, Bouguereau’s star seemed always to have been in the ascendency. That was partly due to the fact that his painting skills continued to keep improving from experience, but also boosted by an influx of wealthy international art collector-speculators who were willing to pay very high prices for to buy what they believed to be the best paintings being made in the world at that time.

But beginning shortly after the Great War, public appreciation for paintings by the Impressionists and other avant garde artists began to boom, and appreciation of what became seen as the old-fashioned academic style of painting plummeted. Of course, the value of Bouguereau paintings, and older paintings in general, plummeted as well, reaching their nadir in the 1970s. Here is a quote from a 1974 New York Times article by art critic John Canaday:

[Bouguereau] is a hard man to defend for he is always lapsing into a full‐blown, undisguised and unhappily outdated kind of sentimentality (pretty mothers, beautiful children, immaculate urchins) that the public has been taught to laugh at while enjoying carte blanche to wallow in Renoir’s worst excesses in the same direction. Then there are Bouguereau’s nudes. They are always turning their unfashionably full‐fleshed, wide-gauge bottoms to the observer for admiration, which they received from their contemporaries. But they inspire giggles today . . .

For a long time now it has been standard practice in history of art classes to victimize him as the perfect foil for the Impressionists, to the point where instructors intent upon entertaining their classes have used him as comic relief. His artificiality is played against the Impressionists’ freshness, his slick surface against their sparkling brushwork, his elaborately synthesized compositions against their slice‐of‐nature vision.

These days, although appreciation for Bouguereau’s work has been rising among art connoisseurs and historians I think that it is safe to say that he is not a well-known artist among the general public. Even among people who appreciate art history, if they see his work at all in person, it is likely to be as one of an art museum’s few token representatives of the once-important-but-now-archaic academic painting style, or as an introductory painting at an exhibit of Impressionist paintings intended to show the art style that they were rebelling against.

As you might guess, I think that is very unfair, and that future generations will discover the genius, creativity, and outstanding technical skill of this fine artist.

Temptation: The painting that is this puzzle’s image

When it comes to interpreting paintings, I am a simple person and prone to simple explanations. So when I saw this painting at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, I saw simply a beautiful and warmly touching interaction between a mother and her young child of ambiguous gender. This was despite the painting’s title, Temptation, and the museum’s interpretation that was posted on the wall right beside the painting:

The title, although ambiguous, suggests a biblical interpretation of the shiny apple that woman holds in her hand. It thus refers to the apple of knowledge and the innocence of the child on the right.

The outdoor setting suggests the landscape of Bouguereau’s native La Rochelle, a coastal town in northern France. It has also been described as an Arcadian background, based upon the seventeenth century idyllic representations of the Greek pastoral landscapes. (source)

While doing the puzzle I still saw it with my simple eyes and that is how I still see it despite all that I learned while doing my research after the puzzle was completed.But I must admit, that knowing what I now know about Bouguereu’s deep religious values and his propensity to hide moral meaning in genre paintings, the title, the apple, (and some observers say also the lone water lily) do suggest that Bouguereau may indeed have intended for this painting to to be capable of having deeper allegorical meaning.

On Instagram, “romartcus” sees this deeper meaning:

The title La Tentation isn’t accidental. Bouguereau is cleverly reimagining the biblical Garden of Eden. The mother holds the “Apple of Knowledge,” playfully teasing her child. It represents that fleeting, golden threshold of life: the exact moment before a child grows up and trades pure innocence for the curiosity of the world.

Kathryn Wehr, adjunct professor of Catholic Studies at St. Thomas University, sees an even deeper meaning:

The title, “Temptation,” along with the apple in the woman’s hands, draws our reflection back to the Garden of Eden. Could this be a mother telling her daughter the story of the Fall?

And yet, if we look closely at the woman and the girl, we see that they have matching burgundy velvet ribbons and similar hairstyles. It seems more likely that they are, in fact, the same woman, caught in a moral quandary, or are a symbolic contrast between naked Innocence in direct light and covered Experience in shadowed half-light. (source)

Wehr interprets the source of the light, out of frame on the left, as being Christ’s forgiveness. She goes on:

So, imagine with me what might happen if this woman turned toward the light over her right shoulder, to see its source, as pure Innocence can see from her point of view. To expose Experience’s face to the cleansing light and so be healed and transformed into light. Perhaps she would set down the apple and take Innocence up into her arms, walking out of the dark woods and into the sunlit meadow beyond.

In academic painting iconography, an apple can symbolize knowledge, temptation, fertility, hospitality, or other things. Bouguereau may be using this multifaceted emblem to allow viewers to project their own interpretations onto the scene.

I tried to remember how to think like a Catholic and persuade myself that this might be one of Bouguereau’s ambiguated Madonna and child paintings, with the apple being symbolic of original sin and a foreshadowing of Jesus’s future sacrifice on the cross. The baby does appear to be apprehensive about the apple, and he does not appear to be eager to reach out for it.

But no, I still much prefer to think of my puzzle’s image as simply a beautiful mother and child genre painting. Sometimes an apple is just an apple, and babies just aren’t hungry.

[Note: For a detailed technical discussion of Temptation, including its composition, spatial arrangement, atmospheric tone, and technical mastery (including under magnification) I recommend this Classical Canvas essay, although I should warn you that it is almost certainly the product of an unidentified AI agent.]

Puzzle assembly walkthrough

Oops! I really went overboard with my research and writing about the image, so I’ll just give you an illustrated walkthrough of my assembly experience without my usual rambling commentary, except to say that while I enjoyed assembling this puzzle very much in retrospect I wish that my specs had asked Mary Lee Smyth include one of her famous decorative edges along the top.

I had been thinking about preserving the artistic integrity of Bouguereau’s painting when I asked her to retain its full composition, but I now recognize that I missed a wonderful opportunity to experience the full impact of how turning a painting into a puzzle can create a whole new artistic fusion. Besides being a puzzle-maker, Mary Lee is an art connoisseur. I am sure that if I had asked her and gave her time to think about it, she could have created a top-edge scene that would have enhanced both my assembly experience, and my appreciation of the completed puzzle.

Bonus analysis of Bouguereau’s Pieta

The following is a Classical Canvas analysis of the emotional impact of Bouguereau’s Pieta (shown above after Bouguereau’ death). This is the painting that he made shortly after the death of his own 16 year-old eldest son. The analysis is apparently written by an AI agent that did not know about the circumstances of why it was painted, that the artist never tried to sell it, and that he retained it as a memorial to his son. But the AI essay is a very interesting technical analysis of Pieta as a painting, and it seems to me that these statements are probably a true description of the artist’s intended depiction of Mary, as well as his and his wife’s own ways of dealing with their grief.

One of Bouguereau’s greatest accomplishments in this painting is his ability to portray overwhelming grief without tipping into melodrama. Mary’s face is heartbreakingly composed. Her eyes do not weep; they hold the viewer’s gaze with silent resignation. Her mouth is closed, her posture firm, her arms steady. This emotional restraint only heightens the impact of her suffering. She is not broken—she is enduring.

This portrayal echoes classical interpretations of tragic figures in Greek art: dignified in loss, monumental in sorrow. Mary becomes more than a mother grieving her son—she is transformed into the archetype of human suffering, timeless and universal.

In contrast, the surrounding angels express visible pain. Some hide their faces, others bow their heads, as if unable to bear the scene before them. This juxtaposition of divine mourning with Mary’s human composure further elevates her spiritual status within the composition.

The puzzle

This is a small ”Academy” series puzzle made by the J. Salmon & Sons Ltd company, arguably the best of the “Big 3” British jigsaw puzzle manufacturers in the 1920s and ‘30. The interlocking pieces are 5mm thick solid mahogany-like wood so I suspect that this puzzle was made in the early to mid-1920s.

Cutters usually aim to make their pieces of uniform size: That is seen as an indicator of quality in cutting. In this case, the pieces came in a wide range of sizes, suggesting that it may have been made by a relatively inexperienced cutter. On the other hand, as I was assembling the puzzle it struck me that these were consistently among the most elegantly-shaped vintage puzzle pieces I have ever seen, with the effect possibly enhanced by the variety of sizes.

There is a postcard of the puzzle’s image mounted on the bottom of the box but I did a good job of not getting anything more than a quick fleeting glimpse of it before assembly. The playful cut of the pieces, and the tactile richness of the 5mm-thick solid wood, made this a very enjoyable puzzle to assemble.

As a “snack puzzle” this is perfect and assembly seemed to be over much too quickly. I will certainly want to do this puzzle again.

The castle

The image for this 101 piece puzzle is a familiar tourist scene on the Isle of Jersey, the largest of Britain’s Channel Islands just 23 km (14 miles) off the coast of France. Historically part of the Duchy of Normandy, its location put the Jersey on the front line of the many Franco-English wars over the centuries.

Mont Orguel Castle was built by Britain in the very early 13rd century when Philip II was conquering the rest of Normandy from King John, and it was instrumental in the Island staying under English rule. Archaeological excavations indicate that the elevated site had been fortified since at least the Iron Age (which in that region of Europe began about 800 BCE.) It was Jersey’s primary fortification for the following four centuries, with several expansions and improvements being made to strengthen it to keep up with changing military technology (such as the introduction of cannons.)

The Castle was lost to the French in 1461 (due to treachery by Jersey’s Warden), and that is when its name was changed from Gorey Castle to Mont Orguel. It was retaken in 1468 by a combined Jerseymen-English force but the French name stuck. It helped fend off many further French attacks, but in the late 16^th century Mont Orgueil Castle was superseded by the construction of the new Elizabeth Castle in the harbour of St. Helier. What became locally known as “the old castle” then became a British prison, and then later refitted to be a garrison for soldiers. During the Napoleonic wars it was a base of operations for British spies and saboteurs.

The old castle continued to decay, and in 1907 the British government handed it over to the people of Jersey who managed it as an historic site. (That would have been when the Castle is depicted in this painting.) During WWII, when Jersey was occupied by the Nazis, it returned to being a garrison, and inconspicuous artillery observation towers were added and a bunker built within the structure to serve as the headquarters of the 1^st Battalion of the Wehrmacht Coastal Artillery. After the war it returned to being an historic site museum

Here is a relatively recent photo of Mont Orgueil Castle:

The painter

This image was painted by Edmund Blampied (1886-1966) who was born and lived on Jersey. Blampied was a prolific and highly acclaimed illustrator, known primarily for for the etchings, drypoints and lithographs he made based on his own sketches, but he was also adept as an oil and watercolour illustrator.

When J.M. Barrie died in 1937 he bequeathed the copyrights of all of his Peter Pan books to the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital in London. The appeal of the pictures is very important for the sale of children’s books, and by that time the earlier edition of the series’ far most popular book, Peter and Wendy that had been published in 1911 were looking quite old-fashioned. The Hospital’s publisher recommended that they issue new edition edition of it and recommended that Edmund Blampied be the artist.

The first printing of the new edition of the famous book, introduced in 1939, was intended to be a premium product and collectors’ item. It had a gilt-embossed cover, endpaper designs, many black & white sketch illustrations, and 12 colour ones printed onto higher quality paper. It was titled The Blampied Edition of Peter and Wendy. That printing was priced at 25 shillings – about half of a typical building trade worker’s weekly wage at the time. (A less extravagant printing soon followed at less than half that price.)

The first review of the new edition, in the Birmingham Daily Post, said:

‘Peter and Wendy’ is the tale of Peter Pan and while there have been several previous illustrators, there has been no satisfactory illustrator. Mr Blampied has some of Rackham’s fantasy and has done the book rather as Rackham might have done it - which is intended as the fullest compliment. He seems to be the most successful of those who have pictured the story and after all, it has not, like ‘Alice’ any claim to have been done once and for all.

Mr Blampied draws Peter as he should be - an active boy. The artist’s twelve coloured plates have magic vistas and lead the imagination subtly wandering; his full-page line drawings offer such clever glosses on the text as children like.

[Note: Rackham was never an illustrator of Peter and Wendy but he had illustrated its 1906 predecessor children’s book Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. The following year Barrie wrote and produced a stage play for children based on the intriguing Peter Pan character, but with the storyline about Neverland with which we are now so familiar. The stage play was a big hit so he re-told its story in the fantasy-adventure children’s book Peter and Wendy.]

When World War II was breaking out, after the Germans invaded Belgium in May 1940 the British government recognized that they could not defend the Channel Islands. In June, they removed all military personnel from there and arranged for civilian residents who wanted to leave to be evacuated. Many of the men had already left to enlist or otherwise join in the British war effort, but about 15% of the remaining Jersey population did so. For unexplained reasons Edmund and his Jewish wife Marianne chose to stay.

The German occupation began the following month, and lasted for nearly five years. Beginning in 1942 the whole Island was turned into a colossal defensive fortress as part of Hitler’s “Atlantic Wall” project. At one time there were two German soldiers and one construction labourer on the Island for every five British residents.

The British government had requested that its civil servant bureaucracy remain in the Channel Islands to look after the intersts of the British subjects while co-operating with German occupiers as best they could. The occupying Germans saw an advantage in retaining the intact government, especially since none of them could speak Jèrriais, the obscure native language of most Islanders. By and large, governance of the civilian population was left to the native Jersey government with limited interference.

Although food and fuel were rationed and often in short supply, and the local economy was is severe recession, until D Day life on the Island was relatively peaceful for most Jersey civilians. The Germans imposed very high taxes, required local homes to billet soldiers and non-slave construction workers, and requisitions things like vehicles and bicyles from cicilians that were hard for them to obtain otherwise. But they or the Jersey government also paid for whatever goods and services they bought or requisitioned from the locals. The Island continued to retain its role as a tourist destination (especially for German soldiers on leave.) It is estimated that well over 50% of all income the islanders received came either from the Germans or from the Jersey government.

Interestingly, D Day on June 6, 1944, did not bring respite for Jersey – rather the opposite. Before the war about 80% of their food had been imported from the mainland but throughout the war food was scarse there too and severely rationed. After D Day German-occupied Jersey was entirely cut off from any food at all from off-island. Residents had developed their own equivalent of victory-gardens (not called that of course) but the food supply dried up, all while the large population of German soldiers and construction workers remained on Jersey. Food supply was at slow-starvation level even for the soldiers.

It was over six months after D Day before a Red Cross ship was able to bring any food supplies at all to Jersey, but still nowhere near enough for the isolated island that was still occupied by the Germans but had been bypassed because it no longer held any strategic significance. It was not until long after VE Day in May of 1945 that any sizeable amount of food could be brought to Jersey, and the German soldiers and their construction workers (many of whom were slaves) could be relocated.

Marianne had had to register with the police as a Jew, but she was allowed to remain on Jersey and never taken to a concentration camp. However her and Edmund’s life was obviously greatly disrupted. They were both in their 50s at the time. Edmund could not stay in contact with the British publishers and art dealers, and professional quality art supplies were no longer available for him.

AlthoughBlampied’s life is otherwise well-documented, both here and in his extensive Wikipedia entry, I can find absolutely no information about how he and his wife survived during the occupation, nor any reference to any art works having been made by him during the five year occupation. Blampied was a diarist, but none is extant from those war years.

This is only my speculation, but Blampied was clearly a very multi-talented individual, and perhaps one of his talents was doing whatever he needed to do for him and his wife to survive. Making a living by providing goods and services to the Germans was not frowned upon on Jersey – indeed that is what almost all of the Jerseymen and Jerseywomen had to do during the war. Perhaps he did continue to work as an artist, selling unsigned or pseudonymous works to German buyers through local retail outlets.

I can well imagine that many people did not want to remember, let alone recount to others, their experiences during the hardscrabble days of the war.

Coming up

Temptation, a puzzle I commissioned from Canadian hand-cutter Mary Lee Smyth, with an image by the French Impressionist painters’ nemesis William-Adolphe Bouguereau

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Frugal puzzles and images of fox-hunting

As I have mentioned in previous postings, I intersperse “frugal alternatives” with my splurges of buying expensive wood jigsaw puzzles, both high quality newly-made laser-cut ones and vintage ones for which I have to compete with collectors to become the high bidder. After experimentation, my favoured frugal alternative puzzles have become the less-expensive vintage puzzles. They are quite abundant due to their huge popularity during two crazes in the early 20^th century.

Sure, new laser-cut ones from China can be quite inexpensive and benefit from huge advances in printing technology (such as UV printing). But they are a gamble, and I suspect that just about all of their images are AI. Unlike puzzles made in Europe and North America, Chinese puzzles are made by very large anonymous-to-us Chinese manufacturers who sell in lots to mid-level distributors and retailers. They are capable of making puzzles to very high quality standards, or cheap-and-nasty, depending on what the retailer is willing to pay for.

The manufacturers' package and label the products to the distributor or retailer’s specifications, which explains the wide range of brand names for puzzles with similar or identical images. The manufacturers don’t seem to care about quality or copyright; their own reputations aren’t on the line, and the Chinese government isn’t regulation-oriented when it comes to consumer or copyright protection. The online retailers themselves are a mixed bag, both quality-wise and in their business/marketing integrity.

A significant portion of vintage puzzles I buy at auction are from the 1930s or earlier, when the jigsaw puzzle assembly was much more popular than it is today. They are individually hand-cut, sometimes in factories but often in home workshops. Yes, their printing quality usually isn’t up to modern standards, but their handcrafted character appeals to me and their images are windows into the tastes of times past. Also, they provide entirely different kinds of variety to jigsaw puzzling challenges. These three puzzles demonstrate types of challenges that are not found among the modern laser-cut ones.

I buy almost all of my vintage puzzles from British eBay auctions. Such puzzles come up for sale there much more often than here in North America. Canada has no custom duty on puzzles and shipping to here from the UK is much less expensive than from the US. I only buy from vendors who will combine my purchases from several auctions until I have bought enough for a cost-efficient 5 kilo shipment via the Royal Mail. That brings the shipping cost down to an average of about £3.75 ($7 CDN) per puzzle.

I was able to buy each of these three puzzles for the minimum bid of £10. Converted to Canadian currency, less than $26 for a hand-cut puzzle (including shipping) is definitely a good frugal alternative. The reason that these puzzles did not attract other bidders has nothing to do with their quality as puzzles: It is mainly because their subject matter of fox hunting is now so VERY out-of-fashion in England. Among the other types of images that do not appeal to contemporary tastes, and therefore commonly sell for low prices at auction, are the once-ubiquitous quaint cottages, gardens, gatherings of period-costumed important-looking men in rooms, and other images that reek of British colonialism.

The history of foxhunting

The use of dogs to track prey by scent dates back to ancient Egypt, Assyria and Babylon, but the “following the hounds” to hunt foxes first began in the 16^th century Norfolk. (I presume that they had not previously been hunted because they are not
traditionally considered to be edible.) Then, besides being good exercise, it was seen as a practical method for controlling the predatory fox population on behalf of the estate and nearby landowners and farmers. At the end of the chase, if the fox had “gone to ground (hidden in a badger burrow) it would be dug out and killed either by terriers who were part of the hunting pack or by the hunters themselves.

By the 18^th century, following the hounds had evolved into a highly formalized form of athletic group riding, popular all across Britain among the landed gentry and nobility, and it followed very strict conventions including about the riders’ attire. (E.g., the number of buttons on a rider’s jacket, and the material they are made from, are coded symbols of the wearer’s foxhunting and social status. It is an extreme faux pas to wear buttons that, in the opinion of other riders, one is not entitled to; it is better by far to under-dress). With some evolution, the 18th century protocols continue to this day.

Such fox hunts are not races - in fact, it is very inappropriate for any of the other participants except the “whippers in” who control the dog pack to ride out in front of the Hunt Master. Thus, the stylized foxhunting that developed isn’t really a sport at all since it is not a competition. The extent that someone was deemed to be a successful, and therefore rises in status as a foxhunter, was because he had ridden the challenging route with the most skill, decorum, and panache, in keeping with the ritualized spirit of the chase.

While the nominal purpose had previously been to kill foxes or other game, it evolved into not really even being fox hunting (although its name has remained the same). The role of the fox had evolved to being a random rout generator for athletic country riding over hill and dale, and through forests and across pastures separated by hedges and fences. The foxes may or may not have been killed at the end of the highly formalized events.

Women first began participating in foxhunting in the mid-19^th century, riding sidesaddle but dressed in pseudo-masculine attire (however never in a red jacket because that colour has a particular association with regard to women).

That is also when foxhunting chases became emblematic of genteel country life, and therefore depictions of them became a very common subject for romantic and nostalgic “genre paintings”. Essentially, the inclusion of fox hunters gives a rural landscape painting human interest, converting it into a highly desirable and rather iconic portrayal of idealized outdoor country life of the English gentry.

That is when such paintings began to be hung in the residences of wealthy people, and art prints of those paintings began adorning the walls of the middle-class despite the fact that most British people never participated in such hunts, and had never even seen one. Working class people could avail themselves of the many, many such images that were published in the newly invented illustrated magazines. Hanging such a picture upon one’s walls was a form of celebrating one’s English identity.

During the 20^th century fox hunting became increasingly controversial in the UK. This was partly because of animal rights concerns for both the foxes and horses, but also because of a growing class warfare perspective. The fact that it is an activity associated only with the very rich was beginning to become a detriment. But the controversy only slowly gained traction, and foxhunting remained a popular subject for paintings, prints and magazine illustrations well into the 20^th century. That is why they are so frequently the images of vintage jigsaw puzzles.

As I have discussed above, and here with regard to the vintage Victory puzzle Drawing the Covert, fox hunting images have recently become notably out-of-fashion. In fact, all puzzles that include men wearing the iconic red coats associated with the activity are now very unpopular in England even if the riders are only drinking libations together after a chase, as portrayed in Jolly Good Old Ale (that I reported about here).

Public support turned against foxhunting very quickly at about the turn of the millennium and in 2004 hunting live foxes was banned in England and Wales. It remains legal in Scotland and is still a contentious political topic: Hunt clubs continue to lobby for repeal of the Hunting Act, and hunt opponents lobby for its expansion and better enforcement. Wentworth no longer has any puzzles with foxhunting images among its current offerings, but they did as recently as about that time (see my report about one of those here.)

Personally, I’m on the anti-hunting side of this issue even though as a heritage conservationist I do have some sympathy for the perspective that a horseback adventure following a carefully preplanned rout is not the same as following one extemporized by a fleeing fox. As a person with compassion I’m on the side of the foxes, but I don’t have the same emotional investment in it as folks in Great Britain.

As far as I know, this kind of foxhunting was never done in Minnesota where I grew up. My great-great grandfather was a pioneer settler in the Red River Valley. If he saw a fox around his chicken coop he would have efficiently dispatched it with his Winchester .25-20 varmint rifle (which my father inherited as a family heirloom). So to me, these puzzle images are just a type of landscape painting that depicts the long ago and far away, and I appreciate the opportunity to get well-made vintage puzzles inexpensively.

As I said near the beginning of this section, these puzzles are “windows into the tastes of times past” – from a time when horses still played a significant role in rural transportation and farm life, and when people did things that are now considered to be unacceptable.

Now, on to the puzzles and their stories:

Tally Ho

I don’t have much to say about this puzzle other than that the sheer quality of fabrication of this semi-interlocking puzzle, and its colour-line cutting, made it a real treat to assemble. It is the largest of these three puzzles, at 474 pieces, making it excellent confirmation of my strategy of getting good value by buying puzzles with unfashionable imagery. It was a both fun and challenging, and the image that developed from my assembly proved to be an attractive Autumn landscape.

I tried to begin with the pieces that included the scarlet red which I knew would be the hunters’ coats but was immediately thwarted, so I looked for targets of opportunity among the autumn foliage colours. I didn’t really intend to do this puzzle edge first but it was with those pieces that I made the most progress.

When things slowed down with the autumn foliage I moved to the sky and what proved to be a gray and tan roadway, again with the most progress being with edge pieces;

Continuing with the edge pieces, and expanding the grey/tan roadway led to finally making progress on the hunters, who I knew would be the painting’s focus of attention. I forgot to take a progress photo until after I had the rather major task of reorganizing my puzzle board and completing most of the puzzles outer edge. As always, it gave me satisfaction to see the image begin to come into view.

At this point my progress on the foreground slowed down quite a bit so I moved back up to the sky:

The whole puzzle now looked like this:

Almost all of the pieces that were left to place were about the same shade of dark green. As you can guess, progress got to be quite slow even though there were relatively few pieces left to place.

And it was complete:

My overall impression was of how well this puzzle was made – besides the colour-lines and well-executed free-form cutting, it was made with a very high-quality print and high-quality 3ply, probably birch. Throughout this assembly I was curious who the artist and puzzle-maker were, and when it was made.

My post-assembly research got me nowhere in identifying the artist or when it was painted. A reverse image search revealed nothing, and the subject matter – genre painting of foxhunting – was very popular among all classes of the British public from the early 19^th century to nearly the present day. (And if the online artistic photos are any indication, such images are probably still being painted for the remaining participants and fans of the activity.)

As to who made the puzzle, that was another dead end. The puzzle’s quality is not evidence that it was made by a professional cutter. Some of the finest vintage jigsaws have been made by skilled but anonymous hobbyists. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable than myself would be able to identify the maker of this puzzle from its cutting style and other evidence in its fabrication, but I have insufficient experience to make an informed guess.

As for when it was made, there are a few clues, but it is very difficult to estimate the age of hand-cut wooden jigsaw puzzles. That is especially true when, like this one, the puzzle may or may not be in its original box.

It came to me in this recycled box that matches the color of the hunters’ scarlet jackets. The box once held Orbit brand office paper in what was then called the Quartro size (8” x 10”). Paper of that size was phased out in the 1970s. There is a handwritten label glued on the top of the box giving its name and the number of pieces, to which someone has added the puzzle’s completed dimensions. The bottom of the box has even better clues.

On the bottom is a list chronicling 11 assemblies from 1968 to 2004. If the puzzle was made by an amateur or semi-professional cutter this undecorated recycled box could be its original packaging. On the other hand, this might not be the puzzle’s original box – old dried-out cardboard boxes are much more susceptible to getting age-worn and broken than the pieces they hold. If this is a replacement box, the puzzle could be from as early as the 1920s (when plywood of this quality was first becoming available.)

The mostly-interlocking cutting style could be from any time from the 1920s on, and the image of the puzzle offers no further clues by as to when it was painted. The hunters wear scarlet coats and top hats. That was standard attire for this activity from mid-19^th until the 1980s when several highly-publicized accidents motivated hunt clubs to turn away from wearing the traditional headgear and allow (later, require) the wearing of riding helmets.

The pieces themselves show little wear. On balance, I think that Tally Ho probably is in its original box, and that it was probably made in the latter 1960s shortly before the first assembly chronicled on the bottom of the box.

A Quorn Crowd

This push-fit puzzle is by another unidentified cutter. It has a fold line running down the centre indicating that the image came from a magazine. The painting is signed. The signature itself is illegible to me but I think I do recognize the date as being 1931, and that date appears to be supported by the lone vehicle in the painting. If anyone recognizes the name of this artist, please let me know.

Here is the box that the puzzle came in:

There’s not much to see there – just an attractive but faded box covered with decorative paper. But like Tally Ho it has interesting information on its bottom:

I don’t know why there are periods between the words in the puzzle’s title, but this shows that the puzzle was made in 1939 or earlier. The handwriting of the first two entries on the list appear to be from the same hand as whoever wrote the previous information. (Note the identical letter “p” in the words pieces and complete.) My guess is that it was made by an amateur cutter for his or her own amusement somewhat earlier than 1939 but after 1931 (the date on its image) who did not put its fabrication date on the box.

Now on to puzzle assembly. Of course, all of that identification and dating analysis was done after I had completed the puzzle. When I began assembly all I remembered from when I bought it was that the puzzle was push-fit, there were people wearing a red riding coats in the image, and that it was rather pale and seemed to be about half sky.

I can’t remember now why it was that I decided to switch to edge-first assembly rather than continuing with the pieces showing horses, dogs and riders. Those pieces were all near each other in the lower right-hand part of my sorting. Probably I got stuck there and the edges were coming along easily:

In the above photo the bottom edge was complete but this is how the assemblies were on my assembly board. I reorganized the board and moved my attention to the central focus of the image and the greenish-beige foreground. That progressed rather quickly, as push-fit puzzles go, and I forgot to take another photo until I got this far:

I was able to complete the entire bottom half of the puzzle easily, but then came the dreaded sky, . . .

. . . so it was back to edge-first assembly:

As had been the case with the green foreground (but which I had forgotten to photograph) the fold line proved to be a helpful assembly clue:

Here’s the completed puzzle:

The image does not appear to be depicting a fox hunt taking place; rather, it is the time before the hunt when participants are getting ready for it.

While Tally Ho had been largely interlocking, this is a push-fit puzzle; i.e., one in which the pieces do not lock together with their neighbours. Assembly of push-fits is somewhat more challenging than the fully interlocking ones we are used to today. The vast majority of assemblers, even fans of vintage puzzles, won’t bid on them. By developing a tolerance, and even enjoyment for the extra challenges that push-fits present I have greatly expanded the number of wooden puzzles I can afford to buy.

When I bid on this one I was reasonably confident that I could get it for a low price despite the fact that it is in quite good condition for its age, and not just because it is related to foxhunting and is push-fit: It has a magazine illustration rather than a calendar or art print for an image, and the image has large bland sky and grassy areas. One of the things that attracted me to buy it was that the cutting is quite wiggly. Such puzzles are easier to work with than push-fits that have slowly curving cutting.

Now having assembled it, as a frugal alternative purchase it was quite a satisfying puzzle. The sky and grass had enough variation in shades to make them less difficult than I had expected. But I doubt that I will ever assemble it again because I have so many puzzles, both premium and frugal, on my to-do shelves.

In my post-assembly research I was not able to find this painting online using either a title- or image search, but the name A Quorn Crowd indicates that the events are taking place in relation to the Quorn Hunt, commonly known simply as The Quorn. It is held in the rolling hills of Leicestershire in central England and is one of the oldest and most prestigious hunt venues in England. The name comes from the village of Quorn (aka Quorndon) as well as the name of the manor hall where its pack of hounds and their kennels were first established in 1696.

The Quorn Hunt continues to this day, but of course, in accordance with the relatively recent English legislation the hounds now follow an artificial scent trail pre-set by Hunt staff rather than chasing live foxes to exhaustion. Events are held four days a week during the Autumn and Winter foxhunting season. The organization owns extensive lands itself, and its events can also extend onto adjoining properties by agreement with the landowners.

As I understand it, the stature of various hunt clubs and venues is judged partly based on the quality of their pack of hounds, partly on how well the events are organized and whether participants observe the traditional protocols, but most importantly, like golf courses, on the quality of its pastures and variety of challenges riders have to overcome on its hunting fields. The Quorn has a long history of having among the very best of all those features.

The second Master of the Quorn Hunt was the wealthy squire Hugo Meynel. In the mid-1700s he was the first person to begin applying scientific principles to breeding foxhounds for purpose – selecting for speed, endurance, working together as a pack, and scent-tracking ability. Besides innovations in breeding, Meynel also introduced landscape changes designed to promote fox hunting. These included using previously-commons land that had been cleared of use by tenants and converted to pastures for sheep.

The pastures were enclosed by jumpable hedges with gates for use by the less-skilled riders (as well as for moving the sheep to shearing or market). The sheep kept the pastures well-manicured and their wool and mutton were profitable commodities. He also introduced changes in the protocols of the activity. They have since become the accepted rules of the “sport” (although, as mentioned above, the events are not competitions). Maynel is considered to have been “the Father of Foxhunting”.

If you want to know more about modern foxhunting, the Quorn website has a very informative introduction for newbies, including its terminology, customs, dress expectations, and rules. It also reveals how the Quorn crowd feels about following a carefully planned scent trail rather than the tradition of following the panicked fleeing of a desperate fox: “We look forward to the repeal of the Hunting Act.” They are presumably among the entities who are coordinating political donations and lobbying towards that end.

Prince of Wales

I took this puzzle from my yet-to-do shelves when I was simply in the mood for a vintage puzzle. It was in what appeared to be a hand-decorated box with no formal label. On the box’s top, barely legible, was a hand-scrawled “Prince of Wales”. Within the box, my notes said that it had 215 pieces and that I had bought it for £10 - the standard minimum bid from my favourite British vendor, but I could not remember having bought it, nor for that matter, ever having bought a portrait of royalty.

Pouring the pieces out on my puzzle board a few memories came back to me. Amidst the many pale blue (probably sky) pieces and pale green ones (probably grass) there were some glossy chestnut brown ones and a few with the scarlet red that is a telltale for this being a fox hunting image. I vaguely recalled having purchased a puzzle with a rather sedate equestrian image and thinking at the time that I did not know whether Prince of Wales was referring to the title of the rider or the name of his horse. I had had mainly bought it because the puzzle had appealing cutting, including large figure pieces.

I began flipping, and did only basic sorting:

As you can see, there is a lot of angularity to this cutting, and it is not an interlocking puzzle. That seemed very odd. I had never before seen a puzzle with whimsies that was not interlocking.

I began with the obvious centre of attention, and it wasn’t long before I thought I had the answer to whether it was the horse or rider who was the Prince of Wales:

I am not a royal-watcher by any means, but I have recently seen a couple of documentaries about King Edward VIII. He was the British king who abdicated in 1936 to marry the Catholic and twice-divorced American socialite Wallis Simpson, and about whom evidence of sympathy and even assistance to Nazi Germany has recently been revealed. He had an interesting life to say the least. (Neither documentary mentions it, but throughout their lives Edward and Wallis were big-time jigsaw puzzle enthusiasts – wooden ones, of course.)

But this image would have been painted well before all that, when Edward was a princeling who was an enthusiastic and proficient steeplechase racer, polo player and follower of the hounds, and had a reputation for being an international high-society playboy.

I did not confirm my identification of him as the subject of this portrait until after the puzzle was completed, but then I did a reverse-image search had found that he and his favourite hunting horse Forest Witch were indeed the subjects of this equestrian portrait. It was painted by the famed artist Alfred Munnings (1878-1959), the son of a miller who was blind in one eye, but due to his artistic talent he rose to the point where in 1944 he became President of the Royal Academy and was knighted as Sir Alfred Munnings.

Munnings is most renowned for his remarkable equine paintings. In fact, he is considered to be England’s best-ever painter of those subjects, whether the equines he depicted were worn-out workhorses or outstanding thoroughbreds. But he was not a one-trick pony. (Sorry about that!)

Like the impressionists before him, he was a strong advocate of en plein-air painting, and like them he strived for accurate rendering of light’s reflections and other illusions. But he was highly critical of many other aspects of modern art and absolutely hated expressionism, cubism and all of the other avant-garde styles that did not aim to depict the appearance of their subjects and their surroundings, as well as the “pretentious nonsense” of surrealism.

The equestrian portrait which is this puzzle’s image (titled H.R.H. The Prince of Wales on Forest Witch) was commissioned in 1920 by The Field magazine for presentation to the26 year-old Prince and future King. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy the following year to much acclaim. Later, when Edward abdicated the throne, the pinting was deemed to be privately owned by him and not part of the royal collection so he retained ownership of it. He and Wallis remained together for 35 years until Edward’s death in 1972. The painting became part of the Dutchess of Winsor’s estate, and in 1998 it was sold by Sotheby’s to a private buyer for over $2.3million.

The artist himself did not think that it was among his best work. Sir Alfred Munnings wrote this about it in the 3-volume autobiography he wrote in the early 1950s:

What a good picture this should have been! The portrait was fair. The Prince himself said it looked more like his brother. … The scarlet, too, was good but for some foolish reason, I made too much of an old oak on the right. Every old oak in this region had been looked at, and at last a gnarled specimen, centuries old, standing near the road in Mistley Park, was chosen. As a hoary oak, nothing could compare with it. From a careful study I put it on the right of the picture, thinking, ‘Future King - British Oak’, and all the rest of it. Seeing reproductions of the picture, this forceable tree always asserts itself and makes me long to attack it. But there it is.

This wasn’t Munnings’ only royal commission. As England’s best portraitist of horseflesh he painted several more, both of royals riding their mounts and of favourite horses that they owned. His final royal portrait was in 1954 of the young Queen Elizabeth II in the paddock at Epsom Downs just before her racehorse Aureole ran in the Coronation Cup Derby. Aureole went on to win that race by five lengths, and a month later it won the Derby at Ascot. Over the years, the horses aged and were replaced by other generations of winners. With a stable like that it is no wonder the Queen was such a big fan of horse racing.

But back to puzzle assembly:

Conclusion

As you could see, with their varying cutting styles all three of these vintage puzzles were very well made, had interesting images, and were incredibly good value having cost me only about $26 Canadian each including shipping. I’m sure that I will be buying more puzzles with fox hunting images in the future.

• Puzzle-maker: StumpCraft (Calgary, Alberta; Canada)

• Designed by Jasen Robillard; 2025

• Image painted by Darlene Kulig; 2020

• Stats: 346 pcs 21.5 x 36 cm (8½” x 14”) ave. 2.2 cm²/pc 6+mm mdf

This posting will not be a puzzle review type of post. I have documented StumpCraft puzzles many times already in this series; you can find a list and links to all of them at the end of this essay about the history of the company. They always live up to the very high expectations one should have for wooden puzzles in their premium price range. I have truly enjoyed every StumpCraft I have ever done - even the mini-puzzles rated 1-out-of-5 difficulty that I reported about here.

Different degrees of difficulty serve different roles.Jasen Robillard, this puzzle’s designer, rates this one as 3 out of 5 difficulty, which is easier that the 4-out-of-5 that I consider to be my current sweet spot for a challenging StumpCraft puzzle. (I haven’t assembled any of the ones that are rated 5/5 yet, although I have three of them sitting on my to-do shelf; I am afraid that they might be beyond my current puzzling ability and prove frustrating.)

I know from experience that 3-out-of-5 difficulty puzzles, and StumpCraft’s always beautiful colours, make them perfect for interspersing as a break after having assembled one that either had rather drab colours or which I found to be very challenging. In this case, I assembled Bridge Across Fraser River in between Puzzleplex’s very challenging 415 piece Hospital at St. Remy, by Van Gogh (which I reported about here), and a challenging 474 piece vintage puzzle by an unknown cutter called Tally Ho (that I will discuss in my next posting.)

So in lieu of a review I will just say that this fully lived up to both my high expectations for StumpCraft’s puzzles and its intended role as an entertaining and only moderately-challenging break. I will undoubtedly assemble it again someday.

The artist - Darlene and trains

This colourful and fanciful image of an iconic Canadian bridge is a painting by Ontario artist Darlene Kulig. In Jasen’s Deep Dive essay about this puzzle he says that she “LOVES trains” and quotes her explanation for why:

I have wonderful childhood memories of growing up with the train tracks in my back yard, waiting for the train to go by so we could wave at the passengers and the driver in the caboose. I have memories of “taking the tracks” to walk to school. Growing up in Ottawa, a special family outing was a trip to the Science and Technology Museum to see the trains - and of course the crazy kitchen.

As a Canadian, I understand the historical importance of Canada’s railway in the development of our nation. As a Canadian artist I am humbled to have the privilege of seeing, experiencing and painting some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world.

Darlene has travelled and painted landscapes and landmarks all across Canada (and beyond.) Here she depicts the view of the Canadian National Railway’s Cisco Bridge (built in 1910), a few kilometers south of Lytton in British Columbia’s Coastal Mountain Range, which is younger and more rugged than the Canadian Rockies.

The painting is based on a photo she took while riding on the luxury passenger train Rocky Mountaineer, who had commissioned her to travel with them and paint the mountains for a Canadian Rockies series. The Rocky Mountaineer runs on the Canadian Pacific’s tracks. At this location it had just crossed the Fraser River itself and and it is passing under the CNR’s bridge over that river. You can see Darlene’s train on the right-hand side of the painting. If you look closely at the above puzzle image you can see a self-portrait of her taking the the reference photo for this painting.

Below is another artist’s depiction of the bridge taken from the opposite perspective which shows a train on the CP track where Darlene’s would have been. As you can see, from the vantage point in Darlene’s painting her train would have just crossed the Fraser River on its own historic bridge; built in 1883 when the Canadian Pacific Railway was built as part of the construction of the first railway to cross Canada.

Places where two railways cross both a major river and each other in such close proximity are very rare. This site is a magnet for railway buffs from all over the world. It has its own Wikipedia entry. You can click here or on the above painting for a brief film clip from reddit of two trains crossing at the same time.

The Impressionists said that they did not paint things or places; they painted light. Darlene does not paint things or places either, she aims to portray the beauty and feelings of the experience of places. This “semi-abstracted spirited landscape” is in her distinctive style with signature effervescent champagne bubbles. You can read more about Darlene art on her website or in Jasen’ Robillard’s Deep Dive essay about this puzzle.

The puzzle designer - Jasen and philosophy

Jasen’s cutting designs have always seemed rather cerebral: Even his early puzzles have layers of meaning in the cutting and figure pieces. But he has gotten increasingly philosophical about it in recent years. You don’t have to take my word for that. You can read about his design process in his deep dive essays, on his own Substack, or see and hear him being interviewed by hosts of philosophy podcasts here and here.

When Jasen founded StumpCraft one of his intentions had been to bring recognition to Canada’s many fine 19^th and early 20^th century painters, such as Tom Thompson (Soft Maple in Autumn), C.W. Jeffreys (Carnival), and Roland Gissing (Sunset Glow). But his design style has evolved and Jasen now prefers to spark his own creativity through collaboration with the artists themselves. This especially shapes the kind of figure pieces he puts in the puzzle, based on both their intended layers of meaning and the thoughts that their evoke for Jasen. Sometimes the artists end up participating in the cutting design process and the placement of the whimsies in relation to the image, in which case he attributes them as co-designers.

He explains his design meaning and process for each of his puzzles in his deep dive essays. I read those before I buy the puzzle but don’t re-read them until after I have completed my assembly, usually months or years after that. (As I have said many times, I like to have time to forget the details of the image and puzzle.) In this case, he played with the idea that tunnels and bridges represent a metaphor of life’s transitions. In his deep dive for this puzzle he says:

Much like trains navigating through towering bridges and dark tunnels, our emotions and circumstances can often feel like daunting passages we must traverse. This puzzle serves as a powerful reminder that these difficult moments are the necessary bridges or tunnels in our lives. To truly move forward, we need to keep moving all the way to the other side. Avoiding these passages leaves us mired in … ‘still frames,’ rather than embracing the flow of life. Bridges, in their essence, are powerful symbols of hope and progress, spanning obstacles and uniting what was once divided, fostering connection and resilience. . . .

To successfully navigate any passage, it’s crucial to trust the process and the context we find ourselves in. Just as a massive bridge relies on deep foundations and countless intentional acts of support, trust in life often requires recognizing the profound, often invisible, forces of nature, and the intricate, hidden structures of support built by those who came before us. The act of puzzling itself becomes a mindful exercise in trust and a practice of flow – trusting the design, trusting that each unique piece has its rightful place, and allowing the journey to unfold.

I am not much of a deep thinker myself so I am usually amazed at the rationale and symbolism that Jasen’s figural pieces represent. This seriousness about meaning in puzzling does not prevent Jasen from complementing the sheer joyfulness of Darlene Kulig’s painting with a playfulness of his own in its own transition into also becoming a puzzle. For example, within each burst champagne bubble-star he places a seedling in a (fallen?) maple leaf. I especially like the large whimwhams (multi piece whimsies) depicting an “emotional support sasquatch” holding up a bridge and a ghost train crossing the bridge.

Puzzle assembly

[Spoiler alert: I recommend that you skip this section if you anticipate assembling this puzzle in the foreseeable future: Discover the surprises for yourself.]

As usual, I covered the image of this puzzle with a Christmas card and let it sit for a while. When I began assembly all I recalled was that it was very colourful and rather cartoon-like, and as its title says, its central feature is a bridge. Of course, I hadn’t done the above research then and it had not occurred to me that it shows one of the most important bridges in the history of Canadian railroading.)

Since the puzzle is only about 350 pieces, in addition to separating out the apparent whimsies I did only rough colour sorting; blue and white (sky?) pieces at the top of my assembly board, and most of the yellow ones on the lower right:

I began with the bright yellow pieces and found that they were associated with pale green. They led to orange and some targets of opportunity:

Since I knew the bridge was the image’s focus of attention I continued to build the red trusswork:

On another part of my assembly board I began doing the pieces with a different shade of red.

Note that there is what I think of as a “ghost train” on the bridge in the above picture (with alternate windows scattered around the train), and in the back-of-the-puzzle photo below you can see what Jasen calls an “emotional support sasquatch.” During assembly I recognized the sasquatch, but not that it was holding up a broken arch. It is always worthwhile looking at the backs of puzzles that include large multi-piece whimsies (AKA whimwhams)after completion. And in StumpCraft’s case, this is a good time to re-read puzzle’s deep dive design notes and its list of whimsies to discover features that one has missed.

Coming up

Three more vintage puzzles of folks in fox-hunting garb. I have previously reported on vintage puzzles with other such images. It is not that I am a fox-hunting, but i am a fan of getting good wooden puzzles cheaply because their images are so out of fashion.

The Welsh Wizard is an English nickname for a locomotive on one of the narrowest gauge working railroads ever constructed. It was made to run on tracks that are just 1 foot 11.5 inches (60 cm) wide!

The locomotive’s official name is Merddin Emrys in honour of the legendary Welsh hermit, prophet and madman also known as Myrddin Wyllt (Merlin the Wild) who was the inspiration for the 11th century “historian” Geoffrey of Monmouth’s wizard Merlin in King Arthur and his court. More prosaically, the double-ended loco is known by British railway buffs as Double Fairlie 0-4-4-0 Tank No. 10. It is the only remaining train engine of that unusual style.

Actually, its 22 miles of tracks are over 40 years older than the story of the steam engine itself. They were built in 1836 for gravity-powered trains of wagons to carry slate from the quarries at Blaenau Festiniog (elevation about 1000 feet; 300 metres) down to the harbour at Porthmadog. Originally, the wagons were hauled back uphill by horsepower.

In 1879 the railway built this locomotive to do that job. It was designed by George Percival Spooner, a mechanical engineer who was the son of the railway’s manager, who was a civil engineer who had worked with the famous Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and grandson of James Spooner who had surveyed, designed and overseen the construction of the gravity-powered railway.

The Merddin Emrys has an unconventional double-end design modeled after one that had been first invented by the Scottish railway engineer Robert Francis Fairlie and known as a double-Fairlie. Spooner had previously designed two other such locomotives but this was the first one that the railway itself built in its own works yard. Two years later he designed cars for a passenger service on that route. You can read more about the history of the Festiniog Railway and its locomotives here.

Following a long decline in both freight and passenger traffic, the railway closed in 1946. Nine years later a group of dedicated volunteers began restoring the railway and its rolling stock. In 1960 they re-opened the passenger service, making both it and the town of Blaenau Festiniog major Welsh tourist attractions.

The puzzle’s image is by the late Barry Freeman (1937-2017) who specialized in meticulously accurate oil painting portraits of steam locomotives. He was known to spend up to two months planning, researching and studying archival photos and then a similar amount of time on his paintings. His always depicted a particular time and place where the engines operated during their history of operation. In this case, it portrays the Merdding Emrys nearing the end of its climb at Tan-y-Grisiau. I don’t know what era this painting of the Merddin Emrys depicts since its Indian red colour is both its original and current livery.

Below is another painting by Barry in which “a BR 9F 2-10-0 passes with a ‘windcutter’ coal train bound for Woodford Halse” on a birdcage bridge while the southbound Royal Scot “makes a cautious transit of Rugby.”

The age of steam locomotives is a popular jigsaw puzzle motif. Besides Wentworth, many makers of cardboard puzzles have also used Barry Freeman’s paintings as images for many puzzles. I have previously reported on locomotive puzzles here, here, and here, and one early train station.

This is a “red box” Wentworth puzzle, named after the packaging in the company’s early days from their founding until about 2020. As I understand it, green boxes were for puzzles that the company sold online itself, and red was for purpose-made puzzles to be sold at historic site and museum gift shops. I presume that this puzzle was sold at the railway’s gift shop and at other tourist stores in the region.

Because laser-cut wood jigsaw puzzles are so much more expensive than cardboard ones they are particularly suitable for purchase as souvenirs or gifts. Wentworth was the pioneer in exploiting that market. Interestingly, selling wood puzzles in gift shops is less common here in North America.

The substrate for this puzzle are dark medium-density fibreboard, which the company began using about 2000. It is 4mm thick, which I think was only a short-lived early thickness, after they transitioned from 4mm 3-ply and before they standardized the MDF at the 3 mm, which they used until late 2002. So I estimate that this one was probably made about 2000, about five years after the company first began selling puzzles.

Personally, I prefer the early Wentworth puzzles to their more recent ones, which have a rather formulaic cutting design that is modeled after the hand-cut vintage Victory brand Artistic puzzles (later re-named Gold Box) that were made from the early 1930s until 1988. While the more recent Wentworths clearly have better fabrication quality and much more vibrant UV printing, I think that the early ones have more interesting cutting designs despite the fact that their figure pieces are quite simple by modern standards. You can read my more extended rant about that here.

I had covered the image on the box with a Christmas card when it had first arrived so all that I remembered about the image when I did the puzzle was that it was a train. I did very little colour-sorting as I flipped and spread out the pieces . . .

. . . and then began with the red pieces which I was confident would be the focus of attention:

I got a bit stuck trying to put the train together so I moved on to the sky:

As is typical of the early Wentworths, the figure pieces are fairly simple, although this puzzle surprisingly has five multi-piece ones, and are a mixture of thematic ones and others with no apparent relationship to the image. The four locomotives and a coal car make sense, and I presume that the large six-piece one in the lower right is a chunk of coal or slate. But a bunny rabbit, boats and a submarine? I suspect that although this particular puzzle was made in about the year 2000, its cutting design was from somewhat earlier, when Wentworth still had only a very limited stock of ready-made whimsy designs.

Like all of the 250 piece Wentworths I have assembled, this puzzle was enjoyable but only moderately challenging. Since I assembled it after two quite difficult vintage hand-cut puzzles that was exactly what I wanted at the time. And it did lead me into a very interesting research rabbit hole, although I did not follow the side passage to learn how the heck a double-ended steam locomotive works.

• Puzzlemaker – Liberty Puzzles (US) designer – Lynon Aksamit

• Image –central image by Anton Seder (1850-1916); elaborate frame by Lynon Aksamit

• 454 pcs 41 x 33 cm (16” x 12¾”) estimated 2.4 cm²/pc 5+mm hardwood-clad poplar

• inner image has many figurals, including multi-piece ones, mostly curl connectors; the “frame” has cutouts instead of whimsies

[Note: As usual, most of these images are fairly high resolution photos. You can zoom in to see the details.]

This is a truly special puzzle, and not just because I got it for free! I’ll begin by telling you how that happened:

The contest

In Britain there is a club for jigsaw puzzle enthusiasts called The Benevolent Confraternity of Dissectologists (BCD). It was founded in 1985 and its whimsical name is rooted in the highfalutin word for people who like to assemble jigsaw puzzles. (The now-standard name “jigsaw puzzle” did not emerge until after an international craze for them which began in 1908. In the 19^th century such puzzles were usually called dissected maps, and then dissected pictures.)

The BCD’s membership includes aficionados from many countries of both cardboard and wood puzzles, old and new. Many of its members are puzzle-makers, not just assemblers. Since I live in Canada, I can’t participate in their regular in-person gatherings, but joined primarily because they have a quarterly magazine called Jigsaw Pieces that publishes research and information about jigsaw puzzles. Their archive is a great reference resource for someone like myself who is interested in their history.

In the Winter 2025 issue of Jigsaw Pieces, Bronwen Lewis, the editor, invited members to tell her which of their puzzles are on the top of their personal Liberty Puzzles wish-list, and and to give a brief explanation why. The enquiry was because the upcoming issue would include a celebration of the 40^th anniversary of the Liberty company.

Luxurious quarter-inch thick puzzles made by North American companies like Liberty are relatively rare in Britain. Most puzzles made there and in Europe are 3- or 4-mm thick. North American jigsaw puzzles are therefore expensive to begin with, and the price is even higher over there because of international shipping costs, brokerage fees, and VAT taxes that need to be paid when they are imported.

Also, during the Covid pandemic “social isolation” created a such a huge demand for all kinds of jigsaw puzzles that Liberty could not keep up with demand and had to ration them. They stopped selling their puzzles internationally; even Americans were restricted to buying no more than one puzzle at a time. That caused their prices as used puzzles from private vendors to soar, with used Liberty puzzles often selling for more than their Liberty price.

The Covid frenzy has since subsided but Liberty’s puzzles still hold their values very well when sold used. So Liberty puzzles have almost legendary status in the UK; and here in Canada too for the same reasons. I had only bought and assembled one used Liberty puzzle, and I too knew about them more from their reputation than from personal experience.

I suspected that Bronwen’s request for Liberty wish-list puzzles might be an invitation for a contest, but at first I hesitated: I rarely enter contests and I don’t do wish-lists. But, if it did turn out to be a contest I would regret not having given myself to get a free Liberty, so I decided to identify a desired puzzle. I did some research using Liberty’s huge online catalog (600 puzzles!) which not only includes images but also partial photos of their cutting designs. After about an hour’s perusing I selected Landscape: The Parc Monceau as my top wish-list puzzle and gave the following reasons for my choice:

It is a Monet painting that is not overfamiliar, even for us Impressionist fans, and its green-filled image adds an extra challenge to what appears to be the classic Liberty cutting design style.

The following Spring 2026 issue of Jigsaw Pieces included an interesting article about the founding of Liberty by the company’s CEO Chris Wirth. It was followed by photos and rationales that members had submitted of their top wish-list Liberty puzzles, including my own. Most were from the UK but there were also ones from other international members in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the US. It was only at the very end of the magazine, on the back page, that Bronwen said that Liberty had generously offered to give one lucky contributor their wish-list puzzle, and she announced the winner. As you’ve figured out by now, it was me.

Bronwen sent me the name and email address of Liberty’s Head of Marketing, Kamie Kennedy, so that I could arrange for the shipping. But you know my writing style. I didn’t just send her a brief business-like message with my address. In addition to expressing my appreciation for their having sponsored the contest I admitted:

In my submission to the magazine I identified Landscape: The Parc Monceau as being my Liberty wish list puzzle, but truth be told, you have many others that I would enjoy just as well. In fact, I chose it instead of one of your beautiful shaped puzzles mainly because I thought those would get chosen by many other people, and I thought that the Monet painting was more representative of your company’s general cutting style.

Kamie’s reply was very gracious and invited me to study their catalog further and send her my top 3 choices rank order; and they would ship the highest one they had in stock.

I took that a step further, sending her a list of my top eight puzzles in rank order, all about 500 pieces, along with brief statements saying what it was about those puzzles that especially appealed to me. (I developed my list partly by checking out the ones that other BCD members had identified as their top wish-list ones. Also, some of my selections, like Octopus, Leopard, and Carolina Parakeets, were Liberty’s most highly-revered ones about which several fans in the Facebook wooden puzzle discussion group had enthusiastically raved. Others were promising ones that I had overlooked in my earlier perusal of the 600 offerings in their catalog. Then I added:

I would certainly appreciate any of the above, but I suspect that you have other puzzles I would like even better, and you guys know your offerings better than I do. Creativity and challenge in cutting is more important for me than puzzles’ images (although I’m not a fan of tessellation, and I tend to ignore alternative solutions) but your extensive catalog is mainly searchable by image, not design.

Do you have a secret favourite that you would like to introduce to me; perhaps a puzzle that hasn’t gotten as much public attention it deserves? As an alternative to sending me a puzzle from the above list, you could suggest one or more for my consideration of which the company and its designers are particularly proud.

Or better yet, you could send me a mystery puzzle with a similar artistic style and degree of difficulty as the ones listed above. (In which case, please cover up the picture on the box so that it remains a mystery. I like doing puzzles the old-fashioned way, where you discover the image during assembly.) If a perfect puzzle for me is not currently in stock, I would be happy to wait for it.

Kamie’s reply was polite but brief, saying only that they had shipped my prize via UPS prepaid so that I would not face any COD taxes or brokerage fees, and she gave me the tracking number. Her reply didn’t say which puzzle it would be. I think that she had figured out (correctly) that I like surprises.

I followed the tracking eagerly, but I didn’t have to wait long. It arrived about four days later in a larger box than I was expecting. Liberty had not only sent me my revised top wish-list puzzle but also a bonus mystery puzzle – no picture on the box, just its name on the label – Flourish.

My revised top wish-list puzzle was another one by Claude Monet, called Water Lilies, 1916. It got to the top of my selection list because, although it is in Liberty’s characteristic cutting style, it has a particularly attractive thematic cut design:

For now, I’ll give that puzzle my usual time to “ripen in anticipation”, and time to forget the image, that I do for my major puzzle acquisitions. But I could not do that with the mystery puzzle. What could Flourish possibly be? Within a few days the pieces were on my assembly board.

Assembly (Part 1)

SPOILER ALERT: The following images and text include information that would assist in assembling the puzzle. If you anticipate having an opportunity to assemble this puzzle in the foreseeable future I recommend that you do not read further (except the digression about the image’s artist Anton Seder.) On the other hand, if you have the puzzle and are stuck and getting frustrated, this might be helpful to get you over the hump.

As I mentioned in my message to Kamie, I like to assemble puzzles the old-school way where I have no idea other than the clue from its title what the image will be. I get to discover the image by watching it develop from my assembly. Sure, that makes doing the puzzle more challenging and much slower, but when jigsaw puzzles for adults first burst into popularity in Europe and North America during a “great society craze” in the early 20^th century they never had reference images on their box-tops. For me, the fun of puzzle assembly is about the journey not the destination, so I am in no hurry to get my tactile-rich (and expensive!) wooden puzzles completed.

Of course, I do look at the images carefully before I buy puzzles. which is why I let them sit for a while with old Christmas cards covering their box-top images. But there was no need to employ my amazing puzzle-appreciation superpower of forgetfulness for this puzzle, since I had never seen the image in the first place. This would be one of my few opportunities to truly replicate the experience of early 20^th century puzzle assembly. And with a puzzle that has over 450 pieces!

It was obvious as soon as I looked into the box that there were a lot of pieces that were either entirely or almost-entirely two shades of gold, and that those tended to be more swirly and sprawly than the more varied multi-coloured ones. They also tended to lack obvious connectors, and it soon became apparent that there were also no flat-sided apparent edge pieces.

My guess, which turned out to be correct, was that the sprawly pieces would be an ornate gold frame around a central image that was comprised of the compact multi-coloured pieces. I assumed that the frame, with dropouts and no colour clues, would be much more difficult to assemble than the interior image. So the logical approach was to assemble the interior image first and put the golden pieces on a side-board. That would give me lots of working space on my main board.

On the main board I tried to so some colour sorting but almost all of the pieces had multiple mixed-up colours. But at least now my initial challenge was now a puzzle of “only” about 300 pieces.

I began with the rare pieces that had scarlet red, and building around some whimsy pieces that included the colour white:

Then I continued with my usual mixture of shape- and colour-matching. As expected, my progress was slow; in addition to not knowing what the image would be, this puzzle had Liberty’s acclaimed trickiness in cutting design:

Eventually I completed the very unusual central image:

[Digression about the image and artist: I was able to find the puzzle’s central image online using a Google’s image search: It is a version (with the backgrounds recoloured) of a page from Anton Seder’s 1896 book of illustrations Das Thier in der Dekorativen Kunst (The animal in decorative art).

Anton Seder (1850-1916) received his artistic training at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, one of the oldest and most prestigious art schools in what was then the German Confederation. His training in the academic style of painting served him well to design sculpture, ceramics, jewelry, iron-grillwork and architectural decoration, as well as become a highly-regarded painter and illustrator, and a teacher of all those branches of the arts.

In 1889 he was appointed to be the Director of the Kunstgewerbeschule Straßburg, (the Strasbourg school of arts and crafts.) Basically it was (and still is, under the name Haute école des arts du Rhin) a school to train designers, illustrators and decorative artists. Strasbourg is in the Alsace-Lorraine region that has long been claimed by both Germany and France. Then it was part of the German Confederation, having been ceded independence after the disastrous 1871 Franco-Prussian War. Since WWI the region has now been part of France.

At the time, an avant-guard modern art movement which had been begun in Vienna, which most of us know by its French name Art Nouveau,but which the Germans call Jugendstil, was taking European architecture and decorative arts by storm. Its primary features included long sinuous organic curves inspired by nature, and a sense of dynamism and movement. Seder was one of the Jugendstil’s leading proponents. Between 1882 and 1903, when the style was rapidly on the rise, he published ten design resource books that demonstrated the style for artists .

Das Thier in der Dekorativen Kunst was one of those reference books. The book was thin – only 85 pages – but the pages were very large (56 x 44 cm; 22” x 17”) so that the intricate details could be studied closely. Actually, when you look at this image you can see that it has seven separate studies compressed as one composition on the page. Here is one of those illustrations separated out from the others:

Here are some his more illustrations from the same book:

Seder’s German contemporary, the scientific illustrator/artist Ernst Haeckel, has had several of his paintings used as jigsaw puzzle images by various companies. Seder also aimed to document his subjects realistically, but with artistic creativity rather than scientific documentation as his objective. For reasons that entirely escape me, this is the first time that I have ever seen a one of Seder’s studies used as the image for a jigsaw puzzle.

But Anton Seder was much more than just an illustrator. He also developed designs to be used in other media, such as jewelry, ironwork, ceramics, and architecture. As I understand it, one of the factors that won him the Director position at the Kunstgewerbeschule Straßburg over 39 other candidates was his proposed design for the façade of a new main building for the newly established school:

Seder remained the Director of that school for 25 years. His educational philosophy mirrored that of the Arts and Crafts movement in England, seeking to eliminate the distinction between those two sides of creativity. He also sought to embed Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) aesthetic sensitivity into all aspects of design.

But unfortunately for Seder (and for his students), in the first decade of the early 20th century Art Nouveau fell out of fashion even more rapidly than it had risen in popularity all across Europe only about 15 years earlier. What had been an avant guard movement to imbue graceful nature-based aesthetics into all aspects of art and design turned out to be a dead end. Seder could not accept the austere new “form follows function” and art deco aesthetics that followed it, in which decoration was unwanted.

By 1907 his graduates were complaining that their artistic training had not prepared them for to get design work jobs in the new styles of design that had come into fashion. By 1915 when he retired, his once great reputation lay in tatters, only to be resurrected when Art Nouveau regained popularity in the 1960s and ‘70s, and in a new revival that appears to be occurring now. Hopefully, more puzzle makers will now discover Seder’s charming illustrations. End of digression.]

Puzzle assembly – part 2

Now, back to the puzzle, which you will recall wasn’t yet complete. There was still that elaborate golden frame to come, which I anticipated would be the more difficult part of the puzzle. Here is the daunting pile on my side-board:

In my initial sorting I had begun separating out the ones that had a tiny bit of other colour from the ones that had only teh two shades of gold, and the pieces that were more compact compared the sprawly/swirly ones. But I soon decided to save that sorting task for when I was ready to do the frame and move the pieces to the main board, hence the pile of unsorted pieces.

When I did move the golden pieces to my main board and spreading them out did not make the challenge look any easier. In fact, it confirmed my initial impression that most of these gold pieces did not have the usual connector knobs and sockets.

As you can see in the above photo, I was able to place the pieces that had tiny traces of colour, and a few with connectors, adjacent to the interior puzzle image. In some cases, those smidgeons of colour were tiny indeed. But after that, my progress soon came to a standstill.

I began to feel discouraged, fearing that that this puzzle might prove to be beyond my level of ability. But then I noticed a pattern: I found that some of the golden pieces seemed to be duplicates of each other, and when I tried to match them up I found that some were duplicates and others were mirror images.

Ah-ha! I recognized what was happening; I had previously encountered this in the cutting design of the Cabin in the Woods puzzle I reported about here, and in Mediterranean Summer here. The two sides of the frame might mirror each other, and the top and the bottom might also mirror each other – quadrilateral symmetry. In those previous ones it had been the cutting of the whole puzzles that had such dual symmetry, but this time it was being used to make the most elaborate irregular edge I have ever experienced, which I could see would also include numerous drop-outs. In fact, this appeared to be more like a shaped puzzle than one with just an extravagant irregular edge.

Before progressing further I invested some time in sorting the pieces into their groups of four, and identifying a few (in the bottom left) that only came as a pair or for which their shape was unique.

All the evidence was there for quadrilateral symmetry, except for all those oddball pieces that did not create a set of four, and as you can see, the middle two pieces already attached to the bottom edge of the central image are not symmetrical.

There was one oddball piece, the long dark one in the centre-top of the above photo, that I thought was probably a piece from another puzzle that had accidently gotten mixed in with mine at the Liberty factory since it clearly could not connect to the central image.

I began to build out from the central image assembly:

Most of the oddball pieces fit into the middle of the bottom edge where they made a multi-piece variation of Liberty’s usual single-piece signature eagle whimsy:

I had expected assembly of the frame to be very challenging, but that was mitigated by the fact that whenever I found the location for one piece it immediately led to the placement of three others. It was still challenging, because of the numerous dropouts and subtlety in how the pieces connect to their neighbours, but after recognizing the quadrilateral symmetry trick this phase actually proceeded quite a bit more quickly than the central image.

Putting in the final piece, which was the long dark one that I had thought was from a different puzzle but turned out to be an inside-frame tailfeather, was preceded by some drama. Along the way I had convinced myself that it was indeed a extraneous piece. The frame only had golden pieces, and that dark one clearly did not protrude from the central image. I removed it from my puzzle board and set it aside.

Once I had placed all of the golden pieces, as shown above, I thought that the puzzle was complete. Over the next few days I began my research and writing. I found photos of completed Flourish puzzles online and realized that it was indeed part of the frame. My puzzle was still incomplete, and I could not find the piece!

I looked everywhere for the piece I had set aside – over and over again. I was quite sure that I had not disposed of it, but rummaged through all of my wastebaskets anyway – twice!

I panicked about having an incomplete puzzle and checked the Liberty website about their policy regarding replacement pieces. They do provide replacements– for free if the piece was not in a new puzzle bought from them, or for a very small charge ($3 USD) if its absence is not their fault. That is probably the best replacement policy of any of the wood puzzle makers, and it is an honour system.

But I was still worried. Maybe they could not provide a replacement because my puzzle is no longer in production. I contacted the company’s help-line, acknowledging that the missing piece was my fault. They told me that their usual replacement policies would apply, and told me how to how to order a replacement piece using their usual system. I did so and my stress melted away.

The next morning I found my missing piece: It was hiding behind the base of one of the task lights that I use for puzzle assembly but which Ihad moved to a side table after assembly. I contacted Liberty again to cancel my order for a replacement piece. I apologized for having wasted their time (I’m a Canadian, after all!) and said that they could keep the fee that I had paid. They canceled the order and refunded my money. At least from that stressful lost-piece experience I can I can confirm that Liberty lives up to its reputation for having absolutely great customer service.

Here is the puzzle, now complete:

Lynon Aksamit’s cutting design, with its graceful curves and swirls, clearly aims to follow the Art Nouveau organic growth aesthetic: Not a straight line to be found:

I cannot count how many figure pieces this puzzle has – several are partially or fully branching or look like coral, but are rather ambiguous in that regard. But filling a puzzle with as many whimsies as possible is a Liberty characteristic, and in this puzzle those branch/coral pieces seem to fill that role in the central image part of the puzzle. Very uncharacteristic of the company is the fact that the golden frame (which accounts for about half of the puzzle area) has no figure pieces at all except for the multi-piece signature Liberty eagle at the bottom centre.

Puzzle non-review, and the frame image

Although this is only the second Liberty puzzle that I have assembled to date, the company’s 20-year reputation as being among the best makers of laser-cut wooden puzzles is well established. They are almost universally highly regarded, and I have long recognized that because they are so well-known they need to one of my standards of comparison for other laser-cut puzzle-makers in their high-end price range.

I posted a very favourable mini-review of Liberty Puzzles based on my assembly of their How the West Was One (as a digression near the end of my report on Stumpcraft mini-puzzles.) This essay is not itself a review, but if it was it would be another very favourable one. This puzzle does nothing to diminish the fact that Liberty well deserves to be in the same highest-quality tier of laser-cuts as StumpCraft, Artisan, Hidden Piece, and possibly others that I have yet to formally review.

[Brief digression: Fathom Puzzles are arguably of even finer quality, but are also higher priced than the other premium laser-cut puzzles. But those are all shaped puzzles and have Geoff Cota’s distinctive tailor-made artwork which is designed for his unique and very challenging colour-line cutting designs. Fathom’s puzzles are in a class of their own, and are a love-it-or-hate-it kind of puzzle experience.]

My reviews always include my assessment of the quality of a puzzle or company’s printing, but whether I like or don’t like the artwork is never a factor in my reviews. Art is very personal, and that is why companies offer puzzles that have many styles of images, to cater to many preferences. And like Liberty, puzzle companies always ample attention to showing you the image of the puzzles in their catalogs.

So please don’t take my following critique of the image of this puzzle as being criticism of Liberty puzzles. These are my viewpoints, based on my personal tastes alone.

Just this past weekend as I write this, I was able to participate in a Zoom call in which Chris Wirth, the CEO and co-founder of Liberty Puzzles, made a very interesting illustrated presentation to BCD members entitled “Innovations at Liberty Puzzles”. In the Q&A after the presentation I asked him about Flourish. His answer included the information that the company often uses their limited edition puzzles to let their chief designer experiment with new ideas for puzzle-making techniques, and he went on to talk about how they always try to learn from their mistakes.

He didn’t say what he that they had learned from Flourish, but I think that the company may have received negative feedback from individuals who had never before assembled a puzzle with quadrilateral symmetry. I do not know whether I would have been able to complete it myself if I had not previously encountered that cutting technique. (At least two people who bought the puzzle posted in a Facebook wooden puzzles discussion group that they found it frustratingly difficult. One of them said that they had had to contact Liberty’s customer service for hints in order to complete it. Both acknowledged that it proved very satisfying to complete.)

Personally, I think that using that design trick was a fair challenge, and puzzles should be challenging. I have twice now had to put the pieces back into the box without completing assembly. That is not the fault of the cutter, but just an indication that my skills are not yet up to the challenge that they presented to me. But I do think that the image in this puzzle missed out on being a real winner in two ways.

As you probably inferred from my discussion above about the artist I really do like the central image, but the first shortcoming was having it surrounded by a 2” (5 cm) wide golden frame that not only gilds the lily it also overpowers what it was intended to complement. The wide frame also forces the central image to be a mere 29 x 21 centimetres (11½” x 8 ¼”) – about the size of a standard piece of writing paper. That is much too small for such an intricate work as Seder’s artistic composition.

Personally, I think that it would have been better if that central image had been the full size of the puzzle, without the frame. That would have enabled people to better enjoy the wonderful details emerging during their assembly of the puzzles pieces. Even at that size it would still have been smaller than it been in Anton Seder’s original extravagantly-sized Das Thier in der Dekorativen Kunst resource book.

To illustrate this, here again are those parakeets that were one of the seven paintings in the composition, . . .

. . . but see how they get lost in the overall puzzle:

The second lesson they may have learned from this experimental limited release might have been the image aspects of the frame itself. Framing and matting are intended to bring out the best in what they surround, and should complement, not compete or overwhelm. Ornate, seemingly oversized frames are sometimes effective at highlighting the importance of a painting. Here is how Vermeer’s hugely famous but relatively small painting Girl with the Pearl Earing is framed at the Mauritshuis Museum in the Hague:

In this case I really like the elegance of the swirly pieces and the extensive inclusion of dropouts in this puzzle version of a frame. But it is comprised of only two shades of gold, the darker of which is rather drab. Overall, the effect is rather flat, and side by side with the delicacy and chromatic vibrancy of Anton Seder’s paintings I don’t think they really fit together all that well.

But I do like the idea of a puzzle that has a suitable central image being surrounded by a baroque or rococo frame. It is just that I think that the delicacy of the image would look better surrounded by the simple cork of my puzzle-board rather than having to compete with grandeur. On its page in the book the central Seder image is surrounded by a generous margin of negative space. I hope that Liberty puzzle designer Lynon Aksamit continues to explore opportunities for this kind of golden framing , and also continues to use dropouts in the frame. But one suggestion that I would make is that shading and perhaps more colour tones could be used to give the frame more of a trompe l’oeil illusion of being three dimensional, like a picture frame, rather than a flat puzzle frame.

I don’t know who the artist is, but here is a now-discontinued puzzle called Alice, both sides of the mirror made by Sophie Malraye’s Façon Puzzles company in France (that I have assembled but haven’t yet reported about) which does that to good effect:

But these quibbles and arm-chair quarterbacking about the image do not detract from the fact that Flourish is a puzzle that was both challenging and a real treat to assemble. I thank Liberty Puzzles, the BCD, and of course Lady Luck, that I have the good fortune to now own it.

As an proof of what it did for my regard for the Liberty Puzzles company, in that presentation by Chris Wirth that I told you about he mentioned that he was particularly proud of a new puzzle they recently released called An English Bouquet. I had already been eyeing that puzzle whenever I went to the company’s website while writing this report. If it had been released before I submitted my revised wish-list to Kamie it would have been my top pick. I have now bought my first puzzle from Liberty despite the fact that I already have my other prize one ripening in anticipation (and giving me time to forget what the image looks like) on my do-do shelves.

The image for this 356 piece push-fit puzzle is a 1915 Pears rotary chromolithograph print. Pears prints were sold in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries as part as a long-lived pioneering marketing campaign (1891-1925) by the British company A. & F. Pears Ltd., who made Pears Soap. I bought the puzzle mainly because I had noticed that puzzles that have Pears prints as their image routinely sell in British auctions for much higher prices than other comparable sized puzzles with similar cutting. I wanted to see what the fuss was all about.

I bought this puzzle from a British eBay auction in July 2025. The vendor had abbreviated its title to merely None but the Brave, perhaps to soften full title for those of us who are not familiar with the judgmental complete expression. If so, it worked, because I might not have bought it if I had known its full name (which is the title on the box). It comes from a 1697 ode called Alexander’s Feast written by John Dryden. I wasn’t particularly fond of the image, but I did get it for a very good price for a puzzle that has a Pears art print as its image – only £31.

As I assembled the puzzle in February and March of this year I could see that it is notable in that it does not have the seam down the middle that is common in puzzles made by non-professional cutters of this size (35 x 45 cm; 14” x 18”) from that era. Both amateur and professional cutters often used colour centerspreads from illustrated magazines as their images for large puzzles. Also notable is that the printing quality is definitely better than usual for early 1900s printing.

As usual, I assembled the puzzle before doing my research so as not to refresh my memory of its image. I like to see an unknown image develop from my assembly. But my progress in doing this large (for me) push-fit and colour-line cut went quite slowly, so as reward to myself, when my assembly of the puzzle was about half complete I began research into …

Pears soap and Pears art prints

According to this chatty history of Pears soap, the company was established in 1789 by a cosmetics merchant, but it has been his translucent orange bars of soap that has endured and become iconic for over 200 years.

Before Pears came along, soap was mostly a rough, utility item. Think: big, smelly chunks for laundry or general cleaning – not something you’d willingly use on your face. There was no such thing as “gentle” or “skin-loving.” People used whatever was available, and a lot of it was harsh as hell.

So when Pears started making something that was not only mild but also beautiful to look at, it felt like a total upgrade. It wasn’t just a hygiene product. It was a luxury.

In 1789, Andrew Pears, a Cornish barber, opened a store in Soho, a wealthy area of London, and started making creams, powders and other beauty products.

Pretty soon, Pears noticed his socialite clientele used his products to cover the damage and dryness caused by arsenic-laden cosmetics they applied to achieve the fair, alabaster complexion that was so fashionable at the time. We’re talking full-on chemical chaos – lead, mercury, you name it. And they were slathering this stuff on their faces like it was skincare.

Seeing a gap in the market, he decided to create something that would be gentler for the skin. After a lot of experiments, Pears Soap was born. Made with glycerin and natural oils, the soap smelled like an English garden, and had a transparent appearance that set it apart from its competitors. And let’s be real: back then, most soaps were chalky, thick, and kind of gross. This was shiny, golden, and almost jewel-like. It cleaned your face and it felt fancy.

Andrew Pears first began manufacturing and selling his unique soap in 1809 when Britain pioneered in creating trademark protection. He was one of the first merchants to get registered and Pears is now the oldest surviving brand name in the world.

When Andrew retired, his grandson Francis took over and expanded the business to compete with the increasing number of rivals who had begun making similar gentle soap. Sales of Pears brand soap really took off when it won a Gold Medal at the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace that was held in 1851. Based on that honour the company expanded further and established distribution channels internationally.

But enough about the soap. My research was intended to be about Pears’ art prints. In 1865, Francis’ son-in-law Thomas J Barratt became a partner in the business. According to this online catalog for the antique art prints:

… it was Thomas J. Barratt who revolutionized the company with his advertising schemes. Barratt linked the product with art and culture, buying paintings in order to acquire the copyright and using them in advertisements, most famously adding a bar of soap to the John Everett Millais painting “Bubbles”.

The lithographs … were sold with Pears’ Annual, a yearly volume of fiction accompanied by up to four high-quality lithographs ready to frame. The annual was sold for one shilling, placing fine art within the reach of people who would never otherwise have been able to afford it. These chromolithographs required a separate block for each color … . The lengthy process resulted in incredibly rich images as appealing now as they were in 1900.

Thomas Barratt is still recognized as an important figure in the international history of marketing, applying the then-new discipline of psychology to invent new techniques for created unconscious associations rather merely touting the benefits of the product itself. According to this article in an advertising trade publication:

Thomas J Barratt has secured a place in advertising history as the man who first annexed high culture to commercialism when he bought the copyright to Sir John Everett Millais’ painting Bubbles for £2,200 and used it to sell Pears soap.

Yet there was much more to Barratt – who joined Pears as a book-keeper, married his boss’ daughter and rose to become the company’s chairman – than recognizing the promotional possibilities in Millais’ portrayal of his grandson, William Milbourne James, looking up at a bubble.

Barratt stands, 127 years later, as a true industry pioneer. Indeed, Lord Northcliffe described him as “the father of English advertising”.

He was a client that today’s agencies would kill for. Barratt constantly stressed the importance of a strong and exclusive brand image for Pears, was brave and innovative, forceful in making the case for advertising and always prepared to back his ideas with big-budget campaigns. He also understood the importance of constantly re-evaluating his market.

Barratt developed subliminal approaches to marketing that are still used today. In fact, that appears to be exactly what the Pears art print used for this puzzle was doing. The Pears annual pre-Christmas magazine and art prints were sold at considerably lower price than they had cost the company. That made them irresistible for British working- and middle class people who wanted to emulate heir social betters. It is a brilliant example of the company’s identification of their product with the landed gentry, to reinforce the soap’s image as an affordable luxury product for every family.

When the Pears’ art prints campaign began the prints were made using a method called chromolithography, which was the colour reproduction state-of-the-art at the time. It was a labour-intensive process that had been developed in the mid-19^th century which involved using limestone printing blocks that required a separate pressing for every color. In the case of the early Pears prints they used at least 24 limestone colour blocks to make near-identical copies of watercolour paintings. Each pressing had to be lined up absolutely perfectly!

(I have previously written about chromolithography in my very first Bill’s Wooden Jigsaw Puzzle posting, which was about a puzzle that had a Currier & Ives image which originally had been made that way.)

The Pears print that became the image for this puzzle was from the 1915 Pears Christmas Annual release. That was the first year that the prints were made using rotary offset lithography, which had only then developed to the point where it produced colour printing similar in quality to the old block chromolithographic printing, but at considerably less cost. Basically, that process transferred an inked image from a metal plate cylinder to a rubber blanket cylinder, which transfers the image onto the paper.

It too relied on the principle that oil-based ink and water do not mix. It uses dampening rollers to repel ink from non-image areas, but adhering in places where the colour is wanted. It soon became the printing technique that then ruled the printing technological roost until the 1980s. I suspect that Pears’ transition to the emerging state-of-the-art printing technique was a point of pride for the company at the time, and was probably featured in their advertising for the 1915 series.

The image for this puzzle is a painting by the British watercolourist James Shaw Crompton (1853-1916), known for his historical works as well as social and domestic genre scenes. He exhibited at the Royal Academy, Fine Art Society and Royal Institute, giving him impeccable artistic credentials, although many of his most famous works are now the ones he made for Pears. That company bought both the paintings and copyrights from contemporary artists and introduced them to the world via the Pears Christmas Annual as new works from a master of British watercolour painting.

The other prints in that year’s series were A. Dampier May’s The Beauty of the Glade, Arthur Eisley’s deceptively titled The Invaders, and the feature work was Thomas Gainsborough’s ultra-classy The Morning Walk. The artists (except for the old master, Gainsborough) benefitted from the fame and acclaim that Pears’ widespread promotion and distribution gave them, as well as an immediate sale of their paintings. However for the aristocratic painter Sir John Everett Millais the agreement with Pears had backfired. He was already so highly regarded that he had already been elected President of the Royal Academy when he sold a portrait of his nephew blowing bubbles and its copyright to the Pears company. He even added bits of the distinctive orange soap to the original painting, suggesting that flakes had been shaved off from it to make the bubble soap. (Being made from glycerin it would be excellent for that purpose, but in my experience one could never make that kind of bubble with a pipe.) For that outrage Millais faced the wrath of his fellow Pre-Raphaelite painters, who accused him of selling out to commercialism. The novelist Marie Corelli said to him: “I look upon all Pears posters as gross libels both of your work and you.”

Pears clearly benefitted greatly from the association of its brand with the world of fine art and upper class culture. In the case of the Pears print used for this puzzle, the image holds another subliminal marketing message for young women, since the title None But the Brave Deserve the Fair can be reversed to suggest that an investment in beauty products is the route for women to marry well.

Every year there was at least one Pears print that featured a rosy-faced child; one of their frequent advertising messages was the importance of using a gentle soap for children’s tender skin. Since 1915 was during the Great War, this military wedding genre image taking place in the glory days of Empire had the bonus benefits of associating Pears Soap with the values of courage, patriotism and victory.

And the general public? They probably did not think of these prints as yet more corporate or political propaganda. They appreciated the annual opportunity to buy three or four large classy art prints, and the richly-illustrated Christmas magazine, for the amazingly low price of only one shilling. And for many amateur jigsaw puzzle makers it was an opportunity too good to be missed: These prints were bigger and much better quality than the usual calendars, or magazine colour centre-spreads with their seams down the middle.

The puzzle

Of course, I didn’t know any of that while I when I began assembling the puzzle. When I began in February about all that I knew was that Pears was the hand soap that my wife had always bought for our family, and that this was an outdoors crowd scene that depicted a procession after a Victorian era military wedding.

As it turns out, my memory of it being a large crowd and a military wedding was incorrect. As I approached completion of the puzzle, and could begin to read the image better and saw that there are only two men in uniform at what would have been a rather modest size Victorian era wedding of the daughter of country gentleman to an officer who was the son of another red-coated officer. And because there is no church in the background, I suspect that the procession is going to the church rather than returning from it.

As I flipped and sorted I could see that, rather than plywood, the pieces are 4mm thick solid wood – French walnut I think. The sturdy plain box gives no clues as to how old this puzzle is, but that solid wood suggest it is fairly early. The fact that this print is from the Pears Annual 1915 release is proof that as the earliest possible year for it to have been made.

The cutter’s choice to use both a premium quality print and premium wood suggests to me that he or she may have wanted to create a special puzzle of which they could be especially proud.

As you can see in the above photo, I began with my usual style of rough sorting, but in this case I didn’t separate out the presumed edge pieces. I decided to start the puzzle with the Pears logo and the other light-coloured pieces. I hadn’t intended to begin with edge piece assembly, but as it turned out, they had a high proportion of pieces that became the full bottom edge of the puzzle:

My sorting had also grouped together other colours, textures, and pieces that appeared to be people and their clothing. There were a lot of green foliage pieces, so as I often do, I mostly I saved those for when the number of loose pieces would be less intimidating. As occasional breaks from the above cream-coloured foreground I worked on making other types of small assembly islands, and the relatively few pieces that turned out to be the sky (and more edge assembly):

Then I proceeded from there:

Little sub-assemblies were being developed in various places around the perimeter of my puzzle-board. I would turn the board around on my table to work on different groupings of pieces.

Eventually I realized where all the white pieces must belong:

Consolidating loose pieces into island and continent subassemblies is satisfying in itself, but it also created working space on my once-crowded puzzle board. At this stage I decided to reorganize my board to put the larger assemblies into their apparent relationship to each other. That is much more difficult to do with push-fit puzzles than it is when the pieces interlock, especially with the larger subassemblies. Often I had to reassemble them in their new location. But seeing my puzzle as an emerging image composition gave me a real feeling of progress.

A feeling of progress was really needed at that stage. All along, assembly of this puzzle had been particularly slow going. This was the largest push-fit puzzle that I had done to date, and besides being non-interlocking and having abundant colour-line cutting, the regular cutting only has mostly languorous of curves. That, made shape-matching much more difficult than when puzzles have tight-curve cutting. My progress had not been so slow as to be painfully frustrating, but the slow pace was beginning to detract from my enjoyment of the assembly.

It was at this stage that to give me some respite and encouragement I began doing the above research into Pears soap and the Pears art prints. I learned the above history and that this particular print is from Pears’ 1915 series. I inevitably got a few glimpses of Crompton’s None But the Brave painting while doing so, but initially I always tried to divert my gaze to maintain the purity of my vintage puzzle-assembly experience. Up to this point I had been doing the puzzle without a clear memory of what the final image would be: As usual, I was trying to replicate the experience of someone who had done the puzzle when it was first made.

But then something occurred to me. The fact that this puzzle is on a solid walnut board substrate suggests that it was likely made soon after the prints had been released. At that time, solid wood which is prone to warping was rapidly being replaced for puzzle-making by hardwood plywood. Everything that I had learned about Thomas Barratt’s marketing suggested that release of Pear’s 1915 Annual would have been accompanied by extensive publicity to generate excitement about that years’ magazine’s contents and its curated selection of art prints.

That publicity, and a major advertising campaign for the soap itself featuring images from the Annual, would inevitably have made the art prints’ images common knowledge. In other words, the image would have been well known by the early assemblers of this puzzle at that time. Well, whether that is true or not, it was enough to persuade me to allow myself to get some assembly clues by occasionally looking at the painting’s image, which is widely available online.

After I got this far I returned to assembling without looking at the image. The progress was still slow because the colour-line cutting was so very well done, but most of my little island subassemblies had now been placed and with fewer loose pieces left the challenge was less intimidating.

Just a few places left to fill (on the roof in the top left) . . .

. . . and the puzzle was complete:

The following photo of the back side of the puzzle highlights both the colour-line cutting and the warping of some of its pieces. (The pieces are all pushed together fairly tight: Most of the dark lines that you see are shadows from warping.:

I had forgotten that when I bought this puzzle I had been told that it has two replacement pieces. During assembly, only one of those replacement pieces was readily apparent as such, but as usual, a photo of the backside makes replacement pieces obvious.

To make replacement pieces, a person needs the right tools, skills, and material that matches the thickness of the wood. The task also requires colour-matching and painting skills and equipment. It is quite a skilled craft in itself. The replacement pieces for this puzzle were well cut, but I thought that their colouring could be improved. I have occasionally been doing that with coloured pencils in previous puzzles, but I had recently bought a set of acrylic paint and a variety of small model-painting brushes for this kind of job.

Below is a comparison of the part of the image that has the replacement piece, and the same part of the image from a photo of the Pears print that I found online. The replacement pieces are the area around the officer-groom’s right hand, and the wedge shaped off-white piece between the bottom of the bride’s veil and the fence post. Presumably, the replacement pieces had been made before the original image was readily available on the internet.

Here is the completed puzzle with my re-colouring of the replacement pieces:

Above, I speculated that although this puzzle has very well done colour-line cutting, the unknown maker of this puzzle was not a professional puzzle-maker. That tends to be confirmed by the fact that, while the cutting is top-notch, there are a number of place where that person’s gluing skills were not up to par for adhering this large of a print onto what may have already been a warped thin walnut board.

The dimensions of this puzzle are 33.5 x 45 cm (13” x 17¾”). The Pears print is on fairly thick and stiff paper. I suspect that the maker was more used to using thin magazine paper for his or her images. The angle from which I took the following photo exaggerates the problem, but it does show the extent of bubbles and wrinkles in the gluing on that part of the puzzle:

I began to tack the paper down with craft glue in a few places, to prevent it from being peeled off or torn in the future. But, as you can see in the above photo, the Pears paper is quite thick and tough, and nowhere is it torn. I considered flattening out a few of the bubbles to give the puzzle a bit of an aesthetic upgrade, but decided there is no need for further stabilization to prevent future damage so I left this truly antique over 100 year old puzzle in its as-made condition.

All in all, this was a very satisfying puzzle to assemble. Admittedly, this 356 piece line-cut, push-fit was more difficult than I expected and it would probably have been better suited for a time when I wanted a puzzle that was this challenging. But that was a choice that I made, not any fault of the cutter. Oh well, as part of my recovery from this one I’ll next treat myself to a modern laser-cut puzzles.

Coming up:

63. Liberty’s Flourish – a prize puzzle

This is the second part of an essay. To begin at the beginning, go here.

Artistic politics in Mexico

Alfredo maintained his role as the Director through most of the postwar decade of the 1920s even though the political situation remained volatile. My guess is that he mostly survived by keeping a low political profile. But in the bigger picture of government as well as Mexican art world politics, the soft-spoken and definitely-not-flamboyant or self-promoting artist was outmaneuvered by three of his radical leftist compatriot artists comprised of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and Ramos’ former student David Alfaro Siqueiros. They came to be known as los tres grandes (the big three) .

Ironically, Ramos Martinez may have had a role in launching their rise when he advocated to José Vasconcelos, the Minister of Public Education (i.e., the minister of Propaganda), that large public artworks would be an effective vehicle for educating the largely illiterate Mexican working class about their country’s history, including the recent revolution, and that fresco murals made by him and his students would be the best way to begin to teach history to them.

Murals, like large sculptures, have a sense of grandeur and permanence can’t be beat; they monumentalize their subject matter. Posters and paintings might also glorify history and the revolution but they can come across as transitory – they are small, fragile and can easily be removed. Statues and murals tell their stories in a way that makes them seem like truths that will last forever. (The Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan codified this concept in 1964 with his catchy phrase “the medium is the message”.)

But unlike Ramos Martinez, los tres grandes were individuals who enjoyed the cut and thrust of political combat. They were also, like the Minister, very radical Marxists who believed that the country’s revolution was a great accomplishment in the international class struggle. I can envision them agreeing with Ramos Martinez that murals were the right medium to monumentalize Mexico’s history, but telling the Minister that the best style of art to tell the story would be a Mexican modernist variation on the strongly masculine and muscular “socialist realism” style of painting that was favoured in Stalin’s Soviet Union.

The Minister and other left-wing politicians probably did not require much persuasion in that regard. They came to see no place in public art for Alfredo Ramos Martinez’ less-explicitly-political, peaceful and picturesque scenes and subtle messaging.

Below are two of Alfredo’s soldier paintings. The first is a pastel-on-paper painting of an unarmed soldier made by Ramos in 1917, during the revolution. [Note: this work is currently for sale by the Bond Latin Art Gallery in San Francisco.] This subject’s calm but perhaps war-weary demeaner, and the sadness in his eyes, contrasts with the paintings by his contemporary Mexican painters who generally usually depict the revolutionary fighters as fearless armed warriors.

And next is a large (126 × 100 cm; 50” × 40”) oil-on-canvas of that Ramos Martinez painted circa 1932. (Note that date and its change in artistic style from his previous paintings. That will be discussed below.)

Again, the expressions on the face, and the way that the soldiers in the foreground tightly clutch their weapons, do not depict fearless warriors: They are resolute but apprehensive, frightened men. In my mind, that makes them all the more heroic as people fighting for a cause they believed in. But this is not the way that the government wanted the revolutionaries who brought them to power to be remembered. They want the revolution to be depicted as a time of hope, excitement and triumph, and so that is not how the post-civil-war Mexican people saw the soldiers depicted in the government’s history-lesson murals.

For comparison, below are two highly-acclaimed frescos by Diego Rivera. The first was created as part of a huge commission for the headquarters building of the Ministry of Public Education itself. It has 117 panels and tells the story of the Mexican Civil War. This panel depicts the Communist Party distributing weapons to newly-enlisted revolutionaries at the beginning of that war. (Side-note: Frida Kahlo, who later became Rivera’s wife, was the model for the woman handing out the rifles and bayonets.)

And if, as propaganda goes, that image is too subtle, here is a detail photo from a series of Diego Rivera murals called The History of Mexico that spans three large walls around the grand stairwell of the Palacio Nacional (National Palace). This allegorical part of the huge fresco was painted seven years later, in 1935.

Despite the fact that Alfredo was not the kind of artist that the government wanted, he continued in his role as Director of the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes for most of the 1920s. He was protected somewhat from both art-world and government politics by the fact that he was highly revered by his students, clearly was an advocate for the indigenous and mixed-race proletariat class, and the fact that his Paris sojourn had given him an international reputation as being the innovator who first established a distinctive Mexican modernist artistic style: He had become widely recognized as “The Father of Modern Mexican Art” and Mexican modernism was emerging as an important part of that country’s identity.

Alfredo also still had a loyal following for the relatively few private paintings that he had time to produce in that decade. But he was unable to get commissions for any major public artworks, or even major commissions from potential wealthy Mexican patrons who felt a need to curry favour with the Mexican government (which was just about all of them.)

But in the latter 1920s the spirit of revolution in Mexico was turning against Ramos Martinez. He was accused in the artistic community of having swung the pendulum too far in favour of modernism and al aire libre painting, and of having adopted his own autocratic style of leadership. Even some of his students protested against the rigidity of his teaching methods (at the same time that schools modeled on his methods were being established in other countries.)

Move to California

By 1928, at the age of 57, Ramos Martinez got fed up with being on the losing side of the non-stop power struggle that being Director of the prestigious national art school entailed. He stepped down from that position to become merely the head of one of the open air schools that he had fought for, but he didn’t stay long in that position. In that same year, he got married. His new wife’s name was María de Sodi Romero, and she was 17 years younger than him. They soon had a baby daughter, but unfortunately the infant was born with a debilitating disease and the local doctors did not know what it was.

I don’t know if Ramos had been living frugally and had considerable savings, or if they found a benefactor, but the couple were able to bring their baby to the renowned Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota for a diagnosis. The doctors there identified the problem as a particular rare bone disease. I don’t know who recommended that the infant required a dry warm climate (that the high elevation of Mexico City does not have) to lessen the pain, or recommended a promising new treatment for the rare disease that was being administered by a doctor who practiced in Los Angeles, California.

Los Angeles was a city that Alfredo had previously visited. In 1926 he had arranged for an art exhibition there by his students and had attended the opening of the show. I don’t know how fluent he and María were in English, if at all, but Alfredo quickly wrapped up his commitments in Mexico. He completed a large unfinished painting that would have been awkward to take with them (more about that later) and they moved to the Hollywood suburb of Los Angeles.

If Alfredo and his wife had been worried about a starting a new career in a new country, they needn’t have been. He came with his great artistic credentials, reputation, skills, and talent. And he also came at just the right time, despite the fact that the Stock Market Crash of 1929 happened just one week before they arrived. Alfredo soon was getting exhibition opportunities, and commissions for both paintings and frescos, which was a good thing because baby María’s medical treatments were costly. (I won’t hold you in suspense about the baby – the treatments were successful.)

According to art reporter Gussie Fauntleroy:

[Los Angeles] in the 1920s and ‘30s was experiencing an artistic renaissance, combined with what has been called the “Mexican flirt.” California artists, collectors and intellectuals were inspired by the Mexican Modernist aesthetic, and captured by an idealized view of the Mexican Revolution. Diego Rivera was striding across the international stage, and Hollywood was enthralled by the exotic beauty of Mexican actresses, even as the Great Depression spread and Mexican migrants were deported. …

Already influential in promoting muralism before he left Mexico City, Ramos Martinez employed his significant fresco skills in creating a number of murals in Southern California. Unlike Rivera and others of the period, he painted murals of serene beauty, rather than for political impact. In these works, remembrance and honoring of indigenous Mexican people and landscapes is elevated to monumental scale.

The “Mexican flirt” was not just in California and the American southwest; it was all over the country, possibly ignited by the swashbuckling 1920 Douglas Fairbanks silent movie The Mark of Zorro, and spurred on by the many hispanic musicians and actresses (including Dolores del Rio, whose portrait as an 11-year-old is shown above) who were suddenly in high demand across the country. Appreciation and demand for Mexican Modernist style of artwork followed in their footsteps.

In the US, except for the occasional masterclasses, Ramos Martinez never returned to being an art educator. He became a prolific painter and muralist for the rest of his life.

Change in artistic style

All of Alfredo Ramos Martinez’ paintings before his move to California had been but a prelude to what he achieved after the move, when his artistic style and subject matter significantly and abruptly changed.

Does the following image look familiar? It is a painting that Ramos Martinez made very shortly after he moved to California. This painting recently sold at a Sotheby’s New York auction for $352,800 USD. It doesn’t look much like any of his previous paintings, but it is very typical of his later works.

Throughout his career, Alfredo had not tried to make his works “challenging” to viewers. He was not a Realist, in the 19^th century art movement sense epitomized by the works of Courbet, Millet and Manet, but he was realist in the sense that he wanted the viewers of his work to instantly recognize the subject matter if not the subtle meanings of his paintings. After the move to California he immediately began to feature indigenous subjects in his works, and began making his paintings appear deceptively simple, described by detractors as cartoon-like in their apparent naiveté.

Here is how the Alfredo Ramos Martinez Research Project describes his paintings and murals after his move to California:

Ramos’ simplified forms bathed in resplendent color rivaled Gauguin in their luscious representation of the feeling of life itself. Yet each composition adhered to a rigorous unity of form. The work has a strong decorative quality, but with no wasted space and every line rich with meaning. In essence, Ramos had taken the Mexico of his youth, informed by his vision of its indigenous heritage, and filtered it through his response to the here and now. In Los Angeles, a blossoming urban metropolis – “a city without a past” – Ramos mined his rich history to create canvases of striking modernity.

Additionally, the artist’s maturity and sophistication, forged by his years in Europe and friendships with noted artists and intellectuals, prepared him for the evolving sensibilities of California and Hollywood. With the petty political rivalries of Mexico behind him, Los Angeles became a fresh creative space. …

By distancing himself from Mexico … and from an environment that is slowly becoming more narrow under the weight of self-interests, Alfredo Ramos Martinez creates a new Mexican art drawn from the Mexico of memory but enriched by his understanding of a cultural past (Europe) and a new cultural space (Los Angeles). That understanding of a past within a present that looks forward is what Ramos’ work reveals. Modern and modernista, the world we find in Ramos Martinez’s work takes Mexican art past its borders and toward a new universal space.

And returning to Gussie Fauntlery:

Away from the … politics of Mexico City, the forward-looking lifestyle and Art Deco architecture of southern California inspired Ramos Martinez and allowed him to quickly shed his earlier, European-leaning approach. In Los Angeles, his painting took on a bold, graphic style with the sophisticated colour pallet, stylized, angular shapes and monumental sense of volume and mass, even in portraits of small scale, for which he became known.

Ramos Martinez’ subject matter shifted as well, turning more fully toward the people and landscapes of Mexico, the home to which he always intended to return. His paintings often featured large-scale, striking portraits of indigenous women, fruit and flower vendors, farmers and other working people, and floral still lifes.

I suppose that it is possible to argue that Alfredo Ramos Martinez was just catering to American tastes and market demand by creating beautiful, unchallenging, and seemingly-simple works. But the consensus of art scholars seems to be that that it was a sincere change in the artistic vision of a master painter. Personally, I wonder if besides the influence of moving to Los Angeles, his many years as a teacher and mentor to indigenous people and mestizos who had had no previous artistic training had been a two way street which laid the foundation for the transformation

I think that he may have been learning from them, just as they were learning from him. In effect his students may have helped Alfredo Ramos Martinez unlearn much of his European fine art training and begin to create works that were honest folk art (also called “primitive”, “naïve”, or “self-trained”, but as a folk art collector myself I don’t like those names.) Becoming estranged from the contemporary Mexican modernist mainstream, a genre which he had pioneered, and going into self-exile from his homeland, may have been necessary ingredients in enabling him to put his deepest emotions and love for Mexico, and especially for its indigenous people, into his paintings.

Unlike most other post-impressionists, his later oil paintings were not done with loose, spontaneous brush strokes. They were carefully crafted works that had been completed in the studio – meticulously finished despite their apparent simplicity. (See Zapatistas, above, and Flowers of Mexico below.) For him, making a finished oil painting was a slow process, not a brisk al aire libre experience of documenting one’s impressions.

In the 1930s he scaled back his production of those oil paintings and began devoting most all his attention to his beloved fresco murals and to his long-time love of painting works on paper using charcoal, Conté crayon, pastels, gouache, tempera and watercolours. One format that he used frequently was to make the paintings on newspaper. He had first done that back in his learning days in Paris, when during a creative frenzy he ran out of blank art paper on a weekend. In the 1930s he returned to it, not out of desperation but as an artistic choice.

I can’t be sure about his earlier life, but in his later years Alfredo Ramos Martinez was a devout Catholic. While working on the fresco murals for the Santa Barbara Cemetery chapel he would pray in the chapel for extended periods of time before beginning to paint. I presume that was part of his usual routine before painting. While he was making the frescos the chapel was not closed to the public, and his working on them was attracting sightseers. María would to stand guard outside while he was praying to make sure no one interrupted him.

Many of his drawings and paintings in the 1930s and ‘40s were religious icons.

When they had moved to Los Angeles in 1929 Alfredo and María fully expected it to be a temporary stay. But except for two return trips to work on mural commissions (one of which was for the Ministry of Education) Alfredo lived the rest of his life in the United States.

Last project and legacy

Alfredo Ramos Martinez died unexpectedly in November 1946, just four days before his 74^th birthday. At the time he was working on a 100-foot-long (over 30 metres) mural called Los Vendedororas de Flores (the flower sellers) for the Margaret Fowler Memorial Garden at Scripps College in Claremont, California. As an additional memorial to him the mural has been left uncompleted. As you might guess, preserving the incomplete parts of the outdoor fresco is more of a challenge for art conservators than preserving its completed panels:

The following photo features one of several incomplete panels in the mural that show all of the layers in Ramos Martinez’ buon fresco technique:

The process for making traditional fresco murals has been updated over the years, in some cases by basically using the same process but incorporating newly-developed materials and methods, but also by making fresco secco (painting on the surface of dry plaster). For his murals Ramos Martinez chose to use the same authentic buon fresco (true fresco) method that the Romans used 2000 years ago and which Italian renaissance artists like Giatto had revived in the late 13^th century.

It was the same process that which the Egyptians and Minoans had used as far back as 2500 BCE, but for Ramos Martinez it might be more relevant that it was the same process that and which the ancient peoples of Mesoamerica such as the Aztecs and Maya had invented independently.

Here is how Ramos’ Los Vendedororas de Flores mural was made, as explained by its conservator Aneta Zebala:

On the wall to be painted, skilled plasterers first applied a rough layer of lime plaster mixed with large granules of sand. Called the “arriccio,” this layer was allowed to dry.

Next, the artist drew a very rough sketch or guide on the arriccio called the “sinopia,” named after the dark red earth pigment used to paint it. The sinopia helped in guiding the layering on of the last coat of fine plaster, the “intonaco.” The intonaco was laid on in small patches, just the amount that an artist could finish painting on in one work session. The artist would paint onto the wet intonaco layer with water-based pigment, remembering the outlines of the sinopia hidden beneath the fresh intonaco. When the plaster and pigment set and dried, the painting became permanent.

Google AI explained to me how the process works chemically: “Lime plaster, composed of calcium hydroxide reacts with carbon dioxide in the air as it dries. This converts the plaster into calcium carbonate, a form of limestone, which acts as a natural binder that fixes the pigment in place.” In buon fresco, the pigments in the water-based paint migrate below the surface into the wet intonaco plaster, not only binding the painting to the wall better but also making the painting itself part of the hard calcium carbonate wall material.

Because the plaster must be wet when it is painted, the artist can only paint one area of the image at a time; often only a single face. The fresco image is planned with this in mind. And mistakes are nearly impossible to correct; the area must be allowed to dry, and then the hardened plaster is chipped off, replastered, and the artist starts over. It is a challenging, high-pressure technique.

Remember, it was Alfredo Ramos Martinez who had encouraged the “Ministry of Public Education” to use buon fresco murals to commemorate Mexican heritage. Although the Ministry turned to the Diego Rivera and other artists who were more willing to deliver the heavy-handed propagandistic messages that they wanted, those murals made using this ancient technology and painted in their variation of the artistic style which Ramos Martinez had pioneered became the defining image of Mexican modernism for most people.

When the gringos began their “Mexican flirt” the 1920s, both murals painted in that style suddenly became very popular in the US. During the Great Depression, when the Roosevelt government launched the Works Progress Administration to make work for people, and that included projects for artists. Because of the influence from Mexico, for a decade American murals and the social realist style that had typified those works in Mexico, became a frequent feature in both new and renovated public buildings (although most of the American-made murals were actually the less durable fresco secco, painted on the surface of dry plaster, or were large oil on canvas or wood paintings.)

This influence has continued to this day, especially since the 1960s and ‘70s when outdoor murals (and graffiti) were revived as a medium for public art, albeit not in the form of frescos. Ramos Martinez’ influence is most directly seen in the mural art of the Chicano Movement, where such public works are a particularly important form of cultural expression and affirmation of cultural identity. Here is a large indoor acrylic-on-wood mural at the Dallas Latino Cultural Center painted by Judy Baca:

One still sees Chicano murals that make political statements, but rarely with the masculinity and in the social realism style of the ones that were painted by Diego Rivera and most other Mexican artists in those earlier times. Much more common are murals and other Chicano artwork that follow Ramos Martinez’ typical style of lovingly celebrating Mexico’s people and culture

Alfredo’s wife María was not an artist herself before or while she was married to Alfredo, but after he died in 1946 she basically took over the family business, both to keep his work alive and to provide an income for herself and their teenage daughter. Actually, on the commercial side of things, María had been running the family business ever since they were married. According to their daughter: “Fortunately for the family, my parents tended to complement one another. Thus, father had no interest in nor aptitude for business matters. But mother was able to handle this task with competence.”

After Alfredo died, besides arranging for memorial art shows and continuing to work with her late husband’s agent/dealer to sell his remaining paintings, María learned the art of serigraphy (which was then a newly-invented form of artistic silk-screening) to produce her own prints of Alfredo’s works.

In 1947 she set up a print studio in her garage, having been taught how to do serigraphy by the American painter Guy Maccoy who had been the first artist to use that process for limited edition artist prints. Serigraphy is complex and time-consuming. She used as many as 64 screens for one print, and 37 for another. They were printed onto special handwoven paper, but they were sold to the public at memorial exhibitions for as little as $35. (If in good condition, her prints now sell at auction in the $600-$1200 range.)

The following serigraph was printed by María Sodi de Ramos Martinez in 1949. Like all of her works it is based on a painting by her husband:

Maria only made her serigraphs for about five years, but her influence on the Los Angeles artistic community didn’t stop there. According to this article by art curator Rachel Heidenry, in 1951 María had a role in helping art teacher Corita Kent learn how to do it, who in turn taught serigraphy to Sister Karen Bocallero. Bocallero “went on to co-found Self-Help Graphics — the influential organization that brought printmaking to the Chicano/a and Latinx communities in East Los Angeles and helped launch the careers of countless artists and activists.”

Serigraphs as well as murals were among the initial media of the Chicano artistic renaissance. Together with inspiration from the Black power movement, that artistic trend sparked the rise of the Chicano political and social justice movement in the 1960s. According to its Wikipedia entry, the Chicano Movement:

… worked to embrace a Chicano identity and worldview that combated structural racism, encouraged cultural revitalization, and achieved community empowerment by rejecting assimilation. Chicanos expressed solidarity and defined their culture through the development of Chicano art … and stood firm in preserving their religion.

In 2009, The Alfredo Ramos Martinez Research Project was founded by Alfredo and María’s late daughter María (whose married name was Maria Martinez Bolster), the late art historian Prof. Margarita Nieto who was Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at California State University, and Louis Stern who was the art dealer who represented Alfredo’s estate and is now recognized as the leading art expert for authenticating his works. According to the Project’s website:

The mission of the Research Project’s Executive Committee is to protect the artist’s legacy and to advance the understanding and appreciation of the artist whom many have deemed “the father of Mexican Modern Art.” The Committee is currently overseeing the preparation for the catalogue raisonné of the paintings and frescoes. The catalogue raisonné of works on paper will follow.

Alfredo Ramos Martinez is remembered and cherished by Mexican and Chicano art historians as the Father of Mexican Modernism, but he is clearly not among the Mexican artists whose works are currently well-known by the general public or valued most highly by collectors. The would be the los tres grandes, Frida Kahlo, and a few other more recent Mexican artists. But artistic tastes and preferences change over time, and artists who were famous in their own time sometimes become forgotten and then long after their deaths can return to popularity and acclaim. That happened with Rembrandt and Vermeer. My research, reported above, suggests that Ramos Martinez deserves much more public recognition and praise than he now receives, an my guess is that he will someday get it.

More Ramos Martinez paintings

If you want to see more works by Ramos Martinez besides the ones that I have used to illustrate this essay, there are three authoritative galleries that have been compiled by the Alfredo Ramos Martinez Research Project. Two of them show the difference between Alfredo’s pre-1930 style and the paintings he made after his move to California in late 1929. When known, the date when the painting was made is given, but they are grouped by subject matter, not chronologically. The Project also has a gallery with beautiful photos of selected Ramos Martinez frescos.

There are also many other galleries and individual Ramos Martinez paintings online, and I drew from several sources for the photos of them in this essay. One way to find some good sources is to click on my “image source” hyperlinks.

But I’m not quite finished showing you pictures myself yet. Here are three more of Alfredo’s that I found particularly interesting:

Flowers of Mexico
In June 2007, Ramos Martinez’ large-scale (over 160 x 112 cm; 63” x 44”) ca. 1938 oil-on-canvas painting titled Flowers of Mexico by Alfredo Ramos Martinez sold at a Christie’s New York auction for over $4 million USD. As with all Ramos Martinez paintings, it was originally titled in Spanish – Flores Mexicanas – but Christie’s sold it under the English translation and that name seems to have stuck. Because of the record sale has become one of the artist’s most famous paintings.

The painting had originally been acquired from the artist by Mildred Strong De Mott, who along with Abby Aldrich Rockefeller was one of Ramos’ earliest patrons after he moved to California. She had previously commissioned him to make a fresco for the living room of her home Rancho Yucca Loma in the Mojave Desert, which she shared with Mrs. Gwendolyn Boynton Behr, with whom she had been inseparable friends since their school days together.

The name of this painting suggests more layers of meaning than you might expect, and perhaps more than its original owner knew about. The large white flowers featured in the background are floripondios (Brugmansia arborea), known in English as angel’s trumpets or judgement trumpets. Their size is not exaggerated in the painting. They are sweetly fragrant, but they also are highly narcotic and quite deadly.

Las vendadoras de flores

The above painting stood out for me during my research as being almost the opposite of both the previous one and the next one. It is described by the Minneapolis Institute of Art, who now own it, as being “not a work of art that would command attention because of its size, but the elegant composition of a procession of young women carrying baskets of flowers to market”. It is a tempera and pastel drawing on heavy cardboard and is about 66 x 84 cm (26” x 33”).

The subject matter, as a procession of workers, was a common composition in Ramos Martinez’ later frescos and paintings. This is just one representative of that motif.

Flores Mexicanes
I think that the Ramos Martinez painting that I came across in my research with the most interesting backstory is another one by the same name, but in its original Spanish.

This is a large piece that Alfredo began painting in about 1914 during the revolution, but he did not complete it until 1929. It was the last work that Ramos completed before he and his family moved to California, and his last work to show such a clear European influence. He sold it to the Mexican President Emilio Portes Gil, who had it mounted in a sumptuous gilded frame and gifted it to the aviator Charles Lindberg on the occasion of his marriage to his wife Anne (whose father was the Ambassador to Mexico.)

When I say that the painting and its frame are large, I mean very large – with its frame it is 9 feet tall and 12 feet wide! (about 2.75 x 3.66 metres) Watch this brief one-minute YouTube video.

The painting proved much too large for the Lindberg home so they, in turn, donated it to the Missouri Historical Society. There it remained off view and was soon forgotten. It probably would have been deaccessioned by the history museum’s curators because of the storage space it took up if it had not been for its connection to Charles Lindberg.

Later art scholars knew about the enormous work from photos of it in Ramos Martinez’ studio, but they did not know about its sale to the President or what had become of it. It was considered to be a lost masterpiece. The painting was variously interpreted as being a depiction of the variety of races that comprise modern Mexico, or as an allegory of the four seasons. No art historian thought to look for it in the backrooms of a Missouri history museum.

Only fairly recently was the painting’s location discovered, and it has been brought out of storage, cleaned and restored. It currently serves as the centrepiece for a travelling exhibit called Flores Mexicanas: Women in Modern Mexican Art. In that show, paintings by Frida Kahlo and los tres grandes artists take second place to several of Alfredo Ramos Martinez’ paintings.

Hopefully, the discovery of this major lost work, even though it doesn’t represent his mature artistic style, will spark a reconsideration of Ramos Martinez’ importance as a post-impressionist artist who began his career by bringing modernist art to Mexico, where it took roots and became an important part of their national identity, but who really only realized his own true artistic self in the last 16 years of his life.

Coming up:

None but the Brave Deserve the Fair, a 356 piece push-fit, line-cut puzzle that is probably over 100 years old.

• Puzzlemaker – Artifact Puzzles (US); designer – Matt Lyon

• Image – María entre las flores, by Alfredo Ramos Martinez ca. 1930

• 245 pieces 30 x 25 cm (12” x 10”) 2.6 cm²/pc 5mm hardwood-clad poplar

• Floral irregular edge; nine figurals (two 2-piece); knob connectors

With its beautiful colours and irregular floral edge, this was a very fun puzzle to assemble. Its image is a ca. 1930 painting by Alfredo Ramos Martínez (1871-1946). I had not heard of him before, so of course that led me into online research. There I found many sources of information and it really piqued my interest in the subject of Mexican modernism, a subject about which I previously knew almost nothing.

While Diego Rivera, Freda Kahlo and others are more famous now, he is the artist who is considered to have been the “Father of Mexican Modernism” because of the considerable influence he had on his contemporaries and on Mexican and American Chicano artists who followed after him. His career arc proved to be a very interesting story.

Puzzle assembly

I got fascinated by my research, and carried away with writing about what I was learning. That made my biographical essay about the artist long - very long - so much so that I have to post my essay in two parts. I have already looked into Artifact puzzles in considerable detail in my postings 44-46 so I’ll just give you the illustrated assembly walkthrough of the puzzle without commentary. Suffice it to say that this 245 piece puzzle fully lives up to the company’s very high standards that I reported about in depth here.

The completed puzzle:

Alfredo Ramos Martinez

The artist’s early years

Alfredo Ramos Martinez was born in 1871, the ninth child in a middle-class family who lived in Saltillo in northern Mexico. (Note: Ramos is his paternal surname and Martinez is his mother’s. In the Mexican tradition both “Ramos” and “Ramos Martinez” can be used as his last name.) The family made and sold sarapes as well as highly decorated clothing of the sort that is worn by matadors and mariachi performers.

I could find no clear evidence online that the Ramos Martinez family was mestizo (of mixed Spanish and indigenous ancestry), but I think it is almost certain that they were. The relevance of Alfredo’s racial identity will become apparent later in this essay.

Estimates of the number of old Mexican families who now identify as mestizos range from 70 to 90%, but in the 19^th century that figure would have been lower even though the proportion of actual mestizos would have been higher. Recent DNA studies of the mestizo population indicate that the typical proportion of indigenous ancestry is in the 80% range.

As in the US and Canada, Mexico has a long history of marginalization of, and racism against, its indigenous people. Most mestizo of earlier generations were motivated to exaggerate their Spanish bloodlines, or to entirely deny/ignore/forget their indigenous forebears. And in fact, this tendency to identify such people primarily with their the Spanish aspects of their culture is continued today by identifying them as being “hispanic” or “latino/latina.

When not telling children about the indigenous aspect of their heritage wasn’t inadvertent oversight it may have been purposeful erasure of the past to enable the children to grow up with more self-esteem; there was also prejudice against the very culture of the indigenous people. That was certainly the viewpoint promoted by both the Catholic Church and the Mexican educational system at that time. Thus, if the Ramos Martinez family was indeed mestizo it is very likely that Alfredo was raised with more awareness, understanding and appreciation of the Spanish part of his heritage than of his indigenous roots.

In 1880, when the artist was still quite young, a portrait that he drew won first prize at an art exhibition in San Antonio. The exhibition had not been intended for children, and the prize was a scholarship to attend the prestigious Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. (Also known as Academia de San Carlos, it is the oldest national art academy in the western hemisphere.) The submission had been mailed in and the jurors must have been quite surprised when they learned that their best-in-show artwork had been painted by a nine-year-old! (Unfortunately I cannot find photo of that painting.)

Alfredo was much too young to begin studies there, so the scholarship was deferred until he finished high school. In the meantime, his parents recognized the promise of his exceptional talent and began planning ways to facilitate his attendance there. The solution was that the large family and it’s fabric and clothing-making business moved to Coyoacan, a town that was then on the outskirts of Mexico City which had a tramway connecting it to the heart of the city where the school was.

Alfredo spent eight years as a student at the Academy, but from the beginning he rebelled against its institutional bureaucracy, rigid schedule, and later, it’s narrow focus on the international Academic style of art. He often skipped classes when he thought that outdoor activities, weather and lighting conditions were more conducive to sketching than than being in class. It was probably only recognition of his intrinsic talent that protected the rebellious adolescent from being kicked out of the school.

Most of Alfredo’s fellow students at the expensive National Academy would have come from wealthly Spanish-descended families. All would have been male. I don’t know how they treated the mestizo scholarship kid. He doesn’t seem to have made any lifelong friends in the eight years that he was a somewhat troublesome student there. And I don’t know what to make of the fact that the remained a student there for eight years. I found no commentary that online, but I have not tried to get access to his written biography or the academic art and history journal articles about him.

Being a student at the Academy gave Ramos Martinez valuable training in principles of composition, an understanding of how to apply scientific colour theory to his works, other training that the demanding academic style of painting required, and lots of experience applying what he learned and getting observant feedback about the things he drew or painted.

He especially appreciated the access being a student there gave him to the art journals in the Academy’s library. It is from them and his fellow students, not the academic training itself, that he learned about the seismic changes that were then taking place in the European art world. Alfredo became excited about impressionism and its modernist offshoots, and especially about what the French called en plein air painting. Creating painting outdoors in their natural lighting and weather conditions, and leaving the work in what academic painters considered to be an unfinished state, was initially promoted in the 1820s to ‘50s by a movement that came to be known as the Barbizon “school” after the region in France where it became very popular. That style of painting became an important component of painting Impressionist outdoor scenes.

Alfredo eagerly sought information from students and faculty members who had been to Europe about all aspects of modernist thought, and he learned to read and speak fluent French while doing so. Alfredo longed to go to Europe to study the works of the old masters as well as the modernist painters, but his family were not wealthy enough to support that ambition.

Then, in 1899, while he was still an Academy student, he was commissioned to create a set of hand-painted menus and placemats for a dinner hosted by Mexican president Porfirio Diaz. One of the attendees was Phoebe Apperson Hearst, the wealthy mother of the even-more-wealthy newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Mrs. Hearst was very intrigued by his artwork and asked to meet the artist.

The president arranged for that, and when she met Alfredo she was so impressed with him that, not only did she buy all of the paintings that he had on hand, she said she would become his artistic patron. She promised to pay for him to move to Paris. and give him a monthly stipend of 500 francs to live there (today worth at least €2000-2500 in purchasing power!) until he had established himself as a professional artist.

Nine years in Europe

Thus, in 1900 Alfredo Ramos Martinez achieved his dream and moved to Paris. Mrs. Hearst’s generous stipend allowed him both to live comfortably in Paris and to travel and study artwork throughout Europe.

At the time, Paris was attracting modernism-inclined artists and intellectuals from many countries, but language differences and/or a narrow focus on their own disciplines often limited the circles with whom they associated. Alfredo’s fluent French as well as his knowledge and interest in all things modernist enabled him to attend and participate in discussions at various artistic and literary salons, winning him recognition and respect not only from fellow painters but also from creatives in other media.

In Paris, I suspect Alredo found that the people he met were often more intrigued by his and his country’s indigenous roots than by the Spanish aspects of his heritage. Modernists were coming to Paris from many European countries, but almost all of them were European, and the ones who came from other places tended generally to be financially well-off Caucasian people. Few of them had mixed-race ancestry.

Before long, his closest friend was the internationally well-travelled Nicaraguan symbolist poet Rubén Darío (1867-1916), who was of mixed African and indigenous heritage. Darío was also already established as a Spanish-language “modernisimo” literary giant. He was also the natural leader of one of Paris modernism’s highest social circles of creative people, and his gregarious personality complemented rather than matched that of the quiet young newcomer from Mexico.

In Paris, it was through Darío that Ramos Martinez got into the same social circle as the painters Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Joaquín Sorolla and Henri Matisse, as well as the sculptor August Rodin. It was also through him that Alfredo became friends with the dancers Anna Pavlova and Isadora Duncan, and symbolist poets like Paul Verlaine and Remy de Gourmont.

Darío would entice his creative peers to join him in enjoying (and creating) the city’s legendary bohemian bon vivant artistic lifestyle, with excursions to the city’s intellectual salons interspersed with the City’s exhilarating nightlife. Besides the in that his friend gave him with those creative individuals, Darío’s “spontaneity, enthusiasm and knowledge about art, philosophy, music and literature were undoubtedly not only an influence, but also a model for Ramos.” (Unless otherwise stated, all quotes in this essay are from his biography on the website of the Alfredo Ramos Martinez Research Project.)

In the decade that he lived in Paris under Phoebe Hearst’s patronage, Alfredo thus lived in the midst of modernist sophistication in a way that he could never have dreamed of when he had been in Mexico. Of course, the flashy lifestyle of all those creative people would now all be long forgotten if it had not been accompanied by them having used that life to inform and nurture their artistic impulses and experiment with avant-garde creativity. Ramos must have learned how to do that too, even though he had not primarily come to Paris for the lifestyle but to learn from the works of the European artists he admired.

With Darío, Alfredo travelled to Holland to study the works of Rembrandt and Van Gogh. On other season-long field trips they went to Spain and Mallorca together where I wouldn’t be surprised if there they discussed the cultural features that they recognized as dominating his own nations’ mixed-race cultures. That may have given both of them insight and appreciation of indigenous cultural features that made their own homelands’ culturally distinctive from Spain, and may have planted the seeds for Alfredo to later realize that a true Mexican style of modern art would have to look and feel different from European modern art.

There is no record that Ramos ever spent any of Mrs. Hearst’s money on art lessons, and certainly not at Paris’ Académie des Beaux Arts, although he did spend “a period of time” (some sources say it was measured in months) in solitary meditation at a Carthusian monastery on the Island of Mallorca. Besides his trips with Darío to the northern Low Countries and to Spain, he also travelled to Germany, and of course, to Italy to study and learn from the paintings by their old masters. He applied what he learned and continued to develop his own artistic style, although it was still more like European modernism than anything distinctively Mexican.

In his early years in Europe Ramos’ palette had been “dominated by umbers and sepias, underscor(ing) the artist’s sensitivity not only to the environment, but also to the harsh poverty endured by a people who live off the land and the sea.” But a new expanded palette emerged, “infused with oranges and blues, cast in golden light”. His subject matter changed too. Inspired by the works of Claude Monet he began to paint landscapes, and before long, inspired by Jean-François Millet and Jules Breton he would depict farmers and day laborers at work in fields.

I suspect it was the renaissance religious paintings that inspired him to begin painting many nominally secular scenes of mothers lovingly holding their babies, but with a look of sadness in their eyes, that became forerunners to later works that he would explicitly title as Madonna and Child.

Paul Gauguin had moved to Tahiti shortly before Ramos arrived in Paris so he never met that artist, but there is no question that Alfredo was well aware of his work and was greatly influenced by it. Like Gauguin had done before him, he travelled to the rugged northern coast of Brittany to spend a summer painting landscapes and portraits of the rural people there.

Later, learning from the paintings that the artist sent back from Tahiti, he adopted a similar stylistic approach in depicting both landscapes and indigenous subjects, with flattened figures in strong non-naturalistic colours. Ramos’ paintings did not aim to copy Gauguin, but he was learning from him, as he was from the old masters. According to his friend the poet Rubén Darío (who, like all Paris intellectuals in those days, was also an art critic): “Ramos Martinez does not copy, he interprets; he understands how to express the sorrow of the fisherman and the melancholy of the village.”

Growing recognition

In 1905 Ramos began exhibiting in Paris’ then-new annual art exhibition the Salon d’Automne, which was established to be a major display venue for modernist art, and was already beginning to compete in prestige with the academic painter’s annual Salon de Paris which 25 years after the rise of Impressionism still did not welcome avant-garde styles of art and subject matter.

The timing of the upstart exhibition in the Fall was not accidental. The conservative Paris Salon was held in the springtime, to be a display venue for the new works that artists had been painting in their studios over the winter: The Salon d’Automne was timed to feature the new plein air works that had been made during the summer.

In 1906, Ramos Martinez’ painting Le Printemps was a big hit with both the public and the jurors at the Salon d’Automne, and it won the first-prize gold medal. I cannot find a photo of Ramos Martinez’ painting, but it is described here as a landscape painting of women participating in a rite of Spring. Much of his work at that time is described as having “dark sensual women evoking the decadence of fin de siècle sensitivity” and “with their dark eyes, luminous skin, half veiled faces and lustrous hair, they embodied a dangerous sexuality that seemed to balance or, in some cases, defy the dancing sprites of his mythological landscapes.”

I presume that giving his painting the same French name as Sandro Boticelli’s famous renaissance masterpiece, which Ramos had seen at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, is no coincidence, and was intended to inspire viewers to interpret this new work in eh context of that one. As a reminder, below is Boticelli’s La Primavera, known in French as Le Printemps:

For Alfredo, the unfortunate result of this winning the gold medal at such a prestigious exhibition was that Phoebe Hearst determined that her protégé was now a flourishing artist and capable of living off his works, and she discontinued her monthly stipend. She seemed pleased with his success but perhaps she misunderstood the marketplace for modernist paintings in Paris.

While art critics and fellow avant-garde painters clearly appreciated his art, modernist paintings still did not sell well or for high prices at that time, especially the watercolours, tempuras, gouache and pastels on paper that Ramos favoured. Also, while Ramos was maturing as an artist, he was soft-spoken and not a very good self-promoter, and the emerging profession of art dealers may have considered his not being European to be a detriment for selling his modernist paintings in France. According to Rubén Darío, Ramos Martinez was “reduced to working for a factory making artistic trinkets and illustrating publications for a few cents.”

With his financial ability to live the bohemian Paris lifestyle diminishing, in despair Ramos brought his portfolio to London where exotic non-European painting was more appreciated, and where there was even a prestigious Royal Watercolour Society. He exhibited some of his works at the Circle of Watercolourists and within a few days the Duke of Devonshire had bought one. That kind of patronage catches the attention of Brits, and led to a one-man show at the Carlton. Alfredo was able to continue to live in Paris for a while, although under considerably reduced income.

Ramos Martinez’ time living in Paris overlapped with that of the younger Mexican artist Diego Rivera (1886-1957) but I found nothing to suggest that they were friends or even met each other there. Rivera hung with a different circle of modernist artists, which included the likes of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Piet Mondrian and Amedeo Modigliani. By the standards of that crowd, Ramos Martinez’ artistic friends were no longer in the avant-garde.

Return to Mexico

Ramos Martinez returned to Mexico in late 1909. I could not find any explanation online about why he returned to his homeland at that time, although I suspect that topic must be extensively discussed in his written biographies. Perhaps he was disappointed in not being able to continue to maintain the bon vivant lifestyle he had lived under Mrs. Hearst’s patronage, or even was still in significant financial distress. Perhaps he was just getting homesick for Mexico and he missed his close-knit family.

Or perhaps it had to do with the changes that the heard were beginning to take place in his homeland and he wanted to be there during a particularly important time in its history. In his heart, Ramos was still very much Mexican, and the developments in Mexico at that time would have been exciting news being talked about in the Paris cafés by the politically-leftist modernists.

In Mexico there was growing political instability, labour unrest, and demands for land reform from the indigenous and mestizo (mixed race) people, and he may have recognized that the 35 year dictatorship by the Mexican President was potentially on the verge of collapse. Whatever the reason, Ramos Martinez returned to Mexico in 1910, on the eve of the ten-year long Mexican Revolution.

[Digression on Mexican politics: In order to understand the following story of Ramos’ career in his homeland it is necessary to know something about Mexico’s political governance in 20^th century. Porfirio Díaz was a Mexican general who had come to power through a military coup in 1876 and whose 35-year rule became increasingly authoritarian and corrupt.

Díaz’ power base was in the southern half of the country. In May of 1911, due to a collective uprising by wealthy Spanish-blood northern landowners (who more resembled aristocratic warlords), the President was forced to resign and flee the country. But the violence was just beginning in Mexico’s Revolutionary War. The warlords began fighting among themselves, and with support from newly-communist Russia, poor and working class people rose up against the unstable newly established regime that the rich northern landowners installed in its place.

After continuing battles between rival armies representing the (mainly white) upper caste and (mainly indigenous and mestizo) communist-backed leftists, the leftists rose to power. A new Constitution and nominal democracy was established in 1917 but Mexico still did not function as a working democracy: It operated as a one-party authoritarian state, only now run by the leftists, and then new power-struggles began between its own rival factions.

The Mexican Revolution was nominally considered to have ended in 1920, but the turmoil continued to be characterized by violent power transitions, and with the atheist-oriented communists trying to diminish the power of the Catholic church. From 1926-’29 there was another civil war in which indigenous and mezito Catholics unsuccessfully rose up against the leftist government.

After that, the PNI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) government consolidated power and there was a long period of relative stability. The PNI remained solidly in power until 2000, when actual democracy was finally exercised in Mexico’s national elections. The PNI was able to return to power from 2012-2018, but since then its political popularity has declined. The PNI still remains a major contender in Mexican elections to this day. End of digression.]

Now, back to Ramos Martinez. When he had won the gold medal the press had run with it as a national success story — local boy makes good in an important new art style called modernism. What did the Mexican National Academy have to say about his success? What could they say other than that they were proud that the training they had given him had helped him to master this new artform that seemed to be exploding in popularity in Europe. People got interested in this new way of doing art that was gathering so much attention everywhere else, and also like everywhere else, some people hated it but many people, and especially many young artists, really loved it.

Upon his return to Mexico City in 1910 at the age of 39, Alfredo Ramos Martinez was he was a celebrity and a returning artistic hero.

The Academy immediately invited him to hold a solo art show at the school. He had returned with plenty of paintings to sell. His show had 41 oils, 29 pastels, 23 watercolors, and 17 drawings – 110 works in all. (Make of those figures what you will about why he might have been returning to Mexico from Paris.)

Ramos was never directly involved in the armed conflict, but he had returned to a land that was in great change. And those changes were not just political and economic. They were also cultural. One manifestation of that was that the students and some of the faculty at the national art academy that Alfredo had attended went on strike to demand change.

The leftist students, like their contemporaries in Europe, and like Ramos Martinez before them, were attracted to modernism. They wanted the school to move beyond being a training ground for traditional European-style academic art, taught in rigid national academy style of instruction. Even the students who aspired to be academic style painters themselves demanded that it train and teach students about the modern as well as traditional styles, and the students demanded a say in who should lead that institution. The spirit of revolution was in the air, and the person the students wanted to head the school was the returned modernist hero Alfredo Ramos Martinez.

As far as I can tell, Ramos had no role in fomenting this institutional uprising, which paralleled the military and political one, although he did express support for the views of the strikers. As a compromise, in 1911 he was appointed Assistant Director of the newly renamed Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes (note that they dropped of the word “academy” from the name). Two years later, due to “significant changes in the government”, he was appointed as the School’s Director.

He immediately developed a separate school campus in Santa Anita Ixtapalapa, in the countryside on the outskirts of Mexico City, dedicated exclusively to painting outdoors and capturing the ephemeral effects of changing light, atmosphere, and weather. He named the open air school Barbizon, in honour of the French landscape painting movement that had been an important precursor to Impressionism’s en plein air, but he always referred to open air painting by its Spanish translation – al aire libre.

In 1914, after another change in government, he was fired as the Director and the open air school campus was shut down. He continued being an art educator by opening his own private open air school in Coyoacan, the town on the outskirts of Mexico City where he and his parents lived. In 1916 he established a studio on Madero Street, I presume to sell paintings made by his current and former students as well as himself.

In 1920, when the civil war nominally ended with the leftists having won, he was re-hired by the new Minister of Public Education. With generous government subsidies he restarted the open air school, and began establishing other ones in that format in locations away from Mexico City that would be more accessible for indigenous and mestizo students. No formal qualifications were required for admission to the schools, and tuition was free in what at the time was a would-be communist country. There, the teachers encouraged the students to make paintings that depicted scenes of everyday life. (One of the al aire libre students who went on to become a highly regarded professional artist was David Alfaro Siqueiros.)

I get the impression from the fact that his focus as an educator was making artistic training available for indigenous and mestizo artists that Ramos Martinez was beginning to identify more with his indigenous aspects of his own and Mexico’s heritage. It does not necessarily show up prominently in his artwork at this stage, but later his paintings that include people will almost entirely feature indigenous subjects.

Apparently, after his return from France Ramos had continued to submit works for exhibit in Paris as the Salon de Automne, because in 1913 he was recognized as an associate member of that institution, which had become (and remains today) one of the world’s most prestigious venues for display of modern art. Besides automatic eligibility for some of his own works, that status enabled him to be a juror, and to submit the best of his students’ work to Paris for exhibition consideration there.

Coming up:

Alfredo fights a losing battle in Mexican artistic politics, but emerges with distinctive new subject matter and a much more impressive personal artistic style.

Introduction

When this vintage puzzle came up for auction in July 2025 I was intrigued. It was the first time that I had ever seen a jigsaw with anything like its cutting design. I wanted it, but I could tell by the information in the posting that it was aimed at collectors, and I knew that its unique cutting would appeal them just as it did to me. I bid accordingly and was pleased to get it for £75 (about $140 Can). That means that it does not fall into the “frugal alternative” category that first attracted me to vintage jigsaws. The price of this 308 piece puzzle was roughly equivalent to that of a 450 piece StumpCraft.

Although it is branded as “The Popular”, this puzzle was made in the 1930s by Robert Plum’s unnamed company. Plum had been the puzzle “expert”, presumably meaning puzzle-maker, for The Graphic Gallery that operated out of the same address that was the headquarters of The Graphic, a weekly publication that had been founded in 1869 as a competitor to the popular Illustrated London News. In the 19^th century they expanded to also issue a newspaper called The Daily Graphic, another weekly called The Bystander, and various other periodicals.

In the 1910’s and ‘20s a number of publishers were branching out to participate in the jigsaw puzzle craze (discussed in my jigsaw puzzle history essay here). The Graphic Gallery was presumably a branch of the parent publishing company (although it is also possible that it was a separate tenant company owned by Robert Plumb but licensed to with operate under The Graphic’s branding.) For the publisher, this jumping on the jigsaw craze bandwagon gave them a different kind of product to distribute to their existing network of newspaper and magazine vendors. Graphic Gallery puzzles were a high-end product, not only because of their distinctive but slow-to-do style of cutting, but also because of their premium quality plywood and printing. They would have been among the most expensive puzzles sold by that kind of vendor.

In 1932, The Graphic and its other publications closed down, no doubt as a casualty of the Great Depression, but Robert Plumb continued making puzzles. In fact, he probably expanded his operation during the jigsaw puzzle boom of the early Depression years. (That counterintuitive phenomenon of growth in the 1930s is also discussed in my general jigsaw history essay, and also in the introduction to this post.) Plumb adopted the brand name The Expert for his self-produced line of puzzles, and its marketing featured his ten years’ experience and expertise as having been the maker of the premium Graphic Gallery puzzles.

He also made puzzles under other brand names, often anonymously, but always with the same general style of cutting and high quality, and therefore also with premium prices. My “absolutely British” puzzle branded The Popular is one of them. I don’t know why this puzzle is under such an innocuous brand name. Its cutting style, quality, and packaging and label seem to be are nearly identical to The Expert brand puzzles, and like many of those, this puzzle was sold through Boots the Chemists stores.

This puzzle, as well as Grandmother’s Garden (below) is well printed by 1930s standards, has dense (birch?) 5mm thick plywood, is very well sanded and finished, and the attractive cutting design without figure pieces has the added benefit of making assembly somewhat challenging for a puzzle of only about 300 pieces. It is hard to believe that this “Popular” branded puzzle could have been inferior in any way to the ones branded The Expert.

I could find no information indicating the scale of Robert Plumb’s puzzle-making business, but the phrase “made by experts” on the above box cover suggests that it was not a one-man operation. On the other hand, there is also no indication that the company was ever incorporated or even given a name other than that of the proprietor, so I presume that it was workshop scale of business rather than a small puzzle manufacturer. There are many jobs that need to be done well in the making, packaging, and marketing of fine puzzle. Possibly, it was a sufficiently small workshop that Plumb did all or most of the cutting himself, and the others were being recognized as also being “experts” at their roles in the company.

And I am not the only one who admires Robert Plumb’s puzzle-making. British jigsaw puzzle expert David Shearer, the former owner/operator of the British Jigsaw Puzzle Library and founder of the BCD, posted this on his The Jigasaurus website about The Expert brand: “These puzzles were amongst the finest made in Britain, rivalling Tuck’s in their quality with a superb, almost whimsical mixture of interlocking as well as push-fit cutting style.”

Assembly

I was so excited about the novel cutting design that I could not bring myself to let this puzzle ripen with anticipation. I assembled it as soon as it arrived. Despite that, I did not have a clear memory of the details of its image.

I began with only a rough sorting:

I appreciated the fact that its cutting left the faces and two prominent hands intact:

From here I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves:

The image

This puzzle’s image is by French painter and photographer Jules-Alexis Meunier (1863-1942). According to his Wikipedia entry:

In 1880, Jules-Alexis Muenier entered the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts where he studied under Jean-Léon Gérôme, now considered one of the most important academic painters of his age. In the latter half of that same decade Muenier began exhibiting his work, first at the Paris Salon with the painting Le Bréviaire, which brought him much acclaim. In 1891, he exhibited The Catechism Lesson which brought recognition from the government, which eventually purchased his work.

Many of his works depict his native Haute-Saône, where he lived most of his life. He received the Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur in 1895 and became a member of Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1921. He was a close friend of fellow realist painter Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret.

Although it is fact-filled about his roots in the Beaux-Arts academic establishment, that does not give us much insight into what Muenier was like or how he worked as an artist. But it does hint at the importance of his paintings The Breviary and The Catechism Lesson to his career. It helps to know that the Salon did not award prizes, but it was the main venue from which the country bought works of art for France’s national art collection. Having a painting bought for that was both the equivalent of winning a prize, and an indication of what avant-garde styles were becoming accepted as fine art in Beaux-Arts establishment circles.

About the above painting, The Catechism Lesson, in his 1993 book Beyond Impressionism: The Naturalist Impulse, Dr. Gabriel Weisberg wrote:

Muenier’s rapid rise at the Paris Salon, beginning with Le Bréviaire (The Breviary) in 1887 and reaching a crescendo in 1891 with The Catechism Lesson, caused considerable consternation in the artistic community. Numerous artists wondered how this painter from the provinces could complete works of such delicate precision without associating with Paris artists. Few were aware of his ties with Dagnan-Bouveret, and little was known of his training when he exhibited The Catechism Lesson at the Salon of 1891. That work established his reputation: it attracted the attention of collectors, both private and in the government.

Few realized that The Catechism Lesson was the product of Muenier’s ultimate use of photography and of his glass studio. In constructing the image, he took an extensive series of photographs of his models in a garden in Coulevon ... The existing glass-plate negatives prove that Muenier utilized photographs much like drawings. To retain all details in sharp focus, especially the flowers at the right and the background landscape, he took close-up photographs of them. Once he had transferred these elements to the canvas, he reassembled his models in the studio, where he concentrated on the tonal and color relationships that contributed to his painting’s popular success.

It is not unreasonable to think that he may still have been using those methods when he painted La leçon de clavecin (The harpsichord lesson). This puzzle’s image is a cropped version of that painting, which was displayed at the Paris Salon in 1911 and also was purchased for the national art collection. It is now held by Musée Georges-Garret, Vesoul.

Soon after that, the artist made a sequel painting for it, called The Young Artist, depicting the same elderly tutor giving a painting lesson to the same young girl wearing the same gauzy white dress and in the same room, and with her legs dangling from the same too-tall bench. Even the same kind of roses are in the vase.

The Young Artist was not commissioned for the nation’s collection, but privately, and in 2008 it was sold by Sothebys. Their catalog note for it says that both paintings probably depict their scenes taking place in the parlour of one of the chateaus of Coulevon, Muenier’s small home village in rural western France. It notes that both paintings give a believable depiction of a young girl who does not appear to be particularly enthusiastic about her lessons. (That was not meant as criticism of the paintings, but a compliment to their adherence to the principles of their artistic style. And personally, I only see the girl’s ennui in The Young Artist; I don’t see it in the face that I became so familiar with during puzzle assembly.)

It seems to me that both of Muenier’s paintings would have been seen as being very old fashioned in their time. They were in a style of painting called Naturalism which was a closely-related spin-off from Realism. Both Realism and Naturalism had been considered to be avant-garde in their time, as rebellions against Beaux-Arts and the Salon’s Neoclassicism. But that time had been from about the 1820s to the 1880s, before both were swept out of avant-garde fashion by the by sudden rise of Impressionism and the other next-generation modern art movements. But as you might expect, the older styles of art still had their fans into the early 20^th century; in act, even to this day, although they are a distinct minority compared to the Impressionists’ many fans.

The Sotheby catalog notes include a very interesting artistic analysis of The Young Artist that borrows heavily from the published reaction that some sympathetic art critics had given to La leçon de clavecin when it was shown at the Salon in 1911. My takeaway is that both paintings lived up to Naturism’s objective “to record nature without allowing any extraneous sentiment or artifice to come between the artist and the canvas. Rather, they were expected to bring all scientific and artistic resources to bear on capturing a specific moment in time within a contemporary setting.”

You can read the full Sotheby catalog note here.

Grandmother’s Garden

Introduction

This puzzle came up for auction while I was was really enjoying the experience of assembling The First Music Lesson. When I saw that this one had very similar cutting to the puzzle I was enjoying so much it immediately became a “must have”.

I put in a high bid that I figured would be sufficient, and was very pleased when I again got it for less than I expected; only £21 (about $40 Can). That puts it into my “frugal alternative” price category despite the fact that it is definitely a premium vintage puzzle. I benefitted from a number of factors that made it less attractive for collectors: It has two replacement pieces, it is not in its original box, and whoever re-boxed it had not identified the maker. They also had incorrectly labeled it as being named Grandmother’s Cottage.

The British vendor, who is very experienced with vintage puzzles, posted it with an accurate piece count, and said that it was “probably” by Frederick Warne & Co. noting its similarities to that company’s “Chandos” style of cutting, and estimating that it was probably made in the 1930s. Those conjectures both proved to be correct. After I completed my assembly, I found it listed as a Chandos puzzle called Grandmother’s Garden in a 1930s Frederick Warne booklet that is posted on David Shearer’s The Jigasaurus website

Its price at that time was 7/6, which was about the same price as puzzles of this size from G.J. Hayter’s top-of-the line Super-Cut series of Victory puzzles. Those had colour-line cutting in addition to a generous scattering of well-cut whimsies, and interlocking pieces to justify their premium price. Hayter’s standard grade puzzles of this size sold for about half that price.

Frederick Warne & Co. was a British company that had been founded in 1865, known for publishing children’s books. The company has an interesting history, including how it became the publisher of all of the Beatrix Potter’s books. But its puzzles were such a small sideline that they aren’t even mentioned in the company’s Wikipedia entry even though children’s jigsaw puzzles were sold under its name as early as the 1870s and continued into the 1950s. Making wooden puzzles suitable for adults was a short-lived complement to that in the 1920s and ‘30s. The 1930s catalog described Warne puzzles as:

A varied selection of first-class Jig-Saw Puzzles, noted for their good workmanship, and cut from the best quality wood. The pieces are exceptionally irregular, which renders the Puzzles much more interesting than the usual low-priced Jig-Saws.

Having now assembled two such puzzles, I couldn’t agree more.

When I bought this puzzle I strongly suspected that the similarity in cutting styles to my better documented The First Music Lesson could not be a coincidence. I knew that cutters frequently made puzzles on a contractual basis to be sold under the distributors’ or retailer’s chosen brand name, and figured that Robert Plumb might have done so too.

It was only after I completed the puzzle, and had written the first draft of this newsletter, that I discovered that David Shearer has recently updated his commentary about The Expert puzzles on The Jigasaurus. He has added a photo of Robert Plumb that he received from the puzzle-maker’s great-granddaughter (which I posted above), and he now says: “It also appears that they were the producers of the Chandos puzzles for Frederick Warne who were, after all, primarily a publishing company.”

Assembly

Everything I said about The First Music Lesson applies equally to this puzzle. If anything, this one was more fun to do because of its brighter colour palette. As with that one, I’ll let my assembly photos do the talking:

The image

The puzzle’s image is a painting signed WM Thompson. That would be William McMurray Thompson (1893–1967) who was an American illustrator known mainly for his wilderness landscapes as well as genre paintings such as this one. Many of his paintings were destined for reproduction as art prints, calendar art, and postcards. In jigsaw puzzles’ vintage years his paintings were turned into jigsaws by several makers, both professional and amateur, but now his style of painting and types of imagery have fallen out of fashion.

Tthere is a small Facebook gallery of WM Thompson’s work online here, and here is a much larger gallery of his prints that are available for sale. The image of this puzzle is at the more intimate end of Thomson’s subject matter, which seems to lean towards more dramatic landscapes. Although it does not show in this painting, I get the impression that he was influenced by the saturated hues, dramatic lighting effects, and idealized neo-classical landscapes of Maxfield Parrish.

Here are three other Thompson paintings:

Autumn Effect at Argenteuil by Monet

• image – Autumn Effect at Argenteuil painted by Claude Monet in 1873

• cutter – Claudia Stocken (Puzzleplex) cut on November 14, 2022

• size – 463 pieces 9” x 13” (23 x 32 cm) 1.6 cm²/pc 4+mm 3ply birch

• assembled - July 2024

Introduction

I have learned from reliable sources that over 75% of all of wooden jigsaw puzzles are sold during the pre-Christmas season. They are a splurge item to buy as a Christmas treat for oneself, and are eminently suitable to become treasured gifts for others. Most puzzle-makers try to counter that seasonal imbalance by releasing and promoting new puzzles throughout the year. Not so with Puzzleplex. Throughout their lives the current generation of Stockens have experienced the pre-Christmas puzzle-making binge, and they seem to see it as part of the normal rhythm of the year.

While Puzzleplex accepts commissions at any time, sending pre-Christmas catalogues to invite commissions from people on their mailing list is their only real marketing effort. Simon has not even updated the website that his father developed to make it more sales-oriented. As explained in Part 3 of this series, the rest of the year Simon and Claudia earn their livings as a professional bridge teacher and as an event organizer.

I commissioned this puzzle after Puzzleplex released their Christmas and Classic Collection catalogs in October 2022. Here is what I wrote in my correspondence with Simon to buy the puzzle:

I was excited to get your new catalogs. I would like to get another Puzzleplex, but this time I would like to see what Claudia’s cutting style is like. It will be interesting to see if I can recognize a difference between your cutting styles.

I am quite flexible as to what image the puzzle has and would like one that Claudia either would particularly enjoy doing, or which she has already made and knows that she of would enjoy cutting again. I would prefer one with fairly bold colours, and where the image provides some assistance to assembly, resulting in a puzzle so that is medium-hard difficulty, and in about the 300-500 (plus or minus) piece range.

I then gave a list of about fifteen paintings from the catalogs that looked appealing to me to show what kind of images I like. That probably showed my bias towards paintings by the Impressionists.

Before long I received a message from Simon telling me that Claudia had made her choice. He offered to tell me what it was, but I declined:

I’m pleased that Claudia has chosen a painting for me, and no I don’t want to know what it is yet. I hope it inspires her to cut something that she is as proud of as you are about my Renoir.

The puzzle arrived in early December. As always, there was no image on the box and the name of the puzzle was the name of the painting – Autumn Effect at Argenteuil by Monet. I was not familiar with that painting and I did not use that information to look it up online. Not knowing the image would give me the authentic heritage puzzle assembly experience.

But first, as usual for a major puzzle purchases, I then set it aside to ripen.

Puzzle assembly

I did not assemble Autumn Effect at Argenteuil until July, 2024. As I poured its 463 pieces onto my puzzle board I got the impression that they were even smaller than I have come to expect from Stocken puzzles. After assembly I did the math. Claudia’s average piece size for this puzzle is only 1.6 square centimetres – about 4 pieces per inch² – making them smaller than the range of 1.7 to 2.2 cm²/piece of my other Stocken puzzles and those that I have seen online .

In my sorting I put the potential edge pieces along the bottom of the board. I saw that there were relatively few of them, as well a there being few pieces that had slowly-sweeping curves. The non-figural pieces were generously endowed with interlocking knobs. I wondered if that might indicate that this puzzle did not have very much line cutting.

I began assembly with the usual targets of opportunity based on rare colours and obvious shape matches:

That gave me a lot of early wins with strings of edge pieces. Since I had so few apparent edge pieces I decided to look for more matches among them:

That was working out so well that I decided to try to use the classic edge-pieces-first assembly strategy. As long as I was doing this old school puzzle the old-school no-peek way, I might as well go all in with old school style of assembly:

I had been so focused on the connecting the pieces that I had not noticed the obvious that was happening before my eyes –I was assembling the puzzle upside down. Rather than reorganize the loose pieces on my board I decided to turn the puzzle around.

I suppose that I should have known that a Monet painting would have the sky reflected in the water. After all, that kind of reflection of light is his premier Impressionist talent. In fact, having done so in his 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise is what gave that avant-garde art movement its name.

Having the puzzle the right way up led me to see a tenuous puzzle connection of the light-colour island to the light sky, and placing it that way gave me the feeling that I was beginning to see the image develop.

I wondered why there was a dark blue strip in the water in front of the town. I later learned that is the water flowing in the main channel of the Seine River: the water in the foreground is the still water between two islands.

I finally completed that tricky left side of the puzzle. Claudia had included two disguised edge pieces the in which the pieces came to a point on the edge-line. That gave me the completed edge frame accomplishment that I traditionally mark with a photograph. Because I rarely do my puzzles edge first these days that usually only happens closer to the end of my assembly process.

Complete:

On the Puzzleplex website Peter says: “Simon and Claudia have now developed their own styles and manner of cutting …”. Remember, I had bought this puzzle to compare their cutting. Since this was my first Claudia puzzle I was looking for indications that might make her style different from that of her brother or grandmother. As you saw in Part 4 of this series, I had not yet identified any specific characteristics that make Simon’s style significantly different from Enid’s.

Her cutting of this puzzle certainly has plenty of very effective colour-line cutting. Below is photo of part of the puzzle in which I have pulled the piecee apart to highlight just some of it. If you look around the photo you can see more colour-line cutting around the clouds.

When I turned the puzzle over and began to remove figure pieces for the following photo and saw something that I had completely missed during assembly: hiding amongst the autumn tree foliage on the left of image Claudia had cut a large multipiece figure of a deciduous tree, and in tribute to Monet, below river waterline she has that same tree reflected upside down!

Enid’s puzzles frequently had figure pieces that adjoined each other in a line. In this puzzle, Claudia has cut four of them in a cluster:

As with my study of Simon’s puzzles, this is too small of a sample size to draw any conclusions about the the cutters’ respective variations on the Stocken style. But the large multipiece tree figure and the cluster of figure pieces are different from what I have seen in other Stocken puzzles, both my own and those I have seen online.

The painting

Autumn Effect at Argenteuil was painted by Claude Monet in 1873, four years after his season of painting with Pierre-August Renoir in and around Bougival. Between those years his world had turned upside down, mostly for the better. He married Camille (née Doncieux) on June 28, 1870, and later that same year he became a refugee from France for about a-year-and-a-half fleeing conscription in the Franco-Prussian War. That, quite unexpectedly, led both to an improvement in his financial situation and a new nautical approach to painting the effects of light on water.

Manet had met Camille, who was eight years younger than him, in 1865 when she became his model in Paris. He lived with her off-and-on, whenever he could afford to support her, and later also their son Jean who was born in 1867. They lived in various locations, often being booted out for failure to pay the rent.

The timing of that marriage was likely related both to political events and to an uptick in Monet’s financial situation despite the fact that his paintings continued to be rejected by the Salon jury. For example, in 1866 the following very large (231cm × 151cm; 91in × 59in) painting in which Camille was the model was rejected for exhibition. It’s painting technique might have been up to the Academy standards, but its subject matter was probably considered by the jury to be radical – it is an oblique representation of a fashionable Parisienne middle-class woman rather than being a portrait of a named lady with high social standing.

But among his fellow avant-garde artists Monet’s reputation was growing, and his discoveries of how to depict the effects of light were seen as advancing the state-of-the-art for oil painting. Some of those artists and friends, including Gustave Callebotte, Frédéric Bazille, and Édouard Manet, were themselves financially well-off. They would buy some of his paintings themselves, promote his work to their own clients, and even give him occasional financial patronage. But it was never enough to keep the creditors from hounding Monet; his spending always seemed to exceed his income.

Another marriage motivator may have been that Monet followed politics closely, although he outwardly kept his political opinions to himself except to his closest friends. In early 1870 he could see that the Emperor Napoleon III was about to lead France into a war with the North German Confederation, led by Prussia. Monet knew that war would bring conscription, and even if he survived it he would not be able to fulfill his responsibilities to support Camille and Jean who he both loved very much.

He had previously been drafted into the Army in 1861, and served in Algeria briefly until an aunt bought him out of that seven year obligation. That was something that was common at that time. But his father had refused to do so except on the condition that Claude could only continue as a painter if he were to restrict himself to the Academy style, and he found that condition unacceptable.

The artist knew that his previous brief Army service would not protect him from being drafted in the upcoming war. I think that he probably had already decided to leave France and go to London for the duration of the war, and by marrying Camille his family could go there together as respectable, albeit impoverished, middle-class war refugees. It was also a way to evade his creditors.

The war did begin that year – on July 19, less than one month after the were married. When conscription was announced, Monet fled to London. His refugee experience turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

In London, Monet had the opportunity to learn from the paintings of J.M.W. Turner and John Constable, and he was also was reunited with Camille Pissarro, an old classmate from their early instruction in academic painting in the very early 1860s. Together, they met and became friends with the entrepreneurial businessman Paul Durand-Ruel. A case can be made that if these three individuals had not fallen together in London the Impressionist movement might have never taken off as it did.

Pissarro had been Academy trained, but he found its narrow subject matter and artistic style stifling, so he sought separate tutoring from Camille Corot who encouraged him to paint landscapes and do it en plein air. He and Monet shared musings in London about how to promote public awareness, understanding and appreciation for non-Academic art. Upon his return to France after the war, Pissarro was instrumental in bringing together (and holding together!) the loose collective of avant-garde artists called Société Anonyme Coopérative d’Artistes-Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs et Lithographes who pooled their money and resources to organize the eight art shows held between 1874 and 1886 that have come to be known as the Impressionist exhibitions.

Paul Durand-Ruel was an ambitious businessman who was pioneering in the newly-emerging profession of art dealer. As I understand it, the concept of selling art on consignment and commission had not yet been developed at that time. So being an art dealer meant buying works of art fore resale. In Paul’s case, that had meant doing so out of his father’s print shop when he had been in Paris before his hasty flight to London. In 1870 he took those paintings to London and opened up an art gallery there. Later, besides London and Paris, he also had galleries in New York and Brussels.

Durand-Ruel’s family was well off and he was not in touch with the Montmartre scene of struggling artists. Before meeting Pissarro and Monet in London he mainly bought and sold paintings in the academic style by well-established artists, but he was also an early promotor of Corot and the Barbizon School, a movement of plein air landscape painting that was one of the most important forerunners of Impressionism. As soon as he saw Monet and Pissarro’s paintings he was enraptured by their work and saw their commercial potential.

During Monet’s one year stay in London, Durand-Ruel bought at least five of his paintings and promised to continue to buy paintings from him if they sold well. That was a major turning point in Monet’s career. Durand-Ruel’s selling of his art promoted Monet’s reputation to that of a rising artist, thus also enabling him to receive higher prices for his works even when he sold them through other channels.

The artist continued to have problems with creditors for another decade, but his new-found relationship with the businessman brought him at least some prosperity and gave his life a degree of stability. He was never again evicted from his home/studios.

Over the years, Paul Durand-Ruel’s company bought over 1000 Monet paintings! He also bought about 1500 by Renoir, 800 by Pissarro, 400 Degas, 200 by Manet, and several others by Sisley, Daubigny, Cézanne, and other avant-garde artists. Very unusual for the time, he also bought and promoted paintings by female artists such as Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt. Besides buying their paintings, Durand-Ruel gave struggling artists financial support during hard times, and he financially sponsored some of the Société Anonyme’s art shows. In 1924 Monet reminisced: “Without Durand, we would have starved to death, all of us Impressionists.”

In London, Monet also met another refugee artist, the painter and engraver Charles-François Daubigny, who shared Monet’s passion for learning how to paint the effects of light in different weather conditions.

It turns out Monet had been wise to take Camille and Jean away from Paris: The siege and battle for that city resulted in 24,000 dead or wounded soldiers and at least 47,000 civilian casualties. By mid-1871 the Franco-Prussian War was over but a new danger broke out in Paris – the Paris Commune insurrection, which happened in Monet’s old neighbourhood of Montmartre. An estimated 15,000 of its inhabitants were killed or executed by French troops.

Even after that insurgency had been suppressed the situation still looked unstable so both Monet and Daubigny decided it was still too dangerous to go back to France just yet. Instead, with their new-found financial backing they spent four months painting the picturesque town of Zaandam. There, the landscape was uncommonly flat, making the sky uncommonly large. A local art movement called the Hague School was making the same kinds of breaks from academicism that they were doing and the two artists were able to se their work in the nearby city of Amsterdam.

A painting trick that Monet learned from Daubigny was that often the best viewpoints for a landscape painting in which light reflects off water come from the painter being in a small boat, not on the shore. A boat can be anchored or moored wherever it enables the best composition for a painting, and the low viewpoint from a small craft can enable more dramatic reflections off the water. Daubigny himself had converted a small boat to be a mobile studio in 1861. Monet thought that was a great idea.

With his emerging financial stability, when Monet returned to France in October or November 1871 he was able to rent a whole house, complete with a garden, in Argenteuil. That was another town on the Seine on the outskirts of Paris that was transitioning into becoming an industrial centre because of the building of a railroad. (Remember, for Impressionists having industrial elements in their paintings was not just acceptable, it was another way to rebel against Academicism.)

He also bought an old boat, and had a shelter built on it so that it could be a mobile studio like Daubigny’s:

As far as I can tell, the image of this puzzle was among first paintings Monet that he did from his new studio-boat.

Judging by the colours of the leaves, it looks to me like this second one was painted a week or two before the one used for the puzzle. Painting the same subject from a similar viewpoint on different days is such a Monet thing to do!

Hospital at St. Remy, by Van Gogh

• image - Trees in the Garden in Front of the Entrance to Saint-Paul Hospital
  painted by Vincent Van Gogh, October 1889

• cutter – Claudia Stocken (Puzzleplex) cut on November 24, 2010

• size – 12” x 9” (30 x 21 cm) 1.5 cm²/pc 4+mm birch 3ply

• assembled - August 2025

Puzzle assembly

This is the most recent Puzzleplex that I have assembled. I bought it used from an auction in July of this year; Claudia had cut it about 15 years ago. I was very intrigued by this image of a Van Gogh painting that I don’t recall having seen before, although I did recognize that as a puzzle image it could be a challenging. To include it in this series, instead of giving it time to ripen with anticipation I assembled it almost as soon as it arrived.

I gave the pieces a more thorough sorting than usual. As had been the case with Autumn Effect at Argenteuil, there were fewer single-piece whimsies than I have come to expect from a Stocken puzzle. I sorted the other pieces by their predominant colours – reddish-brown and yellow on the right; and green, blue and turquoise on the left. The large group of dark pieces in the centre were the hard-to-categorize ones. I did not separate the potential edge pieces this time.

I began with the small turquoise group . . .

. . . and then I got stuck. I turned my attention to the reddish-brown ones. Those had a lot of edge pieces and I was pleasantly surprised when they gave me the full bottom of the puzzle. The fact that the bottom edge was only 21 centimetres (about 8½”) confirmed my vague recollection that Van Gogh’s composition for this painting was in portrait orientation.

The other pieces in the following photo are ones that had even a smidgeon of reddish brown.

Then it was on to yellow:

I took this next photo only a few minutes later, after a sudden burst of progress. No loose pieces had been added. All four of the yellow assembly islands touched upon the large reddish-brown sub-assembly that I had previously built.

My reporting above might give the impression that assembly was easy. That was certainly not the case. Claudia’s cutting of this puzzle includes much more colour-line cutting than I had experienced in any of my previous Stocken puzzles. Other than that burst of progress, it was always slow going. There were a few times when the time gap between placing pieces was so long that I had the feeling that this puzzle might prove to be beyond my assembly ability. But then the joy/relief was all that much more heartfelt when I was finally able to place a piece or even have a brief flurry of placements.

From my memory of the puzzle image I had expected yellow to be the easy part but I had forgotten that the façade of the building was broken up by tree trunks and foliage. I still had a fair number of pieces with yellow left so I continued to try to place them, as well as the turquoise ones that I took to be lower-level sky.

All along during assembly I kept reorganizing the loose pieces on my puzzle-board, usually based on fine-tuning the colour sorting. At this stage I began to segregate the potential edge pieces. In general, I don’t like to do edges first, but I can better make placements based on shape if I have more assembly frontiers.

At this stage the only loose pieces and islands that I had left were predominantly dark green or dark blue. A few had bits of brown or yellow on them but I had great difficulty figuring out where they belonged. Despite being able to complete the edge, progress was still going very, very slowly, and it continued that way until almost near the end.

And finally it was complete.

Claudia cut this puzzle into even smaller size pieces than she had cut Autumn Effect at Argenteuil. The average piece size is only 1.5 cm², or 4.3 pieces per square inch. In proportion to their 4mm thickness that makes each interestingly shaped piece seem like an exquisite little gem. But because each piece displays less colour and texture variation it also makes assembly more difficult.

This puzzle also includes a large multi-piece tree figural like the two in the more recently cut Autumn Effect at Argenteuil, and in the lower left there is another large multi-piece tree cut in Van Gogh’s contorted style. Perhaps smaller piece size and having multi-piece ones are among the features of Claudia’s cutting that Peter was referring to when he said that each sibling have their own distinctive style, but this still is too small of a sample size to draw a conclusion.

I think that despite the fact that it has only 415 pieces, this is the most challenging puzzle, new or old, that I have assembled to date. Many long periods of patient searching were needed, and I had a near constant feeling that pieces must be missing. Part of that was because of Claudia’s very extensive, and very well-executed, colour-line cutting – short stretches of it as well as long. And because of the lulti-piece whimsy trees there was even some false colour-line cutting – smooth curving cutlines that did not separate colours or textures.

As always, don’t read any of my descriptions of this puzzle’s difficulty as being a complaint. Jigsaw puzzles are supposed to be challenging, and it was very satisfying to be able to successfully complete this challenging puzzle. I don’t know if I would have been able to do so if I had not already assembled smaller Stocken puzzles before I took this one on, each one seeming to be more confounding than the ones before.

Also, I shouldn’t forget to credit Van Gogh’s painting style for some of the challenge; his short chaotic brushstrokes, and the fact that I couldn’t count on my knowledge of natural history to help me anticipate what his trees would look like. The image that grew before my eyes was a fascinating one, and very much in the painting style that we associate with that artist’s brief but very productive career.

The painting

Throughout his adult life Vincent van Gogh experienced extreme mood swings in which periods of intense creativity alternated with terrible depression and anxiety. Although it could not be diagnosed at the time, many experts now believe that he had bipolar disorder, formerly known as manic depression. But whatever the diagnosis, as his Wikipedia entry notes: “his condition was likely worsened by malnutrition, overwork, insomnia and alcohol.”

During a particularly severe depressive episode in December 1888, in which he had a fierce argument with Paul Gauguin and he could see that his dream of establishing a community for Post-impressionist artists in the yellow house at Arles was crumbling, Van Gogh sliced off part of his own left ear with a razor. His moderately prosperous ever-supportive brother Theo arranged for him to receive mental health care from the progressive mental asylum Saint-Paul-de-Mausole Hospital in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. The hospital was, and still is, housed in a former Augustine monastery about 25 kilometers (16 miles) from Arles.

Initially he stayed there only for short periods while he was having a depressive episode, but on May 6, 1889 Vincent voluntarily admitted himself there for long-term care because his depressions were coming on so intensely, quickly and unexpectedly. He was aware that he was potentially a danger to himself or others.

Although there was little understanding of mental health at that time, the hospital doctor, Théophile Peyron, was aware that although Vincent’s painting was often obsessive it also seemed to prolong his non-depressive intervals. Vincent’s own room was on the second floor of the hospital, with a view over its walls to the lands beyond. There is no hint in the paintings that he made from there (including what is perhaps his most famous painting, The Starry Night) that he was seeing the scene through a barrier of heavy iron bars.

When he felt felt it was safe to do so, he even gave Vincent the use of an extra room to use as a studio. After about five months living there, when he was clearly within an extended non-depressive period, Vincent was even allowed to leave the hospital compound to paint. That was a very rare privilege for an asylum resident, but it gave him the vantage point from which to paint the olive and poplar trees near the hospital. I presume that Vincent told Dr. Payron about the importance of colour in his depictions of his emotional response to the scenes in his paintings. This personalized approach to dealing with Van Gogh’s particular mental health issues is now considered to have been one of the earliest instances of a now-common approach to treating mental health issues called art therapy.

The image of this puzzle is one of the paintings made from outside the hospital:

And here are two more painted outside the hospital:

While living in St. Paul’s Van Gogh made many sketches and painted about 150 paintings including some of his most famous ones – Irises, The Starry Night, Almond Blosoms (painted as a wedding gift for Theo), and his Olive Trees series of which Vincent was particularly proud.

See my write-up about the double-sided puzzle Van Gogh Landscapes, here, for further information about his life there. Wikipedia has a long entry specifically about this period of his life.