Mostly known as an etcher, engraving accounted for the most significant part of Ernest Stephen Lumsden’s output.
However, in the late 1920s, due to advances in industrial printing techniques the traditional engravings market suffered a considerable setback. This new situation forced Lumsden to look in other directions, and he devoted himself mostly to oil painting. Commissions of portraits and landscapes became the recurrent subject matters in his work. As a painter he took part in a group show at the New Gallery of Edinburgh.
This particular painting belongs to that brief period in which Lumsden centred his work on portraiture and landscapes. As such, this landscape in the BBVA Collection is one of the few oil paintings ever made by this British artist.
Formally speaking, the work is fully modern, showing some of the typical features of the avant-garde, like free-flowing brushwork or the photographic viewpoint evocative of some Impressionist works.
Praised by his coevals for his technical virtuosity in and his masterful ability to capture light, Lumsden instilled this composition with a sense of originality. He placed the tree trunk in the foreground, inviting beholders to enter the landscape and, once inside it, to discover an apparently disorganised nature that directs our gaze towards the horizon.