COLIN CAMPBELL COOPER

 SUNDAY Feature on ART of Architecture -by Gautam Shah

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Colin Campbell Cooper Jr. (1856-1937) was an American Impressionist architectural landscape painter. He was an ardent traveller, and has drawn numerous skyscrapers and urban architecture scenes of New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. He was as proficient in watercolours as he was in oils. He often created small well-detailed study in watercolour, before the full size oil painting. Cooper used both, the colour and texture with seamless transition. Cooper’s wife Emma Lampert, was herself a noted artist.

Cooper said that he was "greatly interested in the skyscraper buildings in Broad Street. It was intensely interesting to watch the freakishness disappear from those queer towering structures in the glory of the right kind of light" –  

"one of the points that most strikes me about this view up Broad Street is the dramatic contrast between the old, low type of buildings ... and the great skyscrapers. My pictures are built on these contrasts."

 

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FABIO BORBOTTONI

 

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SUNDAY Feature on ART of Architecture -by Gautam Shah

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Fabio Borbottoni (1823-1901) was an Italian Painter, mainly of urban scenes of Florence. Most of his paintings focus on architecture that was on the verge of demolition in Florence (during the decade of the 1860s -of Italian unification and statehood), He painted as a social duty to preserve the identity of Florence. He endows a romantic feel within the bare landscapes that are drawn nearly free of people. The human figure in the paintings served as a scale for lay viewers.

Fabio Borbottoni used only earth brown monochrome tones for exterior walls, floors and roads. He has occasionally taken artistic liberty and drawn his own versions of the architecture. He avoided architectural details. As an Artist, he was not a great classicist, but, sincerely achieved the aim of urban documentation. Many of his paintings were used for reconstruction, after the destruction of the Nazis, after 1944. 

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