Solitude
Thomas Alexander Harrison
THOMAS ALEXANDER HARRISON, 1893. OIL ON CANVAS.
Trained as an engineer, Harrison approached nature as a scientist, searching endlessly for something new, something unseen, that revealed truth and beauty. Spending summers at a ramshackle cottage on the Brittany coast, he would race to the dunes each evening and watch the sun set over the water, observing the colours change successively with new variations and gradients appearing each night. It was not that Harrison was a lover of nature, rather he was a lover of art and admired nature only in service of art itself. He saw the scale of the earth, and the beauty in that scale, and spent his life trying to capture it in all of its poetic light and colour. Solitude is somewhat unusual in Harrison’s oeuvre, though large in scale like the others, it appears not to be of the sea in its dramatic splendour but of a lake in its quiet tranquillity. A figure stands, nude, at the end of a still rowboat while the oar balances delicately on the surface, not breaking the water tension, and catches the brightness of the moonlight. The work is both peaceful and ominous, one sentence in a lifelong love letter to the water.