Title: “Dunes Under the Sun”
Artist: Anna Boch
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: (62 x 95 cm) by the Belgian painter
Collection: Musée d’Ixelles (Belgium)
What I love about this painting:
Anna Boch painted the dunes on summer day along an ocean strand. The landscape she gives us looks and feels real, as if we were walking through the dunes. She captured the soft grittiness of high-piled sand, and the hardy brown grasses struggling to conquer the dunes and reach the sun. No sooner does the grass emerge from the sand than the wind and waves bury it again. Still, the grass continues its battle. Every tough blade climbing into the sunshine is a win.
About the Artist, via Wikipedia:
Anna Rosalie Boch (10 February 1848 – 25 February 1936) was a Belgian painter, born in Saint-Vaast, Hainaut. Anna Boch died in Ixelles in 1936 and is interred there in the Ixelles Cemetery, Brussels, Belgium. She was born into the fifth generation of the Boch family, a wealthy dynasty of manufacturers of fine china and ceramics, still active today under the firm of Villeroy & Boch.
Anna Boch participated in the Neo-Impressionist movement. Her early works used a Pointillist technique, but she is best known for her Impressionist style which she adopted for most of her career. A pupil of Isidore Verheyden, she was influenced by Théo van Rysselberghe whom she met in the Groupe des XX.
Besides her own paintings, Boch held one of the most important collections of Impressionist paintings of her time. She promoted many young artists, including Vincent van Gogh, whom she admired for his talent and who was a friend of her brother Eugène Boch. La Vigne Rouge (The Red Vineyard), purchased by Anna Boch, was long believed to be the only painting Van Gogh sold during his lifetime. The Anna Boch collection was sold after her death. In her will, she donated the money to pay for the retirement of poor artist friends.
140 of her own paintings were left to her godchild Ida van Haelewijn, the daughter of her gardener. Many of these paintings show Ida van Haelewijn as a little girl in the garden. In 1968, these 140 paintings were purchased by her great nephew Luitwin von Boch, the CEO of Villeroy & Boch Ceramics. The paintings remained in the house of Ida van Haelewijn until her death in 1992. The Anna & Eugène Boch Expo opened 30 March 2011.
Credits and Attributions:
Wikimedia Commons contributors, “File:Anna Boch 006.JPG,” Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Anna_Boch_006.JPG&oldid=555267549(accessed July 21, 2022).
Wikipedia contributors, “Anna Boch,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anna_Boch&oldid=1063159988 (accessed July 21, 2022).
Wikipedia contributors, “Eugène Boch,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eug%C3%A8ne_Boch&oldid=1088797052 (accessed July 21, 2022).
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 
Perfect painting for this time of year!
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Thank you, Johanna. I thought a day at the beach would be a nice change!
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A lovely painting of dunes. It really evokes the feeling of walking through them on a hot summer day.
I didn’t know anything about this artist before. I’ll look her up.
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What little information I was able to glean glossed over her artistic talents, focused more on the traditional 19th century female artist’s role as a support person. Especially they mention her purchase of van Gogh’s “The Red Vineyard” as if that were the crowning glory of her career. It may have been the crown jewel of her collection but art historians only mention her work in passing–and while they respect it, they don’t give it the value they do her brother’s work.
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Such was life for women, especially artists and musicians, in those days. Sad really. Although we are beginning to discover them today. Radio 3 often plays music by women from the past.
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