Red and Golden Hues - Here Are the Most Famous Autumn Paintings in Art History

Featured image: Vincent van Gogh, The garden of Saint Paul’s Hospital (‘Leaf-Fall’), 1889, detail

A timeless subject in art, autumn has been an inspiration for artists throughout history. While depictions of this colorful season preceding the dark winter changed with time, what remained constant is the atmosphere and emotions autumn provokes, translated by artists into allegorical, realist, symbolic, and even abstract forms. 

Nature is said to be the best artist, creating canvases of eternal beauty in the landscape. However, artists integrate these images with human preoccupations such as the transience of time, the fading of beauty, and the changes provoked by industrialization. 

In numerous autumn paintings, of which a selection is presented below, the leading modern artists explored their own surroundings but also engaged in emotional travels through their psyche and feelings provoked by autumn. Some, like John Everett Millais, aimed to stoke a religious fervour by showing the incineration of leaves, while others tried to present themselves through natural motifs, as Egon Schiele in his painting Four Trees. 

Post-war modernism has brought the dominance of abstract art, but even with this style absolved of figural representation, artists managed to create works that immediately bring to mind images of autumn and its flaming colours of reds and yellows. Melancholy and the feelings of transience permeate these depictions, but colours render them warm and comforting. 

All is flux. Nothing stays still — wrote ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. The images of transience and the changes of the season reflect these philosophical ideas, with human presence, in painting or behind the canvas, foregrounding them in human experience.

Hokusai, Peasants in Autumn, 1760-1849

Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760 – 1849) specialized in ukiyo-e painting and printmaking during the Edo Period. His famous series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (1831) is among his most iconic works, with The Great Wave off Kanagawa being its most famous piece.

In this print, Hokusai presents a pastoral scene of peasants collecting crops from the field. The atmosphere is serene and bathed in autumn colours or yellows and reds, showing the artist’s mastery in woodblock printing and representing changing seasons and times.

Featured image: Hokusai, Peasants in Autumn, 1760-1849

Gustave Courbet, Forest in Autumn, 1841

Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), the famous French realist painter, caused a sensation when he exhibited a series of paintings at the Paris Salon of 1850–51. The works depicted workers and other motifs from his native Ornans that defied the genre standards of the times. 

Although recognized for his realism, Courbet was inspired in his early career by old masters’ works, and this influence is visible in Forest in Autumn. Created before his realist masterpieces, the painting relies more on an atmospheric representation of the fall than on its realist rendering.

Featured image: Gustave Courbet, Forest in Autumn, 1841

John Everett Millais, Autumn Leaves, 1855–1856

Although John Everett Millais’ Autumn Leaves were considered the perfect painting without a subject at the time, the work was later interpreted as the representation of the transience of life and beauty.

The evening atmosphere of the painting the critic John Ruskin described as “the first instance of a perfectly painted twilight,” while the artist stated later that his aim was to awaken “the deepest religious reflection” through a depiction of burning leaves (although in the painting only a smoke is visible). Regardless of the intention, the work is another perfect representation of autumn.

Featured image: John Everett Millais, Autumn Leaves, 1855–1856

Claude Monet, Autumn on the Seine at Argenteuil, 1873

Soon after he arrived in Paris in 1871, Claude Monet painted this scene of the Seine near the village of Argenteuil, perhaps from the tiny boat he had turned into a floating studio. Visible in the painting is the Château Michelet as well as other well-known buildings from this region. 

Recognized as belonging to the high period of Impressionism because of the delicate brushstrokes, the painting conveys the colours and emotions of the fall season, with Monet’s technique blurring the lines between the landscape and the water. 

Featured image: Claude Monet, Autumn on the Seine at Argenteuil, 1873

Vincent van Gogh, The garden of Saint Paul’s Hospital (‘Leaf-Fall’), 1889

In 1889, inspired by the large garden of the hospital he checked himself in, Vincent van Gogh painted this image of the autumn reverie he later named leaf-fall. 

The autumn atmosphere is suggested through colours and the leaves blown by the wind. Choosing a higher vantage point, Van Gogh decided to follow the compositional techniques of his friends Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin and Japanese prints.

Featured image: Vincent van Gogh, The garden of Saint Paul’s Hospital (‘Leaf-Fall’), 1889

Helmer Osslund, Autumn, 1907

Helmer Osslund was a Swedish painter from an artistic family. His father, Daniel, was also a painter, as was his brother Elis, while his sister Frida was an author. Osslund specialized in motifs from Lappland and often painted on greaseproof paper.

In Autumn, he painted a mountain motif from Northern Sweden, a popular source of subjects around 1900. At the same time, the country’s industrial development was underway, and the landscape became a national asset. 

Here, the autumn landscape is shown from a low perspective, inspired by Japanese prints.

Featured image: Helmer Osslund, Autumn, 1907. 

Egon Schiele, Four Trees, 1917

This stunning landscape dominated by four trees was painted by Egon Schiele in 1917. 

The eye focuses on the setting sun in the background, while the trees are evenly dotted in the foreground. The contrast between the light and dark areas was a popular technique used by Schiele, which he often deployed to present emotionally charged scenes.

The trees are interpreted as a personal artist’s reflection on how he saw himself in relation to others.

Featured image: Egon Schiele, Four Trees, 1917.

Jackson Pollock – Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950

This Jackson Pollock painting shows that autumn motifs do not need to be presented in a realistic manner to convey the mood and atmosphere of the season.

Belonging to his famous series of ‘drip’ paintings, the work was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1957, just a year after the artist’s death, showing that his art was quickly included in the art historical canon. 

Revolutionary in technique, the painting also relies on the muralism of the 1930s, including works by Thomas Hart Benton, such as America Today and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Pollock worked alongside these painters for some time, proclaiming at one point in 1947 that he intends to paint pictures that “will function between the easel and the mural. . . . the tendency of modern feeling is towards the wall picture or mural.”

Featured image: Jackson Pollock – Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950.