Painting and Sculpture

A Balloon in Mid-Air

A Balloon in Mid-Air is an 1875 aerial landscape painting by French illustrator and painter Jules Tavernier. The work is thought to be based on a gas balloon ride the artist took in October 1874 from San Francisco to the East Bay on the Sierra Nevada, a balloon operated by aeronaut Étienne Buislay of Woodward's Gardens. Buislay died in a balloon accident a week after their trip. The work was Tavernier's first major painting and first major success on the West Coast. For the next decade, from 1874 to 1884, Tavernier mostly focused on California regional art, featuring the San Francisco Bay Area, the North Coast, the Central Coast, and the Sierra Nevada. A Balloon in Mid-Air is one of more than 25 works he completed within the Bay Area series. After Tavernier's death in 1889, his work fell into semi-obscurity for over a century, but the painting received new attention with an exhibition at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento in 2014.

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See also

• ▸Cabinet of curiosities
• ▸Fan (Daoism)
• ▸American Figurative Expressionism

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Text from Wikipedia; plate via Wikimedia Commons. Text CC BY-SA 4.0; plate freely licensed (see Commons). Source record. Images and catalogue data are reproduced from open-access collections.