River Landscape In Summer
Artist
William Mason Brown
(American, 1828-1898)
Date1856
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsOverall, Frame: 35 3/4 x 28 3/4 in. (90.8 x 73 cm)
ClassificationsAmerican art
Credit LineMuseum purchase with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Richard M. Waitzer, Alan and Susan Nordlinger, Mrs. Kathryn K. Porter, and Art Purchase Fund
Object number91.45
Terms
- River
- Trees
- Summer
- Cows
- Sheep
- Green
- Brown
- Tan
- Yellow
- Red
- White
- Blue
- Gray
- Hudson River School
- Landscape
- Newark, New Jersey
On View
Not on viewLabel TextWilliam Mason Brown American (1828-1898) River Landscape in Summer, 1856 Oil on canvas Museum purchase with funds from the Accessions Fund and Mr. and Mrs. Richard M. Waitzer, Alan and Susan Nordlinger, and Mrs. Kathryn K. Porter 91.45-46, respectively Brown's River Landscape in Summer and its companion, Summer Pastures (above right), celebrate the unspoiled beauty and tranquility of America's mid-nineteenth-century rural landscape -a principal aim of the Hudson River School painters. Thomas Cole set the American fashion for pendant landscape paintings in the 1830s, and the convention was commonplace by mid-century. Many of these works were conceived as allegorical complements. For example, contrasting seasons or times of day might, by extension, reflect contrasting natural or emotional states. Though both of Brown's landscapes depict summer scenes, they may represent differing states of nature: the blasted tree trunk and towering, vine-tangled oaks in River Landscape in Summer may symbolize wildness or "untamed nature," while the fences and placid pastureland of Summer Pastures may signal that nature has been tamed by civilization.
1914
Pair/Pair