Land & Sea

Artists have celebrated New England’s scenery for more than 200 years. In lush summer or frigid winter, they have depicted iconic scenes of majestic wilderness and well-organized farms, ordinary meadows and marshes, and towns large and small. Equally alluring has been New Englanders’ close relationship with the sea. With so much wealth derived from shipping and fishing, artists’ interest was inevitable.

Looming in the backstories of many paintings are the harsh realities of industrialization and urban expansion, which painters generally avoided depicting. And yet while evading those issues, in some ways these paintings underscore them. Celebrating and preserving New England’s natural beauty is of urgent concern today, a fact that makes these glimpses of the region in the past particularly meaningful.

For a closer look at the paintings in this gallery, click on the images below and use the zoom feature. Some of the paintings have even more information, including historical photographs, additional context, and a glimpse into the work of the conservation lab. (If the images or text seem too small or large in your browser, try clicking ctrl and + or – key to adjust.)

Gallery 1: Land and Sea          Gallery 2: At Home          Gallery 3: New England’s People          Gallery 4: The Wide World

View of Boston across the Flats

Where Is This?

Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow made this scene of Boston while looking west from Winthrop, probably from Point Shirley. In the twentieth century, landfill was added to the flats to create the area that has become Boston Logan International Airport. This detail of a U.S. Coast Survey chart offers a view of Boston Harbor in 1863, almost fifteen years before Longfellow painted this scene. Colored in brown, the flats are seen to the right of Boston’s historic center.

Woman Reading Under a Tree

While living in Boston in the early 1850s, Edward Mitchell Bannister could not have ignored the city’s growing fascination with the Barbizon “School” (style) of painting then being imported from France. In contrast to the meticulous detail and strong coloring employed by such then-fashionable Hudson River Valley and White Mountains landscapists as Thomas Cole and Benjamin Champney, Barbizon artists emphasized cooler and more tonally unified coloring, looser brushwork, and softer forms.

The first Barbizon painting exhibited in Boston (1853) was created by the now-forgotten Frenchman Eugène Cicéri, and the following year Bostonians began admiring the French master Jean-François Millet, whose scenes of peasants in the fields were especially popular. The vogue for Barbizon pictures gained momentum in 1855, when the talented and well-connected artist William Morris Hunt returned to Boston after twelve years in Europe, including a period of study with Millet. Hunt helped an 1858 exhibition of Barbizon paintings at the Boston Athenaeum become a huge success, inspiring both New England collectors and artists as wide-ranging in age and background as Bannister, Longfellow, and Davis—all represented in this gallery. Some New Englanders also perceived in Barbizon paintings a moral element that appealed to them; the collector Thomas Gold Appleton wrote of Millet’s paintings: “They have a Biblical severity and remind us of the gravest of the Italian masters.”

Women Reading

In Bannister’s painting, a woman reads while gentle breezes flutter the leaves and grasses around her. This scene evokes the Massachusetts poet-philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalist belief in the unity of nature and people. In Nature (1849), he wrote: “In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair… I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” Emerson’s readers, possibly including Bannister, no longer saw nature as something to be conquered, but rather something that offered peace, which this woman may well have been experiencing.

Although depicted throughout the history of art, women reading took on an urgent symbolic power in the later nineteenth century as more women demanded, and secured, a higher education. Bannister often took his art students—both men and women—outside Providence to paint and sketch outdoors. The woman seen here may in fact have been one of his students, though the flock of geese grazing at left would have inferred to some viewers that she was instead a farm girl tending them. Compare the tiny detail of the woman reading here with artist Mabel Stuart’s Portrait of Mary Elizabeth Cutting Buckingham in this exhibition’s second gallery. By situating Buckingham indoors and centering the composition on her, the artist made reading the subject of her composition, rather than an incidental occurrence tucked off to one side.

Paintings from the Eustis Estate

Bannister’s capacity to find luminosity and poetry in seemingly ordinary scenery was sustained by the younger artist Laura Coombs Hills (1859–1952). Hanging in the parlor on the ground floor of the Eustis Estate is The Shaded Stream, which she painted in her hometown of Newburyport, Massachusetts. Although Hills became better known for her pastels and miniatures, she excelled at Barbizon-inspired landscapes like this, made around the same time Bannister created his.

Learn more about The Shaded Stream below.

From the Conservator's Notebook

Historic New England objects conservator Michaela Neiro supervised the conservation treatment and stabilization of this exhibition’s paintings and frames over a period of two years. The Conservator’s Notebook features explanations and insights that Michaela has drawn from her project notebook, including close-up photographs showing how the work was done.

Take a look at the two paintings above. Both were made and framed around 1860, when this style of frame was very typical. All the decorative molding elements—the outermost bead, the serpentine braid, the incised cove, and the corner ornament—were cast out of a putty-like material containing linseed oil and whiting called composition or “compo.” The ability to cast decorative elements instead of carving them allowed for much more elaborate moldings, and several at a time, to be used on frames and thus keep costs down. Because the compo was smooth coming out of the mold, gesso and bole were unnecessary. A thin coat of oil size was brushed on and the compo could be gilded very quickly. The oil gilded areas could not be burnished, however, and therefore they appear matte. The thin strips between the different compo decorations, called flats, were made of wood coated with gesso and bole. These flats were burnished to produce a shiny contrast to the oil gilding and make for a more interesting frame.

Benjamin Champney’s Mount Chocorua has hung at Barrett House (see Forest Hall in Gallery Two) for years and now shows its age. The compo on its frame has shrunk and cracked, and the gold has worn through from years of dusting. The oil size has dried and shrunk, causing faults in the thin gold layer and exposing the tan-colored compo below. Along the bottom edge and the high spots of detail, the exposed compo has darkened with dirt. This aged surface is very typical, natural, and acceptable considering its age.

The frame for A Country Home by Shapleigh looks remarkably good for its age – and so does the painting. Over 150 years old and no wrinkles! How can this be? The framed painting came to Historic New England in 1985. Sometime before then both painting and frame were given a facelift. The painted canvas was removed from its original stretcher and adhered to a Masonite board. This is a somewhat heavy-handed treatment, but the conservator likely had few other options to preserve what must have been a very delicate painting. The frame was likely in equally rough condition. Conserving a badly damaged frame so that it maintains its appearance of age is a very time-consuming, and thus expensive, process. It’s far easier to restore the frame to its original appearance by putting new gilding over old and that’s what happened when this was restored before it came to Historic New England. It looks fresh and new and much more “golden” than the frame on the Champney. This aesthetic was likely quite appropriate for the modern home it came from, but at Historic New England, we prefer items to have age-appropriate patina.

In the video below, Michaela Neiro describes the issues on the Champney frame that the conservation team worked to address.

Sunny Morning, Gloucester Harbor

Martha Hale Rogers Harvey’s Photographs

The black-and-white photographs made by Martha Hale Rogers Harvey share the spirit of the paintings created by her husband George Harvey. Capturing picturesque aspects of life along the water in Gloucester, the Harveys were at the heart of its Rocky Neck artists’ colony, which still exists on a peninsula in the town’s working harbor. Among the talents who worked there at various times in the nineteenth century were Winslow Homer, Frank Duveneck, and Childe Hassam, yet most of the artists active there are not household names today. The six photographs illustrated here reflect not only Martha Harvey’s gift for atmosphere and composition, but also the diversity of her vision: Some scenes are as formally elegant as her husband George’s painting of a schooner, while others reveal the strenuous labor and primitive conditions endured by Gloucester’s fishermen. Particularly charming are the scene of George Harvey sitting with a cat and the snapshot catching men relaxing on a pier.

Learning to Look

Most of us first look at a painting and see the overall image. We imagine being in the place where the artist was. Has the artist captured the mood of a rainy day in the city? What was the person in this portrait like? But we can also learn something by looking more closely at what’s on the canvas. How has the way the artist applied the paint enhanced the image? How does the composition direct your eye around the scene? How do the choices this artist made relate to those made by another artist?

In the dining room on the ground floor of Eustis Estate hangs another harbor scene, Twilight Seascape, painted by Alfred Thompson Bricher, who was eighteen years older than George Harvey. Although both works date from the 1880s, the older man’s has a more traditional “Luminist” look featuring detailed brushwork and a hazy atmosphere. By contrast, Harvey’s painting features the brighter coloring and looser handling embraced by younger New England artists as Impressionism made its way from France across the Atlantic.

Learn more about the Bricher painting in the section below.

Off Nix’s Mate, Boston Harbor

Paintings from the Eustis Estate

It cannot be overstated how popular marine paintings were in nineteenth-century New England. On display in the dining room on the ground floor of Eustis Estate is another example of this phenomenon, Wesley Webber’s Along the Maine Coast. It was made approximately one decade later than George Curtis’s scene and therefore is considerably more Impressionistic in handling, coloring, and mood.

Learn more about the Webber painting in the section below.