Lot 432
William M. Hart, N.A. (Scottish/American, 1823-1894), "Crossroad by a Village", 1840s/1850s, oil on wood panel, signed "W.M. Hart" lower left, inscribed "Painted for [name trimmed away" lower right, 9 in. x 14 1/4 in., in a fine period giltwood frame, with ornamented oval giltwood liner. E3000-5000 Note: A native of Paisley, Hart immigrated with his family to Albany, where he began painting portraits at seventeen. After working (c. 1841-1845) as an itinerant painter in New York State, in Virginia and especially in Michigan, certain of his Albany patrons-for whom he had converted his artistic production to landscape painting-enabled him to spend three years in Scotland (1849- 1852); by 1854 he was established in New York City, where he was immediately elected an Associate, and then a member of the National Academy of Design in 1858. This characteristic pastoral view (whose trees and buildings prove it to have been painted in upstate New York, rather than in Scotland) is fragmentarily inscribed as a commissioned work, and thus almost certainly dates either from Hart's first period of landscape painting in c. 1845-1849, or from 1852-1854, the period of his return to Albany. This small portable panel, with its scene of rural tranquility "warmed by [the tone of sunny repose" for which Hart was consistently praised, by his contemporaries as well as by posterity (Henry Tuckerman, American Artist Life, New York, 1867, p. 547), was probably painted "en plein air".
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