George Henry Durrie

H.V. Weil
Mr. and Mrs. Amory L. Haskell, Red Bank, New Jersey, 1938
Private collection (by descent; sold: Sotheby's, New York, May 24, 2000, lot 103)
Acquired by the present owner at the above sale

In discussing the artist’s paintings from the early 1860’s, Martha Hutson writes, "The mainstream of Durrie's art is toward the intimate rather than the grand . . . They retain a quiet placidity characteristic of Durrie's scenes with a prominent genre element of people and animals plus the peaceful mood of a snow-covered New England countryside. As landscapes they are related to the human being and draw their charm partly from the human pleasures associated with the season. One early nineteenth-century writer summed up the attractions of winter which were so evocatively painted by Durrie. 'Then begin to dawn other delights. The bracing air, the clean snow-paths, the sled and sleigh, the revelation of forms that all summer were grass-hidden; the sharp-out-lined hills lying clear upon the sky; the exquisite tracery of trees; especially of all such trees that dendral child of God; the elm, whose branches are carried out into an endless complexity of fine lines of spray, and which stands up in winter showing its whole anatomy that all its summer shade was founded upon the most substantial reality'" (Martha Hutson, George Henry Durrie (1820-1863): American Winter Landscapist: Renowned Through Currier and Ives, Santa Barbara, California, 1977, pp. 96, 109).