Study of a Fern
Aaron Draper Shattuck American
Not on view
In the mid-1850s, many of the Hudson River School painters, encouraged by their leader, Asher B. Durand, fell under the spell of the English critic John Ruskin. Ruskin’s “Modern Painters” set a new standard of naturalism based not on the stagelike compositional strategies of the classical landscape, but on the fastidious pictorial replication of nature’s details. Studies like this example have their counterpart in those of other American Ruskinians such as William Trost Richards and are among Shattuck’s most attractive works (see also 65.280.2).
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