River Landscape

The leading artistic personality of Boston from the Civil War years until his death in 1879, Hunt pioneered the taste for French Barbizon art that emerged in America after the war and stimulated the native movement in mural painting with his work for the New York State Capitol in Albany. He began his career essentially as a portrait painter but in his later years indulged a growing taste for landscape in oil and charcoal. This drawing represents features of one of three sites in Massachusetts at which Hunt worked in the late 1870s: West Newbury, North Easton, and Magnolia, on Cape Ann. The artist’s preference for bold, coarse charcoal rendering recalls the favored medium and technique of his friend and paragon in France, Jean-Francois Millet, while the composition reflects the screen-like arrangement in the landscapes of Jean Baptist Camille Corot.