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We look across and down into a valley with a person sitting near a tall tree and a train puffing smoke beyond, all enclosed by a band of mountains in the distance in this horizontal landscape painting. Closest to us, several broken, jagged tree stumps are spaced across the painting’s width. A little distance away and to our left, the person wears a yellow, broad-brimmed hat, red vest, and gray pants. He reclines propped on his left elbow near a walking path beside a tall, slender tree with golden leaves. The green meadow stretching in front of him is dotted with tree stumps cut close to the ground. Beyond the meadow, puffs of white smoke trail behind a long steam locomotive that crosses a bridge spanning a tree-filled ravine, headed to our left. The ravine creates a diagonal line across the canvas, moving subtly away from us to our left. The train has climbed out of the valley, away from a cluster of brick-red buildings. The most prominent structure is a train roundhouse, a large building with a high, domed roof to the right of the tracks. Smoke rises from chimneys on long, warehouse-like buildings, and a steeple and smaller structures suggest a church and homes to our left. Hazy in the distance, a row of mountains lines the horizon, which comes about halfway up the composition. The sky above deepens from pale, shell pink over the mountains to watery, pale blue above. The artist signed the work in tiny letters in the lower left corner: “G. Inness.”
George Inness, The Lackawanna Valley, c. 1856, oil on canvas, Gift of Mrs. Huttleston Rogers, 1945.4.1

The Lackawanna Valley

George Inness · c. 1856 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  1945.4.1

Far below us, a river winds through a valley lined with hazy mountains in this horizontal landscape painting. In the distance, the line of mountains emerges from the left, near the top of the canvas, and marches down toward the center, growing lighter and mistier in the distance. Streaks of olive-green growth drape down their sides, and pale sunlight from the upper right warms their craggy faces, which are painted in tones of peach, tan, taupe, and parchment white with pewter-gray fissures. The mountains move across the canvas and angle way from us, to our right. There, they are overlapped, just off center, by a tree-covered slope that emerges from the right. At its foot is a steel-gray river that winds from the lower right toward the center of the composition. The land sweeps down from the left side, spreading out into meadows that meet the river. They are carpeted in moss green with streaks and patches of rust-brown earth and scattered with clusters of trees painted in tones of celery, olive, and pine green. Closest to us and near the lower left corner of the painting, is a man, tiny in scale, on a flat bluff. He wears a white coat and trousers, and sits hunched on a stool facing our left. He looks toward a grove of trees with pea-green leaves and ginger-brown trunks that tower over him, along the left edge of the composition. He has turned away from a painting on an easel that stands just beyond him, and an open wooden box that sits on the ground behind him. A closed, seafoam-green parasol also lies nearby. Just beyond the lip of the bluff and down in the valley are creamy white dots that suggest livestock. Farther back, near the foot of the mountains, a cluster of buildings sit near the tree line in the meadow. Wispy white clouds drift through the light azure-blue sky. The artist signed and dated the painting in the lower left corner, “THOS.MORAN.1864 OP.8.”
Thomas Moran, The Juniata, Evening, 1864, oil on canvas, Gift of Max and Heidi Berry and Ann and Mark Kington/The Kington Foundation, 2010.107.1

The Juniata, Evening

Thomas Moran · 1864 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  2010.107.1