Provenance

Collection of Gordon Abbott, 240 Beacon Street, Boston, Massachusetts

One of the first Americans to espouse the French Barbizon style, Winckworth Allen Gay was a celebrated Boston artist who painted in a similar manner to Worthington Whittredge. Gay was born in Hingham, Massachusetts to ‘a family long prominent in Eastern Massachusetts.’^[1] At the age of seventeen, he studied with Robert Weir at West Point and with Constant Troyon in Paris beginning in 1847. Gay subsequently made a grand tour of Europe, visiting Italy, Switzerland, and Holland and returning to Boston in 1850.

At the Boston Athenaeum during the 1850’s, Gay’s paintings were exhibited alongside works by European masters such as Millet, Hunt and Diaz as proud reminders that Boston artists were well versed in European trends. Gay also exhibited at the Boston Art Club and the National Academy and had many prominent Boston patrons. His work can now be found at The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Watson Gallery, Yale University Art Gallery, Boston Athenauem, Brooklyn Museum and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Gay was the first American to train under a French Barbizon artist^[2] and was an important figure in introducing Barbizon painting methods to America. The rich, luxuriant atmosphere that hovers over this magnificently calm stretch of coast of Nantasket Beach, 1872 and the warm, harmonious palette of soft turquoise, tan and maroon tones shows how the French Barbizon masters left an indelible impression upon the artist. Nantasket Beach also predicts the atmospheric beach scenes that Worthington Whittredge would execute along Second Beach and other locales some twenty-five years later.