Nahant Rocks, 1865

Provenance

Victor Spark, New York, by 1966
[With]Sales & Rental Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri
Private collection, acquired from above
Sale, Sotheby’s, New York, September 19, 2019, lot 40
Private collection, New York

Exhibited

National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., American Landscape: A Changing Frontier, April-June 1966, no. 54.

Expressions of Place: The Art of William Stanley Haseltine, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, California, June 20—September 20, 1992; Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, January 20—April 18, 1993, no. 32.

Literature

Washington, D.C., National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, American Landscape: A Changing Frontier, April-June 1966, no. 54, p. 4.

Marc Simpson et al. Expressions of Place: The Art of William Stanley Haseltine (The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Hudson Mills Press, 1992), 24, 105, 219.

Related Works

Rocks at Nahant, 1864, oil on canvas, 22 ¹⁄₁₆ x 40 ⅛ inches, signed lower left: W.S. Haseltine 1864; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York

Narragansett Bay, 1864, oil on canvas, 20¼ x 32 ³⁄₁₆ inches, signed lower right: W.S. Haseltine; The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C

Castle Rock, Nahant, 1865, oil on canvas, 24 × 38 inches, signed lower right: W.S. Haseltine, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.

Note

Critics praised Nahant Rocks as Haseltine’s most ambitious work to date, noting its impressive scale and the natural play of sunlight and shadow over the rocks, sea, and sky. Marc Simpson, a leading scholar on 19th-century American art who has written extensively on Haseltine poises that in the artist’s best American paintings, the land formations “speak with geological truthfulness, the waves break convincingly, and a palpable atmosphere suffuses the whole.”[1] Haseltine painted the New England shore more than any other region of the American landscape during his years in this country before moving to Rome, where he resided for more than thirty years.

Victor D. Spark (1898-1991), a previous owner of this painting, was a highly regarded New York City appraiser and art dealer who specialized in Old Masters paintings as well as 19th and early 20th century art.

[1]Marc Simpson et al, Expressions of Place: The Art of William Stanley Haseltine (The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Hudson Mills Press, 1992), 24.