Study at Mt. Desert, Maine, 1864

Provenance

The artist
The artist’s estate
Thomas Colville Fine Art, Guilford, Connecticut
Dr. Christopher MacLaughlin, Woodbridge, Connecticut, 1986

Exhibited

Fifth Avenue Art Galleries, New York, New York, Executor’s Sale. Catalog of Paintings by the Late Jervis McEntee, N.A. March 30, 1892, no. 92 (as Mt. Desert)

Literature

Executor’s Sale. Catalogue of Paintings by the Late Jervis McEntee, N.A.,… (Ortgies and Co., 1892), no. 92 (as Mt. Desert)

Related Work

Mount Desert Island, Maine, 1864, oil on canvas, 10 11/16 × 15 7/8 inches; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Note

Following the path of his teacher, Frederic Edwin Church, McEntee traveled to Mount Desert, Maine, with Sanford Robinson Gifford, spending three weeks sketching on the island, from July 14 to August 5, 1964.[1] Study at Mt. Desert, Maine, was painted just one day before he painted Mount Desert Island, Maine (1864; National Gallery of Art), featuring Gifford in the middle of sketching.[2] McEntee and Gifford desired respite from the turbulence of the Civil War, finding solace in the “grand panoramic view’s repose and its calming silence, far removed from the deadly violence.”[3]

[1] Ila Weiss, Poetic Landscape: The Art and Experience of Sanford R. Gifford (University of Delaware Press, 1987), 100; Pamela Belanger et al., Inventing Acadia: Artists and Tourists at Mount Desert (Farnsworth Art Museum, 1999), 89, 101.

[2] Eleanor Jones Harvey, The Painted Sketch: American Impressions from Nature, 1830–1880 (Dallas Museum of Art, 1998), 218–19.

[3] Belanger, Inventing Acadia, 105.