Another auction purchase. Another wild ride aimed at discovery. Isn’t that the joy of collecting?
How better to keep a retired old man active, alert and engaged.
One of my latest acquisitions is a large, likely unsigned oil-on-canvas riverscape painting I believe to have great potential. I snagged it at auction a couple months ago. It was described in the catalog as “American School,” and my first impression narrowed it down further. I saw it as an early Hudson River or White Mountain School work, though at the time site was not my primary interest.
What immediately captivated me was the activity it pictured. Two men on opposite sides of a raging mountain stream were retrieving fishing nets from the water. The time of year is early autumn, the place our Northeast.
Because there is no evidence of fish or a fish-processing station, in my mind, they were likely picking up for winter storage and mending. Just a guess. But one would think such nets were most likely used during the spring for shad and salmon, or, I suppose, fall Eastern brook trout spawning runs, though I have never heard of those.
My main focus was on the seines or gillnets shown. I had only read about such nets in sources like The Diary of Matthew Patten of Bedford, N.H. from 1754 to 1788, which I featured here in recent months, along with town histories from the Connecticut and Merrimack valleys. All you get is words in those accounts. No illustrations. One has no choice but to rely on imagination. Now, finally, an artist’s depiction. Akin to a photograph. A step in the right direction.
The only previous illustrations I had seen of weirs, traps, nets, hooks, sinkers, and spears came from clear across the land, displayed in Hillary Stewart’s 1977 book Indian Fishing: Early Methods on the Northwest Coast. Then, more recently, similar online images. I was forced to assume, and still believe, that the fishing practices of indigenous fishers from faraway North American places differed little from those employed here, first by indigenous people, then by European copycats.
Illustrations of such fishing activity here in the Northeast are still rare, especially early representations, which are virtually nonexistent. So, when I spotted this circa 1840 canvas depicting a fishing scene at a roaring whitewater bottleneck on an unnamed upland stream, my curiosity blossomed.
Ah! At long last, an image to work with. Let the auction bidding begin.
I knew it might represent the only chance of my lifetime to obtain such a treasure to pick at and probe. I was thus compelled to take an honest run at it, welcoming the exhilarating research I knew it would trigger. That said, there was a limit to what I could spend, and I expected the hammer price would race out of range.
Not so. I lucked out.
Shockingly, as I put in a phone bid, only one bidder seated at the auction went against me, and he didn’t hang in there long. A stroke of luck, I guess.
The date of my purchase was April 30, which coincidentally would have been my late father’s 97th birthday. Who knows? Though he was never a fisherman or historian, he may have been watching over my shoulder for that adventure. Just a fleeting thought.
Two days later – delayed a day by a late, greasy, spring snowfall I decided not to challenge – I drove to the auction house, wedged the large painting into my double-cab Tacoma’s back seats, and left it with a conservator for minor inpainting and repair. Less than a week later, the 47- by 43-inch framed painting was hanging proudly in my west parlor. Not only had I finally found the illustration for which I had furiously searched for decades. I owned it. Could study it.
The chase was on, and is ongoing.
The journey thus far has meandered up and down the Merrimack and Hudson valleys, the White, Green, Adirondack, and Catskill mountains, the upper Lake George and lower Lake Champlain country, and even rivers in western Connecticut. Who knows? The artist’s impetus way have been born elsewhere, like, say, a lower Merrimack tributary where fish runs persisted long into the mid-19th century.
The biggest problem confronting such research is the weakness of documentary evidence detailing fishing activity before and after the Revolution.
I started my research by studying topo maps and online images of suspected rivers. I found many possibilities, but nothing conclusive. I then queried river guides, book dealers, town clerks, historical societies, and even museum curators who I thought might recognize the site. I sent them images that I hoped would stimulate interest or, better still, ring a bell. Uh-uh. No one could place it.
Though I was familiar with 19th-century artists like Hudson River School founder Thomas Cole and White Mountain School master Benjamin Champney, I knew little in depth about their “schools,” which overlap. I bought books, read them, and found nothing to discourage me from digging deeper.
I then took the YouTube route, watching several scholarly presentations. Similar to the reading, I found it validating. My painting does indeed display several Hudson School characteristics, including repetitive themes and symbolism, atmospheric effects, and contemplative allure.
Attribution to a specific artist is seldom easy, however – and this is no exception. Complicating matters, I soon learned that pinpointing sites of Hudson River School paintings is not easy due to the liberal employment of “artistic license” to romanticize compositions. These artists routinely enlarged and reshaped background mountain ranges, or even moved picturesque distant peaks to backdrop a river scene where it didn’t exist.
The early Hudson River School painters were not plein air artists who set up their easels onsite and painted precisely what they saw. The best of them were academic studio painters, who routinely embarked on weeks- and months-long sketching trips to scenic places and returned to their studios to add color, atmosphere and an imaginative touch.
I had recently seen this with my own eyes, in a Charles Louis Heyde landscape a friend of mine chased at a Labor Day auction. The 1850s painting – which I believe Historic Deerfield purchased – showed a sun-splashed view from the west of the old Deerfield Toll Bridge that once stood at the present site of the General Pierce Bridge connecting Greenfield to Montague City.
Framing an upper background of light blue sky and cumulus clouds on the right side of the canvas was the distinctive profile of Mount Toby. I immediately realized that Heyde had moved it a few miles north to improve the background of his composition.
So where does this leave me in my attempt to attribute this new painting to a known early Hudson River artist? Well, I know the work came to auction from a Washington County, New York estate in the shadows of Lake George and Fort Ticonderoga. The consigner inherited it many years ago from her father, described by the auctioneer as “a well-known collector from the Albany area,” who was an active buyer between 1940 and 1980. It was he who likely paid for a professional cleaning and fitted it with an expensive, 20th-century gilt frame that cost him more than twice my auction price.
That’s the beauty of auctions. It can happen.
The consigner came up empty in a search through her father’s stored files for information. Nonetheless, given where he was from, he, too, likely believed it was of the Hudson School. Getting an attribution to one of the masters – say Cole or Durand or Kensett – is a more difficult matter, one that could invite disagreement among experts unless there’s a signature or initials hidden on the canvas.
So, consider my search a work in progress – one I intend to continue pursuing. I believe I may have found an important artwork that got lost in the shuffle. Thus far, one “off-the-record” expert agrees with me.
All I can do is keep searching, turning over every stone of inquiry.
To me, it’s not drudgery. I love the hunt.