Pulpit Rock, Nahant

After studying abroad in the late 1850s, William Stanley Haseltine returned to the United States to concentrate his efforts on painting the beauty of the American landscape. Traveling from Maine's Mount Desert Island to Rhode Island's Point Judith, approximately three hundred miles south, Haseltine executed a series of vivid coastal landscapes that celebrate the bold rock formations of those particular locales. Painted in 1865, Pulpit Rock, Nahant, a large-scale, dynamic composition is among the canvases that Haseltine painted at this time. A contemporary account from a studio visitor notes what is likely this work: "Hazeltine[sic] has completed his large picture of 'Pulpit Rock.' The fine fine form of the rock, the waves surging and dashing against it, the wide expanse of water reaching to the horizon, and the blue sky bending over all, form a picture of great beauty and excellence" (as quoted in Expressions of Place: The Art of William Stanley Haseltine, San Francisco, California, 1992, p. 16)
Henry T. Tuckerman, an art chronicler of the 1860's praised Haseltine's works: "The waves that roll in upon his Rhode Island crags look like old and cheery friends to the fond haunters of those shores in summer. The very sky looks like one beneath which we have watched and wandered; while there is a history to the imagination in every brown angle-projecting slab, worn, broken, ocean-minded and sun-painted ledge of the brown and picturesquely-heaped rocks, at whose feet the clear, green waters splash." (as quoted in Expressions of Place: The Art of William Stanley Haseltine)