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拍品专文
In 1866, John Frederick Kensett’s friend Vincent Colyer purchased land on Contentment Island in Darien, Connecticut. Kensett purchased a piece of this property the following year and, while he intended to build his own house, the artist spent the last years of his life with rooms on the third floor of the Colyer home. As described in a later advertisement for the property, the home was “built on a bluff overlooking deep waters of Long Island Sound, with an unobstructed view of thirty miles, either east or west.” Kensett also built a separate studio on the high southeastern bluff of the island, overlooking the Fish Islands and the Sound. From these coastal viewpoints, a low, sandy section of Long Island was only ten miles away. The Sound and distant coast provided inspiration for several works during these productive last years of his career, including Passing Off of the Storm (1874, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).
Janice Simon writes, “Generally, the Connecticut shore paintings amplify those characteristics that became fundamental to Kensett’s pictures in the mid-1950s—repose, breadth, abstraction, measured order, subtle alterations of weather and light, and quiet instances of movement.” (Images of Contentment: John Frederick Kensett and the Connecticut Shore, Waterbury, Connecticut, 2001, p. 21) Indeed, the distant horizon line of Long Island—painted circa 1866-67 when Kensett was first beginning to spend considerable time on the Long Island Sound—appears to hark back to Kensett’s Shrewsbury River series from an 1853 visit to the Jersey shore. As John Driscoll describes of those earlier works, “The boats and tufts of grasses which appear randomly placed are, in fact, carefully positioned to lead the viewer’s eye toward the horizon. The emphasis on contour tends to flatten forms into abstract shapes that extend laterally beyond the confines of the canvas, enhancing the sense of lateral space. This, coupled with the balance between masses and voids in the asymmetrical composition, which is organized in a strong horizontal line, promotes a feeling of calm, harmony, and measured order in nature unmatched in any of Kensett’s earlier paintings. Despite the formal role these physical elements play in the composition, the real subject of these paintings seems to be color, light, and atmosphere, which envelop and crystallize the scene.” (John Frederic Kensett: An American Master, Worcester, Massachusetts, 1985, p. 103)
In Long Island, Kensett takes a similar approach, designing a strikingly horizontal composition, banded into sky and land with a thin strip of water and distant coast visible along the horizon. Carefully placed trees in the foreground and a small inlet stream lead the eye back to the graceful sailboat at center, surrounded by a crystalline sky. The result in Long Island is a timeless beauty for which Kensett is most celebrated. As Simon writes, “picturesque diversion yields to contemplative vision…Kensett requires that the viewer be attentive to the subtle nuances of his experimental pictorial designs.” (Images of Contentment: John Frederick Kensett and the Connecticut Shore, p. 22)
Janice Simon writes, “Generally, the Connecticut shore paintings amplify those characteristics that became fundamental to Kensett’s pictures in the mid-1950s—repose, breadth, abstraction, measured order, subtle alterations of weather and light, and quiet instances of movement.” (Images of Contentment: John Frederick Kensett and the Connecticut Shore, Waterbury, Connecticut, 2001, p. 21) Indeed, the distant horizon line of Long Island—painted circa 1866-67 when Kensett was first beginning to spend considerable time on the Long Island Sound—appears to hark back to Kensett’s Shrewsbury River series from an 1853 visit to the Jersey shore. As John Driscoll describes of those earlier works, “The boats and tufts of grasses which appear randomly placed are, in fact, carefully positioned to lead the viewer’s eye toward the horizon. The emphasis on contour tends to flatten forms into abstract shapes that extend laterally beyond the confines of the canvas, enhancing the sense of lateral space. This, coupled with the balance between masses and voids in the asymmetrical composition, which is organized in a strong horizontal line, promotes a feeling of calm, harmony, and measured order in nature unmatched in any of Kensett’s earlier paintings. Despite the formal role these physical elements play in the composition, the real subject of these paintings seems to be color, light, and atmosphere, which envelop and crystallize the scene.” (John Frederic Kensett: An American Master, Worcester, Massachusetts, 1985, p. 103)
In Long Island, Kensett takes a similar approach, designing a strikingly horizontal composition, banded into sky and land with a thin strip of water and distant coast visible along the horizon. Carefully placed trees in the foreground and a small inlet stream lead the eye back to the graceful sailboat at center, surrounded by a crystalline sky. The result in Long Island is a timeless beauty for which Kensett is most celebrated. As Simon writes, “picturesque diversion yields to contemplative vision…Kensett requires that the viewer be attentive to the subtle nuances of his experimental pictorial designs.” (Images of Contentment: John Frederick Kensett and the Connecticut Shore, p. 22)