Hillside Farm

Academically trained in Paris early in the twentieth century, Chauncey Ryder’s strongest works are his Tonalist landscape paintings of the New England countryside. Painted with broad, loose strokes, landscapes such as Hillside Farm strive to convey poetic mood over specific detail. The soft rendering of the tree branches in this work, seen through the painting’s grey atmosphere, recall the delicate work the best-known Tonalist James McNeill Whistler. Though an American group of artists, the Tonalists—mostly active from the 1880s through the 1910s—owed a great deal to the French Barbizon style of landscape painting. After returning from France in 1907, Ryder sold his paintings in New York but lived out the rest of his life in rural New Hampshire.