Artist:
Charles Harold Davis
(American, 1856 - 1933)
Across the River in Mystic
Medium: Oil on canvas
Date: early 20th century
Dimensions:
20 1/4 × 36 in. (51.4 × 91.4 cm)
Accession number: 2017.7.4
Label Copy:
When Charles Harold Davis returned from his art study abroad in 1890, he took up the style of American Impressionism at the art colony in Mystic, Connecticut. With that shift, his canvases transformed from the moody and poetic style he had been practicing to a new vision of bright skies and a summery palette. Most of Davis’s landscapes are dominated by sunlight-drenched clouds, often giving up more than half of the canvas to sky. In this painting, however, he divides the composition into bands of grass, water, and sky. The elongated horizontal format emphasizes the calm water and flat coastal landscape of Mystic.