Aaron Anderson
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PROPERTY SOLD TO BENEFIT THE ACQUISITIONS FUND OF THE WORCESTER ART MUSEUM
Lot 34
Thomas Doughty(1793-1856)Desert Rock Lighthouse, Maine 27 1/4 x 34 1/4 in. (69.2 x 87 cm.)
30 April 2025, 14:00 EDT
New YorkUS$30,000 - US$50,000
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Thomas Doughty (1793-1856)
Desert Rock Lighthouse, Maine
signed 'TDoughty' (lower right)
oil on canvas
27 1/4 x 34 1/4 in. (69.2 x 87 cm.)
Painted in 1836.
signed 'TDoughty' (lower right)
oil on canvas
27 1/4 x 34 1/4 in. (69.2 x 87 cm.)
Painted in 1836.
Footnotes
Provenance
Joan Peterson Klimann, Joan Peterson Gallery, Boston.
Gift to the present owner from the above.
Exhibited
Boston Atheneum, Tenth Exhibition of Paintings, 1836, p. 4, no. 46.
London, British Institution, 1838.
Rockland, Maine, Farnsworth Art Museum, Inventing Acadia: Artists and Tourists at Mount Desert, June 13-October 24, 1999, pp. 29-30, 169, fig. 11, illustrated.
Thomas Doughty gained fame through capturing America's bucolic landscapes. The largely self-taught Hudson River School artist was born in Philadelphia but traveled extensively throughout the Northeast in the 1830s to capture the country's picturesque wilderness. The present work, Desert Rock Lighthouse, Maine, depicts the quaint calmness and seemingly pending tumultuous nature of the rocky Maine coastline. In the blink of an eye, a crack of thunder and buckets of rain could engulf the hazy atmosphere. Doughty revisited and experimented with this scene on several occasions, and in 1840 had an engraving of a similar version published in American Scenery. One critic remarked, "There is beautiful scenery in Maine, however; and Doughty...made a tour in search of it and filled a portfolio with sketches which (the most of them) might belong to any Tempe for their summer look..."(N.P. Willis, American Scenery, London, 1840, vol. II, pp. 36-37). The artistic pilgrimage to revisit this scene on several occasions ultimately attributed to Doughty's mastery of landscape painting while imbuing the canvas with lyricism and subtle animacy.