Study of Beeches

John Frederick Kensett

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The title of this work, received with the donation in 1874 of thirty-eight Kensett paintings collectively known as "The Last Summer's Work," is evidently a misnomer. The trees are birches, with their textured white bark and relatively thin foliage, not beeches, with their smooth gray bark and dense foliage. The picture has all the hallmarks of having been painted en plein air, and may well have been executed on the shores of Lake George, the site of scores of Kensett's finished works. Surprisingly, but consistent with his draftsmanship especially of near-at-hand motifs, Kensett here evinced remarkable spontaneity seemingly at odds with the patient, deliberating technician revealed in his serene vistas of lake and shore painted in the studio. On the other hand, in the artist's finished compositions, the foreground parcels of picturesque shoreline—not infrequently composed of birches or brittle conifer trees—which sketches like this one often informed, serve subtly to animate with an electric-like charge the otherwise placid tenor that prevails.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art