Thursday, November 15, 2012
WCMA Close up Challenge Revealed
The painting from Monday’s Close-Up Challenge is William Morris Hunt’s Niagara Falls!
William Morris Hunt painted this in 1878, toward the end of his life. It is one of his largest easel paintings. Hunt was one of the most prominent painters in New England in the 19th century, known for both his dramatic landscapes and his intimate genre paintings. The close-up detail shows Hunt’s judicious use of heavy impasto to show the texture of the water, as well as his use of colors outside the normal blue-green spectrum to depict the point where the falls break over the edge and reflect the sunlight. The heavy application of paint also endows the painting with a force that evokes the power of the falls themselves.
Hannah Wang
Williams Class of 2013
I guessed it!