Object number1864.1.59
Down the Hudson to West Point
Date1861
Artist
Charles Herbert Moore
(American, 1840-1930)
CultureAmerican
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 20 1/16 x 30 5/16 in. (51 x 77 cm)
Framed: 28 3/8 x 38 3/16 x 3 15/16 in. (72 x 97 x 10 cm)
Framed: 28 3/8 x 38 3/16 x 3 15/16 in. (72 x 97 x 10 cm)
Credit LineGift of Matthew Vassar
On View
On viewPeriod19th c
Classification(s)
SignedSigned lower left: C.H. Moore
InscribedBy artist, lower left: 1861
ProvenanceCollections: Elias MagoonExhibition HistoryThe Humanizing Landscapes: Geography, Culture and the Magoon Collection, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, October 5 - December 20, 2000;
'The Glorious Scenery Must Ever Excite': Nineteenth-century American Paintings of the Hudson Highlands, Boscobel House and Gardens, Garrison, NY, July 1 - October 1, 2008;
The Hudson and the Thames: Robert Havell and the Panoramic River, The Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY, February 2, 2013 - May 26, 2013
Label TextA young Charles Herbert Moore made this oil in 1861, the year he moved to the town of Catskill from a studio in New York City. A romantic interpretation of the Hudson Highlands, with its pink-tinged clouds and mists it exudes an evanescent air. At twenty-one, Moore painted this canvas for the Reverend Elias Lyman Magoon, the collector and Vassar College trustee. Magoon collected most of the small paintings on view in our Founders Galleries. He reveled in seeing romantic landscapes—real and painted—preferring fresh scenery cloaked with the light dusk or dawn, or brushed with seasonal tints, suggesting the hands of a supreme maker. Moore and Magoon took country walks together, and through their correspondence we know they were awed by brilliant color-views of the Catskills. Moore would teach art and art history at Harvard University. Enjoying a long career there, he became the first director of Harvard's Fogg Art Museum.
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