#forest

Part of a long series he kept adding to and rehanging for years — love, jealousy, illness, death, all of it as one run. Supposedly this one went under a second title along the lines of 'After the Fall', which tells you roughly where in that story we've arrived.

Summers by a lake in the Austrian countryside are where these came from — square canvases, a whole stack of them, a break from the portrait work that paid. He'd apparently pick a view through a hole cut in card rather than just look at what was in front of him.

Based on what I read, he ran a painters' colony in a little Connecticut town and got tagged as the leader of the 'American Barbizon' crowd — the idea, from what I've read, being that a quiet patch of woods was worth more than any grand mountain view.

They say the French painters who'd worked in these woods half a century earlier were heroes to the Dutch landscape crowd, and apparently he only made the trip himself right at the end of his life — to paint the forest they'd all been admiring from a distance.