Long Island Farmhouses
William Sidney Mount American
An entry in Mount’s diary records that he began a painting of the houses of his brother and of one John Davis in Setauket, Long Island, in November 1862, completing it the following spring. Mount composed the work from the window of his portable studio, a specially made room on wheels, from which he directly captured convincing details and limpid natural sunlight. The dearth of genre content here is unusual for the artist, but he chose to commemorate the tranquility of the village in early spring, in contrast to the turmoil of the Civil War, which was raging at the time.
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