FRANKLIN DE HAVEN 1856-1934
Silvery Waters, 1916
Oil on canvas, 39 1/2 x 49 1/2" (100.33 x 125.73 cm.)
Signed, lower left
Museum purchase, 918-0-102

Born in Bluffton, Indiana, Franklin De Haven arrived in New York in 1886. He studied with George Henry Smillie who, having made a reputation as a poetic landscape painter of Rocky Mountain and Florida subjects, was concentrating upon rural New England and Atlantic shoreline scenes, especially around East Hampton, Long Island, which had by the mid-1880s achieved the status of "The American Barbizon." It is not surprising to find latter-day Hudson River School influences and an intense Barbizon or, perhaps more specifically, Tonalist sensibility in much of De Haven's work.
For nearly three quarters of a century Hudson River School painters had transformed on-the-spot studies into large, emotionally charged studio pieces which combined accurate topographic detail with an idealized, transcendental vision of landscape as direct evidence of the hand of God on earth. Light, as an aesthetic and a divine element, became increasingly important by mid-century, especially among the group of artists often referred to as Luminists.
Emerging from this cultural milieu, American artists like William Morris Hunt, who traveled in France in the 1850s, were almost inevitably fascinated by the French artists Theodore Rousseau and Jean-Francois Millet, who were painting moody, low-keyed, protoimpressionist landscapes around the village of Barbizon. Hunt's influence as a teacher and painter was instrumental in creating an American Barbizon aesthetic, as was the work of George Inness,
Alexander Helwig Wyant, and Dwight Tryon. Tonalism, a stylistic refinement of the American Barbizon manner in the 1880s characterized by static composition, color schemes of closely related tones, and a quiet, misty reverie, is evident in the work of all three painters. A number of Tonalist painters were attracted to the New England coast between Newport, Rhode Island and Mystic, Connecticut, where Charles H. Davis settled in 1892, subsequently organizing the Mystic Art Association in 1913.
Silvery Waters was painted from a study made near Mystic, Connecticut at 4:00 p.m. on a November afternoon. Framed between the dark browns and grays of the foreground and the lavender-mauves of the lowering sky, the silver-white water is layered with golden ochre reeds and crossed by the calligraphic silhouettes of trunks and branches in a tightly composed evocation of the Japanese screens which had been such a pervasive influence on American painting and decorating for decades. The brushwork is loose and impressionistic, as are the individual touches of orange, olive, lavender, and ochre which enliven the fallen leaves in the foreground and those still attached to the branches above. Scumbling and impasto further enrich the painted surface. The patterned repetition of verticals and horizontals, the closely controlled tonality, and the pale, cold light which casts no shadow all contribute to the calm atmosphere of wistful melancholy that pervades Silvery Waters. As Whittier Montgomery noted with reference to De Haven's total oeuvre, "one feels in all not merely the mans ability as a draughtsman and technician, but the scope of his sympathies and the genuine character of his interpretation."

H. DANIEL BUTTS III