AFA Winter 2019

Winter 96 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com Palmer’s snow scenes proliferated as the artist worked into the twentieth century. Eventually he painted little else. Palmer commented on his winter landscapes in an interview for the Boston Globe , in August 1923, while he was working at his summer studio in Gloucester, Massachusetts: “I don’t do anything else, really—haven’t for a long time. You know when you find the thing you can do best. It’s a good thing to stick to it.” White World was Palmer’s last painting, completed not long before his death in 1932. Like so many of his snow scenes, he painted a narrow slice of forest at dawn soon after a freshly fallen snow transformed the landscape into a magical world. Unlike his early winter landscapes, White World’s tangled mass of branches and saturated colors of blue and violet approach becoming an abstraction of a landscape; a view that may be rooted in reality, but one that sores to heights of imagination. In a 1910 article in Palette and Bench , Palmer advised artists to “paint from memory if you can, from nature if you must . . . Art is an interpretation, not an imitation, but unless equipped with a sound, thorough, scientific knowledge of his languages, an interpreter cannot hope to translate qualities the most subtle, the most intangible, the most precious.” Walter Launt Palmer (1854–1932), White World, 1932. Oil on canvas, 30¼ x 30⅛ inches. Albany Institute of History & Art; Gift of Mrs. Ledyard (Dorothy Arnold Treat) Cogswell, Jr. (1955.14).