Hawthorne Voorhees Catalog

7 Now it is midsummer and the scene vibrates with light and heat; then we see the hills turned to russet by the hand of Autumn and a brilliant harvest moon shedding its radi- ance. Finally we see the silent country covered with a blanket of white. The artist is par- ticularly happy when rendering such scenes: in one picture there is an extraordinary effect of falling snow and in another the effect of a snowy road containing deep ruts is admirable; the artist is able to make us feel the presence of the grass beneath the snow. 1 —Albert E. Gallatin writing on Clark G. Voorhees, 1910 W hen Albert E. Gallatin wrote his succinct but deeply admiring essay on the art of Clark G. Voorhees, hemay very well have been thinking of paintings such as Voorhees’ October Mountain in Winter, Lenox, Massachusetts [ fig. 19 ]. Voorhees, whose style was often an amalgamation of Tonalism and Impressionism, was not exclusively interested in fidelity to nature, but instead sought a more poetic and subjective interpretation of it. Here, the viewer is presented with a landscape that unfurls in successive billowing folds of white, its middle ground punctuated by successive jagged rows of trees that draw the eye across the valley to the low-lying October Mountain in the distance. The quietude and still- ness of winter are underscored by the expansiveness of the scene. While he did spend time in the Berkshires region, in particular Lenox, Massachusetts, home of his wife’s family, Voorhees is of course best known and most closely associated with Old Lyme, Connecticut, where, beginning in 1902 until his early death in 1933, he was a leading member of the colony that settled there. Voorhees was born in 1871 inNew York City to Charles Henry Voorhees andMarion Greenwood, both fromprominent families of modest wealth. This advantage allowed him to engage in activities hemight not The Li ght Li es Softly marshall n . pr i ce