Landscape Painting
William Stanley Haseltine (1835–1900)
Rocks at Nahant, 1864
William Stanley Haseltine, of the later Hudson River school, is best known for his paintings of America’s northeastern coast. His works are remarkable for their focus on rock formations, a subject of considerable popular and scientific interest in mid-nineteenth-century America. Rocks at Nahant is one of a group of his paintings that depict, in meticulous detail and under various atmospheric conditions, the shore of Nahant, Massachusetts. Smooth diagonal slabs of reddish igneous stone and vestiges of prehistoric volcanic and glacial activity disrupt the broad horizontal composition of ocean and sky. Two diminutive figures and several sailboats on the horizon lend a sense of scale to this juncture of bare rock and sea. Influenced by the popular theories of the Swiss-born Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), who saw in Nahant’s rocks evidence of a universal ice age, Haseltine intended the image as an artful meditation on geologic history anchored in contemporary human time.
Learn more about this painting on the Terra Foundation website.
Landscape Painting
Thomas Cole (1801–1848)
Landscape with Figures: A Scene from "The Last of the Mohicans", 1826
William S. Jewett (1821–1873)
The Promised Land - The Grayson Family, 1850
John Frederick Kensett (1816–1872)
Almy Pond, Newport, c. 1857
Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900)
Our Banner in the Sky, 1861
William Stanley Haseltine (1835–1900)
Rocks at Nahant, 1864
Thomas Moran (1837–1926)
Autumn Afternoon, the Wissahickon, 1864
Fitz Henry Lane (1804–1865)
Brace's Rock, Brace's Cove, 1864
Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823–1880)
Hunter Mountain, Twilight, 1866
Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823–1880)
Morning in the Hudson, Haverstraw Bay, 1866
John La Farge (1835–1910
Paradise Valley, 1866–68
Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904)
Newburyport Marshes: Approaching Storm, c. 1871
Alfred Thompson Bricher (1837–1908)
The Sidewheeler "The City of St. Paul" on the Mississippi River, Dubuque, Iowa, 1872
Francis A. Silva (1835–1886)
On the Hudson near Haverstraw, 1872
Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900)
The Iceberg, c. 1875
Worthington Whittredge (1820–1910)
Indian Encampment, c. 1870–76