Description:
Known for his genre scenes and pastels, James Wells Champney worked in a range of materials and mediums during his career (oil, watercolor, pastel, illustration, photography, graphite), and completed numerous works tied to Deerfield and the Colonial Revival movement.
In this painting, a young woman dressed in late 19th-century fashion poses in a door frame and prepares to walk to Sunday church. The subject matter and composition set within an 18th-century style door frame relates to Champney’s interest in sentimental, genre scenes in the late 1870s and early 1880s. During this period, he painted picturesque scenes of country life for a late 19th-century audience and market that gravitated toward the sentimental. This composition also includes references to Deerfield and the town’s surroundings. Champney likely pulled several architectural motifs or details from Deerfield’s Old Main Street to construct the scene. The artist and his family would spend summers in Deerfield at his residence, Elmstead. In 1876, the Champneys had moved into the Williams family homestead, and Champney added a studio to the structure. When he painted landscapes and Colonial Revival scenes in the region, he would be based in Deerfield while serving as professor of art at Smith College (1877-1884).
Champney continually engaged with the Deerfield landscape and bucolic New England settings. Through his scenes of Mount Sugarloaf, the Valley, and the surrounding farmland, he cemented a romanticized vision of Deerfield. Travelers gravitated toward a fictionalized vision of old New England, one that emphasized rural and preindustrial settings. As seen with views of Deerfield, Champney also visualized the town and the “colonial” character, including genre scenes of farms, backyards, and Colonial Revival motifs. In this painting, Champney drew inspiration from the Deerfield surroundings by including a door frame and architectural elements from houses on Old Main Street. The attached benches, columns, steps, and overhanging ivy of this porch-like setting appear in the artist’s own photographs of Deerfield (seen with examples contained in the James Wells Champney collection at Forbes Library Special Collections, Northampton, MA).
Signed and dated lower right: "James Wells Champney 82". Condition: Lined canvas. Under UV exam, there appears to be scattered inpaint addressing craquelure lines throughout, and retouching to the shadow of the doorframe, left of the figures head. A few small touches of inpaint to the steps. Minor frame abrasions long the top edge. Faint stretcher bar lines visible.
Label Text:
Champney exhibition: In this genre scene exploring Colonial Revival themes, Champney portrayed a young woman in a late 19th-century walking dress, paused on the threshold of an 18th-century doorframe. Doorways of old houses became a key motif of the Colonial Revival movement, evoking entryways to the past. The profusion of flowerpots and vines (as if having grown for generations on the porch), enhances the idea of the natural beauty found in rural towns. Champney painted this composition in Deerfield and utilized the surrounding setting for scenes of idyllic country life. The artist photographed architecture and houses along Old Main Street as reference material, and incorporated a compilation of porch benches, columns, and red sandstone steps (associated with local colonial architecture) to complete this scene. This work coincided with Deerfield’s own push in the 1880s and 1890s to preserve the town and repair its old houses.
Subjects:
Canvas Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+2024.9 |
