Three Trees, Winter
1922
16 x 20 in. (40.6 x 50.8 cm)
Harold Weston
United States
(Merion, PA, 1894 - 1972, New York, NY)
Object Type:
Painting
Medium and Support:
Oil on canvas
Credit Line:
Gift of Emily Sibley Watson
Accession Number:
1925.33
Location: Currently on view
In 1922, the year he painted "Three Trees, Winter," Harold Weston wrote:
"I stopped beside a big hemlock tree and reached around the great trunk to feel its vigor, its reality, its life existing essence. My ear, laid against the wet bark, seemed to hear the pulse, the flow of life-creating sap....[R]oots plunged into the soil, made it one with the earth and gave it life. As a primitive pagan I bowed before the mystery of that world spirit that giveth life to nature and to man."
Weston has recently emerged as one of the premier painters of the Adirondack landscape. His modernist sensibility - abstract forms, expressive lines and colors - renew the viewer's understanding and appreciation of traditional vistas. In the words of collector Duncan Phillips, "There is a young American painter who stirs in me the hope for a re-birth on this new soil of something that was not lost to the art of painting with the passing of Vincent van Gogh."
[Gallery label text, 2007]