FILTER RESULTS
Snow on Quai
193820th Century
21 x 18 in. (53.3 x 45.7 cm)
Edwin Dickinson (Seneca Falls, NY, 1891 - 1978, Wellfleet, MA)
Object Type:
Painting
Medium and Support:
Oil on canvas
Credit Line:
Gift of Nancy Turner in memory of Richard Turner
Accession Number:
1987.62
Media
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Director Emeritus Grant Holcomb speaks about this object.
Transcript
This loose, atmospheric painting is a superb example of Edwin Dickinson’s “premier coups,” or “first strike”—paintings that were completed in one sitting--quickly and usually out of doors. Here, however, is a scene painted inside a warm room as we look out at a raging snow storm. The strong verticals of the French doors provide a compositional stability and order that serve as a foil to the storm outside.
This painting exemplifies the best of Dickinson’s “premier coups” canvases. Gestural, spontaneous, immediate, direct, fresh all are words that come to mind when I look at this painting. I love its surface…the energy of the brushwork as well as its muted palette and broad ranges of color and form. American poet Mark Strand called such paintings “intimate depictions of nature at its most elusive and beguiling.” And Dickinson’s white landscape is just that—“elusive and beguiling.”
The painting was done when the Dickinson family was staying at a hotel in Sarany, a small fishing village on the Mediterranean. And the artist tells us of the local significance of the scene by writing in the lower right hand corner of the painting: “first snow in ten years!”
Edwin Dickinson, by the way, is yet another noted western New York artist included in this audio tour. He was born in Seneca Falls and grew up in Buffalo.
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Poets and Rochesterians speak about this object.
Transcript
Stan Sanvel Rubin reads his poem Blue Shutters, which was written about Edwin Dickinson's painting Snow on Quai. This poem was published in Voices in the Gallery: Writers on Art, 2001.