Staff Picks: Winter scenes in the collection

This winter season, the “Staff Picks” blog will spotlight some of the curator’s favorite works in the collection that depict the wintry season. 

Road Down the Palisades

Amy Torbert is the Museum’s Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Associate Curator of American Art. She chose Ernest Lawson’s “Road Down the Palisades”, which is on view in May Department Stores Company Gallery 334.

Contemplating Ernest Lawson’s Road Down the Palisades at this time of year reminds me of Thanksgivings spent in Connecticut. Bundled up against the cold, I’d join my aunts, uncles, and cousins on spirited walks down frozen paths, designed to counteract the effects of overly generous meals. Lawson’s painting brings us to a similarly snowy path in northern New Jersey.

We are standing in the newly opened Palisades Interstate Park, looking east across the Hudson River to upper Manhattan. As a young man, Lawson had studied with American and French Impressionist painters in New York, Connecticut, and Paris. He was captivated by painting nature in winter, especially landscapes stripped bare by harsh weather. Here, he intensified the effects of sunlight by picking out individual rocks in unmixed, thickly applied patches of red, blue, and yellow paint. Acclaimed as Lawson’s masterpiece at its debut in March 1911, Road Down the Palisades was quickly purchased by art collector Hugo Reisinger, a son-in-law of Adolphus Busch. At the time, a critic wrote that Lawson depicts “quite ordinary places seen through extra-ordinary eyes that bid one stop and take note of the gleam of sunlight in one’s backyard.”

May we all have the chance to seek such moments of peace in nature this winter. 

On the Ice Near Dordrecht

Hannah Segrave is the associate curator of European Art to 1800. She chose Jan van Goyen’s “On the Ice Near Dordrecht,” which is on view in Opal and Arthur H. Meyer, Jr. Gallery 238.

Capturing both the warm stillness of frozen air and the bustling merriment of icy activities, Jan van Goyen’s On the Ice Near Dordrecht is one of my favorite winter scenes at SLAM.

Growing up in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York, I have countless childhood memories of meeting my friends on frozen ponds and lakes for impromptu games of ice hockey or skating, and special holiday carriage rides in our town’s park—activities Van Goyen captures with carefully observed detail. Instead of hockey, the villagers here play kolf, an early Netherlandish forerunner of golf. And as multiple groups of people are carted across the ice—in carriages by horses or pushed on single-seat sleds—we too remember the thrill that comes from gliding over frozen water.

While the painting’s low horizon point and smooth ice in the foreground emphasize the flatness of the Dutch countryside, the sweeping cumulus clouds that fill the overcast sky and take over two-thirds of the composition create an atmospheric perspective that showcases the panoramic view of the village. The tonal, monochromatic palette of browns and beige with hints of red, black, and blue evokes a coziness that also holds the tension between the calm, ethereal sky and the bodies in motion below, capturing the way that even when you’re moving outside, the freezing winter air seems to stop—or at least slow down—time itself.

Bird and Bowl

American art curator Melissa Wolfe chose Bessie C. Lowenhaupt’s “Bird and Bowl,” which is on view in Charles Oscar Nelson and Anne Nelson Gallery 329.

I love this painting for so many reasons. I love how surprising the monochromatic white is that sets the tone for everything in the scene. Though it’s sparse and reduced to the very minimum, I see an empty dish on a snow-covered ground.

Its odd, nine-sided shape gives the artist, St. Louisan Bessie Lowenhaupt, a good form to convey that gap in illusion that intrigues so many modernists. She outlines the facets of the bowl’s sides enough to give us a sense of its three-dimensional form. However, some lines disrupt this illusion and, along with the rough, insistently white surface, reinforce the two-dimensional fact of painting with a visual playfulness that I appreciate.

And then there’s that little bird—oh Lord, I’m completely won over. Is he or she a little sparrow or junco? Has it puffed out its feathers to stay warm? Or, is it so round because it’s had a really good seed-finding winter? Is that spot of red behind the dish a cardinal who’s also checking the ground for seed? Maybe like me, they prefer avoiding the dinner rush that has emptied the bowl. They enjoy this solitude, finding their meal among the overlooked seeds strewn on the ground. I can hear their chips and chirping carried in the thin winter air, and I realize that this sparse, frozen painting brings me a warmth that is one of those simple but very real things.