Provenance:

Christie's, New York, sale of May 28, 1992, Lot 192.

Exhibited:

Doylestown, Pennsylvania, James A. Michener Museum Art Museum, Earth River and Light: Masterworks of Pennsylvania Impressionism, September 21, 2002 – December 29, 2002 (and traveling to Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, Connecticut, June 28 – September 28, 2003).

Lot Note:

Kenneth Nunamaker is best known for the sunstruck hillsides, stone houses, and rolling farmland of Bucks County, which makes After the Fog, New Hope an unusual yet quietly rewarding work. The subject is the Delaware at winter's edge, with broken ice plates stacked along the near shore and open, slate-blue water moving beyond them. A bank of bare, russet-toned trees leans in at the left and dissolves into the haze, while the far side of the river disappears altogether. The palette is limited to pearl gray, pale buff, and steel blue, and the paint is applied in flat, deliberate planes, so that the ice reads as a faceted, almost architectural surface. With no horizon line to speak of and no figure or building to give scale, the picture depends on tonal control rather than incident. That restraint gives After the Fog, New Hope a measured, almost documentary character. Here, the interest lies in observation–in the slow, quiet moment when weather lifts and the river's condition is revealed.

Framed: 30 x 32 x 2 1/2 in.

Canvas has been relined. Minor deposits of surface soiling and dirt. Craquelure present in at lower center in impasto. Under UV: strokes of inpainting present across top extreme edge and along lower extreme edge. Additional images available upon request.

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