Acquisitions

A Farrer View of Mount Holyoke

During research on Changing Prospects: The View from Mt. Holyoke, co-curator Martha Hoppin discovered a little-known but exquisitely beautiful depiction of the mountain hanging in New York City's Vance Jordan Fine Art Gallery. She knew the painting would make a substantial contribution to the exhibition, as it is unlike other representations of the mountain. She was also very familiar with two other canvases by the artist, Thomas Charles Farrer. Her knowledge of the artist's work was crucial, as the canvas at Vance Jordon was unsigned. Her confidence in Farrer's authorship of the painting has since been supported by a number of other specialists.

Farrer was born in London and studied drawing with John Ruskin. After settling in New York City in 1861 he became a founding member of the Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art, the official American organization for adherents of Ruskin's artistic philosophy of truth-to-nature. Through his influential writings in the New Path and occasional teaching stints, he was considered the leader of the short-lived but intense Pre-Raphaelite movement in America. In the early to mid-1860s, Farrer and his Pre-Raphaelite "brothers" created paintings that reflected their reverential fidelity to nature, including the finest details of flora and fauna. The inherent arduousness of their technique resulted in relatively little output, and today works in any medium by these artists are exceedingly rare.

Farrer spent the summer and early fall of 1865 in Northampton, Massachusetts, painting the surrounding landscape. Several newspaper notices document his presence there, as well as an exhibition of his paintings in October of that year. Four canvases created that summer are known today. These include a view of Northampton from the hospital dome (in the Smith College Museum of Art collection) and a view of Mt. Tom from the Connecticut River, a painting which Farrer may have intended as a companion piece to Mount Holyoke.

For his view of Mt. Holyoke, Farrer took a position on the river in the north arm of the Oxbow, which allowed him to include a train in the middle distance. The railroad, constructed in 1845, ran across a spit of land that had formed at the mouth of the Oxbow after the river changed its course five years earlier. By 1865, when Farrer visited Northampton, visitors to Mt. Holyoke frequently arrived by train at the Mt. Tom station and were ferried across the river by steamboat. Farrer directly linked the rowboat on the river, the train, and the mountain house hotel in the center of his composition. His faithfulness to the details of the observed landscape was appreciated by a critic in 1867 when the painting was shown in New York City along with its companion picture. A critic described it as "full of the tender light and genial influences of actual nature."

As the curatorial team for the exhibition continued their work, the museum director and curator began to seriously consider Mount Holyoke as an appropriate acquisition for the permanent collection. With the acquisitions committee's enthusiastic endorsement, it was acquired just in time for the opening of the show.

Top of page