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with conjoined initials and dated "DJ 75" (lower left) inscribed "Near Noroton, Conn./David Johnson 1875" (on reverse) and signed in pencil on stretcher "D Johnson NY" oil on canvas 16 x 227/8 in. (40.7 x 58 cm) painted in 1875 provenance Alexander Gallery, New York The early 1870s represented the height of David Johnson~dq~s reputation, and, arguably, his artistic production. Johnson, a contemporary of George Inness, Frederic Edwin Church, and Albert Bierstadt, had initially embarked upon a different aesthetic path than most other second- generation Hudson River School painters. The minutely detailed landscapes of his early career during the 1850s and 1860s revel in Pre-Raphaelite specificity, and have come to represent the artist~dq~s oeuvre in recent years. In the early 1870s, however, Johnson entered what John I.H. Baur has characterized as his "Barbizon phase," employing a brighter palette, looser brushwork, and emphasis upon atmospheric effects. For all of its relative freedom, however, Johnson~dq~s near Noroton, Connecticut retains a sense of the "conscientious study" of nature that, in Benjamin Champney~dq~s words, "quietly and modestly elevated him to a very high rank as one of the leading landscapists of New York" (SIXTY YEARS: MEMORIES OF ART AND ARTISTS, Woburn, Mass., 1900, pp. 138-39). For his works of this period, Johnson was awarded a first prize at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, an exceptional distinction. near noroton, connecticut offers a prototype of the stylistic synthesis that Johnson developed in the later 1870s. Incorporating the elements of Pre-Raphaelite detail, luminist clarity of light, and clouds worthy of John Constable, the present work constitutes a summation of the styles in which Johnson had dabbled up to that point. Moreover, the artist has provocatively juxtaposed the massing of rocks at the left with the massing of clouds at the right. near noroton, connecticut shares this geological and meteorological echo with a number of Johnson~dq~s most acclaimed works, including his CONWAY VALLEY, NEW HAMPSHIRE 1859 (private collection) and NATURAL BRIDGE, VIRGINIA 1860 (Reynolda House, Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, N.C.). In the present work, the visual equivalency of rocks and clouds provokes a sense of geological time, measured in centuries and millennia, rather than the brevity of human life. In the wake of the Civil War, Johnson~dq~s paintings doubtless reassured his patrons of the endurance and stability of the American republic. We are grateful to Mark Mitchell for cataloguing this lot.