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141/8 x 221/4 in. (35.9 x 56.5 cm) painted circa 1871-1872 provenance Adam A. Wechsler & Son, washington, d.c., May 20-23, 1976, 1365 Private collection, new york Literature the magazine antiques, May 1976 Eliot Clark, alexander wyant, privately printed, New York, 1916, p. 40. Although Alexander Wyant made his reputation with the Tonalist landscapes that he painted after a stroke left his right side paralyzed in 1873, it is his earlier landscapes, and particularly his scenes of the Keene Valley and Ausable River in upstate New York, painted between 1870 and 1873, that are now among the most admired of his works. In 1870 Wyant began to spend his summers in the Keene Valley in upstate New York. From that summer until his trip to New Mexico and Arizona in 1873, Wyant painted and exhibited many views of the Adirondacks, Ausable River, and Keene Valley landscape. In his biography of Wyant, Eliot Clark writes: When Wyant moved to the mountains it determined his choice of subject, and he so completely portrays this country that his name must always be associated with it. It is the beauty and poetry of our own woods and clearings which he portrays in pictures imbued with sympathetic and intense feeling wrought with consummate skill and knowledge. He was not destined by be a painter of... cultivated lands showing the industry of men,... he sees his picture in the clearing, the mountain valley, and the clouds. Clark then describes a painting "evidently painted at Keene Valley at about this time. [It depicts a] picturesque mountain side, placed high in the composition, [which] is sensitively felt and solidly constructed. The clouds that break its edge float lightly in the air. In the foreground is a shallow stream,... while the middle plane coming in contrast to the mountain shows a group of trees with summer foliage." If this is not a description of in the keene valley, then it is of one that is remarkably similar in subject and style. We are grateful to Bruce Chambers for cataloguing this lot.