Description
George Ames Aldrich (American, 1872-1941) Landscape with Watermill
Oil on canvas
Canvas: 30 x 24 inches (76.2 x 61.0 cm)
Framed: 38.5 x 32.5 x 2 Inchs
Signed lower left: G. Ames Aldrich
Provenance: Private collection, New York.
Condition: Wax lined canvas. Approximately 8 repairs visible on the reverse, the largest being and approx. 5-inch horizontal repair with accompanying inpaint in the water recto.
Born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1872, George Ames Aldrich began his early training as an artist at the Art Students League in New York. He continued his studies in Paris at the prestigious Académie Julian and Académie Colarossi, where he studied under the great masters James McNeill Whistler and Fritz Thaulow. In the 1890s he worked as an illustrator for Punch Magazine and the London Times. In 1909 Aldrich maintained a studio in Dieppe so that he had easy access to the quiet harbors and waterways of Brittany and Normandy for inspiration. When World War I broke out he returned to the United States, where he applied his accomplished painting skills to interpret his native country. His favorite locals included the fishing village of Gloucester, Massachusetts and the rolling hillsides of rural Brown County, Indiana, where he spent most of the rest of his life. Aldrich excelled at painting pastoral river landscapes and the reflection of light upon water, but occasionally departed from these bucolic subjects to paint the steel mills of the Chicago area. These particularly paintings, often large brooding industrial nocturnes, are executed in the gritty manner of the New York Ashcan School, and are powerful commentaries on the American Industrial Revolution, captured with the impressionist glory of a plein air painter. Since his death in 1941 there have been several posthumous exhibitions of his work, including at the Brauer Museum of Art at Valparaiso University and at the Smithsonian Museum.
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