William Lamb Picknell - ADELSON GALLERIES, Inc

11. William Lamb Picknell
From My Studio Windows, c. 1890
Oil on canvas
16 x 22 1/4 inches

William Lamb Picknell (1853-1897)
From My Studio Windows, c. 1890
Oil on canvas
16 x 22 1/4 inches

Signed lower right: Wm L Picknell

Ex-collections:

Collection of Samuel P. Avery, Jr.
Bernard Black Gallery, New York
Private collection, until the present

Exhibitions:

Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, "Paintings by William L. Picknell," memorial exhibition, February 10-March 2, 1898, no. 38
Washington, D.C., Taggart & Jorgensen Gallery, "William Lamb Picknell 1853-1897," November 7-December 7, 1991, p. 55, no. 17, illustrated in color

Literature:

Rabb, Lauren. "William Lamb Picknell: The Emersonian Philosophy of His Cape Ann Paintings" American Art Review, (February 1997): 121, illustrated.

William Lamb Picknell was born in 1853 in Vermont and, as a young man, went to Italy to study under George Inness in Rome. After two years, Picknell enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and subsequently moved to Pont-Aven, a seacoast village in Brittany where an international group of artists had already established an art colony. Picknell painted in a plein-air style, capturing the brilliant light of the seacoast town. It was this "glaring" light that characterized his technique and established him in the vanguard of outdoor landscape painting. In 1876, Picknell began to exhibit in the Paris Salon. His masterpiece, The Road to Concarneau (1880, oil on canvas, 42 3/8 x 79 3/4 inches, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), was awarded an honorable mention in the Salon of 1880. He returned to America in the early 1880s and settled in Annisquam on the Massachusetts coast, the domain of several of the Boston school, notably Theodore Wendel and John Leslie Breck. Picknell was elected to the Society of American Artists in 1880; the Society of British Artists, London, in 1884; and, as an associate member, to the National Academy in 1891.

From My Studio Windows was painted in Annisquam, although it was originally thought to have depicted the old Marblehead lighthouse. Unlike the original wooden lighthouse, the Annisquam lighthouse was a much taller structure and could be clearly seen from all directions. The glowing summer light and clear air are characteristic of Picknell at his most luminous. The rich application of paint and dense facture bespeak his Impressionist connections.