William A. Rogers, Buffalo, New York, by 1909

Henry C. White, c. 1913-1952

By family descent, until the present

White, Henry C. The Life and Art of Dwight William Tryon. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930, and New York: Riverside Press, 1930, p. 158, illustrated opposite p. 160.

Dwight Tryon painted The Brook in May in 1902 at the height of his powers, for he had just completed a cycle of landscape murals for the great hall of Freer's shingle style house in Detroit. These subtle works echoed the muted hues and design features of the oak interior. Additionally, Freer believed that the intricately worked surfaces of his American paintings, by Tryon, Dewing, Thayer and Whistler, resonated with his growing Asian holdings, united under his roof," as members of the same spiritual family."**

Anxious not to monopolize Tryon's production, Freer gave others the opportunity to buy the artist's work. The sale of The Brook in May, to noted art collector William A. Rogers, president of the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, was certainly due to Freer's friendship with the Academy's founder, J. J. Albright, who also owned a painting by Tryon.

Freer promoted his protégé by hiring critic Charles H. Caffin to write The Art of Dwight W. Tryon: An Appreciation (1909). Caffin illustrated The Brook in May, along with other significant landscape decorations by the artist that would move into museum collections, where they are today. The Brook in May, for example, is equal in significance and quality to the Tryons in the Freer Gallery of Art. Amazingly enough, however, it entered the private Connecticut collection of Henry C. White, remaining there for over eighty years until the present.

Henry C. White, an independently wealthy artist who had studied with Tryon for many years, had long wanted to see his master's work in Freer's collection. Knowing that his pupil planned to visit Detroit in the course of a six month tour of the West, Tryon wrote Freer to ask, "Will it be possible for [White] to see some of your treasures?" After White and his family left the city, Freer reported back to Tryon that he had enjoyed their two-day visit and had found Henry White "appreciative and sympathetic."†

Upon their return home White and his wife immediately hired Freer's architect, Wilson Eyre, to design for them a shingle style house on a rocky outcrop overlooking Long Island sound. Inside, it emulated the interior of Freer's own house with rubbed oak paneling, hand-carved decorations, grasscloth wall coverings, and built-in seating with a view to the water. Henry White bought The Brook in May as the lead painting for his own collection of Tryons. Also, like Freer, he acquired a select group of works by Dewing, Thayer and Whistler.

In 1930 Henry C. White wrote the artist's biography, entitled The Life and Art of Dwight William Tryon. He illustrated The Brook in May and discussed it along with the paintings that Freer owned by this master. A work with delicate color tones that evoke the nuances of a New England Spring, the painting is the finest, large, highstyle Tryon available in private hands–a circumstance due entirely to the unique provenance of this painting.

*Tryon to Freer, quoted in Linda Merrill, An Ideal Country: Paintings by Dwight William Tryon in the Freer Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1990), p. 68.

**Charles H. Caffin, "The Art of Thomas W. Dewing," Harper's Magazine 116 (April 1908): 716-717, written after he interviewed Freer.

†Tryon to Freer, letter 154, August 14, 1912; and Freer to Tryon, September 15, 1912.