Landscapes

Memories, George Boughton, 1896. 

A Frosty Night: The Frozen Mill Pond, George Boughton, 1904. 

Boughton’s landscapes "are not according to the set tradition of this or that school," writes Alfred Lys Baldry, author of Boughton's biography. "They have a curiously personal aspect which has plainly not been acquired from any of his predecessors. They reflect his own conviction in their sentiment and character quite as much as in their choice of subject.” Works like Autumn on the Susquehanna (1857), The Widows Acre (1879), and A Sportswoman on a Highland River (1898) illuminate Boughton’s skill with a brush.

Traces of French influence can be detected in some of the figure compositions in his early works, but the evolution of his skill is purely original, guided by no school of thought. In all his landscape work, the background can be “unreservedly admired as exquisite in design and in their adaptation of natural facts.”[1] While Boughton was most famous for his figure paintings, his landscapes reflect his travels in Europe, depicting dark and gloomy English fields or woods frozen over with snow. Works like A Frozen Night: The Frozen Mill Pond (1904) and Memories (1896) employ a darker palette with deep swatches of color to give them depth.