Although not as familiar to most audiences as his Impressionist colleague, Childe Hassam, Emil Carlsen was also a celebrated Realist and Impressionist, critically acclaimed by prominent art historians and critics, such as Duncan Phillips (whose collection forms the core of the museum named after him in Washington DC). Danish born, Carlsen moved to the States in 1872 at the age of twenty-four, getting his first real break when the Danish marine painter with whom he was studying (a fellow named Lauritz Holst) decided to return to Denmark and gave Carlsen his studio in Chicago. Carlsen himself would return to Denmark, stopping in Paris for several months, where he painted at the Académie Julian. It was likely during this visit that he grew enamored of the 18th century still-life painter, Jean Siméon Chardin. By 1883, Carlsen was teaching still life at the Arts Students’ League in Boston and had carved out a niche for himself as a Chardin revivalist, not unlike Antoine Vollon, with whom he also briefly studied. Carlsen’s most famous works are still-life compositions, for example, the somber painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art of Blackfish and Clams.

After yet another trip to Paris, where he continued to churn out floral still-life pictures for an American patron, he returned to New York in 1886, this time armed with a newly lightened, Impressionist palette. Our painting dates from a fecund period of the artist’s career, in which he increasingly turned to landscape, often inspired by the Connecticut hillside that he could observe while staying with his friend, the artist Adam Weir.

Stylistically, Carlsen maintained a certain independence, even though he enjoyed close relationships with American Impressionists of distinction, such as William Merritt Chase and the aforementioned Hassam. In our painting, the palette of ambers, russetts, and emerald green, immediately conjures the brilliant foliage of autumn at its peak. However, at the same time, there is an idealizing perfection in the balance of the compositional elements that relates to the essentializing vision of a more spiritual approach to nature akin to that of the 19th-century Danish Golden Age landscape specialists. The textural effects produced by passing a dry brush over the paint is unique to Carlsen and has little in common with the lusher effects sought by Hassam or Chase.