Winter Scene in Moonlight

Henry Farrer

1869 · Watercolor and gouache on white wove paper · The American Wing

English-born Henry Farrer was the brother of Thomas C. Farrer, the principal founder of the Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art, which represented the Pre-Raphaelite movement in America. Unlike his brother, who studied drawing with John Ruskin in London, Henry was probably self-taught, beginning in the early 1860s to produce painstakingly wrought still lifes and landscapes in watercolor. He exhibited them regularly at the American Watercolor Society, which he helped to found. "Winter Scene in Moonlight," Farrer's earliest known watercolor landscape, probably represents a site in Brooklyn, where he lived most of his life. The picture's prosaic terrain and precise technique reveal the young artist's early adherence to Pre-Raphaelite ideals, while its faint primitivism betrays the earnest autodidact that he was. Because of that quality, as well as its chill nocturnal setting and subtle asymmetry of composition, the image anticipates the disturbing tenor of twentieth-century Surrealist landscapes.

Artist

Henry Farrer

Date

1869

Medium

Watercolor and gouache on white wove paper

Culture

American

Department

The American Wing

Credit line

Purchase, Morris K. Jesup Fund, Martha and Barbara Fleischman, and Katherine and Frank Martucci Gifts, 1999