Cleveland Museum of Art

Niagara Falls

William Morris Hunt

Date

1878

Medium

charcoal and brush and charcoal wash; framing lines in charcoal

Culture

America

Department

Drawings

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

Hunt studied with the famous French painter of peasant scenes, Jean-Francois Millet (1814–1875), and played a major role in introducing the loose brushwork of advanced French painting into American art. In 1878, only a year before his tragic suicide, Hunt visited Niagara Falls. There he produced a remarkable group of pastels, charcoal drawings, and paintings in which the physical particulars of the scene appear to dissolve into a near-abstract pattern of water and mist.

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