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John Francis Murphy"Late Afternoon, " J. Francis Murphy Tonalist Summer / Autumn Landscape1895
1895
$17,000
£12,864.70
€14,750.29
CA$23,783.02
A$25,888.43
CHF 13,732.50
MX$311,664.39
NOK 174,366.50
SEK 159,576.55
DKK 110,166.22
About the Item
John Francis Murphy (American, 1853 - 1921)
Late Afternoon, 1895
Oil on canvas
14 x 19 inches
Signed and dated lower right
Housed in a reproduction fluted cove frame.
Provenance:
Kenneth Lux Gallery, Inc., New York
BNY Mellon, New York
Christie's New York, Living with Art, October 14, 2016, Lot 352
In his lifetime, John Francis Murphy (1853-1921) was known as “the American Corot.” He was renowned for his small, intimate views of nature, especially barren fields and farms, bare trees, and lonely marshland. More than a century later, the power of Murphy’s landscapes has not waned. One contemporary critic wrote, “It was Murphy’s unique accomplishment to achieve an absolute realism without a loss of that mystic, indefinable quality which transfigures realism.”
John Francis Murphy was born at Oswego, NY in 1853 but his family moved to Chicago in 1868 where he worked painting theater sets. Murphy was basically a self-taught artist; his only formal training was a few weeks of instruction at the Chicago Academy of Design.
In 1875, Murphy moved from Chicago to New York, eventually rooming with the painters Dennis Bunker and Bruce Crane above a bakery shop. Murphy’s early work was typical of the Hudson River school but he soon fell under the sway of the loose brushwork and moody style of French Barbizon painting. Moving away from realistic depictions of nature, Murphy attempted to capture the lyrical side of the landscape. His paintings from the 1880s display warm colors, softly defined shapes and strong contrasts of light and dark areas. In 1886, he made a 6-month trip to France where he deepened his knowledge of Barbizon artists and drifted further from realism. He later told an admirer of one of his paintings that it was “a ‘composition’ only, as are all my pictures.”
When he returned to the United States in 1887, Murphy built a studio in the southern Catskills at Arkville, New York. He spent his summers and autumns in the mountains and, in the winter, returned to a studio in the Chelsea area of New York City. In Arkville, Murphy founded the Pakatakan Artist Colony, which operated through the 1960s. During his lifetime, landscape artists Alexander Helwig Wyant, George Smillie, Parker Mann, and Edward Lloyd Field all worked there.
Beginning in the 1890s, Murphy followed George Inness’s lead in moving from Barbizon style to Tonalism, a movement based on free brushwork, vague, indistinct forms, and an emphasis on an intermediary season (such as late autumn) and time of the day (such as dusk). Murphy created evocative pictures of subdued meadows and still ponds. He often applied several layers of translucent glaze to create an atmospheric effect. Murphy’s serene Tonalist landscapes from this period, often painted in thin browns and grays, evoke a peaceful yet uncertain mood.
Although a gifted watercolorist, Murphy mostly abandoned the medium after 1890. Late in his career, he lightened his palette under the influence of Impressionism, but he continued to emphasize the intimate and spiritual visions of Tonalism. He died of pneumonia in New York City in 1921 and was buried in his beloved Arkville.
Murphy’s range of subject was not very wide, but he was a master at recording his own emotional responses to the landscape through an expressive use of color, surface texture, and tone. He always preferred to depict the quiet aspects of unpretentious places at tranquil moments of the day. In the twenty-first century, Murphy’s Tonalist paintings continue to capture the expressive power and lyric poetry of the landscape.
- Creator:John Francis Murphy (1853-1921, American)
- Creation Year:1895
- Dimensions:Height: 18 in (45.72 cm)Width: 23 in (58.42 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement Style:
- Period:
- Condition:Good condition overall. Thin craquelure throughout. Lined canvas.
- Gallery Location:New York, NY
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU184129904422
John Francis Murphy
Not one for dramatic statements and bold colors, John Francis Murphy preferred to use natural, muted tones in his warm, lyrical depictions of tree-lined country roads and mossy-green pastures. While the likes of George Inness as well as the Hudson River School informed the prolific American landscape painter's early pieces, the loose brushstrokes that define his later work owe to the influence of the French artists of the Barbizon School.
Murphy was born in Oswego, New York — a small town adjacent to Lake Ontario. In his late teens, he left New York and headed to Chicago, where he painted billboards and theater sets. His job in Chicago didn't last long, and Murphy soon found himself back east. He spent several summers teaching in Orange, New Jersey, while also operating out of an art studio in New York City that he opened in 1875.
While he shifted from painting rural New Jersey to depicting the mountains of southeastern New York State — and worked initially with watercolors before focusing solely on oil painting — Murphy remained a landscape painter throughout every phase of his career and he would eventually emerge as a leading figure of the American Tonalists. The primarily self-taught Murphy conveyed tranquility and stillness in his evocative paintings of farms, wooded scenes and mountains, celebrating life beyond the frenzied hustle and bustle of metropolitan areas.
Though most found him to be friendly and approachable, Murphy often preferred to work in seclusion, away from the distraction of others. He married painter Adah Clifford Smith in 1883 and the pair visited France toward the end of the decade. In 1887, he built a studio in Arkville, New York. He lived there and painted the Catskill Mountains throughout the summer and fall seasons that year and during those that followed, returning to Manhattan periodically to show his work.
A painting of Murphy’s appeared in the annual exhibition staged by the National Academy of Design, in New York City, in 1876. He earned comparisons to celebrated French painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and the numerous prizes he was awarded over the course of his career include those won at Chicago's World’s Columbian Expo in 1893, the American Watercolor Society in 1894 and San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Expo in 1915. Murphy’s works are held in collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and elsewhere.
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