In the Adirondacks

Alexander Helwig Wyant's 'In the Adirondacks' (1885) belongs to his late series of Adirondack landscapes — painted after his stroke of 1873 had forced him to paint with his left hand, his late work achieving a new atmospheric looseness that transformed his earlier Hudson River School precision into something approaching Barbizon tonalism. The Adirondack Mountains had been associated with American landscape painting from the Hudson River School period, and Wyant's late treatment brought a new atmospheric sensitivity to landscapes that had previously been rendered with sharper documentary detail.

Wyant renders the Adirondack landscape with the atmospheric looseness of his late style — the forms somewhat dissolved in atmospheric haze and the quality of the paint application itself reflecting the changed technique required by his left-handed painting after his stroke. His tonal approach creates a mood of gentle melancholy appropriate to the mountain landscape's autumn or overcast conditions. The specific qualities of the Adirondack landscape — its rounded mountains, mixed forests, and numerous lakes — are rendered in a suggestive rather than descriptive manner.