Artist and His Father Hunting Reed Birds: Marsh Landscape Sketch

This marsh landscape sketch, showing Thomas Eakins and his father hunting reed birds in the New Jersey marshes, belongs to a group of outdoor sporting subjects from the early 1870s that represent some of Eakins's most personally felt work. Reed-bird shooting in the Delaware estuary marshes was a traditional Philadelphia autumn sport, and Eakins participated in it regularly. His hunting paintings and sketches combine personal memoir with the kind of careful naturalist observation that distinguishes all his work. This study, like his rowing paintings, records a specific aspect of the outdoor sporting culture of Philadelphia that Eakins loved and documented with rare specificity.

Painted on a small scale with a freely handled, tonal approach, the sketch captures the horizontal expanse of marsh grass and water under open sky. Eakins uses a limited palette of olive greens, grey-blues, and warm browns to evoke the flat, luminous quality of New Jersey estuary landscape.