|
Saco River, North Conway
Benjamin Champney (1817–1907)
Signed and dated lower right: B. Champney, 1874
Oil on canvas,
24 x 36 inches
New Hampshire Historical Society Purchase, 1968.61
No single work succeeded in embodying the striking contrasts, “of the wild and cultivated, the bold and graceful,” more successfully than Benjamin Champney’s 1874 masterpiece, with its pastoral foreground, winding river, and distant, cloud-covered mountains. Champney painted in the Conway area for more than half a century. His North Conway home and studio were located near a number of popular tourist lodgings, and each summer he welcomed visitors to his studio. As a White Mountain Echo reporter writing in July 12, 1890, pointed out, the paintings that tourists bought from Benjamin Champney served as “exquisite souvenirs of a Conway summer” and were likely to “find their place in many far away homes.”
