Walter Launt Palmer

In Winter Landscape with Stream, a thick trunk of a lone pitch pine anchors the composition, while its branches and needles blend in with a stand of pines clustered toward the top of a hill. Dead branches and grasses, reminders of the past fall, stick up through the thick snow in the foreground, even as a small rivulet of running water cuts through the snow, signaling the thaw and the coming of spring. Palmer combined this close-up glimpse of snowy wilderness with a hazy view of more snow and woods in the distance, in order to suggest that the type of landscape encountered in the foreground extends for miles.

At first glance, the white of the snow and the green and brown of the trees appear to dominate Palmer’s palette. On closer inspection, however, a surprisingly wide range of colors appear, and precious little green, brown, or white is to be found among them. Creamy off-whites, applied in some cases with considerable impasto, indicate patches of sunlight on the snow, together with pale pink middle tones and pale and darker blue shadows. In the trees, yellow and orange give warmth and texture to the needles, and a rich mixture of yellow, orange, lavender, and deep purple describe the afternoon light on the rough bark of the pines. Again, while Palmer’s forms appear carefully drawn and solidly modeled from far away, a closer look reveals that sweeping brushwork fills the painting from the foreground to the distance.

Since there is only one recorded work by Palmer with the same dimensions as Winter Landscape with Stream, it is quite possible that our painting is the one recorded as Late Afternoon, 1911, in Maybelle Mann’s catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work. The light effect in our painting corresponds to this title, and the similarity of our painting’s composition to another work from 1911, The Hillside (location unknown), further strengthens this possibility.