Technical Notes The painted surface is primed with a ground layer of warm white paint. Examination of the paint surface shows that the distant hills were painted first, in broad, flat single applications; this technique was repeated in each successive line of hills up to and including the area of the foreground. Thick edges are discernible on each of the wide brushstrokes. The houses were then blocked in wet-on-dry, the painter varying the tone of paint to suggest the different sides of each building. Details were later painted wet-on -dry on top of the blocked-in house colors. Some quite fine detailing is evident in the thin dark lines used to suggest clapboard and in the thin lines employed to depict the fence rails. Tree trunks also were painted after the green of the foreground was completed and had dried. The green paint used for the tree foliage, one of the last elements to be added, shows a degree of buildup not found elsewhere in the work. The lowest area of the sky is painted with the white ground color. The only significant blending of one color into another is in the sky, suggesting that underlying layers dried before the painter proceeded. The paint surface has large areas of severe abrasion, and in some places the loss of paint is complete. Most of the abrasion probably occurred in the 1880s, when an overall layer of overpaint was removed. The abrasion and loss are most severe in the sky. Because the paint used for the houses has also been abraded, many of the architectural details are lost. The most recent varnish coat was applied in 1979, probably over a layer put on in 1957; it consists of Acryloid B-72. |
Unidentified artist