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Champney made his first voyage to the White Mountains on foot from Boston to North Conway during the summer of 1838, and was so enchanted by the picturesque summits, falls and gorges of this region that he devoted the following sixty years to painting its landscape. He was raised nearby in New Ipswich, New Hampshire, but spent much of his young adult years in Boston. Apart from exhibitions at the Boston Athenaeum, which began in 1827, and at Chester Harding’s Gallery, founded in 1833, the city still held few options for artists during this period. At the suggestion of Washington Allston, Champney sought instruction abroad in 1841 and befriended Kensett, Casilear and Asher Durand while in Paris.

In 1853, Champney purchased the Lewis Eastman House near Conway Village and converted a carpenter’s woodshop into his personal studio. As artists began visiting the Conway area with increasing popularity, Champney joked that his studio threatened to become a fashionable tourist attraction. His paintings were received with equally high regard, and during the 1870s, Louis Prang produced up to 100,000 chromolithographs of many of his works.

Shortly after his 90^th birthday, Champney wrote to a neighbor, remarking: “I paint a little every day as it please me & think some of my last pictures are as good as any I have done.”[1] The artist painted up until the morning of his death in 1907, sixty-nine years after his first visit to North Conway.

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[1] Letter to Georgiana Souther Barrows, Nov. 26, 1907, quoted in New Hampshire Historical Society’s, Beauty Caught and Kept: Benjamin Champney in the White Mountains (Concord, NH, 1996).

Provenance:

LePore Fine Arts

To Ledges Gallery, 1999

To private collection, Bedford, New Hampshire

By descent to collector's son, private collection, Bedford, New Hampshire, 2021

Labels:

Previous Vose Galleries label, inventory no. 37573