Following a year-long honeymoon spent exploring France and Italy, the Wendels relocated to Philena’s ancestral homestead in Ipswich, the town that would serve as the artist’s personal version of Giverny for the latter part of his career. As he had in Giverny, Wendel found plenty of inspiring subject matter both close to his home on County Street and among the fields and marshes of the family’s Lower and Upper Farms on Argilla Road. In Trees at Heartbreak Hill, Upper Farm, the artist painted a close-up view of a cluster of trees found just a short distance from his Argilla Road farmstead. The scene is energized through Wendel’s sensitive interpretation of the assorted types of trees and his finely rendered details of individual trunks, branches and windblown leaves.

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Provenance:

By descent through the family of the artist

Literature:

Buckley, Laurene. Theodore Wendel: True Notes of American Impressionism (North Adams, MA: The Artist Book Foundation, 2018), Plate 49, p. 150

Exhibitions:

Bringing to Light: Theodore Wendel, Vose Galleries, Boston, October 19 – December 7, 2019