Blankenburg #2

Artist William Stanley Haseltine (American, 1835-1900)

Date1875

Mediumwatercolor on paper

Dimensionsframe: 23 5/8 × 30 × 3/4 in. (60 × 76.2 × 1.9 cm)
image: 14 1/4 × 21 1/4 in. (36.2 × 54 cm)

Credit LineGift of the National Academy of Design and Helen Haseltine Plowden

Label TextWilliam Stanley Haseltine is known as one of the foremost American landscape painters of the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Born and raised in Philadelphia by an amateur painter mother and educated at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, he went abroad to study in Dusseldorf in 1855. After spending several years in Europe he returned to the United States, but moved to Paris in 1866 and then Rome the following year. Fond of traveling, he spent the following decades in Europe, regularly voyaging to scenic locales in Italy, Germany, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands and often selling his paintings to American tourists. This watercolor is one of a series of works Haseltine made while staying in Blankenberge, a popular seaside resort city in Belgium. It demonstrates both Haseltine’s technical proficiency and his selective, idealizing tendencies. Unlike the hasty sketches produced by many of his peers, Haseltine’s plein air paintings are detailed and attentive, possibly as a result of his fastidious study of drawing technique as a youth and while in Dusseldorf. Meanwhile, rather than show his fellow beachgoers in Blankenburg #2, he instead focuses on the picturesque subject of a trio of commercial fishing boats, which in Blankenberge often landed on beaches to unload their catch.

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