The Water's Fine

Boys with a Boat by Thomas Anshutz recalls idyllic summer days from an era long past.

As early as 1880, Anshutz was using his photographs as preparatory studies for paintings. Like Thomas Eakins, his teacher and colleague at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Anshutz made photographs that served as compositional experiments or reminders of details of landscape or figures.

Source: Merry A. Foresta. American Photographs: The First Century (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996).

Pictured: Thomas Anshutz, 1851–1912, Boys with a Boat, Ohio River, near Wheeling, West Virginia, 1880, cyanotype on paper, 5 3/4 x 8 3/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment.