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Scene on the Hudson (Rip Van Winkle)
1845
James Hamilton
Born: Entrien, Ireland 1819
Died: San Francisco, California 1878
oil on canvas
38 x 57 1/8 in. (96.6 x 145.1 cm)
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum purchase
1968.138
Smithsonian American Art Museum
2nd Floor, South Wing
Hamilton's painting combines several scenes from Washington Irving's short story. The hazy river valley beyond the trees evokes the Catskills, where Rip Van Winkle looked out over the Hudson River "moving on its silent but majestic course." Beneath the cavernous rock, several men enjoy a game of ninepins while Rip drinks the brew that will make him sleep for twenty years and awake to a different world. Irving wrote his stories for sophisticated urban Americans, whose fast-moving culture, fed by the nation’s industrialization, was displacing the rural society of the old Dutch Knickerbockers of the Hudson Valley.
Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006
Keywords
Animal - dog
Figure(s) in exterior - rural
Landscape - forest
Landscape - New York
Landscape - river - Hudson River
Literature - Irving - Rip Van Winkle
painting
paint - oil
fabric - canvas
About James Hamilton
Born: Entrien, Ireland 1819 Died: San Francisco, California 1878
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