ALEXANDER HELWIG WYANT 1836-1892
Lake Champlain, c. 1868
Oil on canvas, 15 X 25" (38. 10 x 63.50 cm.)
Signed, lower left
Museum purchase, 947-0-112
 

The title, Lake Champlain, has been associated with Wyant's luminous waterscape in the collection of the Butler Institute since it was purchased at public auction in New York City.' The only explicit link between the site and the artist appears in Eliot Clark's 1916 monograph on Wyant in which the author moves quickly from a discussion of Ausable River (1872, location unknown), whose "color is rather dead and monotonous," to rhapsodizing over another Wyant water subject with a "more comprehensive brushstroke, a greater freedom in painting and more consideration for mass. " Clark describes the later painting as "seen from the hills over-looking Lake Champlain" and mentions a field in the foreground "terminated by a dark hedge, over which are the trees bordering the lake." Clearly, Clark is not speaking of the Butler Institute's Lake Champlain in which the sand-colored rock spit in the left foreground is a treeless, natural jetty formed by years of wind and tide pressing upon the beach shore. So too, Clark's references to the painting's distant view with its "long line of hills and mountains lost in heavy atmosphere" have no bearing on this version in which the green and blue shadowed mountains separate a bright, cloud-strewn sky from a shore-line settlement.  The mountains here are a definable presence that seals the architectonic clarity of the composition.
Clark notes that "Wyant often remarked that the key to a landscape was the sky. If one could paint a sky, he could paint a landscape." Lake Champlain is a "sky painting" in which the sky "not only indicates through its form and color the season, [but also] the kind and time of day." It is a panorama of the great lake as seen from the Vermont side on a late summer afternoon. The town at the base of the mountain range is Port Henry. In spite of the painting's chief emphasis on the nebulous sky and its mirror reflection in water, it is topographical and realistic. The specificity of Lake Champlain suggests Wyant's middle period-around 1868-when he first began to make summer visits to nearby Keene Valley in the Adirondacks, New York, at the instigation of his artist friend, Roswell Shurtleff.
Lake Champlain was executed shortly after Wyant's return from Dusseldorf in 1866, where the Ohio-born artist had studied with Hans Gude, the Norwegian landscape painter. Lake Champlain fits into this particular time in the artists career because after 1873, when he suffered a paralyzing stroke to his right side, his painting style changed completely. It became supercharged with a subjective artistic vision, as seen in Rocky Ledge, Adirondacks (c. 1884, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute), painted in Keene Valley. In this later work, his brushstrokes are thicker, forming a gnarled mosaic of color which entices the viewer into an immediate and intense visual experience far from the calm, objective clarity of Lake Champlain.

PATRICIA C. F. MANDEL