Oil on canvas, 34 X 27" (86.36 X 68.58 cm.)

The forest and gorge surrounding Bash Bish Falls in South Egremont, Massachusetts, were considered in the mid-nineteenth century to be one of the most picturesque pleasure-tour destinations in the Berkshire Mountains. The falls themselves were described in The Cray-on as "one of the wildest and most beautiful cascades in the country." They became John Frederick Kensetts favorite among the American waterfalls that he visited and painted during the 1850s.
Kensett painted Bash Bish Falls at least five times. This version is most closely related to a small oval canvas (1851, Lyman Allyn Art Museum, New London, Conn.) and to a larger painting made for his friend, James Suydam (1855, National Academy of Design). The Butler Institute's version is unfinished and therefore the date is uncertain, but it may have been originally intended for Suydam, as both paintings were probably once the same size.  The small Bash Bish Falls that Kensett painted in 1851 shows a pair of boulders in the middle ground linked by a foot bridge, a cataract below that, a pool of water in the foreground and, as a backdrop, a thicket of trees. Kensett completed the first composition in the year that he painted a number of views of Niagara Falls, rendering the Berkshire falls as Niagara's compositional opposite. Far from a powerful, horizontal waterfall along an open horizon as in Niagara Falls, the Bash Bish Falls are made delicate, vertical, and closed-in. Later, Kensett returned to Bash Bish Falls to paint another version of them, where he presented the cascade as a grand panorama, which contrasts with this work's concentration on their more sheltered, less spectacular, aspect. It appears that Kensett painted the Butler Institute's canvas to enlarge the view he had painted in 1851. As he did so, he perhaps decided that moving the cataract to the center foreground, in place of the still water, and giving greater variety to the boulders, rather than flattened profiles, would result in a livelier effect. Rather than overpaint a composition already well progressed, a practice Kensett consistently avoided, he seems to have set the canvas aside to begin afresh on another of the same size, that is, the work presented to Suydam. In making the new version, he also altered a number of minor details as he saw fit, from the crevices in the boulders to the arrangement of the surrounding trees.
Bash Bish Falls reveals Kensett's willingness to give himself over to nature's detail and plunge deeply and irretrievably into the woodland interior. The composition is organized upon a series of receding horizontal Planes which makes the viewer lose all sense of deep space. The vertical format reins in the horizontal expanse of sky and, by decreasing the viewer's lateral eye movement, locks all attention into the center of the forest, where the viewer is forced to concentrate on the plethora of tree branches, scrub, rocks, and moss. Such a rendering is indebted to the precedent of the on-site oil sketch, particularly those of Asher B. Durand, exemplified by such works as Interior of a Wood (c. 1850, Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass.) and Study from Nature (c. 1855, The New-York Historical Society).
The Butler institute's version of Bash Bish Falls presents an opportunity to see the underpinnings of Kensett's animated painting technique of the 1850s. Still exposed is much of the thin, reddish priming applied to his canvases before adding the highlights and shadows. Kensett applied the finishing highlights and darkest tones together, working from the top of the canvas down. To paint over his reddish priming he employed an elaborate scumbling technique. With brushes of various degrees of fineness, he scrubbed in layers of very thin paint, which allowed him to create a richly textured image with minimal build up of the canvas surface.
Kensett was the most influential member of the second generation of the Hudson River School of landscape painters. He began his career as a commercial engraver, studying landscape painting in his spare time. He went abroad to study in 1840 and after his return to New York in late 1847, his career as a landscape painter quickly flourished. He is best known for his depictions of the mountains and coastal regions of New York and New England. In contrast to his contemporaries, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic E. Church, Kensett's work was distinguished by an enduring modesty. Avoiding overscaled and overly dramatic scenery, he earned great praise for his sensitivity to modest views of nature and his fidelity to its most minute detail.

DIANA STRAZDES