Skip to main content.
home

Articles & Research

Gari Melchers Home and Studio is actively engaged in ongoing research regarding the artist, his paintings, and his life. Articles regarding this research are frequently published in Gari Melchers Home and Studio's newsletter, Sketches.

Landscape Acquired for Gari Melchers Home and Studio
By Joanna Catron, Curator cottage in snow


Gari Melchers Home and Studio has acquired a diminutive winter landscape, Cottage in Snow, painted by Gari Melchers at Belmont sometime between 1917 and 1922.

Pictured is the stone cottage, once located in the front pasture at Belmont, a building that conveyed with the property when the artist bought it in 1916. Sadly, it was demolished in 1966. Melchers used it as a temporary studio until his new studio adjacent to the house was completed in 1924.  To capture this view Melchers stood at the east portico of Belmont looking into Falmouth bottom, some of which is visible in the background. The steeple of old Union Church marks the horizon much like it does today, although only the façade survives.

The setting was such a favorite with the artist that he returned to paint it at different times of the day and throughout the seasons. Many of Melchers’ most appealing landscapes were poetic images like Cottage in Snow -images in which he aimed to reproduce the subtle atmospheric effects of weather and sunlight at different times of the day-accomplished through the use of a close range of tonalities and sketchy or broken brushwork.

Cottage in Snow was painted sometime between early 1917 and 1922 and it was barely dry when a New York collector, Hersey Egginton, purchased it through Melchers’ principal dealer in Manhattan, Albert Milch. Egginton owned at least one additional Melchers, entitled Ingleside in Spring, picturing the neighboring farm. The picture passed through the Egginton family until 1982, when the family sold it. It changed hands a few more times until Gari Melchers Home and Studio purchased it in 2005 from Thomas Coleville Fine Arts in New Haven, Ct. The painting’s original frame survives and is housed within a new matching Whistler style frame.

It was a particularly desirable Melchers for Belmont’s collection not only because it reproduces a now lost scene on the estate, but also because its delicately veiled “impression” of  winter exemplifies many of the objectives of American landscape painters of this period- the most important of which was to uncover beauty, no matter how prosaic, in an authentic American setting.