Housed in a Bernard Badura frame.

Exhibited:

Hempstead, Long Island, New York, The Emily Lowe Gallery, Hofstra University, November 14, 1981 – January 3, 1982.

Doylestown, Pennsylvania, James A. Michener Art Museum, The Painterly Voice Bucks County's Fertile Ground, October 21, 2011 – April 1, 2012.

Lot Note:

Lathrop did more than any other painter to make the Delaware Valley a destination for American artists. The present lot, Early October, is precisely the kind of painting that attracted them. The canvas is large and nearly square, and it is given over almost entirely to a stand of maples at the height of their fall color. The sky is reduced to a few small patches of pale blue at the upper edges, so the viewer stands inside the woods rather than in front of a view. Lathrop builds the foliage from a narrow range of related hues (copper, vermilion, and burnt orange), warmed with touches of yellow-green at right, and he keeps the paint soft and feathery where his Bucks County neighbors often preferred a more insistent touch. The effect is closer to the tonal, poetic landscape of his early career than to the brighter, more broken color of the Impressionists who followed him to New Hope. Slender trunks rise through the canopy without any clear horizon to anchor them, and the only human note is a pair of small animals grazing in the clearing, set among boulders that catch the low light. These details give the picture its scale and its stillness. Lathrop had a gift for the quiet, enclosed corner of the countryside, and he understood that October in the Delaware Valley is as much about atmosphere as about color. Pictures of this size and ambition are especially sought after among the artist's works, and Early October shows him giving the subject the room it deserves.

Framed: 46 3/4 x 42 3/4 x 2 3/8 in.

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