Provenance:

Rago Auctions, Lambertville, New Jersey, sale of April 30, 2005, Lot 98.

Acquired from the above sale.

Lot Note:

George Sotter understood the poetry of winter darkness as profoundly as any painter of his generation, and Mill-Spring Valley is a testament to that understanding. Here, the Bucks County landscape is transformed by moonlight into a world of glacial greens and cobalt shadows, the snow-laden fields rendered in muscular strokes that seem to hold the cold light itself. A fieldstone mill, its roofline capped with snow, anchors the composition, while a modest arched bridge and the faint curve of a frozen stream draw the eye across the middle distance. Sotter's nocturnes are distinguished by their warmth amid the chill, and nowhere is this more evident than in the small, amber-lit windows that glow from the farmhouses beyond. These pinpoints of domestic life, set against a sky pricked with stars, lend the scene a quiet intimacy: a village at rest, sheltered beneath the hills.

Trained in Pittsburgh and a longtime resident of Holicong, Pennsylvania, Sotter absorbed the Impressionist lessons of the New Hope School while forging a sensibility entirely his own. His nocturnes, born of long, patient observation of the Delaware Valley's fieldstone architecture and its changing light, occupy a singular place within American Tonalism's late flowering. They recall the poetic reverie of earlier masters, yet their robust, tactile surfaces and bold chromatic structure place them firmly in the twentieth century. In Mill-Spring Valley, the tracks of a wagon road sweep through the foreground snow in sinuous, rhythmic lines, while the bare, silvery birch in the left foreground, its trunk catching the pale glow, acts as a graceful repoussoir. The result is a work of remarkable balance and atmosphere, at once a faithful portrait of a place and a meditation on silence, endurance, and the consoling presence of home. Sotter's finest moonlit canvases are rarely so complete in their command of mood, so secure in their design, or so controlled in their palette.

Framed: 27 1/2 x 31 1/2 x 1 1/2 in.

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