TitleEnd of the Shower
Artist
Walter Launt Palmer
(1854 - 1932)
Date1894
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 40 1/8 × 30 in.
Framed: 48 1/4 × 38 1/4 × 2 1/2 in.
SignedSigned at lower right: "W.L. PALMER-1894-"
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, October 25, 1897
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number974-P
Label TextThe large "End of the Shower" combines several compositional elements which place Palmer within the more progressive wing of late nineteenth-century American landscape painting. He creates a decorative space, flattened and patterned, and seems more concerned with atmospheric effects of mist, falling rain, and bright, high-keyed light burning off a lingering haze than with the construction of a clear perspectival system. His brushwork is broken, but ordered nonetheless by a consistent diagonally patterned stroke, which, with faint lines of pure white paint, approximates the falling shower of drops. The surface is further unified by the weaving in of pink and blue highlights in nearly every corner of the picture; the only areas to break from this coloristic and spatial plane are the golden leaves of the foreground trees which suggest a more pronounced sense of three-ality. These qualities were alluded to in a review in the New York Times which noticed Palmer's move toward a less conservative style and commended "that streaky, ropy surface which suggests pastel drawing of the impressionist kind, not the smoothed, rubbed pastel of the old portrait painters."
