TitleThe Wood Gleaner
Artist
William John Hennessy
(1839 - 1917)
Datec. 1890
MediumOil on paper mounted on panel
DimensionsUnframed: 9 1/2 × 6 1/2 in.
Storage: 10 × 8 1/4 × 1 1/4 in.
SubmissionProbable NA diploma exchange presentation, May 8, 1865
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number1493-P
Label TextAcademy records do not give the title of the work accepted by the Council on May 11, 1864, to confirm Hennessy's 1863 election as National Academician, nor the title of the replacement work accepted a year later. However, on the latter occasion the minutes specify that his original submission was to be returned to him. The replacement work is therefore probably the small canvas that is in the Academy collection. Yet a painting by Hennessy entitled Gathering Faggots, lent by John F. Kensett to the Academy's annual exhibition of 1863, surely bears some relationship to the present work. That painting seems to have attracted some attention. Four years later Henry Tuckerman singled it out when writing of Hennessy in his Book of the Artists: "He lately exhibited a little picture representing a poor old woman picking up sticks in a forest at dusk; and the look of extreme age, indigence, and toil about the solitary figure, reminded the spectator of Goody Blake in Wordsworth's Ballad, on account of the sentiment of privation so keenly suggested." Tuckerman also quoted an unidentified critic's mention of the painting: "'Hennessy . . . is rapidly rising toward the foremost rank of our American genre paintings. "Gathering Faggots" is chiefly valuable for its glimpse of brilliant red sky, and the fine relief of a figure against it, standing on the crest of wooded hill whose base was in deep shadow.'" It is possible that Kensett returned the painting to Hennessy to allow it to be the artist's diploma presentation. But it is more likely that this work is either a replica of that owned by Kensett or a study for it.
