Resounding Sea (after Paul Dougherty)

Henry Wolf

In 1915, the year before his death, the American wood engraver Henry Wolf won the Grand Prize for his printmaking at the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. The Wolf prints we have were available for sale at the PPIE and many were the actual prints exhibited and have the label from the PPIE.

The subject of “Resounding Sea” could either be the coast of Monhegan Island, Maine, or St. Ives in Cornwall, the two places between which Paul Dougherty divided much of his painting career after his return to the U.S. in 1902. Dougherty was famous for his depictions of stormy seas, especially where they met the shores of northern Atlantic coasts, and the geological formations of the Maine and Cornwall terrain are very similar.

In “Resounding Sea,” executed late in Henry Wolf’s career, master meets master at each artist’s peak. Walf captures the complexity of Dougherty’s composition in the dramatic waves and looming cliffsides with equal expertise, managing to extoll the beauty and force of the scene on a much smaller scale, and in monochrome. This was likely engraved between 1904 and 1914.