By the River (after Thomas Austen Brown)

Henry Wolf

Whether intentional or simply due to the medium itself, a hazy, twilight atmosphere settles itself over the scene in “By the River,” after the British painter Thomas Austen Brown. Obscuring the faces of a mother and child who are enjoying a walk in the open air - the shoeless child being carried over the debris on the river’s edge - Wolff focuses on the sense of a private, sweet moment illuminated by dappled light, captured by someone with an intimate familiarity of his subjects. Brown was known for his idyllic portrayals of rural townspeople and their daily lives; Wolff’s style compliments it, losing nothing in the discarding of color, but rather enhancing the captivating emotion of the moment with the use of chiaroscuro.

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.