Mountain of the Holy Cross

American Landscape Painting, 1890

We look across a bank of large boulders that give way to a waterfall in the middle distance, behind which a towering mountain marked with a white cross rises near the top of this vertical watercolor landscape. Painted with swirling washes of topaz and powder blue, cream white, and some touches of pale golden yellow, the central mountain ascends amid the clouds that settle around the peaks to either side. Slivers of white along the central and neighboring mountains echo the white cross, which seems to have been made with fallen snow on the face of the central peak. Clouds or fog eddying around the neighboring peaks make the middle distance hazy. Closer to us, some scrubby pine-green trees line a riverbank that feeds a waterfall in the lower third of the composition. The water falls behind the slate-gray boulders hulking in the lower left corner of the paper. A bird flies in the mist near the falls.
Artist
American Landscape Painting
Date
1890
Type
Drawing
Medium
watercolor and gouache over graphite on blue laid paper
Dimensions
45.2 × 31.5 cm
Collection
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Licence
Public domain, CC0

Image description

We look across a bank of large boulders that give way to a waterfall in the middle distance, behind which a towering mountain marked with a white cross rises near the top of this vertical watercolor landscape. Painted with swirling washes of topaz and powder blue, cream white, and some touches of pale golden yellow, the central mountain ascends amid the clouds that settle around the peaks to either side. Slivers of white along the central and neighboring mountains echo the white cross, which seems to have been made with fallen snow on the face of the central peak. Clouds or fog eddying around the neighboring peaks make the middle distance hazy. Closer to us, some scrubby pine-green trees line a riverbank that feeds a waterfall in the lower third of the composition. The water falls behind the slate-gray boulders hulking in the lower left corner of the paper. A bird flies in the mist near the falls.

American Landscape Painting