BRUCE CRANE (american 1857-1937) "AWAKENING HILLS" Signed and dated...

BRUCE CRANE
(american 1857-1937)
"AWAKENING HILLS"
Signed and dated 'Bruce Crane NA./1911' bottom left, oil on canvas
45 1/8 x 46 1/8 in. (114.6 x 117.2cm)
provenance:
Private Collection, New Haven, Connecticut.
Garzoli Gallery, San Rafael, California.
EXHIBITED:
"Annual Exhibition," The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, 1911.
LITERATURE:
David A. Cleveland, A History of American Tonalism: 1880-1920, Manchester & New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2010, p. 497, fig. 8.65 (illustrated).
NOTE:
Similar to William Thoreau's reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, tonalist painter Bruce Crane set out to harness a pure, vanishing rural world through his paintings, which he tinted with a poetic, lyrical and mysterious atmosphere. Crane worked on "Awakening Hills" after he won the Carnegie Prize for "November Hills" in 1909 (now at the Carnegie Museum of Art). According to David Cleveland, the present work "demonstrates Crane's development of a broader decorative style, combining realism and a sense of time, place and mood with a fundamentally conceptualist strategy that emphasizes shapes, patterns, and delicate paint work-all within a harmonized color field." Despite its simple composition, the painting conveys a strong sense of harmony through the artist's use of muted colors and soft-edge forms. Through its square format, the painting translates the artist's yearning for simpler, more decorative patterns capable of "[revealing] the pulsing, glistening energies beneath the surface of things."