JEAN CHARLES CAZIN | MOONRISE

Herman Schauss, New York

Nathaniel Thayer, Boston (and his estate sold, American Art Association, New York, April 25, 1935, lot 36, illustrated)

Alfred H. Cosden, New York (acquired at the above sale)

Schiller & Bodo, New York

Acquired from the above

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1894 (lent by Nathaniel Thayer)

In the late nineteenth century, Jules-Charles Cazin travelled through England, Holland and Italy studying the landscape traditions of the regions’ artists particularly the Old Masters. Building on this foundation was his individual understanding of color and, as Moonrise illustrates, his evocative shifts from luminous to soft tones became both the hallmark or his production and the quality that drew the era’s collectors to it. The artist was well known in Gilded Age America and in particular after a landmark exhibition of his work in New York in 1893. Moonrise hung in the collection of Nathaniel Thayer III, part of an important Boston area family whose line could be traced back to 1630. After graduating Harvard, Thayer joined his father’s banking firm and upon his death in 1883 inherited $2 million from an estate valued at more than $16 million. Thayer served as president of Boston, Clinton and Fitchburg Railroad Company one of a long list of successes in industrial businesses. Moonrise was sold from the Thayer estate in 1935 and acquired by Alfred Cosden, a self-made millionaire. Starting life as the son of a rural farmer in West Dover, Delaware, Cosden grew the Clark and McDaniel pharmaceutical company to one of the largest in the northeast. Upon the company’s take-over in 1913, Cosden retired at forty-two to focus on his Georgian estate in Southold, New York and his passion for raising champion racehorses.