William Stanley Haseltine

Helen Haseltine Plowden, London (daughter of the artist)

Boise Art Association, Boise Gallery of Art, Idaho (acquired in October 1961 as a gift from the above)

Mrs. George Arden, New York

Christie's, New York, May 22, 1991, lot 39 (consigned by the above)

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

An early pioneer of American landscape painting, William Stanley Haseltine first achieved recognition for his “rock portraits”—geologically precise views of the New England shore. During the late 1860s, however, Haseltine and his peers, including Albert Bierstadt, Frederick Edwin Church and Worthington Whittredge, increasingly fell out of favor as the public’s tastes shifted away from the detailed realism of American landscapes and toward the experimental sophistication of European, and especially French, painters. By relocating to Rome in 1867 and painting the exotic locales of his new home, Haseltine was able to maintain his commercial success even after collectors and critics lost interest in his contemporaries.

In Mediterranean Coast, Haseltine calls back to his earlier paintings of the New England shore—depicting the reduction of a landscape to its purest elements of rock, sea and sky. Executed circa 1867, he casts his new European surroundings with the distinctly American naturalism that first earned him acclaim earlier that decade.