The Great Basin of Mount Katahdin, Maine

Download1882 × 3000 px View on a wall Edit

Artist: Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900)
Medium: Oil and graphite on paperboard
Size: 36.3 × 22.5 cm (14 5/16 × 8 7/8 in.)
Museum: Smithsonian Institution
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

Landscape sketch showing a detailed view of Chimney Pond and the Great Basin of Mt. Katahdin in Maine, viewed from the northern shore of the pond. The water's dark surface comprises the immediate foreground and encounters the sloping and heavily wooded opposite shoreline in the middle distance. Behind, the northern face of Mt. Katahdin rises abruptly into the low-lying clouds, which obscure its rocky, serrated ridge in a diaphanous veil of glowing mist.

The mountainside itself has vegetation and undergrowth on its lower slopes and is rugged and bald closer to the ridge. Thinly applied, the paint frequently reveals the underlying light brown ground. In the upper left, upper right, and lower left corners, paint is absent around pinholes, suggesting that Church himself pinned the paperboard to an easel or other support.