Houghton Cranford Smith

Richard York Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above in 2001 by the present owner

An intense admirer of Claude Monet, whom he called “the greatest painter of all times,” Houghton Cranford Smith began his career as a painter of Impressionist landscapes, often painting en plein air under the tutelage of William Merritt Chase and Kenneth Hayes Miller at the Art Students League. Though residing in New York, Smith was a spirited explorer and began traveling across the globe including to Bermuda, Cuba and Jamaica in search of scenery to paint. The greatest influence to his artistic style, however, he found in Paris around 1930 when studying under Amédée Ozenfant, the famed Cubist painter that co-founded the Purism movement with Le Corbusier. Like his mentor, Smith began to reduce his compositions to more geometric arrangements, reducing representation to its barest details.

Black Schooner, “Dacia” exhibits the characteristic flattened forms and clean lines of Smith’s later years. A composition dominated by the strong diagonals of the titular black schooner and the dock it floats in as well as the repetitive shapes of the houses and clouds in the background, the present work bears traces of Smith’s Purist forebears as well as his American Precisionist contemporaries.