Landscape with Haywain

Worthington Whittredge (American, 1820–1910)

1861

Medium
oil on canvas
Classification
Painting
Dimensions
Framed: 65.5 x 103 x 12.5 cm (25 13/16 x 40 9/16 x 4 15/16 in.); Unframed: 40.2 x 78 cm (15 13/16 x 30 11/16 in.)
Culture
United States
Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art, American Painting and Sculpture
Credit line
Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund
Rights
Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
Who can see it
Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed

View at the Cleveland Museum of Art

About this work

Painted during the first year of the Civil War, this idyllic view of a farm near Dobb's Ferry, New York, proclaimed to Northern viewers the success of an agricultural system in which farmers worked their own land. The American flag hanging beside the homestead subtly alludes to the war. Such a scene was thus a critique of Southern slavery. Yet the beauty of the landscape, the wagon carrying a bountiful harvest of hay and the long afternoon shadows, also offers an optimistic image of harmony between man and nature.