Landscape with Haywain (1861): Art, History and Details

Landscape with Haywain (1861) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Worthington Whittredge (American, 1820–1910).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the 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.

Object facts

• Title: Landscape with Haywain
• Date: 1861
• Creator attribution: Worthington Whittredge (American, 1820–1910)
• Culture: United States
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• 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.)
• Collection: American - Painting
• Department: American Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1975.20

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Adams, Henry. What's American about American art?: a gallery tour in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2008.
• Lee, Sherman E. “The Year in Review for 1975.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 63, no. 2 (February 1976): 31–71.
• Green, Tyler. Emerson's Nature and the Artists: Idea As Landscape, Landscape As Idea. Munich: Prestel, 2021.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.