Niagara Falls (1878): Art, History and Details

Niagara Falls (1878) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is William Morris Hunt (American, 1824–1879).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Hunt studied with the famous French painter of peasant scenes, Jean-Francois Millet (1814–1875), and played a major role in introducing the loose brushwork of advanced French painting into American art. In 1878, only a year before his tragic suicide, Hunt visited Niagara Falls. There he produced a remarkable group of pastels, charcoal drawings, and paintings in which the physical particulars of the scene appear to dissolve into a near-abstract pattern of water and mist.

Object facts

• Title: Niagara Falls
• Date: 1878
• Creator attribution: William Morris Hunt (American, 1824–1879)
• Culture: America
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: charcoal and brush and charcoal wash; framing lines in charcoal
• Dimensions: Sheet: 27.5 x 42.9 cm (10 13/16 x 16 7/8 in.); Image: 26.7 x 42.1 cm (10 1/2 x 16 9/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - American 19th Century
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1943.326

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. G. Tappan Francis

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.