Maine Coast
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A rough sea under a dull mauve sky. Dark green-brown waves churn across the surface, with a single translucent green wave cresting at center, backlit and glassy. A low, dark rocky headland sits at the left. The painting is small and thickly worked, the surface weathered and pitted with age, which gives it the quality of something found rather than made. Church was a student of Thomas Cole and the most technically ambitious of the Hudson River School painters, known for enormous canvases of South American volcanoes and Arctic icebergs. This early study is closer to the ground, just choppy water and rock under a flat sky, painted early in his career.