William Stanley Haseltine (1835–1900)
Coast near Rome, 1886–91

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Gift of Alexandria & Michael N. Altman P’22, ’24, ’26, 2019.2

Jeffery Howe
Professor Emeritus, Art History

In 1854 Haseltine joined William Trost Richards as a student of the German painter Paul Weber (1823–1916), who had settled in Philadelphia. Like Richards, Haseltine was influenced by John Ruskin’s insistence on truth to nature and rendering it in painstaking detail. He spent much of his later career in Rome near where this large panoramic landscape was painted. The prismatic colors of sea and sky at left are contrasted with the shadowy landscape of the shore, where a grove of seemingly animated trees reach toward the light.