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Item #AT-0477Charles Baker (1818-?) "Preston Pond, NY 1869" Oil on Canvas
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Description:
Charles Baker (1818-?)
"Preston Pond, NY 1869"
Oil on Canvas 15" x 25"Unframed 22.5" x 32.5" Framed
Framed in Gilt Frame
Provenance: Private Collection, NJ Robert McLean Gallery Albany, NY.
This 1869 painting on Canvas is especially rare and valuable record of a Civil War style encampment on remote Preston Pond in the central Adirondacks. Very few of his paintings are known to exist.
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Charles Baker was an amateur landscapist listed in New York City Directories from 1842 through 1862 as a saddler, silverplater, gunsmith, and importer. He achieved modest success as a painter, exhibiting at the National Academy of Design from 1839 through 1861 and the American Art-Union from 1846 through 1850. His brother Anson Baker Jr. described his paintings as "few in number, scattered principally among friends, his daily avocations affording him but little time to gratify a natural taste for landscape painting, which he possessed in a remarkable degree." In fact, Baker's pictures were in the collections of prominent New York businessmen as well as the artist Jasper F. Cropsey. The titles of his paintings reveal that Baker favored the picturesque wilderness of the Adirondacks, Catskills, the Green Mountains and the White Mountains for his subjects. Baker was a student, friend, and great admirer of Thomas Cole as well as an owner of his paintings.
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A Baker painting offered for sale in 1852 was described as "evidently by a student of Cole, and partaking in a great degree of that masters [sic] color." He is part of the permanent collection of the Adirondack Experience, The Museum on Blue Mountain Lake.
* Info from The Museum on Blue Mountain Lake
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This is a present day image of the same location of Preston Pond today!
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