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Albert Fitch Bellows
(1829 - 1883)
Forest Stream, circa 1870

Albert Fitch Bellows made a tremendous contribution to the production of watercolors and oil paintings of landscapes and genre scenes in the latter half of the nineteenth century. He was born to an old New England family in 1829 and grew up in Milford, Massachusetts. After serving as principal of the New England School of Design, Bellows went abroad to the Royal Academy in Antwerp to study genre painting. Upon his return to New York in 1859, Bellows was made an associate of the National Academy of Design and an Academician in 1861, a great honor.

Bellows developed a keen interest in watercolors in the mid-1860s and was a founder of the American Society of Painters in Watercolor, which published his famous treatise, Water Color Painting: Some Facts and Authorities in Relation to its Durability. When abroad in England, he was exposed to the leading watercolor talents and was admitted as an honorary member to the Royal Belgian Society of Painters in Water Color. After the artist returned from Europe, many of his works were burnt in a fire that destroyed his Boston studio in 1872. He then moved his studio to New York and continued to exhibit at the National Academy, Brooklyn Art Association, Boston Art Club, Boston Athenaeum, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. His works are now held in the collections of Brooklyn Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Birmingham Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, National Academy of Design, and the New York Historical Society.

Forest Stream is a lush, pastoral woodland interior that reflects Bellows' mastery of the medium. Luxuriant autumnal foliage frames a quiet stream at the center of the composition, creating an avenue for the viewer to enter the scene and be enveloped by the soft, diffused sunlight. Like all of Bellows’ paintings, Forest Stream showcases the artist’s “concern for detail, and a sound instinct for composition” (1).

Provenance: From the trade to the gallery.

Bibliography:
1. Frederick Baekeland, Images of America: The Painter’s Eye (The Birmingham Museum of Art, 1991) 48.