Snow-Laden

Walter Launt Palmer is best known as the "painter of the American winter." In 1905, the art critic Samuel Isham made the following remarks about Palmer's unique style and subject matter: "... He has painted most forms of landscape but he has made the winter with its snows his special province...All the resources of the open-air school are resorted to in order to get the exact tone of the shadows and keep them keyed up to their natural brilliancy and yet have a higher, brighter note for the sunlit snow itself. This brilliancy is given perhaps better than by any one else, and yet detail is pushed to the ultimate point of elaboration, every twig on track in the snow has the sharpness and completeness of nature...In this way Palmer's work is original" (History of American Painting, New York, 1905, p. 440, 443, as quoted in M. Mann, Walter Launt Palmer, Poetic Reality, Exton, Pennsylvania 1984, p. 46)