The Saco Museum announces the purchase of a mid-Nineteenth Century landscape of the Saco River in Limington, Maine, by painter William Russell Smith (1812‱896).
The painting, “Sawyer’s Mountain from the Saco” and dated around 1850, has been added to the museum’s current major exhibition, “A Treasured Ten: A Decade of Collecting at the Saco Museum,” on view through November 15.
“This lovely local landscape by a nationally recognized artist is a valued addition to our collection and to the ‘Treasured Ten’ exhibition,” said Leslie Rounds, executive director of the Saco Museum’s parent institution, the Dyer Library Association. “We’re so pleased and proud that the Saco Museum is becoming a repository for these Saco River scenes.”
Born in Glasgow, Scotland, Russell Smith (as he became known professionally), emigrated to Pennsylvania with his family in 1891. After studying painting at a fledgling art school in Pittsburgh, he soon developed a successful career in painting theatrical scenery and panoramas (a rare existing example, not by Smith, is also in the Saco Museum’s collection).
Smith traveled widely both in the United States and overseas to identify subjects for his landscapes; one of his more frequently visited sites was the Saco River Valley. The area became so important to him artistically and personally that his son Xanthus, who was also a painter, eventually bought a summer home on Casco Bay.
The painting joins other Saco River Valley landscapes in the museum’s collection by Albert Bierstadt, Alfred Thompson Bricher, Gibeon Elden Bradbury, Charles Henry Granger, William Stoodley Gookin, and others. It was purchased from W.M. Schwind Jr Antiques and Fine Arts in Yarmouth, Maine, where proprietor Bill Schwind referred to the painting as “a little jewel.”
The Dyer Library/Saco Museum is at 371 Main Street (Route 1). For information, www.dyerlibrarysacomuseum.org or 207-283-3861, extension 114.
