Four Palms on Verdant Field Near Nile

Lockwood de Forest · January 4, 1876

Medium

Oil on card

Original size

15.9 × 26 cm (6 5/16 × 10 1/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Realism

Four Palms on Verdant Field Near Nile is a small, luminous plein air study that distills the Egyptian landscape into something elemental — four palms rising against an open sky, the Nile's fertile banks stretching beneath them. Lockwood de Forest painted this during his 1875–76 journey through Egypt and Syria, a trip that proved formative for the young American artist. Working on card rather than canvas, he captured scenes directly from life, and the intimacy of that format shows — the brushwork is loose and confident, the colour unforced. De Forest had trained under Frederic Church, whose influence in reading light and atmospheric distance is visible here, though de Forest's touch is quieter and more lyrical than his teacher's grand visions. The work is now held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, one of several Egyptian studies from this journey that document de Forest's sustained engagement with the landscape before he became better known as a designer and decorator through his partnership with Louis Comfort Tiffany. Our hand-painted oil reproduction is made to the same scale and on the same surface type as the original, preserving the spontaneity and tonal restraint that make this small study so quietly affecting.