Beach at Beverly

Unlike some of his contemporaries, John Frederick Kensett felt no need to travel to the tropics or the American West to find compelling subjects to paint. Instead, he continually revisited several familiar locales in New York and New England where he could explore the ways in which the same motif was altered by subtle differences in light and atmosphere.

Between 1859 and 1872, Kensett produced over thirty paintings of the North Shore of Massachusetts—then a popular vacation spot for Bostonians. More than twenty works were scenes of Beverly, a coastal town twenty-five miles north of Boston. In each of these works, the dominating compositional element is a large rock formation topped by bushes and small trees at the left. A few figures engaged in various activities usually appear in the foregrounds and the right sides of the scenes are filled by an open area of water.

_Beach at Beverly_ focuses on a rocky projection between Curtis Point and Mingo Beach on the Beverly shore. The artist's choice of an elevated viewpoint serves to lower the horizon and increase the feeling of vast space. An area of dark clouds located over the sand-colored cliff closes the left side of the painting more completely, thus providing a counterpoint to the seemingly infinite sweep of sky and sea at the right. Kensett thus presents a work in which the immediate and the imminent— the figure walking on the beach, the boats sailing on the water, and the clouds approaching from the right —blend with timeless and the permanent—the rocks, water, and sky. It is this delicate balance, depending on a highly sophisticated manipulation of composition, lighting, and paint itself, that gives _Beach at Beverly_ an almost magical intensity and calm repose, ultimately distinguishing it as one of Kensett's most masterful achievements.

More information on this painting can be found in the Gallery publication _American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Part I_, pages 394-397, which is available as a free PDF at https://www.nga.gov/content/dam/ngaweb/research/publications/pdfs/american-paintings-19th-century-part-1.pdf