Haying Near New Rochelle

When many of his fellow artists were searching for painting subjects as far away as the Catskills or White Mountains, Dolph found rural inspiration in Westchester County, commuting distance from his New York City home. He began his career as a landscape painter but then developed a specialty painting animals. Both skills are evident in this work, which may be the Haying Scene he exhibited in Brooklyn in 1872. It depicts the harvesting of salt hay on Davenport Neck, a peninsula off the coast of the Westchester town of New Rochelle. The painting focuses our attention on the quiet, nostalgic moments that could still be found in the midst of a rapidly growing suburbia.