Landscape, Autumn

Sheridan Lord's scene of houses and barns, defined by earth and sky, combines a specificity of locale with a universality of vision. Lord was a painter who never ventured far from home; the rolling fields seen from his front porch in the village of Sagaponack, on Long Island's East End, provided ample artistic inspiration.

In Landscape, Autumn 1974, Lord painted the view from the back of his property. Neighboring farm buildings occupy the strong horizon line. A cover crop is planted in deep furrows that crisscross the canvas in dizzying perspective, converging at the painter's own house, and the pale green of the sprouting winter rye permeates the foreground. The trees along the horizon reflect the changing season, with touches of red and yellow. Lord was not an enthusiastic delineator of clouds. ("Personally I'm not really interested in clouds," he told an interviewer. ) His skies are more like translucent canopies of mottled color. Although he lived barely a mile from the Atlantic, he never painted there, preferring to capture the ocean's mutable atmospherics in the skies he created.