Boys and Barrels

Vedder was in the Boston area from 1863 to 1865 with John La Farge and William Morris Hunt and probably accompanied them on sketching trips to the Massachusetts shore. As Regina Soria has catalogued, Vedder executed a number of small paintings, including this one, with Cohasset, Massachusetts, as their subject matter. At least one of these, Beach at Cohasset (1865; Hollis Taggart Galleries, Washington, D.C. [1994]) is very close in composition and subject matter to the Academy's Boys and Barrels; both paintings contain the exact arrangement of large barrels, rocks, and wooden plank in the foreground.

The precision of the inscribed dates on the Academy's two Cohasset pictures suggests that they were created rather hastily. Vedder remembered that they were not painted on the spot, as their size and freedom of execution suggest, but from memory. In terms of his oeuvre, these images are unusual, as Vedder was not generally known as a genre painter.
This and the following paintings were given by the artist's daughter, Anita H. Vedder, to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters which then gave them to the NAD in 1955.