Long Island Potato Patch

Primarily known as a muralist and a large-scale easel painter, Turner completed this work and also Queen of the Montauks (1886, current whereabouts unknown) during his years of summer residence in East Hampton. Decades earlier, Walt Whitman had drawn artists’ attentions to the region through a series of articles for Brooklyn’s Standard newspaper. In one column, Whitman reveled over the same rustic beauty captured by Turner in this canvas:

The soil is rich, the grass is green and plentiful; the best patches of Indian corn and vegetables I saw last autumn are within gun shot of the salt waves of the Atlantic…