Winter Sheldrake

Dickinson painted this landscape in Sheldrake, a rural village on Lake Cayuga in far upstate New York. His limited color palette, consisting of mainly white and silvery gray, conveys the extreme cold of winter in the region. Dickinson's family had owned a cottage in Sheldrake since 1897, and he would often walk in the surrounding woods looking for a spot that interested him visually. As with the monumental Toward Mrs. Driscoll's (also on this wall), Winter Sheldrake was painted outdoors in one sitting, a procedure known as premier coup.