Fryeburg Intervales

Landscape, Mountains, Landscape, Rivers, Snow

Dimensions

Image Dimensions: 21.0 x 16.5 cm
Support Dimensions: unmounted

In 1898, American amateur photographer William Boyd Post (1857-1921) moved permanently into his family’s summer vacation home in Fryeburg, Maine. He had just sold his seat on the New York Stock Exchange a year after his father had died. An active exhibitor since the late 1880’s with the New York Camera Club, his wealth and new life as a country gentleman gave him the opportunity to devote more of his time to the hobby he loved.

Photography scholar Christian Peterson, in his 2005 volume The Quiet Landscapes of William B. Post, states the artist first began taking winter photographs in 1895.  He would eventually devote a great deal of his time to the season, with his notable masterpiece Intervale, Winter, taken in 1899, a direct nod to several of Peter Henry Emerson’s naturalistic winter studies which appeared in his 1895 volume Marsh Leaves. Later in the new century, Post continued taking winter landscapes, writing about it for the journal The Photo-Era in 1910.

This sublime landscape view, showing areas of snow melting in the foreground as well as runoff from the Saco River which roughly bisects the composition directly above the diagonal area of fence-line, shows the distant peaks of New Hampshire’s White Mountains. More commonly associated with the topography of New England in the United States, an intervale is a low-lying tract of land along a river.  Taken in Fryeburg Maine, the vantage point may be from an area northwest of  the present-day Rivercroft Farm, located along River Street. (ME Route 113) Rivercroft- a seven-generation Maine family farm still owned by the Weston family of Fryeburg, would have been very familiar to Post, as he married then owner John Weston’s daughter Mary Webster Weston (1866-1957) on October 1, 1901. 

Print notes recto: Unconserved platinum print with overall age toning and areas of adhesive tape residue in upper left and right corners.

Print notes verso: Uncommonly titled and signed in black fountain pen ink along lower margin:  Fryeburg Intervales - W(B?). Post.

Provenance:  Acquired by PhotoSeed in January, 2020 from a dealer in Windham, Maine.