Niagara Falls and the Rapids

Kensett painted this around 1851, and he kept the falls themselves small. They sit at the left edge of the canvas, a white curve of water, while most of the picture goes to the broad river and its rapids, broken over the rocks, under a pale, clear sky. A critic once wrote that Kensett could take a subject like Niagara without forsaking his calm, like a cultured elocutionist. He painted the falls again in the following years, and in 1854 the English collector Francis Egerton, Earl of Ellesmere, paid $500 for one of his Niagara views, among the highest prices a Kensett had fetched by then. This canvas, about 60 centimetres wide, stayed in the painter's studio until he died in 1872 and was sold that year in New York, at the National Academy of Design's memorial exhibition. In 1945 the collector Maxim Karolik bought it, and three years later it came to the museum with the bequest of his wife, Martha.