American Masterpieces from Dryads Green Gallery
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Artist Name:       Edward Parker Hayden
Artist Dates:         1858 - 1922
Painting Title:       Berkshire Spring
Painting Date:       No Date
Medium:              Oil on Canvas
Signature:             Signed Lower Right
Provenance:          Private Collection
Condition:             Excellent
Size Unframed:     30 x 20
Frame Condition:   Mint Reproduction
Artist Best Price:   $8,000
Offered At:           $20,000
Curator's Comments: The Hayden clan, emigrating westward, founded Haydenville, Ohio, where Edward Parker Hayden was born on May 21, 1858, the son of William Hallock and Eliza (Goodspeed) Hayden. But Hayden, himself, settled in the east, choosing the sister city, Haydenville, Massachusetts, which his relatives had founded more than a century earlier, and where he died in 1922 (the correct year as attested by Edward P. Bentley’s brief memoir of Hayden).

After spending his boyhood in nearby Columbus, Ohio, we know that Hayden moved to New York City, where he studied under William Lamb Picknell, who certainly pointed Hayden in the direction of Massachusetts. Picknell was a brilliant early plein-aire master, known particularly for the clarity of his light, the same clarity that dominates in Hayden’s works. By the early 1880s, Hayden began exhibiting at the Salmagundi Club in New York, where he was a member, and by 1890, he was living in Cummington, Massachusetts, next door to Haydenville, and one of the splendid Berkshire hilltowns, including Goshen and Charlemont. He was close to the LaValley brothers of Western Massachusetts, Jonas, the still-life painter, and more so with William LaValley, the landscape artist, with whom he shared a studio for many years, and it was only two years before Hayden’s death that LaValley moved north to South Londonderry, Vermont. Another major influence was Hugh Bolton Jones, who Hayden certainly met, as he revisited many of the landscapes Jones, nearby in South Egremont, had rendered in one masterpiece after another.

In 1889, he began exhibiting at the National Academy, which he did through 1897. He later exhibited at the Boston Art Club, the Philadelphia Art Club, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Society of American Artists. The Columbus Ohio Museum of Art held Hayden’s most important retrospective exhibit in 1942, where Berkshire Spring was a featured work. The twenty-three canvases shown there “follow his style from its somewhat precise beginnings through an expanding palette and growing sense of construction that empowered his mature expression of 1910-1916.”
Bentley tells us that at the time it was said that "no one could paint a tree like 'Ned' Hayden," and indeed we think of Hayden as one of the country’s premier landscapists. We also think that Berkshire Spring is his finest work of size ever. Everything that he worked so long to perfect is here—and predominantly the sense of water permeating the earth, the trees, sky and buds. You can see the power beginning to express itself in the smaller work called The Meandering Stream, which we show alongside.
The Meandering Stream (14 x 18) sold for $8000
Berkshire Spring is a painting of awakening, and we would be wrong not to remember that World War I was in Hayden’s mind. It’s horrors are contrasted here with a sense of natural light that tells us there is spring and life and growth— there is green across the landscape as reflected in yellow, grey, white, brown and black hues. We cannot emphasize enough the purity of this work in which every element is coming alive. The light is absolute perfection. Then there is the detail! Hayden was deliberately patient to render every detail with absolute precision--the message is that the landscape is not impatient--it knows the awakening must happen. Our friend Jim Pegg of the John Toomey Gallery is right to have written “that this is one of the finest examples of Hayden’s work known.” We, ourselves, have set a high personal value on this painting, for which we see a very promising future, and we are proud to offer a work that fulfills its promise as an American masterpiece. This painting will appear in the study, The Berkshire Realists, by Dr. Eleanor Ashton.
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