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Bringing in the Hay
Samuel L. Gerry (1813–91)
Signed, lower left: “S. L. Gerry”; undated, circa 1870
Oil on canvas (16 x 24 in.)
Collection of the New Hampshire Historical Society, purchased with funds from Margaret H. Jewell
1969.508.03
In the late 1860s and 1870s, Gerry exhibited and sold a number of pastoral genre scenes like this one. The paintings’ titles—Homeward from Pasture, The Milkmaid, Barn-yard Fowls, Gathering Seaweed, and Blackberry Pasture, for example—suggest the range of their rural subject matter. This genre became popular in the middle of the 19th century and tended to romanticize everyday life in a pre-industrial America—an America that was already disappearing.
