Skip to main content
Collections Menu
Sharpening The Saw
Sharpening The Saw
Artist (1841 - 1919)

Sharpening The Saw

Date1887
DimensionsSight: 26 1/4 × 22 in. (66.7 × 55.9 cm)
Object numberN0423.1955
Credit LineCollection of the Fenimore Art Museum. Gift of Stephen C. Clark
Photograph by Richard Walker
Label TextE. L. Henry is one of the foremost American genre painters. Henry grew up in New York City and studied painting in both Europe and the United States. He specialized in recreations of rural and town scenes of everyday life. Many of his works, including Sharpening the Saw, were derived from the surrounding life and people in his summer home of Cragsmoor, New York. The old man depicted here resembles his summer neighbor Thomas Botsford, an individual Henry painted on several occasions.
Exhibition History“Through the Eyes of Others: African Americans and Identity in American Art,” Fenimore Art Museum, August, 23 – December 31, 2008; Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, TN, January 25 – April 18, 2010, no cat. no.
BibliographyMacleish, Bruce A., “Paintings in the New York State Historical Association,” in Antiques (September, 1984), p. 597, Pl. XII, ill.

Weinberg, Barbara, The Lure of Paris: Nineteenth-Century American Painters and Their French Teachers (New York, NY: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1991), p 63, Pl. 69, ill.

Mueller, Kristen, “Provincial Vistas,” in Heritage, vol. 16 no. 2 (Winter, 2000), pp. 6, 7, ill.

Conforti, Michael, Ganz, James A. et al., The Clark Brothers Collect Impressionist and Early Modern Paintings (exh. cat. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 330, fig. 290, no. 171, ill.

Sorin, Gretchen Sullivan and Aimonovitch, Mary C., Through the Eyes of Others: African Americans and Identity in American Art (exh. cat. Cooperstown, NY: Fenimore Art Museum, 2008), pp. 40, 41, ill.
On View
Not on view
Kept In
Edward Lamson Henry
1889
On The Canal
Edward Lamson Henry
1885-1890
Leather Stocking and ---
Felix Octavius Carr Darley
n.d.
Separate Tables
Joseph H. Davis
c. 1835
Church, Normandy, France
Edward Henry Potthast
1887-1889
De Mott Smith
Henry Walton
1841
The Blacksmith Shop
Eastman Johnson
1863
Cider Making on Long Island
William M. Davis
c. 1870
Maine Family
Unidentified Artist
c. 1850
Mrs. McCormick's General Store
Albertus del Orient Browere
1844

5798 STATE HIGHWAY 80
COOPERSTOWN NY, 13326
607-547-1400

close

Subscribe to our mailing list

* indicates required