(American, 1831-1870)

Mount Chimborazo, Ecuador, 1862, signed with initial lower right "M 62", oil on canvas, 15-1/2 x 24 in.; silver finished wood frame, 19-1/2 x 28 in.

Note: This recently discovered South American work by Mignot from 1862 was done after he had spent four months in Central and South America with his compatriot Frederic Edwin Church in the middle of 1857. Church had already visited Ecuador and painted the first round of his South American masterworks, and Church's influence can be clearly seen here, but Mignot's first trip informed and transformed his art:

"South America offered Mignot a spiritual haven. From the time he set foot on the soil of Ecuador, he painted its contours more than any other single theme. It took hold of him and he of it, as he configured and refigured its rivers and mountains on canvases created between 1857 and his death. To follow the transformations that occurred in his conceptions of the subject is to understand the trajectory of his art...".

Katherine Manthorne with John W Coffey, The Landscapes of Louis Remy Mignot : A Southern Painter Abroad (exhibition catalogue). Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press for the North Carolina Museum of Art, 1996, page 69.

Provenance: Private Collection, Connecticut

linen lined, small areas of retouch sky; frame in good condition