Louis Palmer Church (the artist's son)
Mrs. Ida McCaffery, Detroit, Michigan, 1928 (acquired from the above)
By descent in the family (sold: Sotheby's, New York,  May 27, 1993, lot 138, illustrated in color)
Acquired by the present owner at the above sale

According to Gerald L. Carr, the present work "depict[s] a theme dear to Church's heart, the Hudson River Valley and Catskill Mountains as viewed from the rural property--the future Olana--in upstate New York, which served as his family's permanent residence after 1861.  Church often sketched weather effects there during the mid- and late 1860s.  However, the majority of his undated as well as dated oil studies of this kind evidently are contemporaneous with the construction, between 1870 and 1872-3, of the Persian-style mansion that he and his wife called Olana.  For the most part Church was his own architect, hence his oil studies- notably those painted during wintertime, when building operations were stopped-are evidence of his abundant creative energies during this period, with regard to the design and construction of his home.  These particular scenes resemble those depicted in an undated oil, still at Olana and which Church framed for display there, and in another oil, dated 1871 and also framed, now in a private collection.  The tree-crowned eminence in the foreground of all four is Quarry Hill; [this] smaller freely brushed work suggests unsettled weather...By the 1890s, the last decade of his life, Church had decorated the interiors of Olana with at least fifteen small oils (two of them by another painter) and one medium-size canvas of views of Olana."