Sophia Towne Darrah ranks among America's first professional women landscape artists. Born Sophia Towne in Philadelphia in 1819, she was the daughter of John Towne, a noted collector and patron of American artists. As a young woman, Sophia was devoted to music, but following her marriage to Bostonian Robert Kendall Darrah in 1845, she took up painting. In 1849 she became an early pupil of Paul Weber (1823-1916), a German artist who also instructed William Stanley Haseltine (1835-1900) and William Trost Richards (1833-1905).

Darrah began to exhibit her work at major venues beginning in 1855. Over the next two decades, she would send her paintings, primarily New England landscapes, to annual exhibitions at the Boston Athenaeum, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and, later, the National Academy of Design and the Boston Art Club. She remained active as an artist throughout her life, painting until a few weeks of her death in 1881. A respected member of the Boston art community, Darrah was given a memorial exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1882.

Mount Chocorua, New Hampshire depicts a distant view of Chocorua looking across the Saco River from North Conway. A green meadow takes up most of the foreground, and in the lower left, a reclining shepherd and several grazing sheep add an idyllic note to the scene. The polished and placid quality of the composition is reminiscent of similar landscapes by Paul Weber, and it is perhaps not coincidental that Darrah's teacher is known to have visited the White Mountains around the same time or slightly earlier.

Mount Chocorua, New Hampshire may be identical with the canvas entitled Mt. Chocorua that Darrah exhibited at the Boston Athenaeum in 1856. First depicted by Thomas Cole (q.v.) in the second half of the 1820s, Mount Chocorua and other White Mountain landmarks had become newly popular with younger landscapists during the early 1850s. Located within sight of the artists' unofficial summer headquarters at North Conway, the bare, craggy peak of Chocorua is among the most distinctive in the White Mountain chain. Images of Chocorua would have been easily recognizable at exhibitions, and it is significant that Darrah chose this subject to represent her work at the outset of her career. By sending White Mountain landscapes to exhibitions at the Boston Athenaeum, Darrah effectively claimed a place for herself among the Hudson River School brotherhood that was beginning to gather regularly in New Hampshire. Indeed, at the Athenaeum exhibition of 1856, Darrah's painting of Mount Chocorua shared space with a Chocorua view by Benjamin Champney (q.v.), as well as other White Mountain scenes by such rising stars as William Hart (1823-1894) and John Frederick Kensett (1816-1872). Like these and other artists, Darrah contributed White Mountain landscapes for several years in a row. Later titles included The White Mountains, exhibited in 1857, and Mount Washington, in 1858.

In addition to its distinctive profile, Mount Chocorua was the focus of one of the region's most celebrated folk legends. For many nineteenth-century landscapists, the historical or literary associations of a subject were nearly as important as its picturesque qualities, and in Chocorua, artists had both in full measure. Existing in slightly differing versions, the story told of a Native American chief named Chocorua, whose tribe lived side by side with the early white settlers of the area. A misunderstanding arose between the two groups, and on one fateful day, Chocorua found himself cornered by a band of gunmen on the summit of the mountain. Told to leap from a cliff or be shot, Chocorua chose to stand and die. As he bled to death, he pronounced a curse on the whites and all that they possessed. So effective was the chief's dying bane that the white men soon left the area, and forever afterward, the soil and water in the vicinity of the mountain were held to be poisonous. This dreadful tale appealed to a number of early American writers, and by the 1850s it was reasonably well known.

Darrah's inclusion of shepherd and sheep harkens to Chocorua's curse, if only to discount it. On a more general level, the presence of white men and livestock immediately called up the contrast between the cultivated landscape of Darrah's own era and the untamed wilderness of Chocorua's time. Throughout the nineteenth century, poets and painters mused over the passing of the wild landscape and its original inhabitants. Although most agreed that their disappearance was ineffably tragic, white observers were unanimous in concluding that civilization was America's necessary destiny. Darrah's painting seems to affirm this viewpoint, proffering a vision of pastoral tranquility against the violent past of Mount Chocorua.

Mount Chocorua, New Hampshire was acquired by the Currier Museum of Art in 1994.

VSD

REFERENCES

Catherine H. Campbell with Marcia Schmidt Blaine. New Hampshire Scenery: A Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Artists of New Hampshire Mountain Landscapes. Canaan, NH: Phoenix Publishing, 1985.

Janice H. Chadbourne, Karl Gabosh, and Charles O. Vogel, eds. The Boston Art Club: Exhibition Record 1873-1909. Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1991.

Exhibition of Oil Paintings, Water-Colors, and Charcoals by the Late Mrs. Sophia Towne Darrah, in the Picture Gallery and First Print Room, February 22nd to March 8th, 1882. Boston: Alfred Mudge and Son, 1882.

Robert F. Perkins Jr. and William J. Gavin III, eds. The Boston Athenaeum Art Exhibition Index 1827-1874. Boston: The Library of the Boston Athenaeum, 1980.

Anna Wells Rutledge, ed. Cumulative Record of Exhibition Catalogues The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts 1807-1870 The Society of Artists, 1800-1814 The Artists' Fund Society, 1835-1845. Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1955.