About this work
*Mountain Landscape, Highlands, North Carolina* (1889) is a watercolor, pencil, and colored pencil work on paper — a modestly scaled yet quietly commanding piece measuring roughly 10⅞ by 15 inches. The composition opens onto the layered ridgelines of the Southern Appalachians, where forested slopes recede in muted greens and warm ochres toward a pale, haze-softened horizon. The Blue Ridge Mountains are known for their characteristic bluish cast when seen from a distance, produced by isoprene released from the trees and contributing to the distinctive atmospheric haze that settles over the peaks. Tanner captures precisely this quality — distance dissolving into tonal suggestion rather than hard outline. The watercolor medium suits the subject perfectly: washes of color bleed into one another at the treeline, pencil strokes quietly anchor the nearer terrain, and the whole sheet breathes with the cool, clean air of high elevation.
In the summer of 1888, Tanner sold his small gallery and moved to Highlands, North Carolina, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, hoping to study, earn a living by photography, and benefit from the mountain air for his delicate health. While there, he made many sketches and photographs of the region. This watercolor, dated 1889, was almost certainly produced during or shortly after that residency — placing it in a pivotal, pre-Paris chapter of his career. Tanner would later assimilate the inhabitants of his rural French environment into his works as he had done previously in the mountains of Highlands, North Carolina , suggesting the Blue Ridge sojourn was more than a rest cure; it was a formative exercise in observing and recording a landscape on its own terms. The work is held in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.
This is a work for rooms that favor restraint over spectacle — a study, a reading corner, a hallway where morning light falls sideways across the wall. The intimate scale invites close looking rather than commanding a room from across it. It speaks to viewers drawn to American landscape tradition and to the documentary impulse in 19th-century art: the sense that a place was *seen*, not merely painted. Tanner was not limited to one specific approach — his works reflect at times meticulous attention to detail and loose, expressive brushwork, and often both methods are employed simultaneously. Here, that duality is visible in every inch: precise pencil articulation beneath luminous, freely applied washes. The result is a landscape that feels observed from life and remembered in feeling — unhurried, honest, and quietly beautiful.
