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Lot 63
John Joseph Enneking(1841-1916)Behind the Apple Orchard
26 September – 7 October 2025, 12:00 EDT
Skinner Marlborough, MassachusettsSold for US$12,800 inc. premium
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Jelena James
Senior Specialist, Head of Sale
Claire Dettelbach
Cataloguer
Jewel Bernier
Cataloguer
John Joseph Enneking (1841-1916)
Behind the Apple Orchard
signed and indistinctly dated 'Enneking [...]' (lower right); with labels from Vose Galleries, Boston, and Frank J. Pope, Boston (affixed to the stretcher)
oil on canvas
18 x 24 in. (45.7 x 61.0 cm)
signed and indistinctly dated 'Enneking [...]' (lower right); with labels from Vose Galleries, Boston, and Frank J. Pope, Boston (affixed to the stretcher)
oil on canvas
18 x 24 in. (45.7 x 61.0 cm)
Footnotes
Provenance
Vose Galleries, Boston.
The present private collection (acquired from the previous, 2004).
N.B.
John Joseph Enneking was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and studied art in New York, Boston, Munich, and Paris. He spent most of his life in Hyde Park, Boston, which was his favorite location to sketch and paint. He earned a reputation as the painter of the New England seasons and was particularly well known for his ability to effectively capture the rich hues and crisp atmosphere of a woodland twilight. He found a strong market for these impressionistic landscapes among Boston-area collectors; as the Boston Herald noted in 1962, by the late 19th century "it was a truism that an Enneking painting adorned at least one wall of every Back Bay home of consequence in Boston".
After Enneking's death in Boston in 1916, his family placed many of his works into storage in a Back Bay warehouse where they were soon forgotten. Enneking was consequently relegated to a dusty "artistic limbo", as described by Vose Galleries. It was only in 1960, when that warehouse was scheduled for demolition, that the paintings were rediscovered. Thus began an almost immediate resurgence in Enneking's reputation. At the time of the rediscovery, many in Boston still recalled Enneking himself, decades earlier, as "a figure, easel slung across his back, trudging into a thickening twilight on Stony Brook Reservation" or as "the last of the New England giants", as called by Rolph H. Kristiansen (The Boston Herald, June 31, 1960). The Vose Galleries in Boston played a crucial role in promoting both Enneking and his oeuvre thereafter, holding the first Enneking exhibition in 35 years in 1962 to display the rediscovered cache of paintings.
Enneking was primarily a plein air painter and was particularly interested in the atmospheric effects of the light in different seasons and at different times of day. The present work is a charming evocation of the gentle light, soft shadows, and aroma-filled air of early spring, and was perhaps painted at an orchard nearby Boston. Vose Galleries in 1962 described these types of scenes by Enneking as his "pastorals in blossom time". The springtime trees provided the perfect opportunity for Enneking to apply his studies with Claude Monet and other French Impressionists, as opposed to his sunset scenes, which relate more closely to the darker, richer hues of Barbizon landscapes.