William Preston Phelps Landscape with Sheep

William Preston Phelps
American
(1848-1923)

Landscape with Sheep, 19.5 by 35.5 inches (image), 29" by 45" (with frame), s.l.l.

Throughout his career, William Preston Phelps is closely associated with the White Mountain School of painters. He was born in 1848 in Chesham, New Hampshire and apprenticed early as a sign painter. Upon his first exhibition in Lowell, Massachusetts, patrons assembled a fund to enable Phelps to study abroad. Phelps spent the years between 1875 and 1877 in Munich, a major center for American artists in the latter half of the nineteenth century. He returned briefly to the U.S. in 1878, exhibiting for the first time at the National Academy, but returned to Europe for another five years, spending time in Munich and Paris. In Munich, Phelps was an close associate of Frank Duveneck and William Merritt Chase.

Phelps was a consummate plein aire painter, known for constructing elaborate on-site studios to complete his paintings. One such construction was at the edge of the Grand Canyon. In 1890, the artist went back to the family farm near Mt. Monadnock. He painted the mountain so frequently in his later years that he became known as “the painter of Mt. Monadnock.” Phelps died at his place of birth in 1923.

Work by William Preston Phelps can be found in the collections of the West Point Museum, the Whistler House (Lowell, Mass.), the New Hampshire Historical Society, the Shelburne Museum (Vt.), the Lowell Historical Society, and the William Benton Museum of Art.

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