Mill Pond Near Artist's Homestead, Waterford, oil on canvas, 13.5" by 19.5 " (image), 25.5" by 31.5" framed, signed lower right.

The artist traveled extensively during the 1880’s, particularly in Italy and the United Kingdom, in part to study old master paintings first-hand. He did paint some panoramic landscapes, particularly of the Connecticut River Valley, and sometimes dramatic marine works, but his favorite subjects were the canals of Venice and his “homestead,” featuring cottage, trees and a duck-pond,. Although he is generally regarded a “realist” somewhat at odds with the Impressionist currents of his time, many of his paintings show a soft-edged style achieved by a delicate scumbling at the border of the forms, particularly in the massing of foliage. This, together with the limited palette of some of his works and the subtle tonal shifts, would seem to align him more closely with the movement for “painting softly,” which developed in America in the 70’s and 80’s in the wake of George Inness and James McNeill Whistler. (See Like Breath on Glass, ed. Marc Simpson, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, 2008.)

Works by Henry Pember Smith can be viewed in the Newark Museum, the Butler Institute of Art, the Chrysler Museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, the Hudson River Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the George Walter Vincent Smith Museum, among others.