Ploughmen in a Fenced Field
Oil on canvas
20 x 30 inches
1891
As published in:
Scenic Impressions: Southern Interpretations from the Johnson Collection
As exhibited in:
Scenic Impressions: Southern Interpretations from the Johnson Collection, 2015–2018, Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, Tennessee; Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia; McKissick Museum of Art at the University of South Carolina, Columbia; Telfair Museums, Savannah, Georgia; Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee; Rosalind Sallenger Richardson Center for the Arts at Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina
A native of Mississippi, Ruger Donoho left the state as a child and grew up in the nation’s capital. Like many aspiring artists, he pursued his passion for art in Paris, at the Académie Julian, where his instructors followed a conventional curriculum. Donoho seems to have thrived during his years in France; his paintings were regularly accepted for the Paris Salon from 1881 through 1886. His forte was landscape painting of the Loire Valley and the area around Barbizon.
Donoho returned to New York in 1887, but soon after settled in East Hampton, New York, at the eastern end of Long Island. The village was known as “The American Barbizon” and was attractive to painters as it retained a quaint colonial flavor with shingled saltboxes, windmills, and acres of farmland. The expanse of green fields and pastoral emphasis in Ploughmen in a Fenced Field are reminiscent of Donoho’s French paintings, while the foreground anticipates the broken brushwork that would typify his later canvases.