Branches and Boat

Snell is celebrated for his paintings of boats and harbors. Here, a rowboat in the lower right creates small ripples in the calm water while another vessel travels upstream. Through studying works by Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Vincent van Gogh, Snell discovered Japanese prints and was inspired by their stylized forms, flat shapes, asymmetrical compositions, and bold juxtapositions of near and far elements, notably the bare tree branches that form a web over the picture surface.

Born in Richmond, England, Snell immigrated to the United States in 1875 at age seventeen and studied at the Art Students’ League in New York. He was a beloved instructor at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art and Design) for more than forty years. It was there that he taught many of the members of the Philadelphia Ten, a professional organization that helped women artists secure exhibition opportunities and sell their work. Snell’s works are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the James A. Michener Art Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Allentown Art Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, and Woodmere. 

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