High Peak and Round Top (Catskill) in Winter,

1866

A founder of the short-lived but influential ­Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art, the official organ of the American Pre-­Raphaelites, Charles Herbert Moore had a similarly brief career — totaling less than two decades — that occasioned the creation of some of the group’s most beautiful and characteristic works. Advocating strict adherence to reality as the truest approach to the divine presence believed to be immanent in nature, American Pre-Raphaelites drew inspiration from their English counterparts, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who were motivated by the writings of John Ruskin to seek the "honest scrutiny" thought especially apparent in the work of Italian painters before Raphael. The American and British factions differed in the subjects they favored to convey their ideas — the English tending toward literary and historical themes, the Americans gravitating to landscape and still life — but their mutual preoccupation with an exacting realism manifest through precise draftsmanship, direct observation, and attention to detail cohered the groups into what may be considered the first transatlantic art movement. As a crucial promoter of the American Pre-Raphaelite journal, The New Path, Moore was central to the promulgation of the aesthetic in both theory and practice. Works such as his crystalline Winter Landscape, Valley of the Catskill offer a virtual catalogue of Pre-Raphaelite concerns. The striated masses of the mountains evince the movement’s focus on accurately rendered geological formations, while the evanescent clouds suggest a particular moment in observed time, and the undiscriminating inclusion of what Moore referred to as the village’s "ugly white houses" underscores a desired lack of pictorial selectivity. More particular to the artist’s own style are the image’s undulating forms and snowy setting, which Moore, who had moved from New York to the village of Catskill in 1861, would have been on hand to witness, unlike his colleagues who typically ventured north from the city only in clement weather.