In the Mohawk Valley

Barely visible in the upper right background, a small figure wearing red pants drags a sled through the snowy landscape. This is Mohawk Valley, near the town of Colrain where Symons owned a country home and often painted plein-air. Colrain is situated in the northeastern part of the Berkshires in Massachusetts. Symons lived all around the world—Chicago, Munich, Paris, London, even Laguna Beach, California, but he dedicated much of his energy painting rural New England. His snow scenes were coveted. The composition of the Union League Club painting is brilliantly assembled: Symons intersperses diagonals by utilizing the sharp curve of the North River against the rising trees. Sections of rolling hills are visible through the trees, where a small house sits in the distance amid the blue sky. The landscape is dynamic; the river water glistens with a winter chill. Signs of warmth are evident, the snow recedes from the gentle slopes, and the trees possess a smattering of leaves. Symons’ appreciation for winter is evident, and once remarked "…to miss the winter is to miss your youth." [exhibition catalogue, Paintings by Gardner Symons, N.A. The Macbeth Gallery, New York, 1922, foreword].

Symons was born in Chicago and attended the School of the Art Institute. In 1886 he went to Europe for an extended stay. In 1894, he and fellow Chicago artist William Wendt (also in the Union League Club Collection) traveled to Laguna, California to stay and paint the landscape. The two artists also joined an artists’ colony in St. Ives, Cornwall, England around 1899, where Symons adopted the practice of painting plein-air, as would become the hallmark of the French Impressionists. In 1903, he built a studio and home in Arch Beach, Laguna, but also maintained a studio in New York.

He won the Carnegie Prize at the National Academy of Design, among many other prestigious honors. Symons died at age sixty-four, on January 12, 1930, in Hillside, New Jersey at the home of his brother-in-law, Mr. A.M. Trevorrow.