Study of Old Saw Mill near Saratoga, N.Y.

 

James David Smillie

  1833 - 1909 (biography)

1881  

watercolor 

9 7/8 x 13 3/4" image 

signed in pigment: J Smillie in lower right 

 

in pigment in lower left: Saratoga/ Oct 14 '81; old backing was inscribed in pigment: "Study of Old Saw Mill / near Saratoga. N. Y. / Painted by James D. Smillie / Oct. 1881." 

 

ivory textured watercolor paper 

 

 

BC224 

$9,000.00 

Logging in the Adirondacks began as small operations at the beginning of the nineteenth century and quickly ramped up within twenty years. The vast forests must have seemed inexhaustible and the rivers provided an easy means to float logs downstream to various mills. Smillie seems to been drawn to the picturesqueness of old buildings built over or near water. This theme is repeated in his watercolors Saratoga from 1881 and Rear of No. 1, Portland Pier, Portland, Maine from 1880. With Study of Old Saw Mill Near Saratoga, Smillie captured an old but still functioning saw mill belching black smoke from the chimney. Despite the tranquil scene, the saw mill is a symbol of the vast destruction done by the logging industry to the land, forests, and waterways. The mill situated over placid waters and surrounded by an abundance of trees is far from barren landscape clear cut by the loggers.