A Sketch in Time

This sketch of Crawford Notch by Frederic Church has recently come to my attention. 

The location of the view is easy to identify. 

It can still be seen today from a parking area at the south end of Saco Lake. 

A Google street view roughly matching the sketch can be seen here.

When comparing the sketch with the photo you need to realize that the opening through the notch for the Saco River, the road and railroad tracks has been widened and reshaped since the sketch was made.

However, even with those changes, the comparison is clear due to the unique and definitive geological formations and the shapes of the mountain profiles such as Mount Willard on the right and Mount Webster with Elephant Head and Bugle Cliff on the left. A Google map of the area with these landmarks can be found here and a state park map with other useful details here. 

In her article, The Gate of the Notch, Catherine Crawford Campbell lists 27 other artists who depicted this scene in sketches, paintings, prints, and photographs.

Thanks to Victoria Johnson we can add Frederic Church to that list. Her fabulous new biography of Church, Glorious Nation, covers his 1850 trip to New Hampshire with Regis Gignoux and Richard Hubbard. 

Church made a dozen or more sketches of the area and some of these sketches are now in the collection of Church's home Olana, now a museum in Hudson NY. 

Here are the details for the sketch above

Frederic Edwin Church White Mountain Notch (Crawford Notch), NH, July 1850

Pencil, gouache on paper (11 13/16 x 14 7/8 inches)

New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation,

Olana accession #249r

2026 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Frederic Church and the artist is being celebrated throughout the year at numerous museums with exhibits and special events. FMI see this link here. 

This view of the gate of the notch in Crawford Notch was and continues to be a well-known spot for landscape artists. It has often been mistaken as the spot of the infamous Willey slide of August 28, 1826, two hundred years ago. However, it is not. FMI see my previous blog here. 

While the location for sketch above is well known, the location for another sketch he did has not been frequently depicted by artists and is a little harder to identify immediately.  

However, after looking around a bit, I believe that the view Church sketched from where this parking area is now, just a few miles south of Saco Lake. 

I look forward to working with more of Church's New Hampshire sketches and will post my research in this blog as I do.