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About Joseph Hekking
Largely a marine painter, Joseph Antoine (or Antonio) Hekking was born in the Netherlands in 1830 and was trained in Paris. He was in New York by 1859 and began exhibiting at the National Academy of Design two years later — he would participate in several annual shows until 1875. The works include Housatonic Scenery and Moonlight in the Adirondacks in 1861, A Summer Afternoon in New England and another landscape in 1862, Storm in the Adirondacks in the following year, and Night on the Ausable in 1875. Another landscape appeared in the Pennsylvania Academy’s 1861 exhibition. Meanwhile he had served in the Civil War in a New York regiment. Henry French, back in 1873, said that Hekking painted in Connecticut from time to time. By 1878, Hekking was in Detroit. He exhibited at the Detroit Art Museum, which became the Detroit Institute of Arts, and at the Detroit Artists’ Association.
Some of Hekking’s landscapes recall seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting with their panoramas and predominance of sky area. Mountain Landscape, on the other had, uses a vertical format. Since Hekking’s addresses were Cherry Valley and Poughkeepsie, New York (when he was not residing in New York City), one could easily imagine that Hekking painted this on an excursion to the Adirondacks to the north or to the Catskills, directly south of Cherry Valley. Poughkeepsie is also close to the Catskills. Mountain Landscape, in the Hudson River School tradition, could have been influenced by Thomas Cole’s works. Gerdts mentions that his paintings have been compared to those of Jervis McEntee.
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Paintings by Joseph Hekking
| Mountain Landscape |
| oil on canvas: 17 x 14 inches |
| signed: lower right |
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