Origin Notes
Short Mountain is a Southern landscape. It depicts a panoramic view with a stream, pasture and mountains inspired by the southwestern regions of Hawkins County, Tennessee, the Clinch River, and the French Broad in North Carolina. Between 1850 and 1852, Duncanson undertook several sketching trips, not only traveling up the Ohio River through Pennsylvania, New York and Michigan, but also going south to Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina where he travelled at least as far south as Asheville. One of the earliest known landscapes from this period, A View of Asheville, North Carolina (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) is signed and dated from the year 1850. The following year, Duncanson exhibited another Southern composition, The French Broad, North Carolina, at the Western Art-Union gallery where the work was praised as one of Duncanson’s best pictures.