The Winter Art Show

When he taught painting on Cape Cod in 1899, Hermann Dudley Murphy urged his students to use poetic abstraction to “awaken an emotion” in their viewers, an approach favored by the period’s symbolist movement. In The Marshes , produced that summer, he demonstrated the power of the technique. By emphasizing design over description, he created a dense, fluid landscape, whose lack of specificity manages to give it an oddly modern cast.