The Winter Art Show

This marvelous scene of patriotic revelry could be taking place almost anywhere in the northern United States in the centennial year of 1876, but in fact, Frederic Chapman painted it at the pretty little Hudson River town of Piermont. It is some index of the work’s quality that the member of the staff who spotted it at auction in Manhattan’s William Doyle Gallery watched it soar past its three- to five-thousand-dollar estimate to fetch fifty thousand.