Winter in the Country

George Henry Durrie

National Gallery of Art

A person and dog trudge through ankle-deep snow to approach a barn and farmhouse under a heavy, lead-gray sky in this horizontal landscape painting. The person has pale-toned skin and wears a brown hat and suit. He carries a sack over one shoulder and a handled basket looped over his other forearm. He walks away from us and to our right so the side of his face is painted with a triangular touch of peach. The dog is mostly brown with some gray spots. The pair approach a break in a stone wall built with light and dark gray boulders. Snow sits in the crooks of branches in barren trees and bushes to the left and right. A short distance away, six cows stand looking off to our left or nuzzle through the snow to find grass. A gray-sided, snow-topped barn is just beyond them to the right of center. More trees and other smaller structures are around and behind the barn. Another stone wall stretches from the right side of the barn and off the right edge of the painting. The main section of the three-story house to the left is butter yellow. A single-story structure jutting off the right side of the house is pale terracotta red. Laundry hangs on a line outside the house, and a person, also wearing brown, stands nearby. On the roofs, the snow is painted white where the low sun falls and mauve-pink where it falls into shadow. The distant horizon, which comes about a third of the way up this composition, is lined with slate-gray hills. A strip of warm yellow light lines the horizon beneath piles of gray clouds that mostly obscure a lavender-blue sky. The artist signed the painting as if he had inscribed a boulder in the lower right corner, “DURRIE N HAVEN.”