Rose and Locust Stump

Dove’s richly hued Centerport painting Rose and Locust Stump demonstrates the artist’s shift towards a more saturated and bold palette of colors in his mature years, including his introduction of the rose madder pigment in the early 1940s. During his final years in Centerpoint, near Huntington, Long Island, Dove experimented with a vocabulary of forms that ranged from the planar to the curvilinear. Rose and Locust Stump recalls the fluid organic lines characteristic of earlier paintings such as Cows in Pasture (The Phillips Collection) while suggesting an increasingly abstract approach to the picture plane. Here Dove delineates the overlapping shapes in flat planes of color against a shallow field. The image may have been inspired by Dove’s own back yard, which was dotted with locust trees and rose bushes. While continuing to distill his inspiration from nature, Dove sought to work, as he once said, “at the point where abstraction and reality meet.”