Study for I Know'd It Was Ripe

ca. 1885

In contrast with the previous generation of American artists, Hovenden and his peers (most notably Thomas Eakins) added photography to the list of media in which they executed preparatory images for paintings. This drawing of a favorite model, posed as he would appear in the finished painting, was probably based on one of numerous photographs that Hovenden is known to have taken of the young man. The artist’s reliance on a photograph would account for the rather summary, intermittent quality of the pencil line that delineates the contours of the figure. The broad shading of the head anticipates the strong contrasts of light and dark that Hovenden sought in his broadly brushed canvas.