Vose Galleries is pleased to present the exhibition Aldro T. Hibbard: The Lure of Winter, featuring over twenty paintings by the artist, including many that are fresh from the artist’s estate. The exhibition is viewable online and in the gallery through December 2nd, 2017.

Each year, once the cold descended on New England, Hibbard would depart Rockport, Massachusetts and settle into his farmhouse in Jamaica, Vermont, spending the next several months rendering the grand vistas and charming snow-caked hamlets found throughout his adopted state. The long winters not only provided Hibbard with an abundance of snow, but also the idyllic themes of bygone days – quaint clapboard homes, sprawling pastures, dense forest interiors – that were fast disappearing. He planned his outings well in advance by studying weather forecasts, dressing in countless layers, even crafting a special knit glove through which he’d grasp his brush, before finally donning his snowshoes and trudging out to his chosen spot. Carefully designed and superbly rendered, Hibbard’s compositions feel impromptu, a clever tactic made all the more essential for one at the mercy of the elements. Perhaps his own words say it best: “The glory of winter is that you rarely have two days alike, and that’s the challenge.” Despite the hardships of painting in sub-zero temperatures against a biting wind, Hibbard amassed a portfolio of brilliant landscapes imbued with crisp mountain air coupled with an undeniable warmth.

Aldro Hibbard’s innate tenacity winter after winter paid off. Over the course of his storied fifty-year career he earned numerous accolades and the admiration of collectors, critics, and fellow artists. Several museums acquired snow paintings for their permanent collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Vose Galleries has also enjoyed a long-standing relationship with Aldro T. Hibbard, first exhibiting his work at the Galleries in 1919. From that point on, the Voses admired and promoted Hibbard’s work, through the heights of the ‘twenties, the difficult days during the depression, and through to present day.

Critic William Howe Downes also applauded Hibbard’s mastery of snow scenes: “He has something that the other American painters of these snow scenes, able as they are, do not possess – a superior subtlety, a sense of values, a faculty of lifting the work above the plane of stark realism, and giving it the look of a higher kind of truth than literalism can compass…in the final refinements which give distinction and beauty to the landscape of midwinter we believe Mr. Hibbard has no peer.” 

Click here to view 'Aldro T. Hibbard: The Lure of Winter' online.