Following a year-long honeymoon spent exploring France and Italy, Theodore Wendel and his wife Philena relocated to Philena’s ancestral homestead in Ipswich, the town that would serve as the artist’s personal version of Giverny for the latter part of his career. As he had in Giverny, Wendel found plenty of inspiring subject matter both close to his home on County Street and among the fields and marshes of the family’s Lower and Upper Farms on Argilla Road. Many of these paintings show the day-to-day activity of a working farmstead, but often the play of light and color on the fields, marshes and groves offered pleasing visual material, as seen in Girl Seated under a Canopy of Trees. The painting demonstrates Wendel’s interest in the play of sunlight and shadow in the scene before him, as well as his clever use of dappled brushwork in rendering the lush foliage of the towering trees. His placement of red highlights in the girl’s skirt and sprinkled among the fields beyond the fence and in the sky and grass balances perfectly with the dominant greens of the picture.

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