By Frederica Templeton
Images courtesy of The American Museum of Fly Fishing
PleisnerThe land between Green and Taconic mountain ranges is a place of small rivers and streams, charming old played-out farms, fields and pastures that have gone by, crumbling stone walls, and abandoned orchards. Still, it is our land and we love it. It is also iconic country to legions of fly fishermen and upland hunters even though most of them have never been here. But they have seen this country painted superbly and with undeniable feeling. Have, in other words, seen it through the eyes of a great artist who fished and hunted this little corner of the world, loved it intensely, and put that love into his paintings.
Ogden Pleissner never thought of himself as someone who did "sporting art." He was not, emphatically, one of those hacks who turned out stylized stuff for the covers of catalogues and the numbered print racket. He considered himself, with absolute legitimacy, a "painter of landscapes who also liked to hunt and fish." His work has been compared, with justification, to that of Winslow Homer and Andrew Wyeth.
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