Parlor Ross Turner Watercolor

Ross Sterling Turner (1847-1915) was a favorite of the Eustis family, particularly of Edith Eustis’s mother Mary Hemenway who kept three of his watercolors on the chairs in her back parlor, explaining “My pictures are my friends. I want them to sit on my chairs.” Like so many of America’s best nineteenth-century artists, Turner studied painting in Europe, largely in Italy and Munich. He settled in Salem, Mass. and painted in the area but also painted in Bermuda, Mexico, and the Bahamas. This example showing a marshy scene along the coast in Salem is a reproduction of a Turner watercolor in Historic New England’s collection.