Falls of the Towalaga

DateProbably 1842-1860

MediumWatercolor, ink, and gum arabic on wove paper

DimensionsOther (Primary support): 22 × 27 5/8 in (55.88 × 70.17cm)
Framed: 26 × 32 1/16 × 1 3/8 in (66.04 × 81.44 × 3.49cm)

Credit LineGift of the Museum of Modern Art

Object number1933.302.3

DescriptionWaterfall fills center of paper, with a stag and doe in foreground to the left of dead tree which is in bottom center. The cascades seem to have four levels. The stag walks across a dead log which stretches between tiny island on which center dead tree and doe stands and shore to the left. Trees, grey rocks and grass grow up either side of paper.
The 2 1/2-inch splayed mahogany-veneered frame with gilded liner is a period replacement.Label TextA print source for this watercolor composition has been located, but because of misidentification in a nineteenth-century publication, there has long been confusion regarding its proper title. The Folk Art Museum's view of a cascading waterfall with two deer prominently placed in the foreground is believed to represent the Falls of the Towalaga in Georgia. An illustration of the same composition appeared in an 1842 book called GEORGIA ILLUSTRATED and again in GRAHAM'S MAGAZINE in 1847, both times bearing the engraved title FALLS OF THE TOWALAGA.
The same engraving after a sketch by Thomas Addison Richards (1820-1900) appeared in Richards's book AMERICAN SCENERY, but here the plates bear no engraved titles, and the list of illustrations in the front of the book describes the view in question as the CASCADE OF TUCCOA. To add to the confusion, Folk Art Museum file notes suggest that other copies of the same book may have listed the same view as CATARACT OF TALLULAH, NO. 2. Because some other plates in the 1854 volume are identifiably mislabeled and because two earlier publications are in agreement in their titling of the Folk Art Museum's composition, the watercolor is called FALLS OF THE TOWALAGA until or unless further contradictory evidence can be found.

ProvenanceHelen M. Shevlin, Cambridge, Mass.; L. Earle Rowe; Abby Aldrich Rockefeller; given by the latter to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, in 1939; given by MoMA to CWF in June 1954.