Although not known for them, Speicher seems to have painted landscapes throughout his career, exhibiting them with his figure paintings. After the late 1930s he increasingly concentrated on the landscape. His landscapes are more modernist than his figure paintings and reveal the impact of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906). No doubt because of his affiliation with the Woodstock colony, most are of sites in upstate New York. Landscape was painted at Rondout Basin, near Kingston, New York, a small town along the Hudson River north of New York City.
This painting probably dates from the 1920s, perhaps the later part of the decade, as indicated by the similarity of its brushwork to that in dated landscapes from that period or later. A dating to the 1920s would coincide with the period when George Bellows, a close friend of Speicher’s, was working at Woodstock, which also may explain the vigor of the brushwork. The warehouse and ramshackle buildings are presented as simplified geometric forms built up with short, heavy, staccato brushstrokes of opaque paint. While the overall palette is somber to convey the drabness of the town’s riverfront, it is enlivened with passages of warm rose and orange hues. Speicher retained some of Henri’s and Bellows’s rich color sense in his use of lavender, pink, and blue in the cloudy, gray sky.
