I found this beautiful oil study on its original stretcher in an antique shop in Concord, MA in 2018. With no visible signature, the quality, mood, and charm captivated me. Wamdering through a nice group shop, I kept coming back to this small yet quite complete painting. My gut reaction was American genre painting, mid-1800s, by 1. William Tylee Ranney 2. William Sidney Mount 3. Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait. Buying it then and taking it home I immediately set to work researching it in a preliminary way by looking at images and price records on Askart.com for each of those three artists. My initial surmise, that it was by Ranney, was confirmed visually but for an unsigned piece, more in-depth research was needed. Days of work in books on Ranney and various manuscripts only confirmed my initial thoughts. This was a depiction of Ranney’s brother, a favorite subject for the artist, bird-hunting in a Hoboken marsh near Ranney’s home. The boat, figure, and dog all appeared in other paintings by the artist that had been published. One funny thing is that I had viewed with great enjoyment the major Ranney exhibition presented at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2007 and hesitated over buying the expensive catalogue. “Nah,” I thought, “I’ll never need it.” Now I found myself ordering it via express mail! I love this little painting and although I wound up selling it advantageously, I still think about it. A footnote is that Ranney died young and left a number of works unfinished in his studio. His widow called on his good friends William Sidney Mount and Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait to finish off the works so they could be sold to help support her and the children. Some paintings, including one now hanging in the Art Institute of Chicago, from the Terra Foundation, clearly show portions of the composition painted by those other two artists. So my initial assessment in the Concord, MA antiques mall was hyper-accurate. Quite an object adventure!