Apple Blossoms

Gustave Baumann

"Apple Blossoms is Baumann's first color woodcut based on sketches he create during the summer of 1917 while teaching at Lydia Coonley Ward's summer school at Hillside in Wyoming, New York. Baumann briefly considered settling in Wyoming and establishing a studio there. After he visited New York City and Provincetown in the fall, he returned to Wyoming and prepared new stationary, developed his Swanli chop, and devised the name The Swanli Press for his new venture. The idea was short-lived, as he was in Taos by spring 1918.

"...The apple blossoms at Hillside are described in Chronicles of an American Home, a history of the house derived from correspondence and other papers edited by Waldo Browne: ...Climb a few steps and see, only see, the apple trees - a great procession marching up the hill - each one a big bouquet. ...A few steps more and we can touch the apple blossoms. Looking at them from the garden they are white, but here we get the pink of buds that crowd against great clusters of white flowers set in frames of sage-green leaves."