The painting is not reproduced here because permission for its image has not been established.
A study against the weather record
Harrison Groutage
View of Smithfield
The museum describes green hills, a river and trees around Groutage’s home. What can the regional record add when no season or painting day is known?
Regional year contextPainted day unknown
The Nephos method
How this study was read
The method in fullWhat is written
NEHMA dates the panel to 1950 and locates its subject around Groutage’s Smithfield home. No season or painting day is supplied. The full calendar year provides regional context without choosing a month from the greenery.
land surrounding his Smithfield, Utah home
NEHMA, object record 1984.1868I don’t sit down and copy nature. I dramatize it. I celebrate it.
Groutage, quoted by Boise Art Museum beside Franklin Hill (1960), PDF p. 22; general practice
Records of those days
- Logan Utah St Univ, USC00425186Complete daily high/low temperatures and precipitation for 1950. Monthly values describe the catalogue year; 1949 and 1951 are separate annual comparisons with temperature gaps retained.
- Smithfield, USC00427885: not usedThe downloaded file contains 1924–1930 only. It supplies no 1950 observations.
Not found or not yet searched
- No exact viewpoint, season, painting day, dated sketch or object-specific account of making has been established.
- Inventory coordinates do not establish the 1950 instrument exposure or observation schedule.
- No local river-flow record or weather witness tied to the painting has been established.
Each claim tested
- Does the museum’s green landscape identify a rainy season? No. Green vegetation and the river do not establish when it was painted, local rainfall, or water flow.
- What does the regional record add? Logan recorded 80.9 mm of measurable precipitation in May and 6.6 mm in August. The annual sum is 505.8 mm, with 19 additional trace days not quantified.
- Did Groutage change the sky? His published statement describes dramatizing nature in general. It does not document an alteration to this panel or identify its observed weather.
Verdict
A named landscape beside the changing conditions of its catalogue year. The record adds regional seasonal context; the painted weather remains undated.
- UnknownThe year of the depicted weather The catalogue dates the panel; no dated session establishes when its weather was seen.
- UnknownThe painted sky and Groutage’s changes Neither a date for the scene nor an object-specific making account connects the painting to a daily observation.
What this cannot tell you. 1950 is the catalogue year, not a dated outdoor session. No season is assigned from the green landscape. Logan and the old Smithfield station inventory positions are 13.5 km apart; this is not a distance to the unknown viewpoint. Trace precipitation is stored as zero with a T flag; sums are recorded measurable amounts and exclude unquantified traces. Trace days are not dry days. No rank, modern normal or climate anomaly is claimed. Station moves, instrument exposure and observation-time changes have not been verified; GHCN-Daily is not homogenized. Precipitation includes rain and liquid-equivalent snow; it does not measure river flow, irrigation, soil moisture or cloud appearance.
Step 1 · Start with the painting
A view of home, without a painted day
Harrison Groutage’s View of Smithfield is an oil on panel catalogued as 1950, 25.5 × 33.5 × 1 inches, in the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University, accession 1984.1868. The museum connects the subject to the land surrounding his Smithfield, Utah home
and interprets it through the bond between people and place.
The museum describes green hills, river, and trees
and indexes clouds and blue among the object’s keywords. It names no season, month, painting day or precise viewpoint. Green vegetation does not establish a month or the amount of recent rain. This study therefore keeps the full catalogue year in view. No narrower season is assigned, and 1950 is not treated as a documented outdoor session.
The Marriott Library biography publishes Groutage’s statement I paint mainly in Utah
, attributed there to BYU Museum of Art archives. Boise Art Museum quotes him beside the different painting Franklin Hill (1960): I don’t sit down and copy nature. I dramatize it. I celebrate it.
These are statements about his wider practice. Neither documents how View of Smithfield was made, proves a studio reconstruction, or identifies a change to its sky. The original occasion of Boise’s quotation is unspecified.
Step 2 · The regional record
A wetter May, a drier August at Logan
In the catalogue year, Logan recorded 80.9 mm of measurable precipitation in May and 6.6 mm in August. These two months illustrate the year’s variation; neither is selected as the time of the painting. The green landscape and river cannot choose between them or establish the weather at Smithfield.
The annual recorded measurable amount was 505.8 mm (19.91 inches), with 19 additional trace days whose amounts are not quantified. Precipitation includes rain and the liquid equivalent of snow; it is not a rainfall-only or river-flow measurement. The mean of daily high–low midpoints was 48.2 °F (9.0 °C).
| Month | Mean temperature | Measurable precipitation, mm | Trace days excluded from amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | 24.1 °F / -4.4 °C | 83.8 | 2 |
| February | 30.3 °F / -0.9 °C | 19.6 | 1 |
| March | 36.5 °F / 2.5 °C | 51.2 | 1 |
| April | 46.1 °F / 7.8 °C | 41.5 | 4 |
| May | 51.3 °F / 10.7 °C | 80.9 | 2 |
| June | 61.8 °F / 16.6 °C | 19.7 | 0 |
| July | 70.1 °F / 21.2 °C | 22.6 | 1 |
| August | 69.6 °F / 20.9 °C | 6.6 | 0 |
| September | 60.6 °F / 15.9 °C | 43.8 | 2 |
| October | 54.4 °F / 12.5 °C | 31.0 | 0 |
| November | 40.1 °F / 4.5 °C | 60.4 | 3 |
| December | 32.5 °F / 0.3 °C | 44.7 | 3 |
Temperature means average each day’s (high + low) / 2 over all calendar days, rather than averaging rounded monthly means. Amounts and temperatures come from the daily files after fingerprint and flag checks. A missing value or failed quality check invalidates a period’s corresponding statistic. No gaps are filled. Trace precipitation is coded as zero with a trace flag; it is not a measured dry day.
Step 3 · Check the place and the comparison
Logan is context; Smithfield has no 1950 entries
The Smithfield file, USC00427885, contains 1924–1930 only. It supplies no observations for 1950. Logan Utah St Univ, USC00425186, supplies the accepted regional record. The inventory positions of these two stations are 13.5 km apart. That is a straight-line station-to-station separation, not a distance from a gauge to the unknown painted viewpoint.
The adjacent years below are kept separate to put the catalogue year beside its neighbours. They are not bounds on when the scene was seen. The precipitation sums are close in size; incomplete temperatures in the neighbouring years remain blank. No warmth or wetness rank, climate anomaly, or modern normal is claimed. NOAA’s daily series is not homogenized; historical station moves, observation schedules and instrument exposure have not been verified.
| Year | Mean temperature | Measurable precipitation, mm | Trace days |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1949 | Incomplete: 362/365 paired days | 502.5 | 23 |
| 1950 | 48.2 °F / 9.0 °C | 505.8 | 19 |
| 1951 | Incomplete: 364/365 paired days | 480.8 | 26 |
The linked data preserve the excluded dates and source flags. The NOAA inventory locates Logan at 41.7456° N, 111.8033° W and the older Smithfield station at 41.8333° N, 111.9167° W. Those catalogue positions do not establish either station’s historical exposure.
Step 4 · Where the records stop
A landscape of attachment, with its weather still open
The museum’s interpretation begins with attachment to home. The station record adds the changing conditions of that region in the panel’s catalogue year. It cannot establish that green hills followed a particular wet spell, explain the river’s water level, or verify the appearance of a cloud. Irrigation, soil moisture, river flow and weather at the painted site have not been measured by this study.
Groutage’s statement about dramatizing nature invites a question about artistic choices, rather than a conclusion that the sky was invented. A dated sketch, letter, photograph or object-specific making account would be needed to narrow the comparison or test an alteration. None has been established here. The image remains on the museum’s site; reproduction permission has not been established.
Sources
Every source on this page
Weather values are rebuilt from NOAA files checked against sha256 fingerprints. The museum and Boise receipts identify selected web-tool text extracts, not original downloads. The Marriott biography has separate HTML and text-extraction receipts. Short quotations are checked against those cached texts. Fingerprints preserve the version used; they do not independently validate the historical interpretation.
- NOAA GHCN-Daily v3, LOGAN UTAH ST UNIV, USC00425186
sha256 43333f6df95df96fd9acae60dcc270ce8aae265644693176f2369f72d2a42030 - NOAA GHCN-Daily v3, SMITHFIELD, USC00427885
sha256 b05119af5064110ff0506eb9cabe8b9a9a97ee6a7c2fb7f3833a85960ec457f4 - NOAA GHCN-Daily station inventory
sha256 428eabc955883187935bce283766d5646e3ed7484b92eb0803874c0e8dd9b342 - NOAA GHCN-Daily format and flag documentation
sha256 0e4e6f0e6947cf1add884c328a01760f31c56ef5fb86b85ed57dd5dc4c4aeaa6 - NEHMA, View of Smithfield, 1984.1868
sha256 3d785202fa9600f0734a459da502cfb2537ae8d8271b579a9de5da7fd70487fe - Boise Art Museum, Portraits of Sky, label for Franklin Hill (1960), PDF p. 22
sha256 c82797d20b685d2384b554cec5a0ccb63df1472e2a8df0e734f7761dab77e0ce - University of Utah Marriott Library, Harrison T. Groutage
sha256 a4b47b3c8feba2b147d2f4678a6ff6f56aa51b57dd5053c87424d6005640cb90 - Text extraction of Marriott Library biography
sha256 afb8f52109261eaf728a908dde722ea04ead68594bfc6493b0169a1afbc9c03a - NOAA GHCN-Daily v3 dataset metadata and citation
sha256 ce89c9229499cbb0cdf7d7d19ab45c28e48f51736a99d3b3da2f9a46e64cd690