Biography Thomas Denny, Jr. (1757–1814), who commissioned Looking East from Denny Hill, was the wealthiest man in Leicester, Massachusetts. His grandfather Daniel Denny arrived in Leicester in 1717, four years after the town was established by an act of the colony’s General Court. The elder Denny established the family atop what is still known as Denny Hill.1 Over the next two generations, the farmstead grew from seventy to more than four hundred acres, an area that stretched about two-thirds of a mile in each direction and encompassed four acres of unimprovable land, five acres of tillage, eight acres of fresh meadow, forty unimproved acres, fifty acres of upland mowing, 118 acres of pasturage, and 206 acres of woodland. That land is featured in the foreground of Earl’s painting.2 Thomas Denny’s prominence in Leicester may be measured not only by his landholdings but also by the many public offices to which he was elected. He served as town clerk, selectman, moderator of the selectmen, town representative in the General Court of Massachusetts, justice of the peace, and tax assessor. Denny also served Leicester as Fence Viewer, Hogg Constable, and Surveyor of the Highways, and he represented it in a communal ritual called "perambulations," in which selectmen from two adjoining towns met to affirm the boundaries.3 In the fall of 1786 and spring of 1787, Denny commanded a cavalry unit that helped to suppress Shays’ Rebellion in Worcester. Although many were sympathetic to charges that the commonwealth lacked sufficient circulating currency, that heavy taxation imposed an undue burden, and that government officials in Boston were extravagant and removed from the lives of their constituents, Denny and leaders in other central Massachusetts towns acted together to prevent protestors from closing the courts. He was rewarded for his role in helping put down the rebellion with the rank of captain in the militia and was later made a colonel.4 Denny commissioned this painting shortly after moving from the family farm into Leicester proper and establishing himself there as a retailer of textiles, books, and household goods and as a card-clothing manufacturer. (Card clothing consists of a strip of perforated leather through which thin pieces of wire are drawn; this tool was then used to card wool and cotton fibers.) Card-clothing manufacture was among the first major steps taken toward development of Massachusetts’s textile industry. By the time he died, in 1814, Thomas Denny had considerable commercial and industrial holdings both in Leicester and in Ware, in neighboring Hampshire County.5 Analysis Looking East from Denny Hill is one of only five landscapes that Earl is known to have created for private patrons. Those others are: Landscape of the Ruggles Homestead (1796, Corporate Art Collection, Reader’s Digest Association), Landscape View of the Canfield House (about 1796, Litchfield Historical Society, Litchfield, Connecticut), Houses Fronting New Milford Green (about 1796, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut), and LandscapeView of Old Bennington (1798, Bennington Museum, Bennington, Vermont).6 The first three of these landscapes portray individual properties, while the last two—the Bennington and Denny Hill paintings—depict entire communities. Looking East from Denny Hill is among Ralph Earl’s last works; no painting bears the date 1801, the year he died. Although several scholars have questioned whether the date was painted in the artist’s hand or added later, microscopic examination shows that the fi Figure 1. Ralph Earl, Thomas Earle, 1800, oil on canvas, 37 5/8 x 33 7/8 in. (95.5 x 86.1 cm), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Andrew W. Mellon Collection, 1947.17.42. <A HREF="http://www.worcesterart.org/Collection/Early_American/Artists/earl_r/Den ny_Hill/enlargement.html">Looking East from Denny Hill</A>