If you love stitching scenery, Thomas Doughty is worth your needle. He painted landscapes at a time when American painters were only beginning to treat their own countryside as a subject worth a big canvas, and that ambition shows up in the charts.
Doughty was born in 1793 and died in 1856, and his name sits with the Hudson River School. He worked as a lithographer as well as a painter, which is one of the reasons his scenes hold together so well when you break them down into squares. There is structure underneath all that foliage.
I have charted three of his paintings, and none of them is a quick weekend project. Fanciful Landscape, RE-483 is the gentlest way in at Level 4, and by gentlest I mean challenging rather than punishing. It rewards patience with the middle distance, where the color shifts are small and constant. Ruins in a Landscape, RE-484 and Girls Crossing the Brook, RE-816 both sit at Level 5, my Big League tier. Ruins gives you stonework set into trees, which means two very different kinds of counting in the same piece. Girls Crossing the Brook has figures in it, small ones, and small figures are always where a stitcher earns their stripes.
All three are designed for 18-count Aida and finished as framed wall art. That is not an afterthought. I chart them at a size that lets the detail survive, because a Doughty scene loses its depth if you squeeze it. After 22 years of doing this, I would rather hand you a big chart that looks right than a small one that disappoints you at the end. If landscape cross stitch is what you gravitate toward, this is the deep end of that pool, and it is a good pool.
My advice on the Level 5 pieces is the same advice I give on any of them. Work in blocks, park your needle where you left off, and do not try to finish a section in one sitting because you told yourself you would.
These artists are not connected to Doughty by history. They simply share shelf space with him in my collections, and stitchers who take on one often take on another.
William Bliss Baker, Karel Dujardin, Edward Brown, John Constable.
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