Dispatch 08
June 2025

New Video
Discovering David Hanna: The Round Pond Studio brings the beauty and magic of Hanna’s creative process and art to life. Archival photography of his home, studio and unfinished works combine with oral histories to evoke nights of silent work in a studio and home designed and built largely by his own hand.

Featured Artwork
The Upper Mills (Tarrytown, NY), a key work in the artist’s oeuvre, was produced in his Round Pond studio in 1976. The egg tempera painting was featured in the 1977 mid-career retrospective David Hanna: Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings (1977), organized by Paul A. Chew, the late curator and founding director of The Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. In the accompanying exhibition catalogue Chew remarked, “A painter who deals with realism is confronted with many problems. If he chooses to document a historic building, he must approach it with an almost scientific precision in order to give it lasting moments of his personal experience…the painstaking accuracy of these paintings and drawings is characteristic of this artist but his approach is not cold precision. His understanding and sensitivity to his subject is expressed with a direct and penetrating realism that elicits meaning beyond physical appearance”.

Message from The Trust
On an early spring day in 2018, nearly 40 years after my father’s death, I returned to Tarrytown, New York to visit the Upper Mills. The setting is beautiful and timeless, and the moment I stepped onto the property I felt the presence of David Hanna the artist and his insatiable love of all things old, historic and antique. Our Round Pond home was filled with antiques and featured my father’s craftsmanship at every turn from custom mill work, fireplace mantels and iron work to chimneys built from reclaimed bricks. Round Pond was his exacting, magical masterpiece and the surrounding natural world informed his art.

Thank you to my siblings for participating in an ongoing oral history initiative, as well as friends and collectors, Sara Woodside and Lesley Domiano who knew and believed in the magic of David Hanna.

Warmly,