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Dr. John Moffitt's Cornwall Iron Ore Pit records surface mining activities in Cornwall, a town twenty miles east of Harrisburg. With only a small patch of blue sky visible at the top of the canvas, Moffitt captures the cut-away side of a mountain, which he renders in rich blue-grays and browns. An inclined plane, used to haul ore carts from the floor of the pit, creates a dramatic diagonal that bisects the scene. At the bottom of the pit and at intermediary levels, steam shovels and men are shown hard at work extracting ore from the ground. A small steam locomotive pushes two cars full of ore along the tracks in the lowest portion of the picture, and appears almost toy-like in comparison to the great cliff face of the ore pit. Black smoke and white steam rise from it, an indication of the weight of its cargo. Throughout the painting, Moffitt uses bold, but controlled brushstrokes to present his scene of eastern Pennsylvania industry.
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This document copyright © 1996,
Eric John Schruers