Wolf Kahn's Middleton Place II (1974) belongs to the decade when barns, his signature subject, defined his career. It reflects the split between Kahn's Manhattan winters and the Vermont farm he and his wife, painter Emily Mason, kept from 1968 on. A former student and studio assistant to Hans Hofmann, Kahn absorbed Hofmann's and Matisse's color, Rothko's saturation, and Impressionist plein air technique.

Two towering tree trunks, one pale gray-white, one deep brown, frame the composition, pulling the eye toward a dark, russet-toned structure tucked among the foliage. Kahn renders the scene in loose, confident strokes: a blazing yellow field meets violet shadows and burnt-orange leaves beneath a pale, open sky. That warmth against the cool darkness gives the canvas the charged, late-summer light Kahn returned to often.

The work depicts the home of Kahn's neighbor Dr. Middleton, purchased soon after completion and held in the same private collection for over fifty years. The Smithsonian's High Summer (1972) shares its palette and structure almost exactly, and the Brooklyn Museum's The Red Barn (1970) confirms how central barns were to Kahn's decade. As Brattleboro Museum director Danny Lichtenfeld has said, "Wolf Kahn is to Southern Vermont what Georgia O'Keeffe is to the New Mexico high desert and Claude Monet is to the French countryside."