Thomas Cole – Gallery 60 & Gallery 64
Frederic Edwin Church – Gallery 67
Jasper Francis Cropsey – Gallery 64
Thomas Doughty – Gallery 64
Sanford Robinson Gifford – Gallery 67 & Gallery 91
William Stanley Hasseltine – Gallery 65 & Gallery 67
Martin Johnson Heade – Gallery 65
John Frederick Kensett – Gallery 67
Worthington Whittredge – Gallery 67
Thomas Doughty was born in Philadelphia on 19 July 1791, as recorded in the records of the Old St. George Methodist Episcopal Church, and lived there until 1828. Although little is known about his formal education, he apparently showed a strong talent for drawing from an early age. When he was fifteen or sixteen Doughty was apprenticed to a leather worker, and by 1814 he was listed in the Philadelphia directory as a “currier.” However, two years later he was cited as a “painter” and he exhibited a landscape at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Doughty’s early career as an artist seems to have met with little success, and from 1818 to 1819 he was working once again as a leather currier. He continued to paint during these years and finally, in 1820, decided to make landscape painting his full-time career.
Doughty was largely self-trained, and he relied heavily on copying European landscapes which he saw in collections such as that of his early patron Robert Gilmor, Jr., of Baltimore. From these he learned the established conventions of Continental landscape painting, which he then applied to American scenes. He made sketching trips to record details for his paintings, which came to be much admired for their comparative realism and truth to nature. Doughty was thus one of the founders of the native American landscape school, and his works from the 1820s recorded the beauties of the scenery of the eastern United States. Yet he was never simply a topographical painter, for he classified some his works as “from nature,” and others as “from recollection,” or “composition[s].”
In 1828 Doughty moved to Boston, but he had resumed residence in Philadelphia by 1830. From 1830 to 1832 he edited a monthly magazine with his brother John, called The Cabinet of Natural History and American Rural Sports. This included hand-colored lithographs by Doughty of various types of animals. The magazine ceased publication in 1832, and Doughty returned to Boston, remaining there for five profitable years. During this time he exhibited frequently and also taught drawing and painting. His works from this period, such as the NGA’s Fanciful Landscape (1963.9.2), proved extremely popular although they were less realistic and more romantic than his earlier efforts. Writing in 1834, William Dunlap, the first historian of American art, considered Doughty “in the first rank as a landscape painter.”
http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/Collection/artist-info.1240.html?artobj_artistId=1240&pageNumber=1
Warwick Castle – 1857 – Gallery 57
The Spirit of War – 1851 – Gallery 64
Autumn on the Hudson River – Gallery 64
Autumn on the Hudson River – 1860 – Gallery 64
Jasper Francis Cropsey was born February 18, 1823, on his father’s farm in Rossville, Staten Island, New York. He was the eldest of eight children in a family descended from Dutch and French Huguenot immigrants.
In 1837, at the age of fourteen, Cropsey won a diploma at the Mechanics Institute Fair of the City of New York for a model house that he built. That same year he was apprenticed to the architect Joseph Trench for a five year period. After eighteen months, Cropsey, who had shown an early proficiency in drawing, found himself responsible for nearly all of the office’s finished renderings. Impressed with his talents, his employer provided him with paints, canvas, and a space in which to study and perfect his artistic skills. During this period Cropsey took lessons in watercolor from an Englishman, Edward Maury, and was encouraged and advised by American genre painters William T. Ranney (1813-1857) and William Sidney Mount (1807-1868). It was in 1843 that Cropsey first exhibited a painting at the National Academy of Design, a landscape titled Italian Composition, probably based on a print, which was quite well received. He was elected an associate member of that institution the following year and a full member in 1851.
After leaving Trench’s office in 1842 and while supporting himself by taking commissions for architectural designs, Cropsey had begun to make landscape studies from nature. A two-week sketching trip to New Jersey resulted in two paintings of Greenwood Lake that were shown at the American Art Union in 1843. It was during one of his several subsequent trips to Greenwood Lake that the artist met Maria Cooley, to whom he was married in May 1847. The couple left for an extensive European tour immediately thereafter. After traveling in Britain for the summer, the Cropseys spent the next year among the colony of American artists settled in Rome.
Upon his return to the United States in 1849, Cropsey first visited the White Mountains and later took a studio in New York City from which he traveled in the summers through New York State, Vermont, and New Hampshire. When sales of his works were low, as they sometimes were in these early days, he would teach to supplement his income. The only one of his pupils to gain substantial recognition, however, was the landscape painter David Johnson (1827-1908).
In June 1856 Cropsey and his wife sailed for England for the second time and soon thereafter settled into a studio at Kensington Gate in London. There the couple established an active social life, counting among their friends John Ruskin, Lord Lyndhurst, and Sir Charles Eastlake. Cropsey executed commissions for pictures of English landmarks for patrons in the United States, and painted scenes of America for a British audience. In museums and galleries he was exposed to the naturalistic landscapes of John Constable and the Romantic paintings of J.M.W. Turner. At this time he also explored and recorded the Dorset Coast and the Isle of Wight.
Cropsey returned to America in 1863 and shortly thereafter visited Gettysburg to record the battlefield’s topography in a painting. He began to accept architectural commissions once again and produced his best known design, the ornate cast and wrought iron “Queen Anne” style passenger stations (begun 1876) of the Gilbert Elevated Railway along New York’s Sixth Avenue. For himself, beginning in 1866, Cropsey built a twenty-nine room mansion in Warwick, New York. He was forced to sell this home in 1884 but was able to purchase a house at Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, to which he added a handsome studio. Today the site, called Ever Rest, is maintained as a museum by the Newington-Cropsey Foundation.
For fifteen years Cropsey continued to paint in his home on the Hudson. Although he exhibited regularly at the National Academy of Design, his realistic, meticulously detailed, and dramatically composed scenes were eclipsed in popularity by the smaller-scale, softer, mood-evoking landscapes of Barbizon inspired painters such as George Inness (1825-1894). After suffering a stroke in 1893 Cropsey, a founder of the American Society of Painters in Watercolor (later the American Watercolor Society), turned increasingly to this medium, painting both in watercolor and oil until his death in Hastings-on-Hudson on June 22, 1900. [This is an edited version of the artist’s biography published, or to be published, in the NGA Systematic Catalogue]
http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/Collection/artist-info.1191.html?artobj_artistId=1191&pageNumber=1
Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Prussia, on January 7, 1830, but he spent his early years in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where his parents settled two years after his birth. Henry Bierstadt, the artist’s father, found work as a cooper in the capital of America’s whaling industry.
Primarily self-taught, Albert Bierstadt began his professional career in 1850 when he advertised his services as a drawing instructor. Three years later he departed for Europe, hoping Johann Peter Hasenclever (1810-1853), a distant relative and prominent member of the Dusseldorf school of artists, would help him obtain formal instruction. Hasenclever died suddenly, however, shortly before Bierstadt’s arrival. When Emanuel Leutze (1816-1868) and Worthington Whittredge (1820-1910) came to his aid Bierstadt found, unexpectedly, American rather than German mentors.
After nearly three years in Dusseldorf, Bierstadt joined Whittredge on an extended sketching tour through Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. Following a winter in Rome and a sketching tour to Naples and Capri, Bierstadt returned to New Bedford in the fall of 1857. Described as a “timid, awkward, unpolished specimen of a Yankee” when he arrived in Dusseldorf in 1853, Bierstadt returned to New Bedford four years later a socially poised and technically mature painter.
In the spring of 1858 he made his New York debut when he contributed a large painting of Lake Lucerne and the Swiss Alps to the annual exhibition at the National Academy of Design. Critics were dazzled by Bierstadt’s technical expertise; within weeks he was elected an honorary member of the academy.
Bierstadt’s European apprenticeship served him well the following spring when he journeyed west for the first time, joining Frederick W. Lander’s survey party bound for the Rocky Mountains. Though not the first artist to see or even paint the Rockies, Bierstadt was the first who brought with him superior technical skills and considerable experience painting European alpine peaks. For Americans eager to finally see the mountains a generation of travelers had described as “America’s alps,” Bierstadt’s credentials were near perfect.
By late September 1859 Bierstadt had returned to New Bedford laden with field sketches, stereo photographs, and Indian artifacts. Within three months he had moved to New York, established himself in the Tenth Street Studio Building, and begun to exhibit the western paintings that would soon make his reputation. He completed the most important of these, The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak (Metropolitan Museum, New York), in the spring of 1863 just weeks before he set off on his second journey west.
Accompanied by Fitz Hugh Ludlow, a celebrated writer who later published a book about their overland adventure, Bierstadt traveled to the Pacific Coast. He spent several weeks in Yosemite Valley completing the plein air studies he would later use to compose several of his most important paintings. Following a trip north through Oregon to the Columbia River, Bierstadt and Ludlow returned east. Utilizing studies gathered during all stages of his journey, Bierstadt completed, by the end of the decade, a remarkable series of large scale paintings that not only secured his position as the premier painter of the western American landscape but also offered a war-torn nation a golden image of their own Promised Land.
In 1867 Bierstadt and his bride set sail for London. It was a triumphant return for the emigrant’s son who had arrived in Europe fourteen years earlier an eager but impoverished student. Six months after his arrival Bierstadt was invited to exhibit two of his most important paintings (both of which had been purchased by English railroad entrepreneurs), privately before Queen Victoria. During the more than two years he remained abroad, Bierstadt traveled, sketched, and cultivated the friendships that would sustain a European market for his work for many years.
In July 1871, Bierstadt and his wife boarded the recently completed transcontinental railroad bound for San Francisco. Apart from the artist’s brief return to New York that autumn, they remained in California until October 1873. As he had since his days in Dusseldorf, Bierstadt spent much of his time traveling in remote regions completing the field studies he would later use to compose studio paintings.
In the fall of 1876 Rosalie Bierstadt, who had been diagnosed as consumptive and advised to spend the winter months in a warm climate, made her first trip to Nassau. Until her death in 1893, Rosalie spent increasingly longer periods in Nassau. Though Bierstadt continued to maintain his New York studio and travel widely in the West and Canada, he found new subject matter in the tropics during visits with his wife. In 1880 he exhibited one of the most successful of these pictures, The Shore of the Turquoise Sea (Private Collection), at the National Academy of Design. Though praised by some, the painting drew fire from critics who had found fault with his “theatrics” as early as the 1860s.
Critical disfavor and a falling market plagued Bierstadt during his later years. The most telling blow came in 1889 when the American committee charged with selecting works for the Exposition Universelle in Paris rejected Bierstadt’s entry, The Last of the Buffalo (Corcoran Gallery of Art). Described as too large but more likely judged old-fashioned, the painting marked the end of Bierstadt’s series of monumental western landscapes.
Bierstadt died suddenly in New York on February 18, 1902, largely forgotten. Ironically, renewed interest in his work was sparked by a series of exhibitions in the 1960s highlighting not the great western paintings but rather the small oil sketches he had used as “color notes” for the panoramic landscapes that had brought him such success in the 1860s. [This is an edited version of the artist’s biography published in the NGA Systematic Catalogue]
Thomas Cole, America’s leading landscape painter during the first half of the nineteenth century, was born on February 1, 1801 in Bolton-le-Moor, England. Before emigrating with his family to the United States in 1818, he served as an engraver’s assistant and as an apprentice to a designer of calico prints. Cole worked briefly as an engraver in Philadelphia before joining his family in Steubenville, Ohio, in 1819. While in Ohio he apparently learned the rudiments of oil painting from an itinerant portrait painter named Stein. In 1823, during a stay in Pittsburgh, Cole began drawing from nature, creating closely observed and intensely expressive images of trees and branches. Later that year he returned to Philadelphia, where he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and worked in a variety of art-related jobs.
In April 1825 Cole moved to New York, where his family had also relocated. That summer he made an extensive sketching tour up the Hudson River and into the Catskill Mountains. In late October 1825 three of his landscapes were sold to three prominent figures in the young nation’s art community, John Trumbull (1756-1843), William Dunlap (1766-1839), and Asher B. Durand (1796-1886). In January 1826 Cole was elected a founding member of the National Academy of Design, and his works were increasingly in demand with leading patrons such as Daniel Wadsworth (1771-1848) of Hartford and Robert Gilmor, Jr. (1774-1848) of Baltimore.
Although Cole had ample commissions in the late 1820s to paint pictures of American scenery, his ambition was to create a “higher style of landscape” that could express moral or religious meanings. His first major efforts in this vein met with mixed reviews, and he decided study and travel in Europe were necessary. In June 1829 Cole sailed for England, where he studied the works of Old Masters and also met Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) and John Constable (1776-1837). He subsequently traveled in France and in Italy, with lengthy stays in Rome and Florence. While in Italy he conceived of a multi-part landscape series tracing the rise and fall of an archetypal civilization. Although he failed to interest Gilmor in commissioning the series, upon his return to America in 1832 Cole did manage to convince the retired New York merchant Luman Reed (1785-1836) to support his grand project. The result, the five canvas Course of Empire(New-York Historical Society), was completed in 1836 and received considerable popular attention and generally favorable reviews.
Cole continued to paint American landscapes in the 1830s and early 1840s, but much of his energy in these years went into the creation of complex imaginary works such as Departure and Return (1837, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) and the two versions of The Voyage of Life (1839-1840, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, and 1842, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). In 1836 he married Maria Barstow and settled in Catskill, New York, a small village on the west side of the Hudson and close to the Catskill Mountains. That same year Cole, who was throughout his career a prolific writer of prose and poetry, published his “Essay on American Scenery” in the American Monthly Magazine, in which he expressed many of his most deeply felt convictions about landscape painting.
In 1841 Cole make a second trip abroad, with extensive travel in Italy, including a memorable visit to Sicily that resulted in several views of Mt. Etna. He returned to Catskill in 1842; in 1844 he accepted the young Frederic Edwin Church as a pupil on Daniel Wadsworth’s recommendation. In the mid and late 1840s Cole painted many impressive American landscapes, which are notable for an increased accuracy in the depiction of atmosphere and light. At the same time he labored, ultimately without success, to complete a five-part series called The Cross and the World, in which he endeavored to portray the individual’s quest for spiritual knowledge and salvation.
Cole’s premature death in Catskill on February 11, 1848, was universally mourned and a comprehensive memorial exhibition of his works was quickly organized in New York. His influence on the course of American landscape painting was profound and his works influenced numerous younger painters who matured in the late 1840s and early 1850s, most notably Jasper F. Cropsey and Church. [This is an edited version of the artist’s biography published, or to be published, in the NGA Systematic Catalogue]. http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/Collection/artist-info.1155.html?artobj_artistId=1155&pageNumber=1
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| Title | A View of the Mountain Pass Called the Notch of the White Mountains (Crawford Notch) | ||||
| Date | 1839 | ||||
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| Washington, D.C., USA | |||||
Your National Gallery of Art 