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
Second Beach Newport – Gallery 67
John Frederick Kensett was born on March 22, 1816, in Cheshire, Connecticut, the son of Thomas Kensett, an English engraver who had immigrated to America, and Elizabeth Daggett, a New Englander. By 1828, Kensett had begun studying engraving and drawing in his father’s firm in New Haven and in 1829 he worked briefly for the engraver Peter Maverick in New York. Earning his living as an engraver during the 1830s, Kensett also began to experiment with landscape painting, encouraged by his friend John Casilear (1811-1893). In 1838 he exhibited a work entitled Landscape at the National Academy of Design in New York and by 1840 he had decided to become a full-time painter. In that year he sailed for Europe with fellow artists Casilear, Asher B. Durand (1796-1886), and Thomas P. Rossiter (1818-1871). After an extended stay in Europe, with visits to London, Paris, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, Kensett returned to New York in 1847. He rapidly established a name as a landscape painter and was elected an Associate of the National Academy in 1848. In 1849 he was named a full member of the Academy and was also elected to membership in the prestigious Century Club, which brought him into contact with numerous leading artistic and literary figures of the day.
Kensett’s early works were generally richly painted and owed much to the inspiration of Thomas Cole (1801-1848) and English landscape painters such as John Constable (1776-1837). Works from the early 1850s combined vigorous and expressive brushwork with carefully observed details of rocks, vegetation, and atmosphere in a strikingly effective way, and were well-received. By the middle and later 1850s his style had become more precise and meticulous, reflecting the influence of Durand, and he began to favor more tranquil and simplified compositions. Kensett was at the height of his powers in the 1860s and he created some of the most accomplished American landscapes of the nineteenth century. Although he occasionally painted large works, Kensett generally preferred to work on small to medium sized canvases. Unlike such contemporaries as Frederic Church (1826-1900) or Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), who travelled to exotic and far-off locales in search of inspiration, Kensett returned again and again to favorite spots that were easily accessible to New York. Never tiring of the pictorial possibilities of these places, Kensett produced a substantial body of works that seem superficially similar, but in fact have subtle, but significant variations in composition, lighting, and atmosphere. He became so well known for painting certain places, including Bash-Bish Falls, Lake George, and the coastal areas of Newport, Rhode Island, and Beverly, Massachusetts, that many of his contemporaries invariably associated them with his name.
Kensett maintained a high profile in the artistic and cultural circles of New York and was respected and well liked by his fellow artists. In 1859 he was appointed a member of the National Art Commission, which was charged with overseeing the decoration of the Capitol in Washington. He was one of the founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1870 and also served as a member of its board of trustees. In these same years he began to experiment with simpler and more austere, even reductive, compositions. Many of his works from 1870-1872 were unfinished, but examples such as Eaton’s Neck, Long Island (1872, Metropolitan Museum of Art) are remarkable for their powerful arrangements of a few boldly simplified shapes representing earth, sea, and sky.
On December 14, 1872, Kensett died in New York City, of pneumonia and heart disease contracted while trying to retrieve the body of a friend’s wife from the waters off Contentment Island, Connecticut. His passing at the age of fifty-six was considered virtually a national tragedy, and when the contents of his studio were auctioned in 1873 they brought more than $136,000, an astonishing sum for the period. For many of his contemporaries Kensett had represented a kind of artistic epitome in landscape painting. [This is an edited version of the artist’s biography published, or to be published, in the NGA Systematic Catalogue]
Beach at Beverly – Gallery 67
Narragansett Bay – 1864 – Gallery 65
William Stanley Haseltine was born in Philadelphia on June 11, 1835, the son of John Haseltine, a successful businessman, and his wife Elizabeth Shinn Haseltine, an amateur landscape painter. After two years of study at the University of Pennsylvania, he entered Harvard University in 1852, receiving his degree two years later. He studied painting briefly in 1854 with Paul Weber, a German landscape and portrait painter who had settled in Philadelphia. In the spring of 1855 Haseltine made his public debut as an artist, exhibiting several paintings at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. That summer he journeyed to Düsseldorf, where he joined the colony of young American painters studying landscape painting at the Academy. In 1856 Haseltine joined Worthington Whittredge (1820-1910) and a group of fellow students on an extended sketching trip up the Rhine and into Switzerland and Italy. Although in January 1857 Haseltine returned to Düsseldorf, he was back in Italy by the summer and settled in Rome in the fall. During the winter of 1857-1858 and the spring of 1858 he made numerous sketching tours in the environs of Rome and also visited the island of Capri.
In the late summer or early fall of 1858 Haseltine abruptly returned to Philadelphia. By November of the following year he had moved to New York and taken a studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building, which was the center of American landscape school in the late 1850s and early 1860s. Among the painters Haseltine joined in the Studio Building were Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, and Whittredge, the latter two acquaintances from his European travels. Haseltine now began to establish a reputation as a landscape painter, showing his works regularly at exhibitions in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Many of his works of these years were based on sketches completed abroad, but he also made use of studies made on his travels to popular seaside resorts in New England. Among his favorite subjects were Maine’s Mount Desert Island and the shore areas around Narragansett, Rhode Island, and Nahant, Massachusetts. These landscapes and coastal scenes were generally well received, with critics praising in particular his geological accuracy in depicting the distinctive rock formations of the New England coast. In 1860 Haseltine was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design; he was made a full Academician the following year.
Personal tragedy struck in 1864 when Haseltine’s wife died in childbirth. In February 1866 the artist remarried and in May he and his family departed for Europe. He considered settling in Paris, but by 1867 he had joined the large international art colony in Rome, which would remain his base for much of the next thirty years. Haseltine’s paintings of European views, especially his landscapes and coastal views of Italian scenery, proved extremely popular with wealthy American tourists who were travelling abroad in ever-increasing numbers in the years after the Civil War. In the fall of 1874 Haseltine located his studio in a grand setting at the Palazzo Altieri, which he opened to visitors and potential patrons on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. This was a common practice among artists working in Rome, which had only a few contemporary art galleries and scant opportunities for public exhibition.
From his home in Rome, Haseltine often travelled to other areas of Italy and Europe, including Venice, Capri, Sicily, Paris, Cannes, Belgium, Holland, and the Netherlands. During the 1880s and 1890s, he and his family often spent summers in Bavaria and the Tyrol. Sketches made during these trips frequently served as the basis for later paintings and watercolors, with his scenes of Capri and Sicily proving very popular with tourists. Haseltine also made periodic trips back to the United States, especially during the 1890s. In the summer of 1899 he and his son, Herbert, made a trip west, visiting Utah, Colorado, California, Washington, Oregon, Alaska, Banff, and Yellowstone Park. This was his last trip to the states; a few months after his return to Europe in the fall, he contracted pneumonia and died in Rome on February 3, 1900. [This is an edited version of the artist’s biography published, or to be published, in the NGA Systematic Catalogue]
Natural Arch at Capri – 1871 – Gallery 67
Marina Piccola – 1858 – Not On View
Artist Sketching at Mount Desert, Maine – Gallery 91
Born and raised in the center of the Hudson River Valley, Sanford Gifford came from a family that supported and encouraged his artistic leanings, and whose prosperity meant he could pursue painting without financial worries. Gifford began training in New York City to be a portrait painter, but–inspired by the work of the American landscapist Thomas Cole–turned to landscape painting. Gifford spent the summer of 1846 touring and sketching in the Catskill and Berkshire mountains. By 1847, he had begun to show his work at the American Art-Union and the National Academy of Design in New York, where he was elected an associate in 1850 and an academician in 1854.
In 1855, Gifford traveled to Europe, where he spent two-and-a-half years visiting the great repositories of art and sketching scenery in England, Scotland, France, the Low Countries, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. In England, he admired the color and light in the paintings of J.M.W. Turner, and discussed his work with the critic John Ruskin. Gifford was also impressed by the work of the French landscape painters of the Barbizon school, but wrote in his journal of the dangers of surrendering to a particular method or school of painting, lest they “usurp the place of Nature.”
When Gifford returned to the United States in 1857, he took up quarters in the new Tenth Street Studio Building in New York City but left it nearly every summer to sketch in the countryside. Favorite settings in this period were the Catskills, the Adirondacks, the Green Mountains in Vermont, the White Mountains in New Hampshire, and various locales in Maine and Nova Scotia.
During the early years of the Civil War, Gifford served in New York’s renowned Seventh Regiment. In 1868 Gifford went abroad for a second and last time, spending more than a year traveling in Europe and the Middle East. Along with notable artists and civic leaders of the day, he was a founder of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1870. After his death in 1880, he was honored with the Metropolitan’s first monographic retrospective and a memorial catalogue of his known pictures.
http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/Collection/artist-info.2527.html?artobj_artistId=2527&pageNumber=1
Sioux Egypt – Gallery 67
The River of Light – 1877 – Gallery 67
Frederic Edwin Church was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on May 4, 1826, the only son of a wealthy businessman. Although his father hoped he would become a physician or enter the world of business, Church persisted in his early desire to be a painter. In 1842-1843 he studied in Hartford with Alexander H. Emmons (1816-1879), a local landscape and portrait painter, and Benjamin H. Coe (1799-after 1883), a well-known drawing instructor. In 1844 Church’s father, at last resigned to his son’s choice of a career, arranged through his friend, the art patron Daniel Wadsworth, two years of study with Thomas Cole. Church was thus the first pupil accepted by America’s leading landscape painter, a distinction that immediately gave him an advantage over other aspiring painters of his generation. From the first, Church showed a remarkable talent for drawing and a strong inclination to paint in a crisp, tightly focused style. In 1845 he made his debut at the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design in New York, where he would continue to show throughout his career. Two years later four of his paintings were shown at the American Art-Union, and by that point he was established in New York as one of the most promising younger painters. In 1849, at the age of twenty-three, he was elected to full membership in the National Academy, the youngest person ever so honored.
During the late 1840s and early 1850s Church experimented with a variety of subjects, ranging from recognizable views of American scenery, to highly charged scenes of natural drama, to imaginary creations based on biblical and literary sources and much indebted to Cole. Gradually, however, he began to specialize in ambitious works that combined carefully studied details from nature in idealized compositions that had a grandeur and seriousness beyond the usual efforts of his contemporaries. Church traveled widely in search of subjects, first throughout the northern United States and then, in 1853, to South America. Inspired by the writings of the great German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, he spent five months in Colombia and Ecuador. His first full-scale masterpiece, The Andes of Ecuador (1855; Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem), was a four-by-six-foot canvas depicting a vast tropical mountain panorama that astounded viewers with its combination of precise foreground detail and sweeping space. Two years later Church’s reputation as America’s most prominent landscape painter was secured with the exhibition in New York, London and other cities of Niagara (1857; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington) in New York. A second trip to South America took place that same year and resulted two years later in his most famous painting of the tropics, Heart of the Andes (1859; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).
http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/Collection/artist-info.1138.html?artobj_artistId=1138&pageNumber=1
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