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
Martin Johnson Heade (originally Heed) was born in Lumberville, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania on August 11, 1819. He received his earliest artistic training from the painter Edward Hicks (1780-1849) and perhaps had additional instruction from Hicks’ younger cousin Thomas, a portrait painter. The influence of these two artists is evident in Heade’s earliest works, which were most often portraits painted in a rather stiff and unsophisticated manner. Heade traveled abroad around 1838 (the precise date of this first European trip is uncertain), and settled in Rome for two years. He made his professional debut in 1841 when his Portrait of a Little Girl (present location unknown) was accepted for exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In 1843 his Portrait of a Young Lady (present location unknown) was shown at New York’s National Academy of Design.
Following a second trip to Europe in 1848 Heade attained a somewhat greater artistic sophistication and began to exhibit more regularly. He moved frequently in the late 1840s and early 1850s, establishing a pattern of itinerancy that would persist throughout his life. Heade gradually concentrated less and less on portrait painting, and by the mid-1850s was starting to experiment with landscape painting. In 1859 he settled in New York, where he met Frederic Edwin Church, who became one of his few close friends in the American art world. Heade was drawn to coastal areas and began to specialize in seascapes and views of salt marshes; soon he was receiving praise for his ability to capture changing effects of light, atmosphere, and meteorological conditions.
In the late 1850s and early 1860s he began to experiment with still-life painting, an interest he would maintain for the rest of his career. He continued to travel in the eastern United States and then, in 1863, made the first of three trips to South America. Church had already been to the tropics twice, and his large-scale paintings of dramatic South American scenes had won him widespread fame and critical approval. Although Church encouraged his friend to seek out equally spectacular scenery for his own paintings, Heade was generally interested in more intimate and less dramatic views. While in Brazil in 1863 he undertook a series of small pictures called The Gems of Brazil (c. 1863-1864, Manoogian collection), showing brightly colored hummingbirds in landscape settings. He hoped to use these images in an elaborate illustrated book he planned to write about the tiny birds, but the project was never completed. Nevertheless, he maintained his interest in the subject and in the 1870s began to paint pictures combining hummingbirds with orchids and other flowers in natural settings. During these years he continued to paint marsh scenes, seascapes, still lifes, and the occasional tropical landscape.
In later life Heade’s wanderings took him to various spots, including British Columbia and California. Never fully accepted by the New York art establishment–he was, for instance, denied membership in the Century Association and was never elected an associate of the National Academy of Design–Heade eventually settled in Saint Augustine, Florida, in 1883. He was married that same year and at last enjoyed a reasonably stable domestic and professional existence. He also formed the first productive relationship of his career with a patron, the wealthy oil and railroad magnate Henry Morrison Flagler, who would commission and purchase several dozen pictures over the next decade. Heade continued to paint subjects that he had previously specialized in, such as orchids and hummingbirds, but he now also turned his attention to Florida marsh and swamp scenes and still lifes of cut magnolia leaves and flowers. Heade and his work were largely forgotten by the time of his death on in St. Augustine on September 4, 1904, and it was only with the general revival of interest in American art in the 1940s that attention was once again turned to him and his reputation restored. [This is an edited version of the artist’s biography published, or to be published, in the NGA Systematic Catalogue]
Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds – 1871 – Gallery 65
Giant Magnolias on a Blue Cloth
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
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
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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