These Glorious Mountains

The exhibit assembles many of the best paintings from the Adirondack Museum collection, the largest single repository of works of art depicting Adirondack people and places, and several rarely exhibited major paintings borrowed for the occasion of the museum's 40th anniversary.

For nearly 200 years, America's wild regions -- particularly the Adirondacks -- have been laboratories for evolving ideas about land and its role in American culture. Artistic renditions of wilderness structured popular Nineteenth and Twentieth Century perceptions of wilderness as a concept, and the Adirondacks as one place where it existed. Informed by this notion, artists have celebrated, transcribed and interpreted the Adirondack landscape.

In 1850, American landscape painting was a powerful medium for conveying national, cultural and moral ideas. During the first half of the Nineteenth Century, transcendentalist thinkers, led by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Hudson River School artists led by Thomas Cole, vested the American landscape with spiritual and regenerative powers through verbal and painted images of idealized wilderness scenery. Americans began to appreciate the natural beauty of their land even as the pioneering spirit -- which saw the wilderness as an obstacle to be domesticated -- pushed westward to conquer the continent.

By this time, most prominent painters had been to the Catskills and White Mountains and had exhibited their works of these subjects at the National Academy of Design in New York City. These two mountain areas were readily accessible to the artistic centers of New York, Albany and Boston, while the rugged terrain and remoteness of the Adirondacks made the nation's third great wilderness more difficult to reach.

After 1850, improved transportation and increased knowledge about the area -- partly gained through paintings and prints picturing it -- attracted tourists and artists alike. Inspired by the dramatic vistas, artists produced a substantial body of paintings, drawings and watercolors depicting the Adirondacks as the century progressed. Many were reproduced as engravings or chromolithographs by publishers who recognized that the magnetism of the region for artists was also shared by the populous at large, particularly city dwellers who yearned to escape the growing complexities of urban life in an increasingly industrialized landscape.

The earliest images of the Adirondacks were Eighteenth Century maps of the militarily strategic waterway from Albany to the top of Lake Champlain, wood engravings of forts William Henry and Ticonderoga on Lake George, and drawings of local flora by Swedish botanist Peter Kalm who visited Lake Champlain in 1749.

French naturalist Jacques Gerard Milbert not only collected natural history specimens between 1815 and 1818 but also made innumerable drawings of the Adirondack region and other places in New York State. His wash drawings of the Hudson River were transformed into lithographs in Paris and published, in three volumes, as Itineraire Pittoresque du Fleuve Hudson (1828-29). Twenty watercolor sketches by English artist William Guy Wall of the Region north and west of Lake George were published as aquatints in The Hudson River Portfolio (1821-25). These large, beautifully illustrated books were landmark publications which visualized American scenery for the first time for a European audience.

Thomas Cole (1801-1848) and fellow artist Asher B. Durand (1796-1886) are popularly considered the founders of an American style of landscape painting, known as the "Hudson River School," in the first decade of the Nineteenth Century. Their pioneering forays into the Adirondacks and the resulting paintings capturing its "wild sort of beauty" drew other artists to the northern wilderness.

Artists documented business and scientific projects as well as Adirondack scenery in the first half of the Nineteenth Century. Charles Cromwell Ingham (1796-1863) accompanied New York State geologist Ebenezer Emmons as illustrator for the New York Natural History Survey in 1837. He wrote to his colleague, Thomas Cole, of his intentions to join the trip. The party made the first recorded ascent of Mt. Marcy, New York's highest mountain, on August 5.

Ingham's painting, "The Great Adirondack Pass, Painted on the Spot, 1837," not only documented the remote Adirondack interior for the survey but introduced the largest wilderness in the Eastern United States to the national consciousness. Travelers and artists saw this painting at the National Academy of Design in 1839 and the John H. Bufford lithographic version of it published in Emmons' Report of 1838.

Pictures of camping in the woods are a subject in American art which evokes the Adirondacks. These scenes depict urban sportsmen relaxing in a forest glen with their guides near a lean-to or other shelter. Men usually are seen congenially eating, drinking or smoking rather than hunting or fishing. An Adirondack guide boat, a native canoe, a packbasket, a fishing rod and gun, and other accouterments of sport become tools of the guide and sportsman alike.

The Adirondacks, from earliest times, were promoted as a remote and trackless wilderness inhabited by rustic innkeepers, guides and frontiersmen subsisting in a forested kingdom amidst an abundance of fish, waterfowl and woodland creatures. Many New Yorkers of the Gilded Age viewed the Adirondacks as a vast, aristocratic game preserve. To the gentleman sportsman, no other region of the eastern United States compared to the North Country for hunting and fishing in the second half of the Nineteenth Century.

Works of art did much to reinforce and perpetuate that impression, particularly those by Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait (1819-1905). English-born Tait, one of the best-known and most productive Nineteenth Century painters of American animals and sporting life, was also the quintessential image maker of the Adirondacks. An ardent sportsman and lover of the out-of-doors, Tait came to the region as early as 1851 and lived there for extended periods of time near Chateaugay, Raquette and Long lakes. The Currier and Ives lithographs after his paintings of Adirondack animal, hunting and fishing scenes helped to popularize the region as a sportman's paradise. Tait portrayed his own shanty on Constable Point (now Antlers Point) in Raquette Lake in "A Good Time Coming."

Twenty years after Tait, one of America's greatest native-born painters came to the Adirondacks to hunt, fish and paint. Winslow Homer (1836-1910) visited Keene Valley in the 1870s and the North Woods Club near Minerva in the 1880s and 90s. An avid sportsman, Homer created powerful paintings of technical complexity and physical immediacy depicting hunting, fishing and logging. His Adirondack watercolors have been described to be a major departure in American painting in terms of their technical and Aesthetic brilliance.

Sportsmen were not the only visitors drawn to the Adirondacks. The arresting beauty of Lake George and its surroundings was celebrated in the diaries, journals and travel accounts of early visitors. These popular descriptions, published in the late 1700s and early 1800s, spread the fame of Lake George far and wide.

The popular demand for Lake George subjects was satiated by art of every kind and level. Nineteenth Century landscape painters created masterpieces in oil and watercolor. Printmakers produced an enormous number of engravings and lithographs both after paintings and for the popular press. Photographers produced photographs as works of art and for commercial guidebooks, all for a public eager to buy images of the lake's picturesque beauties.

Although many amateur and professional artists painted Lake George, few found its scenery as compelling as John Frederick Kensett (1816-1972). He made a least a dozen formal compositions of the lake, beginning about 1850, celebrating nature as grand, benign and majestically ordered.

The first artists' colony to be established in the Adirondacks was in Keene Valley, a rural hamlet on the region's eastern side situated in a tranquil river valley amidst exceptionally dramatic mountain scenery. Artists discovered it in mid-century and came as part of summer sketching trips to the Hudson River Valley, the Catskills and Lake George. After the Civil War, artists came for longer stays, built studios and stimulated an economic boom in tourism and wilderness recreation for valley residents.

The 1870s saw an influx of travelers, tourists and sportsmen to the Adirondacks. Artists were no exception. A second generation of Hudson River School painters created tranquil and often idealized scenes sometimes punctuated with evidence of human intrusion in otherwise unspoiled nature. The beautiful view found a ready market among urban patrons now experiencing the industrial transformation of the countryside.

Landscape artists influenced the way post-Civil War American saw their land and prompted scores of tourists to head for the countryside in search of nature's picturesque sites and vistas. This idealized landscape convention remained popular because belief persisted in the spiritual power of nature and the role of the artist to proclaim it. Sanford Robinson Giffords' (1823-1880 painting "A Twilight in the Adirondacks," 1864, exemplifies this.

An exception to the second generation Hudson River School painters was Levi wells Prentice (1851-1935). A self-taught landscape and still-life painter born in Lewis County, N.Y., just outside the present day Adirondack Park, he is noteworthy for the size of his Adirondack oeuvre. Close to 100 landscapes were inspired by the four trips he made to the region in the 1870s. This is a greater number than any other painter among the hundreds of artists who portrayed the North Woods between 1830 and 1930. Prentice's hard-edged realistic style depicted nature's botanical details and local colors in minute detail. Scenes of quiet dignity captured wooded interiors and lakeside vistas as well as campsites.

In the 1930s nationally renowned portraitist Wayman Adams (1883-1959) founded a summer art school in Elizabethtown. Adams began operation of The Old Mill Art School as its only teacher. He soon attracted major Twentieth Century artists to teach a growing number of students from all over the country. Adams is said to have painted 12 portraits of Adirondack people who sat for him in his portrait classes.

American's devotion to natural beauty accelerated as the Nineteenth Century progressed, particularly as the landscape became increasingly settled and changed by agricultural and industrial exploitation. Artists' images of a compromised landscape and wildlife threatened by destruction of the forest provided powerful aesthetic arguments for the conservation of the land and woods.

As early as 1835 Thomas Cole decried the destruction of the landscape. In his "Complaint of the Forest" he notes: "We feed ten-thousand fires! In one short day/The woodland growth of centuries is consumed..."

His concern was enjoined by wilderness advocates George Perkins Marsh, Verplanck Colvin, S.H. Hammond and artist Julian Rix. Businessmen echoed the complaint when dimunition of Adirondack and Catskill watersheds threatened downstate and canal interests. In the Adirondacks, these concerns came to fuition with the establishment of the Adirondack Forest Preserve (1885) and the Adirondack Park (1892).

Traditional hunting and fishing scenes render man as a part of the natural world rather than as an intruder bent on exploitation. Other not so realistic approaches dissect the Adirondack landscape in the components of natural and human elements depicting a man as a consumer and potentially an exploiter of nature. Contemporary artists continue to reverence the sanctity of nature and to acknowledge the tenuous balance between man, animal and land. These have long been the subjects of Adirondack art.

(Caroline M. Welsh is the chief curator at the Adirondack Museum. As curator of art, she has directed the cataloguing and publication of the painting and print collections, written and lectured on the subject of Adirondack art and artists, curated exhibits on Adirondack art, and is working on a "Directory of Adirondack Artists.")