"Twilight in the
Adirondacks," Sanford Robinson Gifford, 1864. Oil on canvas
from the collection of The Adirondack Museum.
In Search
of a National Landscape:
By Linda S. Ferber and Caroline M. Welsh
In 1873 The Aldine, a popular magazine devoted to art and
literature, counted William Trost Richards among the important
interpreters of Adirondack scenery: "For the past thirty years
this region of country has been a favorite resort for artists.
A.B. Durand, J.W. Casilear, and J.F. Kensett led the way, being
followed in 1855, by J.M. Hart, and in 1863 by W.T. Richards, all
of whom found plenty of material for many of their finest
sketches."1
Today, Richards is principally recognized as a painter of marine
and coastal subjects, whose career flourished during the last
quarter of the Nineteenth Century. Less well known is the fact
that during his early practice, from 1853 to 1870, his primary
subject was the American landscape. Richards participated, at
mid-century, in the collective artistic project to originate a
landscape vision that might be acknowledged as national.
The Adirondack wilderness of New York State was the northernmost
outpost in a landscape itinerary that extended south along the
narrow mountain valley course of the Hudson River to the more
familiar and accessible New York touring and sketching grounds of
the Catskills, the Highlands, and the Palisades. The Adirondack
mountain range is bounded by Lake George to the south and east
and Lake Champlain to the north and east and on the west by the
Black River and the Tug Hill Plateau.2 This is the
region in which Thomas Cole (1801-1848) found the "wildness"
described in his 1835 "Essay on American Scenery" as "perhaps the
most impressive characteristic of American scenery."3
"Schroon Lake," Thomas Cole, circa 1846. Oil on canvas from The
Adirondack Museum.
Asher B. Durand (1796-1886) found his calling as a landscape
painter in these mountains on an 1837 expedition with Cole to
Schroon Lake. The rich language of Durand's "Letters on Landscape
Painting," published in 1855 just as American landscape painter
William Trost Richards (1833-1905) was planning his first
Adirondack expedition, gives us insight into the powerful
associations, always on the edge of transcendence, invested in
landscape experience. Durand also saw the whole artistic project
of American landscape painting as uniquely expressive of both
national and cultural identity.4
Richards's experience in the Adirondacks played a critical role
in this development and much earlier, in actuality, than reported
in The Aldine, for Richards had first explored New York
State and the Adirondack Region in 1855. Over a dozen sheets and
several pages in a pocket sketchbook document Richards's
five-week-long expedition in 1855 from June 20, when he sketched
at Fishkill, to July 29, with the last view dated in Pleasant
Valley.5 His itinerary took him up the Hudson River to
Lake George and Lake Champlain, with a stop at historic Fort
Ticonderoga on June 19 before continuing west to Pleasant Valley
and Elizabethtown for a month. He ranged over the valley, the
plains of North Elba, the Indian Pass near the Hudson's source,
and the Schroon River, one of its tributaries. His studies are
meticulous pencil drawings carefully inscribed with site names
and dates, constituting a vivid travel diary and an invaluable
documentary record.
A native of Philadelphia,6 Richards exhibited both
European and American subjects at the Annual of the Pennsylvania
Academy in spring 1857 including "Lake George, Opposite
Caldwell," Richards's single known painting of Lake George, the
most popular site in the Adirondack region. The subject was a
logical one to include as a prelude to his all-New York roster
for the Academy in 1858; the great lake, some 36 miles long and
four miles wide, was not only a major tourist destination but
also a primary route for the more adventurous into the Adirondack
region.
The arresting beauty of Lake George was widely celebrated in
Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Century diaries, journals, and
travel accounts. "Everybody who has heard of American scenery has
heard of Lake George....the lake which of all others, I most
desired to see," wrote English writer Harriet Martineau in
1835.7 Seventeenth Century explorers aboard bateaux
marveled at its virgin forests and pristine waters; Eighteenth
Century French, British, and American soldiers fought there;
Nineteenth Century travelers vacationed at the lake's elegant
hotels as part of the American Grand Tour. Thomas Jefferson was
so struck with the beauty of the scenery that he wrote his
daughter Martha on May 31, 1791: "Lake George is, without
comparison, the most beautiful water I ever saw...."8
Artists were attracted to Lake George because of this arresting
physical beauty and the popular demand for images of it. Among
amateur and professional artists, few found the lake as
felicitous a subject as John Frederick Kensett (1816-1872). One
of America's best known and most successful landscape painters,
he made at least a dozen formal compositions of the lake
beginning in 1850.
Kensett was strongly influenced by Thomas Cole and Asher B.
Durand, particularly their beliefs concerning the religious and
moral content of the landscape. His paintings expressed
transcendental faith in "that beautiful harmony which God has
created the universe." Kensett's "Lake George" of 1856, with its
classically balanced composition of mountains, shore, and serene
lake, bathed in pink-gold light, conveys the sense of awe that
natural perfection inspired in the artist.
Richards returned to the Adirondacks in 1857 and, possibly, again
in 1859. We know that he was there in 1862, 1863, 1865, perhaps
1866, and in 1868. From studies made on these forays, Richards
produced a series of paintings that figure among the most
beautiful and significant records of the region produced at
mid-century.
Richards's encounters with the region came at critical moments in
his own career and in national life. The Adirondack region
provided a virtual laboratory in which he worked out various
landscape agendas over more than a decade. These ranged from the
mastery of the mainstream Hudson River School style in the 1850s
to experimentation with an extreme realism that established him
in the 1860s as a central figure in the short-lived and
controversial American Pre-Raphaelite movement. His first
Adirondack campaigns of the 1850s occurred at the high watermark
of the Hudson River, or New York, School's mission to define a
national landscape. These Adirondack paintings effectively
launched Richards's career.
A pair of accomplished Adirondack landscapes of 1857 depicts a
mountain vista looking west across Pleasant Valley near
Elizabethtown, the county seat of Essex County where Richards and
many other artists based their visits. Like Durand and Cole,
Richards and his colleagues were particularly drawn to Essex
County, bounded on the east by Lake Champlain and containing
within its boundaries the highest Adirondack peaks as well as the
source of the Hudson River. Essex County also contains some of
the region's most dramatic geologic and glacial formations.
The more hospitable terrain of Pleasant Valley and neighboring
Keene Valley was also a favorite sketching ground of the period.
"In the Adirondacks," 1857 and "A View in the Adirondacks," circa
1857 present the same view under different conditions, as if
Richards had set himself the pedagogical task of rendering
contrasting effects of weather, atmosphere, and light. Both
topographical accuracy and poetic license inform the paintings of
the first Adirondack campaign. Each composition deftly
incorporated forms of homage to the landscape visions of
Richards's New York artist-heroes: Cole, Church, and Cropsey. By
such means, Richards could lay claim to a role for himself in the
campaign to define a national landscape.
Almost every summer from 1862 to 1868, he returned to work in the
region. Extant drawings, located paintings, and the titles of
others indicate the continuing primacy for him of Essex County,
especially Elizabethtown and Keene Valley. He was not alone.
Letters, diaries, and the periodical press recorded the
summertime artist excursions in the region.
Alexander Lawrie, Richards's studio-mate and companion in Europe,
recorded meeting him at Elizabethtown in 1863, 1865, and in 1868.
The hamlet was a kind of crossroads for artists. While Lawrie and
Richards were there in 1863, Sanford R. Gifford (1823-1880),
Jervis McEntee (1828-1891), and Richard W. Hubbard (1816-1888)
all passed through.
In August 1865, Lawrie and his party returned there from an
eight-day camp on the Upper and Lower Ausable Lakes. The group
included Richards and his former students Fidelia Bridges
(1835-1923) and Arthur Parton (1842-1914) as well as Homer D.
Martin (1836-1897) and his wife. Such excursions and meetings
must have been the occasion for comparison of sketches and
exchange of ideas. The careful detail of Lawrie's own "Village,
Essex County, New York," circa 1867 suggests that he was
influenced by Richards's meticulous approach. We know the two
sketched and painted out of doors together on more than one
occasion.9
Sanford Robinson Gifford's "A Twilight in the Adirondacks," 1864,
is a masterful example of the persistent belief in the spiritual
power of nature and the role of the artist to depict it. In 1881,
John F. Weir, Yale School of Fine Arts Director, wrote that,
"Gifford loved the light. His finest impressions were those
derived from the landscape, where the air is charged with an
effulgence of irruptive and glowing light....He was unerringly
profound in his insight into that which was most truly nature,
into those potent truths that underlie the superficial aspects
which engage the common mind or attract the common
eye."10 There are four known versions of Gifford's
composition depicting a shoreline silhouetted between a radiant
twilight sky and its reflection in a lake with a camping scene on
the shore. The campers are likely to be the artist, his
colleagues Jervis McEntee and Richard William Hubbard, and their
guide. The Adirondack Museum's painting is the largest version.
It was exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1864 and at
the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876. At its first
exhibition, the New York Evening Post exclaimed that
"Gifford has never painted a picture of more exquisite gradations
than this."11
Arthur Parton moved from his birthplace of Hudson, N.Y. in 1859
to Philadelphia where he studied landscape painting with William
Trost Richards for several years. In 1864, he settled and worked
out of various studios in Manhattan. He first visited the
Adirondacks in 1866 and then made regular summer visits to Keene
Valley and the Ausable Lakes until he bought a cottage in the
Catskills around 1880. Parton was an experienced angler as
described in a reminiscence: "the best fishing fellow you could
wish to meet...and how he can paint!" One can imagine that he
often saw this scene of mist rising off a lake from the
perspective of a fishing boat.
Homer Dodge Martin, from Albany, was sent to the region in 1864
by his teacher James M. Hart. His many Adirondack pictures
include Mountain "View on the Saranac," 1868. This painting was
commissioned by the periodical Every Saturday which used
the wood engraving after this painting to illustrate an article
promoting William H. H. Murray's 1869 book Adventures in the
Wilderness to lure tourists to the Adirondacks. While the
print catalogued the topography, the painting is fraught with
drama and the forbidding atmosphere shrouding the rugged scenery
on the Saranac River.
Richards's contemporaneous Adirondack subjects seemed to offer
the artist an opportunity to reconcile the atmospheric
requirements of landscape painting and the Pre-Raphaelite demand
for detail. Like the works of the 1850s, the oil paintings of the
second campaign are grounded in a group of wonderful drawings
charting itinerary as well as response when he returned to the
area in 1862 and, again, for a well-documented stay in 1863 that
included a wonderful sketchbook.
Like the drawings of the 1855 campaign, these are an independent
body of work, never exhibited in the artist's lifetime but held
in his studio. Worthy of note on aesthetic and documentary terms,
they constitute both a visual diary and an artist's itinerary.
They are compelling records of experience in a region where many
landmarks are still intact. A few open-air studies also survive
executed in oil on paper.
In his diary, Lawrie recorded painting out of doors with Richards
during a nine-week period in 1863. Probably representative of a
larger corpus of plein air work now lost, the open-air studies
are brilliant in palette and informal in composition. These
little records offer an even more vivid transcript of the hills
and meadows surrounding the hamlet of Elizabethtown as they
appeared in the early 1860s.
While we now appreciate these on-site records very much for
themselves, all of these works served a primary function as
studies and reference points for the oil paintings Richards
composed from them and executed later in the studio. The single
exception is the large drawing of "Indian Pass," 1866 that
belongs to the interesting category of oversize elaborate
exhibition drawings in graphite and charcoal produced between
1864 and 1867.
Some of these, like "Indian Pass," were reproduced as photographs
and some are directly related to oil paintings of similar scale.
Richards referred to them as "cartoons" suggesting that these
works on paper were conceived as full-scale studies that might be
executed as oil paintings upon commissions.12
"Indian Pass" is also an exception to the body of known
Adirondack images in its exercise of the vertical sublime. The
massive boulders, looming tower of Wallface Mountain, low clouds,
and soaring eagles strike a note of gloomy grandeur. On the other
hand, the dominant mood in the landscape paintings of the 1860s
is a celebration of the mountain valley pastoral that harks back
to the pendant paintings of 1857. Elizabethtown and the broad
plain of Pleasant Valley drew Richards, with its appealing blend
of comfortable inhabited foreground and middle distance in
combination with the distant austere mountain peaks. The Bouquet
River, imagined as a lake-like body of water in 1857, assumes its
identity in these paintings as a winding watercourse over the
valley floor. Richards dispenses with the dark, stage-like
foreground platforms used in the views of 1857, adopting an open
ended panoramic format also put to use by Gifford, William Hart
(1833-1894), David Johnson (1827-1908) and others in the
1860s.13
While based upon on-site drawings, the paintings are compositions
that seem to vary in topographical focus. "Adirondack Landscape,"
1864 is a very precise record of the Elizabethtown hamlet seen
from Woods Hill. "Autumn in the Adirondacks" portrays Blueberry
and Porter Mountains in Keene Valley with Mount Marcy in the
background. Other paintings, like "The Bouquet Valley,
Adirondacks" 1866, arguably the masterwork of the 1860s campaign,
are convincingly steeped in the topographical sense of the region
but have so far defied efforts to identify their specific sites.
"Whiteface Mountain, Lake Placid," William Trost Richards,
1904. Oil on board from a private collection.
In 1904, Richards's final return to paint these mountains, long
after his reputation and market had been confirmed as a marine
painter, demonstrated the powerful associations the region
continued to hold for him and his generation. He returned to
Essex County for a summer holiday at Lake Placid in the company
of his artist-daughter Anna.
Father and daughter recorded their lakeside sojourn in a series
of small oil paintings. The Lake Placid plein air studies of
light and atmosphere, grounded in the same empirical
investigation of regional topography that inform the pencil
drawings from his early forays, are among the freshest and most
beautiful paintings of a remarkably vigorous old age.
Although William Trost Richards and his fellow artists in the
1850s and 60s preceded the tourist explosion of the 1870s, the
Adirondack region was already established by 1855 as a
destination for the hardy excursionist. As we see from the
paintings of Cole and Durand, Adirondack subjects, enhanced by
historical and literary associations, already operated as part of
a national canon of American landscape images. Elizabethtown, the
county seat where Richards was based on his visits, was as a
regional crossroads during the years 1850 to 1870 for his and the
many other artists in search of a national landscape.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated soft-cover
catalog available for $29.95 (shipping not included) at the
Adirondack Museum Store or online at www.adkmuseum.org. For
information, 518-352-7311.
This article is excerpted from essays by the authors in the
exhibit catalog of the same title. Dr Linda S. Ferber is an
historian of American art who has published and lectured widely
on American landscape painting. She is the Andrew W. Mellon
Curator of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Recent
publications include Master of Color and Light: Homer Sargent,
and the American Watercolor Tradition, 1998 (with Barbara D.
Gallati), and Pastoral Interlude: William T. Richards in Chester
County, 2001. Dr Ferber is currently working on an Asher B.
Durand exhibition. Caroline M. Welsh is chief curator and curator
of art at the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake. She has
directed the cataloging and publication of the painting and print
collections; lectured and published articles and books on the
subject of Adirondack art and artists; and curated exhibits on
Adirondack art. Recent publications include Adirondack Prints and
Printmakers: The Call of the Wild, 1998 (editor), and The View
from Asgaard: Rockwell Kent's Adirondack Legacy, 2000 (with Scott
R. Ferris). Welsh is currently working on a Harold Weston
exhibition. "In Search of a National Landscape: " is on view
through October 14 at the Adirondack Museum, Routes 28 and 30,
Blue Mountain Lake, N.Y.
Notes
- "Elizabeth Valley," The Aldine, VI (October 1873), 198.
- For a general history of the region, see Alfred L. Donaldson,
A History of the Adirondacks (New York: The Century Co., 1921;
reprinted Mamaroneck, N.Y.: Harbor Hill Books, 1977), two
volumes.
- Magazine n.s. 1, (January 1836), 1-12; reprinted in John
McCoubrey, American Art, 1700-1900: Sources and Documents
(Englewood, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965).
- Asher B. Durand, "Letters on Landscape Painting," The Crayon
(1855). The nine articles, pub-lished between January and July,
demonstrate in their earnest eloquence the highly charged state
in which American scenery and landscape painting was approached
by artists, critics, and audi-ences at mid-century. There can be
little doubt that Richards knew these important documents.
- The sketchbook is in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum of
Art, accession no. 1975.15.2, gift of Edith Ballinger Price.
- Information about Richards's biography and career is found in
Linda S. Ferber, William T. Rich-ards: American Landscape &
Marine Painter, exhibition catalog (Brooklyn, N.Y.: The Brooklyn
Museum, 1973); Linda S. Ferber, William T. Richards (1855-1905):
American Landscape and Ma-rine Painter (New York: Garland
Publishing, 1980); Linda S. Ferber, "Never at Fault": The
Draw-ings of William Trost Richards, exhibition catalog (Yonkers,
N.Y.: The Hudson River Museum, 1986), hereafter cited as Ferber,
Richards (1986).
- Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel (London:
Saunders and Otley, 1838), Volume 2, 221 as quoted in Russell P.
Bellico, Chronicles of Lake George Journeys in War and Peace
(Fleischmanns, N.Y.: Purple Mountain Press, Ltd, 1995), 274.
- Thomas Jefferson to Martha Jefferson Randolph, May 31, 1791,
in The Writings of Thomas Jef-ferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford,
volume 6 (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1904), 264.
- Alexander Lawrie Diary, Elizabethtown, N.Y., 22 September
1863, Collection of David Trout, quoted in Mary Ann Goley and
Robin Pell, Alexander Lawrie: Views of Essex County, New York,
exhibition catalog (Washington, D.C.: Federal Reserve Board Fine
Arts Program, 1993), 8.
- Address given by the artist John Ferguson Weir, as quoted in
John K. Howat et al., American Paradise: The World of the Hudson
River School (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987), 220.
- Ila Weis, Poetic Landscape: The Art and Experience of Sanford
R. Gifford (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and
Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1987), 241-42.
- Ferber, Richards (1986), 11, 74.
- The ideological connotation of the panoramic format is
discussed in Albert Boime, The Magesterial Gaze, Manifest Destiny
and American Landscape Painting, circa 1830-1865 (Wash-ington,
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); Angela Miller, The
Empire of the Eye: Land-scape Representation and American
Cultural Politics, 1825-1875 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1993) and Robert L. McGrath, Scenes of Lake Placid,
exhibition catalog (Lake Placid, N.Y.: Lake Placid Center for the
Arts, 1993).
