Drawing on lithographs of the mighty crescent, in “Niagara Falls,†circa 1843‶0, Chambers created his own spectacular view that outdoes paintings by better-known artists. Calling this work a “brilliantly complex design in dark and light, with any number of curved forms pushing forward and taking us into deep space simultaneously,†art historian Sanford Schwartz dubs the painting Chambers’s “masterpiece.†Courtesy of Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.

Given the surge of interest in American folk art in the last half century, it is rare these days for a significant self-taught painter to be shrouded in mystery and then rediscovered. Yet that is the case of Thomas Chambers (1808‱869), a largely self-trained Nineteenth Century marine and landscape artist, who was little known in his lifetime and was completely forgotten by the end of his century.

A 1942 exhibition at New York’s Macbeth Gallery brought to public attention Chambers’s flamboyant, brilliantly hued and boldly expressive marine- and landscapes. His work was much admired, but still little was known about the artist’s life and work.

More than ten years ago, Kathleen A. Foster, then a curator at the Indiana University Art Museum, began looking into the background of the man who created 29 paintings that had been recently acquired by the museum. Intrigued by Chambers’s idiosyncratic style, she continued searching for additional examples of his work and facts about his life after becoming head of the Philadelphia Museum’s Center for American Art in 2002.

It was an unusual challenge. Chambers signed and dated few paintings and there are few documents relating to him. US census data and city directories have been useful tools in tracking him. As the late Philadelphia Museum director Anne d’Harnoncourt put it in the exhibition catalog, “It is rare to find a Nineteenth Century American artist so widely recognized today, and yet so understudied.”

Chambers based this painting, “Capture of HBM Macedonian by US Frigate United States,†circa 1840‵0, on a precedent of Philadelphia artist Thomas Birch. Recording one of the most famous naval battles of the War of 1812, Chambers utilized his strong sense of design and pattern, curving contours, dramatic seas and detailed ship structure to craft a compelling image. Collection of Susanne and Ralph Katz.

Two hundred years after his birth and as a result of Foster’s wide-ranging research and analysis, the first comprehensive exhibition of the little-known star, “Thomas Chambers: American Marine and Landscape Painter, 1808‱869,” already seen at the Philadelphia Museum and The Hyde Collection, is on view at the American Folk Art Museum through March 7. It comprises 44 of the artist’s works, some 15 paintings and prints by contemporaries and a selection of decorative arts from the heyday of American “fancy” taste.

The show and catalog seek, says Foster, “to define Chambers’s style and sources, explore his shadowy career and investigate the audience for popular landscape and marine painting that he pioneered in mid-Nineteenth Century America.” Although Chambers remains an elusive figure, with the help of the informative catalog, Foster has gone a long way toward pinning down facts about his life and oeuvre.

New research suggests that Chambers was born in 1808 in Whitby, Yorkshire, England, to a merchant sailor and laundress. He apparently learned to paint from his older brother, George (1803‱842), a self-taught artist, who started out painting buckets and trunks, then ship portraits, panoramas, theatrical scenery and eventually, “fine art” marine paintings for King William IV and the Royal Academy.

At 24, Thomas left London for New Orleans to pursue a career as an artist in the New World. In New York, 1834‱840, he listed himself in city directories and newspaper advertisements as a marine, landscape and “fancy” painter.

Chambers painted numerous views of Boston and New York harbors filled with ships flying national colors and riding on rippling waves under swirling clouds, as in “Boston Harbor,†circa 1843‴5. The principal vessels here include the 74-gun Ohio, left, described as “one of the finest warships in the world,†and the Royal Mail Steamer Hibernia, right, under both American and British flags, leaving port for Liverpool. Courtesy of National Gallery of Art.

Fancy painting meant everything from oil paintings to coach, furniture and ship ornamentation, graining and stenciling and signs. Chambers apparently worked out of ships or shops, and sold his paintings independently, finding patrons outside established academic art organizations.

Over the next 20 years Chambers worked in Baltimore (1842), Boston (1843‵1), Albany (1851‵7), and again New York (1858‶5). Married and the father of two sons, he outlived his wife, just as he outlived the market for his work.

There is no trace of Chambers in this country after 1866. He evidently returned to Whitby, penniless and disabled and, as the newly uncovered record of his death documents, died in the poorhouse in 1869. To be sure, Chambers was little known during his lifetime. His status as an outsider, his background in lowly sign and decorative painting and his predilection for working from print sources undoubtedly inhibited public and critical appreciation for his work.

Chambers’s timing was bad as well. His bravura romantic style, blending cosmopolitan and folk motifs, was appealing in his day, but he was overtaken by the mid-Nineteenth Century passion for realism and his recently developed market for inexpensive public art was undercut by the onset of chromolithography.

Chambers’s work, sequestered in attics, barns and obscure sites, with his name unknown because he signed few paintings, resurfaced in the 1930s when American folk art became popular among modern artists and antiques collectors.

In 1942, the discovery of a signed painting, “The Constitution and the Guerriere ,” circa 1840‱850, put a name to some of his paintings. That same year, the Macbeth Gallery exhibition touted the resurrection of “T. Chambers, First American Modern,” showcasing his boldly simplified forms with curvy and streamlined flourishes, strong brushwork and intense, bright colors †all of which appealed to Twentieth Century curators and collectors.

The current exhibition appropriately focuses attention on Chambers’s marine canvases, brimming with robust brushwork, audacious colors and rhythmic forms, and his somewhat more subdued landscape canvases that evoke calmness and a sense of place. Whether rendering radiant red skies, white-capped waves, distant purple mountains, greenish waterfalls or forests tinged with orange, red and white, Chambers’s images seem to leap out at viewers. They are appealing pictures that radiate energy and animation.

From his maritime background, Chambers knew ships and the sea, and he had romanticized ideas about life at sea.

Chambers did several variants on this scene, apparently set in Italy and, as usual, based on print sources. In “Landscape with a Walled Town,†circa 1843‶0, he depicted the landscape as sunny and serene, with an air of slow-paced life befitting the venerable red-tiled buildings in the community, all set against a magnificent vista of mountains, sky and clouds. Courtesy of Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington. ⁍ichael Cavanaugh and Kevin Montague photo

While Chambers drew on ideas of other seascapists, notably Philadelphia artist Thomas Birch, he developed his own distinctive, energetic style. An indefatigable marketer of his works, he was adept at portraying newsworthy subjects, such as historic battles, recent shipwrecks, new warships, record-breaking steamships or popular naval fiction.

His best known sea scene, “The Constitution and the Guerriere ,” painted around 1840‱850, vividly depicts the triumph of the battered American vessel, known as Old Ironsides , over the devastated British frigate Guerriere in the War of 1812. The prominently shell-pierced sails of the Constitution suggest the intensity of the battle, while the triumphantly flying American flags reflect the patriotic importance of its outcome.

The artist painted several versions of another War of 1812 highlight, “Capture of HBM Macedonian by the US Frigate United States , October 25, 1812,” circa 1840‵0.

Chambers was inspired by a best-selling, swashbuckling melodrama about pirates to paint “Ship in a Storm,” circa 1836‴5, which looks like something out of The Perfect Storm . The unusual perspective and towering, angry waves make for an interesting composition †and leave little doubt about the fate of the doomed vessel.

Soon after the well-publicized wreck of an immigrant ship off the coast of Long Island in 1836 with the loss of 77 lives, Chambers capitalized on the tragedy with “Rockaway Beach, New York, with the Wreck of the Ship Bristol ,” circa 1837‴0. Backed by animated clouds and a number of sailing vessels, the wreck is pounded by waves as a solitary figure on the beach surveys the salvage scene.

In New York, Chambers often painted famous ships or familiar vessels in the harbor at the southern tip of Manhattan, doing at least seven variants of the composition of “Packet Ship Passing Castle Williams, New York Harbor,” circa 1838‴5, and most dramatically in “Threatening Sky, Bay of New York,” circa 1835‵0.

After moving to Boston in 1842, Chambers painted views of the harbor there that are mates to his New York harbor pictures. “Boston Harbor,” circa 1843‴5, features his characteristic bright, multihued skies, swirling clouds, animated whitecaps and flag-flying ships.

Chambers also created a series of pictures of Boston’s North Shore, often showing groups of sailing vessels peacefully riding the waves off the coast, like “Shipping off a Coast [Nahant, from Lynn Beach]” circa 1843‵0, or a dramatic variant, “View of Nahant [Sunset],” circa 1843‵0, featuring red-yellow clouds swirling around a distant vessel with roiling waves in the foreground.

This painting, “Landscape with Mount Vesuvius,†circa 1843‶0, differs so greatly from comparable works that it has raised the possibility that it was executed by a Chambers assistant or some kind of a workshop. It was attributed to a “Mr Corbin of London,†an artist unknown in England or the United States. Collection of Susanne and Ralph Katz.

In the 1840s, Chambers, who was principally known as a marine painter, added landscape painting to his repertoire.

His work in this genre is interesting, but less compelling than his marines. Basing his images on designs from contemporary books and prints, he boldly remade such pictures in his own bravura style. As Foster writes in the catalog, “Enlarging, simplifying, reorganizing, embellishing and brightly coloring a structure derived from tiny black-and-white sources, he commanded a strong personal style.” Curator Deborah Chotner of the National Gallery of Art posits that this derivative process did not inhibit the development of a “highly original and distinctive artist.”

One of his largest landscapes, “View of Cold Spring and Mount Taurus from Fort Putnam,” circa 1843‵7, depicts rippling water, vessels on the river and tiny figures in the foreground and closely resembles his handling of seascapes.

Chambers used a book illustration as the basis for a much altered view overlooking the Hudson River, “Underhill, near Cold Spring, N.Y.” Mountain peaks, picturesque sky, the white-capped river, sailboats, assorted figures and a handsome white house give this painting both context and charm. After several similar works were found, critics called them “Modern” in treatment and composition.

Chambers’s most popular landscape view †West Point, N.Y. †said by many to be the most spectacular site on the Hudson River †was based on a print. Framed by woods and a colorful sky with sailing ships in the Hudson between the viewer and the US Military Academy, it is a beautiful and tranquil vignette.

In depicting Niagara Falls, the awesome and powerful wonder of western New York, Chambers drew on lithographs to create a suitably dramatic depiction of the sheer height of the falls with powerful water cascading down and raising enormous spumes of white water. A tiny figure in the foreground is dwarfed by this manifestation of nature’s might.

From time to time, Chambers executed paintings that took advantage of the popularity of “fancy” or fantastic images based on imagined, often whimsical scenes. “Landscape with a Road Leading to Water,” circa 1843‵0, has the requisite Edenic, dreamlike qualities, both decorative and emotional, prized by collectors of “fancy pieces.”

Chambers’s version of the “Delaware River Gap,” circa 1840‵0, drew on engravings by either Thomas Doughty or Asher B. Durand, a leading figure in the Hudson River School. But whereas the two older painters depicted the oft-painted site in subdued tones, Chambers’s canvas is predictably bright, green, flat, hard-edged and thoroughly decorative, and adds sailboats and passive figures on the shore.

In the largest and most colorful of five known versions of this scene, “View of Nahant [Sunset],†circa 1843‵0, whirling clouds frame a steamship in the distance, probably the Britannia, which held the record for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic and brought Charles Dickens to Boston in 1842. It is 22 by 30 inches. Collection of Peter and Barbara Goodman. ⁒obert Hashimoto photo

Most American painters visiting Italy in the Nineteenth Century tended to paint nostalgic views of ruined towers and overgrown aqueducts. Chambers, working from print sources, chose to focus on Mount Vesuvius, which had buried Pompeii and adjacent communities in its famous eruption. One version, “Landscape with Mount Vesuvius,” circa 1843‶0, formerly attributed to a “Mr Corbin of London” and now to Chambers, looks uncharacteristic of his work. Foster speculates it might be by a “Chambers circle, including different artists working together from the same source.” Further study may reveal whether Chambers worked alone or had help on occasion. Another sunny view, likely of Italy, “Landscape with a Walled Town,” circa 1843‶0, is a rather static, panoramic view of an ancient community.

Although never a major player on the American art scene, Chambers fell further out of favor as more naturalistic design supplanted “fancy” tastes, and increasing interest in realism undermined his folk-art manner. By the 1860s, photography was replacing many painters, successful landscape paintings invoked closely observed scenes, and inexpensive chromolithographs competed with works by Chambers and others at the low end of the art market.

Although he died in poverty and left few clues to his work and life, today Thomas Chambers is coming into his own. As Foster puts it, “The visual qualities deemed bad in Chambers’s day †flatness, unnatural color, expressive distortion, abstraction and simplification †are exactly the traits that will make him a model of liberated individualism and originality, ‘America’s First Modern.'”

After closing in New York, the exhibition travels to Indiana University Art Museum in Bloomington, March 26 though May 30.

The catalog contains text by Foster that not only reveals the results of her research, but places Chambers in the artistic context of his times. Published by the Philadelphia Museum in association with Yale University Press, it is priced at $50 hardcover, and $39.95 softcover.

The American Folk Art Museum is at 45 West 53rd Street. For information, 212-265-1040 or www.folkartmuseum.org .