The Mentor, No. 26,
American Landscape Painters

The Mentor

“A Wise and Faithful Guide and Friend”

AMERICAN LANDSCAPE PAINTERS

American Art Annual

By SAMUEL ISHAM

The beginnings of art in America were confined almost exclusively to portrait painting. In the earliest colonial times unskilled limners came from the mother country and made grotesque effigies of our statesmen and divines. As the settlements developed and the amenities of life increased better men came, and native painters were found, until about the end of the eighteenth century a portrait school of surprising merit arose, founded on the contemporary English school, and developed men like Copley, Stuart, and Sully. The other branches of painting, however,—history, allegory, genre, still life, landscape, and the rest,—were rarely attempted, and usually with unsatisfactory results.

Probably no artist devoted himself entirely to landscape until 1820, when Thomas Doughty, who was already twenty-seven years old, gave up his leather trade and took to painting American views in delicate gray and violet tones, with small encouragement from his contemporaries.

THOMAS COLE, THE IDEALIST

Metropolitan Museum of Art

THE VALLEY OF VAN CLUSE, BY THOMAS COLE

Soon after came Thomas Cole, the real founder of the school, who emigrated to America with his father’s family when he was nineteen. He was a sensitive, delicate youth, who suffered much in his wanderings while trying to support himself, at first by his trade of wood engraving, but most of all after the chance meeting with an itinerant portrait painter led him to take up art. It was not until he came to New York in 1825 that his merits were recognized and his difficulties ceased. Some small canvases that he exhibited were quickly bought, and from this time until his death his popularity steadily increased. The quality of Cole’s work owes much to his own character, and perhaps also to his early English bringing up. He was an idealist rather than a realist. He cared less to reproduce the beauties of the nature around him than to awaken high, moral thoughts. It was not for the pleasure of the eye, but to suggest profitable musings on the grandeur and decline of nations, the transitoriness of life, the rewards of virtue after death, that he painted the “Course of Empire,” the “Voyage of Life,” and the rest. He was the founder of a romantic school, which may be traced even down to the present day. The succeeding artists did not indeed paint allegories; but they put the main interest of their pictures in the strangeness or beauty of their subject, rather than in rendering ordinary scenes with personal feeling.

CHURCH, PAINTER OF NOBLE SCENERY

Metropolitan Museum of Art

THE ÆGEAN SEA, BY F. E. CHURCH

The best known of these followers was F. E. Church, who was a pupil of Cole—and