Paintings of the Adirondack Mountains

Magazine Antiques, July, 1997 by Caroline M. Welsh

The Adirondack Mountains in northern New York State were discovered by artists well after they had come to know the Catskill Mountains north of New York City and the White Mountains in New Hampshire. Until the third decade of the nineteenth century this wilderness north of Albany, New York, was felt to be so inhospitable that it was not worth exploring.

Thomas Cole's biographer, Louis Legrand Noble (1813-1882), chronicled a two-week-long trip in September 1846 to Long Lake, deep in the Adirondacks, with Cole, two companions, and a guide:

The wilderness, haunted by the great moose, the wolf, the bear and panther, seems almost interminable, and nearly houseless: the mountains, some of them reaching into the sky, ragged, rocky pinnacles, and robed with savage grandeur, are pathless and inaccessible without a guide: the lakes, which are every where, and often strikingly beautiful, repel by the oppressive loneliness in which they slumber.(1)

At the same time, Cole's reaction to the scenery near Schroon Lake, just northwest of Lake George, was quite different: "I do not remember to have seen in Italy a composition of mountains so beautiful or pictorial as this glorious range of the Adirondack."(2) This, of course, was a time when nature was evaluated in terms of how much it looked like a painting, and when landscape painters arranged natural elements into pleasing compositions.

The earliest images of the Adirondack landscape were eighteenth-century maps of Lakes George and Champlain, wood engravings of Forts William Henry and Ticonderoga, and views of Lake George and the Hudson River north of Albany. The Swedish botanist Pehr Kalm (1716-1779) drew the flora and other natural attributes of the region during his visit to Lake Champlain in 1749. Between 1815 and 1818 Jacques Gerard Milbert (1766-1840), a French naturalist and artist, gathered natural history specimens and made many drawings of the southern Adirondack region. His wash drawings of the Hudson River were lithographed in Paris and published in two volumes as Itineraire pittoresque du fleuve Hudson (1828-1829). Twenty watercolors of the region north and west of Lake George by the English artist William Guy Wall (1792-c.1864) were published as engravings in The Hudson River Portfolio (1821-1825). These two large illustrated compendiums introduced American scenery to Europeans.

Lake George in particular was widely celebrated. When Thomas Jefferson visited it in 1791 he wrote:

Lake George is, without comparison, the most beautiful water I ever saw; formed by a contour of mountains into a basin thirty-five miles long, and from two to four miles broad, finely interspersed with islands, its water limpid as crystal, and the mountain sides covered with rich groves of thuja [cedar], silver fir, white pine, aspen, and paper birch down to the water-edge; here and there precipices of rock to checker the scene and save it from monotony.(5)

The lake epitomized nineteenth-century concepts of the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque with its aesthetic juxtaposition of mountains, water, islands, trees, and rocks. Among the many amateur and professional artists and photographers attracted to Lake George few found it as compelling as John Frederick Kensett. One of America's best-known and most successful landscape painters in the mid-nineteenth century, he created at least a dozen formal paintings of the lake beginning in 1850. During this period Kensett was strongly influenced by Cole and Asher B. Durand (1716-1886), particularly their belief in the religious and moral content of landscape. Kensett's paintings expressed his transcendental faith in "that beautiful harmony in which God has created the universe."(4) Lake George [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE III OMITTED], with its classically balanced composition, conveys the awe that natural perfection inspired in him.

By mid-century Lake George was no longer an inaccessible wilderness but a serene, although often crowded, vacation spot. Alfred Thompson Bricher's views of the lake are recorded in two sketchbooks from an 1867 visit.(5) From these he developed paintings of the lake depicting a vacationer's dream for post-Civil War tourists traumatized by the war [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE IV OMITTED]. The following decade David Johnson continued in this tone [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE V OMITTED]. Uniform and luminous light, a tightly controlled technique and composition, rich colors, and extraordinarily realistic details make Johnson's views of Lake George among his finest works.(6)

Cole made his first trip to the Adirondacks in 1826, visiting Lake George and the ruins of Fort Ticonderoga from his summer house in Catskill, New York. In 1835 he journeyed deeper into the mountains north of Lake George to Schroon Lake. He returned there two years later with his wife and Durand, and on this occasion Cole made several drawings of the scenery near Schroon Mountain (now Hoffman Mountain).(7) The painting of about 1846 shown in Plate II, based on those drawings, depicts a known site and its inhabitants while at the same time conveying Coles judgment on civilization's transformation of the wilderness. The log house at the center and sawmill at the far right were built in 1798 and were owned in Cole's time by Joseph Richards, who sold lumber from the shop attached to his house. In the clearing above the mill is Severance Cemetery, and by the shore of the lake is a schoolhouse. The domesticated scene emphasizes Cole's belief in the harmonious relationship between man and nature. The blasted stump in the foreground signifies the taming of the wilderness while the rugged mountains and luminous sky transcend mundane human occupations.