Paintings of the Adirondack Mountains

Magazine Antiques, July, 1997 by Caroline M. Welsh

In June 1837 Cole invited the artist Charles Cromwell Ingham to Schroon Lake, but Ingham declined in order to join the New York State Natural History Survey in August. His task was to illustrate the geological part of this survey under the direction of Ebenezer Emmons (1799-1863), the state geologist. The painting by Ingham shown in Plate I documents one of the passes surveyed and was exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York City in 1839, a year after John H. Bufford (1810-1870) lithographed it for publication in Emmons's report. Thirty years later Alfred Billings Street (1811-1881), in his travel book The Indian Pass, wrote of the engraving: "I wish to bear testimony to the graphic accuracy of the engraving of the loftiest point of the Indian Pass....it is a perfect photograph of a magnificent sight."(8)

In June 1848 Durand returned to the Adirondacks with Kensett and John William Casilear (1811-1893), also an artist. They traveled beyond Lake George to Elizabethtown, ten miles west of Lake Champlain and twelve miles east of Keene Valley. In a letter to his son, Durand wrote: "The mountain scenery is beautiful, superior to any I have met with in this country."(9) Durand visited Keene Valley, Lake Placid, and Lake George several tunes during his long careen According to Durand's daughter, his last painting, executed when he was over eighty, was an Adirondack scene entitled Souvenir of the Adirondacks.(10)

By 1850 American landscape painting was a powerful medium for conveying national, cultural, and religious ideas. During the first half of the century transcendentalist thinkers led by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and Hudson River school artists led by Cole vested the landscape with spiritual and regenerative powers. This convention is masterfully exemplified in the painting by Sanford Robinson Gifford shown in Plate VIII, which is the largest of four known versions.(11) At its first showing at the National Academy of Design in 1864 the New York Evening Post commented: "Gifford has never painted a picture of more exquisite gradations than this."(12) A fellow artist wrote more expansively the year of Gifford's death:

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.(13)

Keene Valley, deep in the high peaks of the Adirondacks, was one of the earliest spots in the region to be settled. Its first hotel opened in 1823, and artists discovered the valleys exceptionally dramatic expanse of mountainous terrain around mid-century. After the Civil War they came for longer stays and built studios, and by the 1880s the valley was known in the press as a mecca for artists. Orson Phelps, a local guide and entrepreneur, claimed that

Keene Flats...was discovered by the artist. With pencil he made pictures and sent them back to the cities, to be noticed in the drawing rooms and public halls. Visitors began to arrive. Each one brought three next year....[The artists] are quiet people, who see more beauty in a summer cloud hanging for a moment on the mountain summit than others.(14)