Paintings of the Adirondack Mountains

Magazine Antiques, July, 1997 by Caroline M. Welsh

Another mecca for artists was near Minerva, southwest of Keene Valley, where the terrain was much less spectacular but the hunting and fishing were excellent. By 1859 sportsmen and artists frequently boarded at Baker's Farm, among them Eliphalet Terry, an avid sportsman and painter, who often vacationed in the Adirondacks, the White Mountains, Maine, and Canada with his fellow Hartford artists Fitch and Homer. Terry painted Baker's log homestead in its newly cleared site, underlining the frontier quality of the Adirondacks.(23) Terry returned to Baker's regularly after Baker's family stopped running the boardinghouse. The Adirondack Preserve Association (renamed the North Woods Club in 1895) bought the Baker land in 1887 to establish a hunting and fishing club. Terry joined it that year and built his own cottage on the grounds in 1889. After Terry's death in 1896 Homer took over his cottage and used it until his own death in 1910.(24)

Homer first visited the Adirondacks in 1870, going to Keene Valley in the summer and to Baker's in September. Shurtleff and Fitch introduced him to the valley, while Terry directed him to Baker's. An avid fisherman, Homer joined the Adirondack Preserve Association in 1888 as the only other artist member besides Terry.

Homer's Adirondack watercolors have been described as a major technical and aesthetic departure in American painting.(25) His hunting and fishing studies are said to be the most technically complex and physically direct depictions of action and place ever painted. The fly caster in Plate XIII is captured at the moment he has stopped his line in flight before launching it forward. The concentration of the angler and the stillness of the dark forest and water unite the action and the man with nature.(26)

In addition to picturesque views, camping in the woods attracted tourists and artists. Camping scenes typically depict urban sportsmen relaxing with their guides in a forest glen near a lean-to. They are usually seen eating, drinking, or smoking rather than hunting or fishing, although an Adirondack guide boat, a canoe, a pack basket, fishing rod, and gun are not far off.

In the second half of the nineteenth century the Adirondack region was promoted as a remote and trackless wilderness populated by an abundance of wildlife. To the gentleman sportsman of the time no other spot in the eastern United States compared to the north country for hunting and fishing. Works of art did much to perpetuate this impression.

The quintessential painter of Adirondack hunting and fishing scenes was Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, who immigrated to America from England in 1850 and established himself as a painter, having already achieved success as a lithographer. When he discovered the Adirondacks in 1852 he made them his subject for the next thirty years. An ardent sportsman and lover of the outdoors, Tait lived for extended periods near Chateaugay, Raquette, and Long Lakes. His images of animals and sport were among the best known in nineteenth-century America, and the Currier and Ives lithographs made after them popularized the Adirondacks as a sportsman's paradise.