19th century AD

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1996 by John W. Coffey

Among Mignot's many distinctions is the honor, scarcely acknowledged today, of being the most important Southern-born painter of his generation. His father, Remy Mignot (1801-1848), had emigrated from France, arriving in Charleston, South Carolina, about 1821, where he prospered as the owner of a popular coffeehouse and later a confectionery on fashionable King Street.(3) His wife, Elizabeth, died while Louis Mignot was quite young, and the child reportedly passed into the care of a wealthy grandfather.(4) Although virtually nothing is known of Mignot's youth or his beginnings as an artist, he almost certainly received some private instruction from a local painter or drawing master, and he would have found inspiration in the occasional art exhibitions that passed through Charleston with their medley of modern pictures and dubious old masters.(5) Even so, the city was no place for an aspiring artist of Mignot's ambition, and at the age of seventeen he left to continue his studies in Europe.(6)

It is reported that the young man was "despatched to the care of friends in Holland, where he was placed in the studio of Schelfhout for instruction."(7) Andreas Schelfhout (1787-1870) was the pre-eminent Dutch landscape painter of his day, honored throughout Europe for his luminous winter scenes. He was also a celebrated teacher, attracting many pupils to his studio in The Hague, Netherlands, chief among them Johan Barthold Jongkind (1819-1891).(8) Although the duration of Mignot's apprenticeship is uncertain, there can be no doubt of Schelfhout's profound influence. The few extant landscapes from Mignot's student years conscientiously rehearse the subjects, compositions, and techniques of the master. The desolate landscape in Winter Scene, Holland [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE IV OMITTED], chilled by a low Nordic sun, is readily recognizable as the special province of Schelfhout and his legion of pupils. Mignot makes the desolation human by inserting the figure of a woman trudging away from the dilapidated tower. A lone wayfarer in various guises makes a frequent appearance in Mignot's landscapes throughout his career. Such figures are venerable cliches in Dutch landscape painting, but on a deeper level, they may reflect Mignot's own rootlessness and peripatetic life.

During his six years abroad Mignot diligently cultivated his contacts in New York City. He regularly submitted pictures, including a four-by-five-foot landscape, to the American Art-Union, which, in 1850, accepted one of his Dutch winter scenes.(9) In 1853 the National Academy of Design included three of his paintings in its annual exhibition.(10)

Returning to the United States late in 1854 or early in 1855, Mignot settled in New York City and immediately entered the fiercely competitive arena of landscape painting. Although still in his early twenties, Mignot had the formidable advantage of a long apprenticeship in the Dutch landscape tradition. Few of his American colleagues could match his technical or conceptual sophistication; fewer still his enterprise.

As might have been expected, Mignot first announced himself as a painter of the winter landscape, a comparatively neglected subject in mid-century American painting. Although such artists as Thomas Doughty, John Frederick Kensett, and Jasper Francis Cropsey had attempted the occasional snow scene, winter was for the most part left to the lesser talents of Regis Gignoux and George Henry Durrie.(11) Readily adapting his Old World training to a New World setting, Mignot produced a number of related views of mountain highlands under snow derived from studies he made in the Catskill Mountains in New York State during the winter of 1855-1856. Snow Scene [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE V OMITTED] is a bravura demonstration of his refined skills as a painter. He confidently attended to the facts of the picture - the glazed stream, the stark woods, and the snow-covered hills - but his primary interest is the light and how it takes and models the terrain and gently warms the air. Winter always remained a favored subject for Mignot, although its connotations darkened as the yearn passed.

Mignot also painted more conventional landscape subjects. An early success was Sources of the Susquehanna [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE II OMITTED], based on sketches of the rapidly dwindling wilderness of Otsego County, New York. For this picture the artist selected the moment just after the sun has set, when the sky is still radiant. The mountain forest, through which courses a rocky stream, eases into shadow. Another version of this picture caused a writer to declare, perhaps rashly, that it rivaled Frederic Edwin Church's Niagara(12) of 1857 as "the most powerful, deeply American landscape in existence.... [Mignot] has dipped his brush in the 'colors of America,' stern and rough-hewn as her face is and hard as a sculpture in bronze, but none the less true to nature."(13)

Sources of the Susquehanna was featured at the 1857 exhibition of the National Academy of Design, which clearly marked Mignot's arrival as a young painter of importance in New York. At the same show he presented three other works calculated to advertise both his talent and his versatility: Winter Scene in Holland, with figures by Eastman Johnson (1824-1906); The Foray, a large history painting with figures by John Whetten Ehninger (1827-1889);(14) and Autumn [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE VI OMITTED]. Reviewing the show, The Crayon reported that "Mr. Mignot shows in all his works a fine perception of Nature and great fidelity, and he is, moreover, endowed with original powers that are adequate for the attainment of great excellence."(15) An enthusiastic response to Autumn must have been especially gratifying for the young artist, not least because several critics praised it at the expense of a larger Autumn by Church, the acknowledged successor to Thomas Cole (1801-1848). Church's picture, now at the Olana State Historic Site in Hudson, New York,(16) was roundly criticized as "strained and overdone,"(17) and "decidedly theatrical, and tawdry,"(18) while Mignot's was applauded for expressing "the sentiment and hectic beauty of the autumnal season."(19) One critic ventured that "Mignot has fearlessly entered on a race with Church...[which] may yet be 'neck and neck.'"(20)