Lot Essay
The title and provenance of the present painting, among Kensett's largest of the 1850s, are here given proposed revisions. In recent literature about the artist, the canvas, which reemerged during the early 1980s after a period of obscurity lasting more than three-quarters of a century, has been equated with Kensett's picture entitled Adirondack Scenery shown at the National Academy of Design in 1854 as no. 42. Adirondack Scenery's initial owner, James M. Burt of New York, loaned it to that venue.
We suggest re-identifying the picture as the one by Kensett entitled Franconia Mountains, shown at the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design between March 15 and May 10, 1856. By then it would have been owned for about two years by Marshall Owen Roberts (1814-1880) of New York, a prominent capitalist, would-be politician and art collector who lent it to the Academy display.
As will be discussed below, the scenery depicted in our painting is equally if not more consistent with that of northern New Hampshire near the Vermont border than with that of the Adirondacks in upstate New York, and it corresponds reasonably with extant outdoor sketches of the White Mountains by Kensett and with verbal descriptions of his painting entitled Franconia Mountains displayed in 1856.
Regrettably little is known about James Burt's personality, his social standing, or his role, evidently an intersting one, in the dynamics of American art patronage at mid-century. Several of his paintings, including Kensett's Adirondack Scenery, were re-shown at the Brooklyn Athenaeum in May 1856. At an auction of his holdings held in New York a year and half later, at the end of 1857, the event attracting public notice and generally good prices, it was said that many of his oils, most of which were "cabinet" size, had been "painted to order." Many such notices appeared in New York newspapers the week preceding the sale, including The New York Times and the New-York Daily Tribune and the collection was recorded in the Catalogue of a Splendid Collection of Costly Oil Paintings, Water Colors and Drawings, Being the Private Gallery of J.M. Burt, Esq. (New York, November 5, 1857). Among the items vended were three canvases by Kensett, one of them, entitled Mountain Scenery, probably the Adirondack scene of 1854. Further sales of Burt's holdings took place in 1864 and 1887, by which later date he had moved to Brooklyn. Burt may have tried to capitalize on the exposures of his works for possible, profitable re-sale.
Marshall Roberts, by contrast, remained imperturbably eminent. As a periodic Republican candidate for political office, he was mostly unsuccessful, and in business, he suffered accusations of sharp practice, but his flair for entrepreneurial enterprises, especially those pertaining to shipping in the Caribbean and the Isthmus of Panama, and his profitable buying and selling of ocean vessels during the Civil War, netted him a financial fortune. Meanwhile by the mid-1860s his private art gallery in his house on Fifth Avenue, the contents of which stayed substantively intact until its dispersal sale in 1897, boasted some of the grandest, nationally symbolic American works of their day. Indeed the sheer sizes of several of his canvases put them beyond the reach of most compatriot connoisseurs: Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware of 1851 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) was the largest of five Leutzes that Roberts owned. Among other notable works in his custody were the second version of Robert W. Weir's Embarkation of the Pilgrims of 1857 (Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York) and Frederic Edwin Church's Mount Ktaadn of 1853 (Yale Unviversity Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut); Roberts later purchased three more paintings by Church. Without apparent affectation or speculation, Roberts consigned his holdings to benevolent causes of various kinds, notably the fair held in New York City during April 1864 on behalf of United States Sanitary Commission. To that assemblage he tendered, among numerous works, a Kensett painting designated White Mountain Scenery in the catalogue, perhaps the Franconia Mountains of 1854. Kensett's Franconia Mountains, sold in 1897 under the title Franconia Notch, measured 39 x 59 inches, coincident with the present picture.
Kensett's account book (Kensett papers, Archives of American Art), while offering few details, helps resolve our identification puzzle. It specifies that during 1854 "Roberts" paid the artist $600, the second highest price he received that year, for a painting he called New Hampshire Scenery, while "Burt" paid him $350 for a Reminiscences of the Adirond'ks, evidently a smaller, albeit sizeable, work. Under calendar year 1854 Kensett also lists a Lake Scene purchased by "J.M. Burt" for $200, presumably not, however, the canvas of that title lent to the National Academy in 1854 (no. 107) by D. Williamson Lee; and a Niagara Falls bought by C.C. Alger for $800, which, however, was not publicly exhibited. Previously, in 1851, "Mr. Burt" bought a Franconia Notch from Kensett for $60.
If these sorts of uncertainties and overlappings limit our understanding of Kensett's oeuvre, his place in the history of American art is, fortunately, a good deal clearer. Born in Cheshire, Connecticut, John Frederick Kensett studied engraving first with his father, Thomas Kensett (1786-1829), then with an uncle, Alfred Daggett, of New Haven, Connecticut. That part of his upbringing resembles Asher B. Durand's and John W. Casilear's, with both of whom, along with Thomas P. Rossiter, Kensett set out for Europe in 1840. Kensett remained abroad considerably longer--seven years, altogether--than they, but after returning stateside he quickly attained recognition as a nationally important landscape painter. He was soon making regular sketching trips to upstate New York and New England, exhibiting regularly at the National Academy of Design, and establishing a reputation for tranquil temper and congeniality. Occassionally he ranged far afield, voyaging the Mississippi and Missouri rivers in 1854 and 1857, respectively, returning to Britain for several months in 1856, and travelling to the Colorado Rockies in 1870. By the late 1860s both his renown and his clientele reportedly extended throughout western Europe. Equally at home, during the 1860s he handled sensitive art-related administrative assignments on behalf of the United States government, the United States Sanitary Commission, and the nascent Metropolitan Museum of Art. His premature death from heart failure at age fifty-six was front-page news in New York and cause for lament throughout the country.
By the early 1860s New York critics were invoking the names of William Cullen Bryant and Alfred, Lord Tennyson in conjunction with Kensett's art, and in 1864 James Jackson Jarves christened him "The Bryant of our painters." The demeanor of his pictures was said to parallel that of the artist himself. "Mr. Kensett, as revealed in his works," a synoptic, sympathetic New York biographer wrote in 1862, "exhibits a serene mind and a quiet disposition. He basks in the sunshine and rests in placid joy under the shadow of just such fine moss-covered rocks as he knows so well how to paint." ("Our Artists: V., J.F. Kensett," New York Commercial Advertiser, February 22, 1862, p. 1., signed "Proteus")
Now and then, though, observers discerned stronger tendencies. In early 1856 a visitor to his studio at Waverly Place found "a wilderness of wildernesses": its ample walls were blanketed with "studies, chiefly of ravine, rock and forest--all evincing his [Kensett's] unwearied and successful devotion to Nature's self." ("Studios of American Artists," New York Home Journal, Janaury 26, 1856, p. 1) A few weeks later another guest beheld among the myriad "sketches on the walls of [Kensett's] room...a fragment of the Appenine range, an Alpine Peak, and the more rounded swell of American mountains, in these data for elaborate works." ("New York Artists," Knickerbocker, vol. 48, July 1856, p. 31) The same writer noticed "the 'Hanging Rocks' which bound good Bishop Berkeley's old Rhode-Island domain; here a bluff we beheld on the Upper Mississippi; and opposite, an angle in the gorge at Trenton where we watched the amber flash of the cascade."
While most commentators concurred that Kensett painted rocks well, they also guessed that "sublime" subjects were not his forte. They tended to compliment the muted sentiments of his studio paintings while recommending that he stretch his wings.
The present painting is suggestive of just this sort of conceptual bifurcation. On the one hand it is tactile, intimate and accessible, at any rate in terms of scale. On the other hand it is rough, powerful and untamed--no residue of human intrusion is evident near or far. The rocky foregound pivots on a bending birch toward the left, its trunk girdled by a thin vine with red leaves indicating early autumn. Just beyond is a craggy pool fed by a bountiful stream, while beyond that looms a beetling, shadowed, tree-topped declivity through which volumes of water exit into the center of the scene. Across the atmospheric far distance the mood is calmer, a tall peak of flattened profile with rock slides on its near face rising from a roughened plateau. Autumnal tints cluster at the far middle left and at one or two portions of the far distance.
This picture is unusually freely, even loosely, painted. Most canvases of his maturity exhibit a certain dryness of touch, as though he were emulating the effects of tempera. Here, however, he has dramatically exploited the oil medium. Probably he was thinking, in part, of the then-topical precedents of Thomas Cole, whose biography by Louis L. Noble was published in 1853 and whose Voyage of Life series was engraved by James Smillie in 1856, and of Barbizon painters such as Narcisse Diaz de la Pena, specimens of whose work were reaching the United States.
Perhaps uppermost in Kensett's mind was what art historians incline to call a search for style. During the mid-1850s, Durand, a senior colleague and National Academy of Design president, was delving into rugged American forest interior scenes, notably those entitled Primeval Forest, exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1854 and In the Woods of 1855 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), while younger colleagues Frederic Church, Jasper Cropsey and Sanford R. Gifford were poised on the brinks of career-changing themes--which for Church meant South America and Niagara Falls; for Cropsey, Niagara, the Hudson River, New England and old England; and for Gifford, Italy, old England, upstate New York and New England. Our painting by Kensett, exhibited on the eve of Kensett's own return to Britain, looks like what it probably is: a major, vigorous, transitional work.
Assuming the painting is Kensett's Franconia Mountains owned by Marshall Roberts, the artist's adherence to topography is generalized rather than specific, as the varied titles given to the work also suggest. Kensett sometimes used the words "reminiscence" and "scenery" in his listings of painting titles, although less often in exhibition titles. Franconia Notch (not to be confused with Crawford, or White Mountain, Notch, twenty miles to the east) was fervently described by a contemporary writer as a "narrow rent, extending more than two miles between towering crags...doubtless the mighty work of some overwhelming internal convulsion; or, perchance, the deluge here tore mountains asunder." (J.H. Spaulding, Historical Relics of the White Mountains, Boston, 1855, pp. 49-50) Drawings made by Kensett in the vicinity of Franconia Notch during the 1850s depict tormented trees, especially gangly birches at the Notch itself, and the pyramidal profile of nearby Mount Lafayette. (See J.P. Driscoll, John F. Kensett Drawings, University Park, Pennsylvania, 1978, pp. 58-66; J.K. Howat and J.P. Driscoll, John Frederick Kensett: An American Master, Worcester, Massachusetts, 1985, pp. 94-95) Interestingly, the prominence Kensett gives to the painted birch prefigures a mise-en-scene in Church's large painting, Autumn of 1856 (Olana State Historic Site, Hudson, New York), where the umbrageous foreground birch is based on a specimen that Church sketched at Mount Desert Island in 1850. (G.L. Carr, Frederic Edwin Church: Catalogue Raisonné of Works of Art at Olana State Historic Site, New York, 1994, vol. 1, p. 225)
Kensett's Franconia Mountains generated mixed reviews at the National Academy of Design. Part of the problem was the perceived low quality of the display as a whole, which precipitated a barrage of faultfinding, for which, in turn, some commentators criticized their colleagues. The Crayon's William J. Stillman, by 1856 a converted Pre-Raphaelite, censured Kensett's painting. "There is no part of it even tolerably well made out, save the distant mountain peak," he declared; "The trees in the foregound scarcely detach themselves from the distances, and are utterly destitute of specific character in their foliage, the rocks are even more careless and indefinite than is usual with him, and the water is neither smooth nor rough--an inky pool, dashed across with certain lines resembling the breaking of agitated water." ("Exhibition of the National Academy. First Article," Crayon, vol. 3, May 1856, p. 117)
The reporter for the New York Evening Post, perhaps John Durand, echoed Stillman's misgivings, with further specifics:
Amongst overhanging cliffs and shadowy trees, a small stream
expands into a gloomy pool--an impressive scene, invested
with a certain gloomy sentiment and romantic abandon,
pleasant to behold. It is painted with a power and originality
which commands admiration, while it provokes in the minds of
those familiar with the artist's best works a feeling of regret
and foreboding. Regret, because one would always see advancement in the right direction, and foreboding, because he sees here the
foreshadowing of a habit that must inevitably lead to artistic
degeneration. Perhaps the only object justly painted in this
picture is the distant mountain...The whole picture has been
painted with a slovenly disregard of the truths of nature,
which if it gives a certain kind of picturesqueness, does not
elevate the true dignity of art...("National Academy--No. 3,"
New York Evening Post, April 12, 1856, p. 2)
The New York Daily Tribune's critic, feeling himself inhibited by gallery viewing conditions, praised more freely but voiced concerns similar to those prompted by Church's contemporaneous works:
There are parts of this large picture which will compare
favorably with the base landscapes in this Exhibition. Its
merits are many and palpable, but either from its not being
viewed at the right distance; or not being placed in the proper
light, it lacks unity of tone and design. Parts of it appear to
have been painted at wide intervals, and not to belong to the
same period. It is not like a single view, but a good many views; composition made up of a variety of studies, and spread over too
large a canvas to be woven together in one woof. ("National
Academy of Design. [Fourth Article.]," New York Daily Tribune, May 3, 1856, p. 9)
The reporter for the New York Albion, while extolling Kensett as "the accomplished Paganini of the pencil" and responding effusively to Franconia Mountains, concluded his review with familiar reservations:
[This is] a very striking landscape. Mr. Kensett has at last
discovered a foreground which he cares to paint. The scene he
has chosen is one of great rocks, among which a stream boils and
bubbles along, in leaping rapids; a tall birch-tree sways as only birch-trees can or will, up against the sky, and far off the
distance reveals the hazy blue of the mountain atmosphere that
throws over all the beauteous forms of nature a veil of beauty
delicate as a dream. Why do our eyes incessantly wander from
the birch-tree, and the rapids and the rocks, away to that hazy
blue? Charming as the vista is, Mr. Kensett evidently meant that it should not be supremely charming--yet it is so, and we recur
to it again and again. Shall we say that we fear Mr. Kensett has not been perfectly successful in handling his foreground, that
Paganini's bow will wander back to his favorite string? We fear
we must say so. For though the foreground is full of feeling, and of careful study, though the drawing of the picture is admirable, it seems to us that the atmosphere exists only in the distance.
Look at that birch-tree, and see how it's [sic] upper limbs and
upper trunk seem pressed in upon the rock [sic] behind and mingled with the vegetation and the foliage which cover them--you are
sure that there is no space between the birch-tree and the rocks, while between the middle distance and those faintly outlined far
away mountains what a delicious brooding of autumnal air you
seem to feel and see! ("Fine Arts. National Academy of Design.
Third and Concluding Article," New York Albion, April 5, 1856, p. 165)
Christie's is grateful to Dr. Gerald L. Carr for contributing this catalogue essay.
We suggest re-identifying the picture as the one by Kensett entitled Franconia Mountains, shown at the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design between March 15 and May 10, 1856. By then it would have been owned for about two years by Marshall Owen Roberts (1814-1880) of New York, a prominent capitalist, would-be politician and art collector who lent it to the Academy display.
As will be discussed below, the scenery depicted in our painting is equally if not more consistent with that of northern New Hampshire near the Vermont border than with that of the Adirondacks in upstate New York, and it corresponds reasonably with extant outdoor sketches of the White Mountains by Kensett and with verbal descriptions of his painting entitled Franconia Mountains displayed in 1856.
Regrettably little is known about James Burt's personality, his social standing, or his role, evidently an intersting one, in the dynamics of American art patronage at mid-century. Several of his paintings, including Kensett's Adirondack Scenery, were re-shown at the Brooklyn Athenaeum in May 1856. At an auction of his holdings held in New York a year and half later, at the end of 1857, the event attracting public notice and generally good prices, it was said that many of his oils, most of which were "cabinet" size, had been "painted to order." Many such notices appeared in New York newspapers the week preceding the sale, including The New York Times and the New-York Daily Tribune and the collection was recorded in the Catalogue of a Splendid Collection of Costly Oil Paintings, Water Colors and Drawings, Being the Private Gallery of J.M. Burt, Esq. (New York, November 5, 1857). Among the items vended were three canvases by Kensett, one of them, entitled Mountain Scenery, probably the Adirondack scene of 1854. Further sales of Burt's holdings took place in 1864 and 1887, by which later date he had moved to Brooklyn. Burt may have tried to capitalize on the exposures of his works for possible, profitable re-sale.
Marshall Roberts, by contrast, remained imperturbably eminent. As a periodic Republican candidate for political office, he was mostly unsuccessful, and in business, he suffered accusations of sharp practice, but his flair for entrepreneurial enterprises, especially those pertaining to shipping in the Caribbean and the Isthmus of Panama, and his profitable buying and selling of ocean vessels during the Civil War, netted him a financial fortune. Meanwhile by the mid-1860s his private art gallery in his house on Fifth Avenue, the contents of which stayed substantively intact until its dispersal sale in 1897, boasted some of the grandest, nationally symbolic American works of their day. Indeed the sheer sizes of several of his canvases put them beyond the reach of most compatriot connoisseurs: Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware of 1851 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) was the largest of five Leutzes that Roberts owned. Among other notable works in his custody were the second version of Robert W. Weir's Embarkation of the Pilgrims of 1857 (Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York) and Frederic Edwin Church's Mount Ktaadn of 1853 (Yale Unviversity Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut); Roberts later purchased three more paintings by Church. Without apparent affectation or speculation, Roberts consigned his holdings to benevolent causes of various kinds, notably the fair held in New York City during April 1864 on behalf of United States Sanitary Commission. To that assemblage he tendered, among numerous works, a Kensett painting designated White Mountain Scenery in the catalogue, perhaps the Franconia Mountains of 1854. Kensett's Franconia Mountains, sold in 1897 under the title Franconia Notch, measured 39 x 59 inches, coincident with the present picture.
Kensett's account book (Kensett papers, Archives of American Art), while offering few details, helps resolve our identification puzzle. It specifies that during 1854 "Roberts" paid the artist $600, the second highest price he received that year, for a painting he called New Hampshire Scenery, while "Burt" paid him $350 for a Reminiscences of the Adirond'ks, evidently a smaller, albeit sizeable, work. Under calendar year 1854 Kensett also lists a Lake Scene purchased by "J.M. Burt" for $200, presumably not, however, the canvas of that title lent to the National Academy in 1854 (no. 107) by D. Williamson Lee; and a Niagara Falls bought by C.C. Alger for $800, which, however, was not publicly exhibited. Previously, in 1851, "Mr. Burt" bought a Franconia Notch from Kensett for $60.
If these sorts of uncertainties and overlappings limit our understanding of Kensett's oeuvre, his place in the history of American art is, fortunately, a good deal clearer. Born in Cheshire, Connecticut, John Frederick Kensett studied engraving first with his father, Thomas Kensett (1786-1829), then with an uncle, Alfred Daggett, of New Haven, Connecticut. That part of his upbringing resembles Asher B. Durand's and John W. Casilear's, with both of whom, along with Thomas P. Rossiter, Kensett set out for Europe in 1840. Kensett remained abroad considerably longer--seven years, altogether--than they, but after returning stateside he quickly attained recognition as a nationally important landscape painter. He was soon making regular sketching trips to upstate New York and New England, exhibiting regularly at the National Academy of Design, and establishing a reputation for tranquil temper and congeniality. Occassionally he ranged far afield, voyaging the Mississippi and Missouri rivers in 1854 and 1857, respectively, returning to Britain for several months in 1856, and travelling to the Colorado Rockies in 1870. By the late 1860s both his renown and his clientele reportedly extended throughout western Europe. Equally at home, during the 1860s he handled sensitive art-related administrative assignments on behalf of the United States government, the United States Sanitary Commission, and the nascent Metropolitan Museum of Art. His premature death from heart failure at age fifty-six was front-page news in New York and cause for lament throughout the country.
By the early 1860s New York critics were invoking the names of William Cullen Bryant and Alfred, Lord Tennyson in conjunction with Kensett's art, and in 1864 James Jackson Jarves christened him "The Bryant of our painters." The demeanor of his pictures was said to parallel that of the artist himself. "Mr. Kensett, as revealed in his works," a synoptic, sympathetic New York biographer wrote in 1862, "exhibits a serene mind and a quiet disposition. He basks in the sunshine and rests in placid joy under the shadow of just such fine moss-covered rocks as he knows so well how to paint." ("Our Artists: V., J.F. Kensett," New York Commercial Advertiser, February 22, 1862, p. 1., signed "Proteus")
Now and then, though, observers discerned stronger tendencies. In early 1856 a visitor to his studio at Waverly Place found "a wilderness of wildernesses": its ample walls were blanketed with "studies, chiefly of ravine, rock and forest--all evincing his [Kensett's] unwearied and successful devotion to Nature's self." ("Studios of American Artists," New York Home Journal, Janaury 26, 1856, p. 1) A few weeks later another guest beheld among the myriad "sketches on the walls of [Kensett's] room...a fragment of the Appenine range, an Alpine Peak, and the more rounded swell of American mountains, in these data for elaborate works." ("New York Artists," Knickerbocker, vol. 48, July 1856, p. 31) The same writer noticed "the 'Hanging Rocks' which bound good Bishop Berkeley's old Rhode-Island domain; here a bluff we beheld on the Upper Mississippi; and opposite, an angle in the gorge at Trenton where we watched the amber flash of the cascade."
While most commentators concurred that Kensett painted rocks well, they also guessed that "sublime" subjects were not his forte. They tended to compliment the muted sentiments of his studio paintings while recommending that he stretch his wings.
The present painting is suggestive of just this sort of conceptual bifurcation. On the one hand it is tactile, intimate and accessible, at any rate in terms of scale. On the other hand it is rough, powerful and untamed--no residue of human intrusion is evident near or far. The rocky foregound pivots on a bending birch toward the left, its trunk girdled by a thin vine with red leaves indicating early autumn. Just beyond is a craggy pool fed by a bountiful stream, while beyond that looms a beetling, shadowed, tree-topped declivity through which volumes of water exit into the center of the scene. Across the atmospheric far distance the mood is calmer, a tall peak of flattened profile with rock slides on its near face rising from a roughened plateau. Autumnal tints cluster at the far middle left and at one or two portions of the far distance.
This picture is unusually freely, even loosely, painted. Most canvases of his maturity exhibit a certain dryness of touch, as though he were emulating the effects of tempera. Here, however, he has dramatically exploited the oil medium. Probably he was thinking, in part, of the then-topical precedents of Thomas Cole, whose biography by Louis L. Noble was published in 1853 and whose Voyage of Life series was engraved by James Smillie in 1856, and of Barbizon painters such as Narcisse Diaz de la Pena, specimens of whose work were reaching the United States.
Perhaps uppermost in Kensett's mind was what art historians incline to call a search for style. During the mid-1850s, Durand, a senior colleague and National Academy of Design president, was delving into rugged American forest interior scenes, notably those entitled Primeval Forest, exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1854 and In the Woods of 1855 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), while younger colleagues Frederic Church, Jasper Cropsey and Sanford R. Gifford were poised on the brinks of career-changing themes--which for Church meant South America and Niagara Falls; for Cropsey, Niagara, the Hudson River, New England and old England; and for Gifford, Italy, old England, upstate New York and New England. Our painting by Kensett, exhibited on the eve of Kensett's own return to Britain, looks like what it probably is: a major, vigorous, transitional work.
Assuming the painting is Kensett's Franconia Mountains owned by Marshall Roberts, the artist's adherence to topography is generalized rather than specific, as the varied titles given to the work also suggest. Kensett sometimes used the words "reminiscence" and "scenery" in his listings of painting titles, although less often in exhibition titles. Franconia Notch (not to be confused with Crawford, or White Mountain, Notch, twenty miles to the east) was fervently described by a contemporary writer as a "narrow rent, extending more than two miles between towering crags...doubtless the mighty work of some overwhelming internal convulsion; or, perchance, the deluge here tore mountains asunder." (J.H. Spaulding, Historical Relics of the White Mountains, Boston, 1855, pp. 49-50) Drawings made by Kensett in the vicinity of Franconia Notch during the 1850s depict tormented trees, especially gangly birches at the Notch itself, and the pyramidal profile of nearby Mount Lafayette. (See J.P. Driscoll, John F. Kensett Drawings, University Park, Pennsylvania, 1978, pp. 58-66; J.K. Howat and J.P. Driscoll, John Frederick Kensett: An American Master, Worcester, Massachusetts, 1985, pp. 94-95) Interestingly, the prominence Kensett gives to the painted birch prefigures a mise-en-scene in Church's large painting, Autumn of 1856 (Olana State Historic Site, Hudson, New York), where the umbrageous foreground birch is based on a specimen that Church sketched at Mount Desert Island in 1850. (G.L. Carr, Frederic Edwin Church: Catalogue Raisonné of Works of Art at Olana State Historic Site, New York, 1994, vol. 1, p. 225)
Kensett's Franconia Mountains generated mixed reviews at the National Academy of Design. Part of the problem was the perceived low quality of the display as a whole, which precipitated a barrage of faultfinding, for which, in turn, some commentators criticized their colleagues. The Crayon's William J. Stillman, by 1856 a converted Pre-Raphaelite, censured Kensett's painting. "There is no part of it even tolerably well made out, save the distant mountain peak," he declared; "The trees in the foregound scarcely detach themselves from the distances, and are utterly destitute of specific character in their foliage, the rocks are even more careless and indefinite than is usual with him, and the water is neither smooth nor rough--an inky pool, dashed across with certain lines resembling the breaking of agitated water." ("Exhibition of the National Academy. First Article," Crayon, vol. 3, May 1856, p. 117)
The reporter for the New York Evening Post, perhaps John Durand, echoed Stillman's misgivings, with further specifics:
Amongst overhanging cliffs and shadowy trees, a small stream
expands into a gloomy pool--an impressive scene, invested
with a certain gloomy sentiment and romantic abandon,
pleasant to behold. It is painted with a power and originality
which commands admiration, while it provokes in the minds of
those familiar with the artist's best works a feeling of regret
and foreboding. Regret, because one would always see advancement in the right direction, and foreboding, because he sees here the
foreshadowing of a habit that must inevitably lead to artistic
degeneration. Perhaps the only object justly painted in this
picture is the distant mountain...The whole picture has been
painted with a slovenly disregard of the truths of nature,
which if it gives a certain kind of picturesqueness, does not
elevate the true dignity of art...("National Academy--No. 3,"
New York Evening Post, April 12, 1856, p. 2)
The New York Daily Tribune's critic, feeling himself inhibited by gallery viewing conditions, praised more freely but voiced concerns similar to those prompted by Church's contemporaneous works:
There are parts of this large picture which will compare
favorably with the base landscapes in this Exhibition. Its
merits are many and palpable, but either from its not being
viewed at the right distance; or not being placed in the proper
light, it lacks unity of tone and design. Parts of it appear to
have been painted at wide intervals, and not to belong to the
same period. It is not like a single view, but a good many views; composition made up of a variety of studies, and spread over too
large a canvas to be woven together in one woof. ("National
Academy of Design. [Fourth Article.]," New York Daily Tribune, May 3, 1856, p. 9)
The reporter for the New York Albion, while extolling Kensett as "the accomplished Paganini of the pencil" and responding effusively to Franconia Mountains, concluded his review with familiar reservations:
[This is] a very striking landscape. Mr. Kensett has at last
discovered a foreground which he cares to paint. The scene he
has chosen is one of great rocks, among which a stream boils and
bubbles along, in leaping rapids; a tall birch-tree sways as only birch-trees can or will, up against the sky, and far off the
distance reveals the hazy blue of the mountain atmosphere that
throws over all the beauteous forms of nature a veil of beauty
delicate as a dream. Why do our eyes incessantly wander from
the birch-tree, and the rapids and the rocks, away to that hazy
blue? Charming as the vista is, Mr. Kensett evidently meant that it should not be supremely charming--yet it is so, and we recur
to it again and again. Shall we say that we fear Mr. Kensett has not been perfectly successful in handling his foreground, that
Paganini's bow will wander back to his favorite string? We fear
we must say so. For though the foreground is full of feeling, and of careful study, though the drawing of the picture is admirable, it seems to us that the atmosphere exists only in the distance.
Look at that birch-tree, and see how it's [sic] upper limbs and
upper trunk seem pressed in upon the rock [sic] behind and mingled with the vegetation and the foliage which cover them--you are
sure that there is no space between the birch-tree and the rocks, while between the middle distance and those faintly outlined far
away mountains what a delicious brooding of autumnal air you
seem to feel and see! ("Fine Arts. National Academy of Design.
Third and Concluding Article," New York Albion, April 5, 1856, p. 165)
Christie's is grateful to Dr. Gerald L. Carr for contributing this catalogue essay.