Kensett, John Frederick: "High Bank"
by Jocelyne Nitsch

Description of Object :

• Oil on Canvas

• 30-1/2 x 49-1/4

• Effects of light and atmosphere together with hue are employed as unifying agents.

• Absence of visible brushstrokes.

• Kensett used the basic physical elements of earth, water, sky and green.

• Kensett was a member of the Hudson River School. The first indigenous American Art School, Thomas Cole is considered its founding father. The Hudson river painters were romanticists, enthralled with the landscape of their new country. They were often Pantheistic in viewpoint, believing God was to be found in nature.

• Kensett belongs as well to the Luminists. These were Hudson River School painters who painted during the middle decades of the 19th century, and who were particularly interested in the effects of light on the air, the weather, the atmosphere and the water in a landscape.

• Born in Cheshire, Connecticut in 1816

• His father Thomas and his uncle Alfred Gaggett were both engravers.

• He did not have a strong physical constitution.  After a vain attempt to save the drowning wife of artist-friend Vincent Colyer in Darien, Connecticut, he contracted pneumonia and died of heart failure in 1872 in New York City. He was only fifty-six years old and his death was widely mourned.

• Received his first artistic training from his father Thomas and his uncle Alfred Gaggett.

• During 1830’s, he worked in print shops in New York, New Haven and Albany, but grew increasingly restless at the engraver’s trade and eager for a career in the fine arts.

• During the 1830’s, Kensett also began to experiment with landscape painting, encouraged by his friend John Casilear (1811-1893).

• In 1838 he exhibited a work entitled Landscape at the National Academy of Design in New York and by 1840 he had decided to become a full-time painter

• In 1840 sailed for Europe with fellow artists Casilear, Asher B. Durand (1796-1886), and Thomas P. Rossiter (1818-1871). He worked and lived in England and Paris and toured the Rhine Region, Switzerland and Italy.

• In late 1847, returned to New York where his artistic career began to flourish.

• Member of the three person U.S. Capitol Art Committee

• In 1848 was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design,

• In 1849 was elected to the prestigious Century Association and made an Academician.

• Founder and member of the Executive Committee of the MET in N.Y.City

• In 1867 showed « White Mountain Scenery » at the Expsition Universelle in Paris

• After his death in 1876, the contents of his studio, about five hundred paintings and drawings, were auctioned for $136,312.00 -- an extraordinary sum for the time, which additionally attests to the high regard that his contemporaries held for him and his work.

• His early works were generally richly painted and owed much to the inspiration of Thomas Cole (1801-1848) and English landscape painters such as John Constable (1776-1837).  Works from the early 1850s combined vigorous and expressive brushwork with carefully observed details of rocks, vegetation, and atmosphere in a strikingly effective way, and were well-received.

• By the middle and later 1850s his style had become more precise and meticulous, reflecting the influence of Durand, and he began to favor more tranquil and simplified compositions.

• Kensett was at the height of his powers in the 1860s and he created some of the most accomplished American landscapes of the nineteenth century.  Although he occasionally painted large works, Kensett generally preferred to work on small to medium sized canvases.

• Unlike such contemporaries as Frederic Church (1826-1900) or Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), who travelled to exotic and far-off locales in search of inspiration, Kensett returned again and again to favorite spots that were easily accessible to New York.  Never tiring of the pictorial possibilities of these places, Kensett produced a substantial body of works that seem superficially similar, but in fact have subtle, but significant variations in composition, lighting, and atmosphere. He became so well known for painting certain places, including Bash-Bish Falls, Lake George, and the coastal areas of Newport, Rhode Island, and Beverly, Massachusetts, that many of his contemporaries invariably associated them with his name.

• The curving river takes us into the scene and the bank on either side repeat one another’s curve. The tall pine tree lends a stability that is reassuring. It also leads our eyes up to the sky with its « scumbled clouds »

• Shadows of the river bank are reflected in the river, and the tree and bushes cast shadows to the left.

• The quality of light, the vast expanse of sky, the misty space and the tonal approach to shading are all characteristic of the Luminist painters.

• There is a far distant horizon and a feeling of peace and reverence for nature.

• There are touches of civilization, the farmer and his cows, the small boat, a house.

1. Do you think it is a real place or one put together ?

2. What time of the day was it when this was painted ?

3. What time of the year  was it ?  What sort of weather was it ?

4. How does the artist tell us these things ? Where do you think it was painted ?  Why ?

5. How has he made this picture peaceful ? Where was the artist standing ?

6. Do you feel like taking a walk into this scene ? Why ?

Bibliography :

Johnson, Ellen. "Kensett Revisited." The Art Quarterly 20 (Spring 1957): 71-92.

Howat, John. John Frederick Kensett, 1816-1872. Exh. cat. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, Ohio; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Cummer Gallery of Art, Jacksonville. New York, 1968.

Driscoll, John Paul. John F. Kensett Drawings. Exh. cat. Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University, State College; Babcock Galleries, New York. State College, 1978.

Sullivan, Mark White. "John F. Kensett, American Landscape Painter." Ph.D. dissertation, Bryn Mawr College, 1981.

Driscoll, John Paul, and John Mowat. John Frederick Kensett: An American Master. Exh. cat. Worcester Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum, New York. Worcester and New York, 1985.

Kelly, Franklin, with Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., Deborah Chotner, and John Davis. American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Part I. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1996: 387-388.
 

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