On Our Cover for 7.1

If you are not an art historian (professional or dabbler) you might be surprised to learn that John Frederick Kensett, who painted Newport Rocks in 1872, was considered a member of the Hudson River School. The painting is certainly a landscape, but it seems entirely lacking in the grandeur that was the calling card of artists like Thomas Cole. Where is the mistily veiled mountain peak? The majestic waterfall? The tiny figures in the foreground, gesturing up at the gigantic landscape as if to say, “We are not worthy!”? To be fair, Kensett’s paintings from the 1850s and 1860s are much closer to the Hudson River ideal, and thus his late work has always been something of a puzzle for art historians. As Herbert Hartel writes, these works from the 1870s are “highly realistic paintings that capture the essence of the American terrain and climate, and yet . . . convey a subtle, equivocal abstraction in depicting nature.” The figures in his paintings are “based on natural forms but distilled to their geometrical essences.” Like Henry James in the 1890s, Kensett is doing his best to transform realism into modernism. Unlike James, however, Kensett’s version of modernism requires the complete absence of human beings. In paintings like Newport Rocks, the only evidence these rocks exist on an inhabited planet might be the canny eye of the artist himself. At least one critic has seen in these “deserted, depopulated shorelines” a commitment to snobbishness and exclusivity, “as in the sense of a posted ‘private property’ sign.” But we might just as easily see in such depictions a fantasy of a serene, self-sufficient natural world that has finally been freed of the depredations of human beings. Indeed, Kensett’s desire to envision such a world might be the most modern thing about him.

Hartel, Herbert R. “Luminism, Transcendentalism, and Abstraction in the Landscape Paintings of John F. Kensett.” Notes in the History of Art 21:4 (Summer 2002), 3, 9.

Johnston, Matthew N. Narrating the Landscape: Print Culture and American Expansion in the Nineteenth Century. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. 81–82.