The Art Gallery at the Athenaeum contains one of America’s unique collections of 19th century American paintings. Each week we will feature a different work on this page. We hope educators will use this link as a tool to enrich their art curriculum. Vermonters and other citizens throughout the nation can now visit our gallery in this new, intimate, and informative way.
The text describing each painting was written by Mark D. Mitchell, Assistant Curator of Nineteenth-Century Art at the National Academy Museum. The digital images were prepared by Robert Jenks of Jenks Studio of Photography in St. Johnsbury, VT.
Please note that the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum prohibits the use of images from its collection in public exhibition, broadcast, electronic reproduction or publication in any form without prior written permission from the institution. If you would like to reproduce any of the Art Gallery images in any form, contact Irwin Gelber at 748-8291, extension 307.
James M. Hart (1828-1901), British-American
Landscape with Cattle, 1872
OIL ON CANVAS, 20 ¼ x 34 ½ inches
Gift of Horace Fairbanks
This quiet idyll is typical of the post-Civil War paintings of James Hart. A herd of cattle, trailing into the distance at the left, leads the viewer's eye from the foreground back to the rural village in the distance in a lyric style and nostalgic sensibility that evoke the approaches of the French Barbizon painters of mid-century. For more on Hart see James Hart-Under the Elms.