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
Under the Elms, 1872
OIL ON CANVAS, 44 x 33 inches
Gift of Horace Fairbanks
James M. Hart remains a little known figure in the history of American landscape painting, but his bucolic Under the Elms makes a strong case for greater attention. The work is inscribed on the back, "Afternoon / Boquet River / Essex Co. / N.Y. / Loitering in the Stream," providing a much fuller sense of the site and subject. Grand, stately elms climb gracefully upward over a peaceful stream as a herd of cattle edges across to the opposite shore. The painting pays tribute to one of America's most elegant tree species, as both the format and vantage point frame the trees themselves, rather than the scene playing out below. Such careful rendering of a single natural subject, in this case the nearest elm, offers eloquent testimony to nineteenth-century artists' search for meaning in the landscape around them through close scrutiny.
Under the Elms is characteristic of Hart's work after the Civil War. Where he favored larger-scale depictions of unexplored wilderness in his earlier work, his later paintings are often more tranquil and refined. Trained in the academic tradition in Dusseldorf, Germany during the early 1850s, Hart already enjoyed widespread popularity before the onset of Civil War in 1861. His pre-war landscapes are also marvels of specificity, delineating every leaf and rock. Not only did his subjects change during the 186os, from wilderness to pasture, but his palette and technique transformed as well. Light-filled, idyllic compositions such as Under the Elm suggest an intermediate step between the detailed landscapes of the Hudson River School at mid-century and the escapism of the impressionists that came to prominence during the ensuing decades.