The Artist

The landscape painter John Frederick Kensett (1816-1872) captured images of America as it evolved from a nation that took its pride and strength from its agrarian roots into one that found its future in an urban and industrial society. He was a leader and a voice for the social and artistic communities that helped shape the way the nation saw itself in the middle of these defining moments of the 19th century.

This is also a story about the importance of an idea that took hold of the country after the Civil War: that nature was a private retreat, essential for the spirit… and that this experience was to be found, and expressed, in coastal Connecticut by John Kensett between the years 1866 and 1872. The influence of this image of private retreat shaped a generation of artists and cultural leaders. This project intends to bring this story to the people of the communities where Kensett lived: Cheshire, New Haven and Darien; and to the larger community of cultural historians, collectors and travelers.

John Frederick Kensett was recognized in his own time, as he is in ours, as an American Master, a painter who changed the way the American landscape was seen and painted. A native of Cheshire, Connecticut, he achieved the highest forms of recognition awarded to American painters at the peak of his career: election to the National Academy of Design (and member of their governing Council), member of the Artist’s Fund Committee, member of the three person U.S. Capitol Art Committee, one of the prestigious 25-member Sketch Club, incorporator of the Century Association, Chairman of the Art Committee for the Metropolitan Fair of the Sanitary Commission (forerunner of the Red Cross), and founder and member of the Executive Committee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He was beloved by his fellow painters, and compared by the contemporary press to Bryant and Longfellow and named the “flower of the school of landscape painting we call American.”