White Mountain Art - Later Artists

Later Artists

In all, over four hundred artists are known to have painted White Mountain views during the 19th century. They came from the Boston area, Maine, Pennsylvania, and New York. Most of the Hudson River School painters worked in the White Mountains while maintaining studios in New York City, including such well-known artists as Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823–1880) and Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823–1900).

Most artists came to the White Mountains in the summer, but returned to their urban studios, or sometimes to warmer climates like Florida, in the winter. Therefore, paintings of winter scenes are not common. A few artists, like Champney, Edward Hill (1843–1923), and Edward's brother, Thomas Hill, would sometimes paint these rarer winter scenes. Two examples of winter paintings, both illustrated in this article, are Thomas Hill's Mount Lafayette in Winter and Benjamin Champney's Moat Mountain from North Conway. Frank Henry Shapleigh (1842–1906) had a home in Jackson and was a prolific painter of New Hampshire scenes, both in summer and winter.

By mid-century, the later painters changed their style from the idealized views of the earlier painters to more literal views of the mountains. Dr. Donald D. Keyes has written, " ... the aesthetics of the time were also changing, with less emphasis placed on the Sublime and more on fact — 'realism'." These more literal views were sought after by tourists as mementos of their travels in an era before photography. As an example of how literal these depictions were, see the composite image where a painting by George Albert Frost (1843–1907) of Franconia Notch painted in 1883 is compared to a photograph of the scene in 2004.