FOR STARTERS arts
Each issue , Terre Haute Living will feature a work of art from the Swope Art Museum . The work will be displayed at the Swope until the next issue . The museum is open noon to 5 p . m ., Tuesday-Sunday and until 8 p . m . on First Fridays .
Treasures of the Swope Fishermen in a Gorge
Thomas Doughty was a member of the group of American landscape painters who worked in the Hudson River area during the period 1826-1876 . A native of Philadelphia , Doughty represents a link between the 18th-century pastoral style of landscape painting first imported from England and the passionate language of the sublime introduced later by Thomas Cole , founder of the Hudson River School . Their romantic , poetic landscapes are in the tradition of European painters who studied in Italy , formally composed and precise in detail .
Doughty ’ s first career was as a currier , or leatherworker . As a painter , he was self-taught , learning composition by studying the works of immigrant English landscapists , who earlier had popularized the topographic landscape manner : map-like renderings with minimal interest in light , atmosphere or mood .
The piece
“ Fishermen in a Gorge ,” 1836 , by Thomas Doughty ( Philadelphia , Pennsylvania 1793 – New York , New York 1856 ). Oil on canvas , 21 x 17 inches . Gift of Mrs . and Mrs . Paxson Link , Paris , Illinois 1963.12
His early paintings simulate nature ’ s light , atmosphere , moisture , transient shadow patterns , rustic vigor and untamed grandeur . In “ Fishermen in a Gorge ,” Doughty ’ s love of the physical beauty and wonder of nature is composed with linear precision and tonal contrasts influenced by the printmaking technique of engraving . Even earlier than Thomas Cole , Doughty painted the wild scenes of America , as distinct from the idealized landscapes of European art . He was particularly fond of depicting land-locked lakes and cascade-fed pools where a fisherman is dwarfed by the magnificence of nature . Humankind ’ s insignificance in the grand scheme of things is a moralizing sentiment which links Doughty to the romantic movement of the early 19th century .
Ultimately Doughty synthesized the vernacular American idiom with the classical style of 17th century French artist Claude Lorraine . In the manner of Claude , the dark foreground in this painting yields to a sunlit body of water , which leads the eye to the horizon where the towering mountain peaks merge with the sky . Claudian , too , is the practice of “ framing ” the center of the scene with great trees . The sun-drenched atmosphere which softens and harmonizes the whole also derives from Claude .
March 2022 • Terre Haute Living 7