Thomas Doughty

Thomas Doughty (Jul 19, 1793 - Jul 22, 1856) was an American artist of the Hudson River School. Born in Philadelphia, Thomas Doughty was the first American artist to work exclusively as a landscapist and was successful both for his skill and the fact that Americans were turning their interest to landscape. He was known for his quiet, often atmospheric landscapes of the rivers and mountains of Pennsylvania, New York, New England, and especially the Hudson River Valley. He taught himself how to paint while apprenticing for a leather manufacturer. In 1827 he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Honorary Academician.

Thomas Doughty was born in Philadelphia and learned to paint alone while he was an apprentice in a leather goods store. He was one of the first artists to be interested in American landscapes and to reproduce them in his paintings. He devoted exclusively to the landscape and worked predominantly in his city, but also in Boston and New York.

Doughty had a remarkable success not only for his talent but also because the attention and interest of the Americans for their landscapes was growing considerably in those years. He was known and appreciated for his serene and enchanting landscapes depicting the mountains and rivers of Pennsylvania, New England and in particular the Hudson River valley, to which the artist gave an almost lyrical dimension . In fact, Doughty was one of the first painters of the Hudson River School.

At the same time, on the wave of Romanticism that Washington Allston (1779-1843) had introduced and made known to the United States, Doughty also proposed images that expressed the fascination exerted upon him by the astonishing, wild, and even terrific aspects of landscapes themselves See for example "Storm Rising", 1804, kept at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts).

He worked mostly in Philadelphia, but also lived and worked in Boston and New York.

Thomas Doughty, one of the pioneers of American landscape painting, adopted the conventions of the European landscape tradition, painters such as Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. Using sketching trips to gather material for his paintings, Doughty adapted the European conventions to depict the vital beauty of American scenery. This large and grandly composed work demonstrated Doughty's synthesis of old-master (European) landscape conventions with his own close observation of nature. It probably was not meant to depict a specific site, but to express the essential character of wild American scenery, a landscape inhabited by people but not yet changed by them in any fundamental way. It is considered one of Doughty's finest works and stands as one of the most impressive examples of American landscape painting of its day, only equaled, perhaps, by the contemporary efforts of Thomas Cole.

Works:
View toward the Hudson River, 1839, Princeton University Art Museum
Ruins in a Landscape, 1828
In the Catskills, 1836, Reynolda House Museum of American Art
Landscape after Ruisdael, ca. 1846, Brooklyn Museum
View of the Fairmount Waterworks, Philadelphia, from the Opposite Side of the Schuylkill River, 1824/26, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
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