"Bringing the Museum to You"

The Cyber Art Show continues our study of American landscape painters in the Public Domain with the first of two 1o-piece Exhibitions of works by Jervis McEntee (1828-1891), a lesser-known but talented painter of the Hudson River School. 

 

McEntee, born in Rondout, New York, showed artistic promise even as a youth. From the ages of 16-18 he attended the Clinton Liberal Institute in Clinton, New York. In 1850 Jervis exhibited his first painting at the National Academy of Design in New York City where he would befriend the renowned painter Frederic Edwin Church.  While McEntee studied under Church, he would never experience the degree of career success that Church achieved.

 

McEntee attempted a career as a businessman in Rondout, but did not experience much success. After three years Jervis gave up business and dedicated himself wholly to his art. In 1857 he rented space in Richard Morris Hunt's Tenth Street Studio Building, where he would maintain a studio for the rest of his life.

 

McEntee's circle of Hudson River School artists included Sanford Robinson Gifford, 

Worthington Whittredge, John Ferguson Weir, and Eastman Johnson. Jervis became an associate of the National Academy of Design in 1860, and became a full academician in 1861.

 

McEntee's lasting legacy was preserved in the journals he meticulously kept from the early 1870s until his death. Many personal stories and accounts of the lifestyles of the Hudson River painters were detailed in the journals, which are now kept by the Archives of American Art, a research center within the Smithsonian Institution.

McEntee’s most-beloved works were his autumnal landscapes. “Some people call my landscapes 

gloomy and disagreeable," McEntee wrote in his journal. "They say I paint the sorrowful side of nature …But this is a mistake…Nature is not sad to me but quiet, pensive, restful."
 

After his wife’s death in 1878 McEntee remained a lonely widower until his own death in 1891. While the artist never achieved the level of fame and fortune that his Hudson River peer group did, both his paintings and his journals are important contributions to American art history.