In the Adirondacks

Thomas Doughty's In the Adirondacks is an idealized glimpse of the quintessentially American wilderness landscape of the Northeast, most likely the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, where the artist often worked. An angler casts his line from a small rowboat on the placid waters of a lake, while a sailboat glides along in the distance. Thickly wooded hills on the right and tall trees on the left frame the view and direct the viewer's gaze back toward a horizon bounded by mountains that appear pale blue and lavender in the haze of still air. To emphasize the illusion of deep recession into space, Doughty juxtaposes sharply angular bare branches, protruding from the rich foliage on the left, against feathery fair-weather clouds in the distance. The branches form a wild and untamed counterpart to the graceful arc of the fisherman's taut rod, a benign instrument of man's ascendancy over nature. These complementary vertical elements only serve to emphasize the calm horizontality of the scene, in which American nature, even in its most uncultivated state, seems a welcoming refuge for human recreation.

Doughty painted numerous landscapes of settings in New England and New York State. Praised by contemporaries early in his career for the topographical accuracy of his views, he is known to have based them on numerous sketches made on-site. However, in a manner typical of landscape painters' practice of the time, he used these sketches as the basis for compositions that are largely imaginary in sum, not least in the rather dreamy, elegiac tone for which the artist is best known. This quality is manifest in a comparison of In the Adirondacks with William Groombridge's somewhat earlier View of a Manor House on the Harlem River, New York (TF 1992.37), in which topographical detail takes precedence.

In a career devoted to picturing American scenery, Doughty was instrumental in shaping perceptions of New England and New York State as America's "classic" ground, at once natural and accessible, wild and hospitable. Self-trained in the conventions of landscape painting formed by such European masters as French seventeenth-century painter Claude Lorrain (1604—82), Doughty worked to adapt those standards to the unprecedented subject of the American wilderness, hitherto largely ignored by artists as irreconcilable with inherited notions of beauty in nature. In the Adirondacks is a typical product of Doughty's synthesis: such details as the protruding bare tree branches and touches of characteristic autumnal color on the distant island mark this setting as unmistakably American, while the mellow late-afternoon light, placid mood, and careful framing fit a time-honored formula of landscape art. Doughty's combination in this work of wild mountain scenery and calm beauty evokes the aesthetic category known as the Picturesque, developed in the writings of eighteenth-century English art theorists with which the artist, as a member of sophisticated art circles in his native Philadelphia, was surely familiar.

American Classics, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, December 13, 2003–February 8, 2004.

A Narrative of American Art, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, February 13–October 31, 2004.

Manifest Destiny, Manifest Responsibility: Environmentalism and the Art of the American Landscape, Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Illinois and Loyola University Museum of Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizers). Venue: Loyola University Museum of Art, May 17–August 10, 2008. [exh. cat.]

Continental Shift: Nineteenth Century American and Australian Landscape Painting, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Australia and Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizers). Venue: Art Gallery of Western Australia, July 30, 2016–February 5, 2017. [exh. cat.]

Not as the Songs of other Lands: 19th century Australian and American Landscape Painting, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia and Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizers). Venue: Ian Potter Museum of Art, March 14–June 11, 2017.

Brownlee, Peter John. Manifest Destiny / Manifest Responsibility: Environmentalism and the Art of the American Landscape. (exh. cat., Loyola University Museum of Art, Chicago, Illinois). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for American Art and Loyola University Museum of Art, 2008. Text p. 35 (checklist).