William Groombridge

William Groombridge is considered one of America's first professional landscape painters. Born in Tunbridge, Kent, in England, Groombridge is believed to have studied under the English artist James Lambert (1725-c.1779) and perhaps also at the Royal Academy of Arts, one of several London venues at which he exhibited his paintings between 1773 and 1790. Groombridge immigrated to America around 1793 and settled in Philadelphia. There, he was one of the founders of the Columbianum, a short-lived artists' organization in Philadelphia. He made portraits and miniatures in addition to local landscape views, but he is said to have been an unsuccessful painter and he supported himself by teaching art. In 1804, Groombridge and his wife, the headmistress of a ladies' academy, moved to Baltimore, where he remained to the end of his life.

Groombridge brought to his American landscape subjects the conventions of the English picturesque tradition, in which a benign nature is presented in calm, idyllic images composed according to conventions of gradual recession into space, framing elements, and delicate lighting and color. The artist was sometimes criticized, however, for the exaggerated, unnatural tints of his paintings. He belonged to an early generation of American landscape painters, many of them trained in England, who struggled to reconcile Old World ideals with the reality of American scenery. Compared with the dramatic wilderness imagery of the Hudson River school, the landscape movement that would soon follow, the works of Groombridge and his contemporaries appear tame and conventional. However, recent scholarship has demonstrated the significant achievements of these artists in laying a foundation for the native school of nature imagery as they created the first artistic interpretations of the American landscape.