John Frederick Kensett

Painter and engraver John Frederick Kensett was associated with a group of landscape painters known as the Hudson River school. Born in Cheshire, Connecticut, Kensett followed in his father’s footsteps by training and working as an engraver in New Haven and New York City. He took up painting, and in 1838 exhibited a landscape painting at New York’s prestigious National Academy of Design. Two years later, in the company of fellow painters, he sailed for Europe, determined to pursue a career as a landscape painter.

For the next seven years, Kensett lived and traveled in England, France, and Italy. Supporting himself as an engraver, he studied landscape paintings by English and continental masters and painted numerous works of his own. Sales of these paintings in New York helped establish his reputation in America, and within two years of his return Kensett was elected a full member of the National Academy. He was also a member of the prestigious Century Club and its Sketch Club, organizations at the center of New York’s artistic and literary worlds. Kensett became an important and respected figure on the New York art scene.

A prolific artist, Kensett traveled widely throughout the Northeast, to the American West, and to Europe to sketch and paint. He is best known, however, for quiet scenes of New England, including views along the Hudson River and the coastline of Rhode Island and Connecticut. Kensett was also active and influential in numerous institutions that shaped the American art world of his day, helping to found the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, and serving as one of its first trustees. He was deeply respected and esteemed by his fellow artists and by collectors and patrons. The year after Kensett’s death, an auction sale of his studio’s contents yielded more than $136,000, an enormous sum for the time that testified to the great respect his art commanded among his contemporaries.