Thomas Doughty

Thomas Doughty was among the first American painters to devote himself wholly to landscape painting. A native of Philadelphia, Doughty appears to have been self-taught as an artist. With his brother Samuel, he worked as a leather currier (one who dresses and colors leather) before eventually turning full-time to painting in 1820. Doughty specialized in romantic river views, many based on sketches made near Philadelphia and in Connecticut, which he began exhibiting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and at the National Academy of Design in New York. He painted topographical views, including "portraits" of country estates, as well as more imaginative works that reflect a European landscape tradition founded by the seventeenth-century artist Claude Lorrain (1604–82). Widely respected, Doughty established close ties in the art community of his native city, but in 1828, with a growing family to support, he relocated to Boston in search of greater opportunity.

Discouraged by a lack of sales in Boston, Doughty returned to Philadelphia to collaborate with his brother John on a short-lived monthly periodical, for which he provided illustrations. In 1832 he moved again to Boston, this time with greater success, and in 1837–38 he briefly visited England, where he came under the influence of Romantic landscape painter John Constable (1776–1837). Doughty's work thereafter is characterized by a darker range of colors and a greater interest in the textural properties of paint. On his return from England, Doughty settled in New York City, which was emerging as the nation's artistic and economic capital. Despite ill-health, he traveled widely in New England to paint picturesque settings, and visited New Orleans in 1844.

Between 1845 and 1847, Doughty went abroad once more, spending time in London and Paris, where he exhibited his works in prestigious official annual shows, and perhaps also in Italy. The dreamy quality and generalized forms of Doughty's landscape art found little favor among mid-century American critics and patrons, however, as taste shifted toward greater realism and specificity with the emergence of a younger generation of landscape painters, led by Thomas Cole. The popularity of these artists overshadowed Doughty in his later years. He relocated several times to better his fortunes, including a stay in Owego, New York, on the Susquehanna River, in 1852–53. However, he was destitute when he died at age sixty-three in New York City. Today, Doughty is honored as an important immediate precursor to the so-called Hudson River school, America's first school of landscape painting.