The Beginnings of American Landscape Painting
"Here the painter can find rare and beautiful subjects for his brush," exclaimed Adrien Van der Donk of the highlands of the Hudson River in 1654. The only pity is that there were seemingly no landscape painters to rally to Van der Donk's rhetorical summons. One may search high and low for landscape in seventeenth-century colonial painting and be rewarded with only an occasional portrait whose background has a snatch of an imaginary landscape vista. And yet the seventeenth-century house was not entirely without pictures. In 1688 Samuel Sewall, the Boston diarist, visiting a friend, saw some "Landscips of Oxford Colledges and Halls," and in Virginia in 1690 David Fox willed "three pictures in the parlor and twenty-five pictures of scenes in the hall." These "pictures" and "landscips" were probably engravings, which after 1700 were regularly advertised in colonial newspapers. Just when the first painted landscapes appeared in the colonies we can only guess. At the very beginning the rigors of settlement in America and the austerity of Puritanism did little to nurture a formal art expression. Landscape painting, however, had certainly begun