America’s First Landscape Painter

Winter Scene Of Brooklyn by Francis Guy - courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum

The art of painting took hold in colonial America in the form of portrait painting. Once wealth established itself in America, the previously puritanical colonies became much more worldly, so a nice portrait of the master and mistress of the house, decked out in all of their finery, was a nice statement of success. All of the painters in America before the American Revolution were portrait painters. Still, a few could paint a decent portrait of the man of the house with a view from his window that showed his ship docked at port or his property as it rolled to the horizon. Those were the first landscapes.

Another form of landscape painting was limning. Limners were generally less successful portrait painters, maybe living in small communities or even self-taught. Their line of work involved decorative painting within the house, maybe painting decorations on a lovely dresser or chest and sometimes painting a landscape across a larger, more masculine feature in the house, like a wooden plaque attached to the fireplace. Several limners managed that feat.

A few portrait painters even painted portraits of a wealthy customer’s estate, a painting that showed a lovely vista tucked away on the gentleman’s property or of his mansion. There were even a few marine painters, professional artists who painted portraits of ships for the ship owners. These also featured the shoreline and rolling waves that surrounded the ship. Still, who was the first person to paint landscapes on a regular basis?

Some people would say it was Ralph Earl. Earl was a portrait painter and a Loyalist who abandoned his family during the Revolution. Hiding within the staff of a British officer, he fled to England, where he studied art. After the war, the scallowag returned to America with another wife, although he was not divorced, and proceeded to start a career as a portrait painter. Apparently, he painted a landscape of Niagara Falls, but I have not found a record of the painting.

For my tastes, a less conniving man may be the first landscape painter in the United States. Francis Guy was born in England, in 1760, and was apprenticed to be a dyer but left for postwar America in the 1790’s. He seemed to have bounced from job to job, full of interest and confidence, but tempered with a streak of restlessness. He developed a tent, of sorts, that he could sit in and peer out onto the world through some kind of fabric and trace the landscape before him. These tracings could be painted in within a few days so he started his own painting factory of sorts. He was even a fair salesman of his mass produced work. Apparently, he turned out around 300 pieces, most of them no longer in existence but enough of them still exist so that his semi-talented style can be studied.

He painted in the Chesapeake area for a number of years before spending his last years in Brooklyn. He was getting old, was married and was working as a dyer. In 1820, he had painted some lovely street scenes of Brooklyn that were quite popular and are now considered historically valuable as a wonderful snapshot of America’s past. But he was also terribly convivial and a heavy drinker and not long after the completion of his Brooklyn paintings, he seems to have died of drink.

Four years later, his wife sold off his collection of sixty two paintings for $1295.

Other works of Fine Art you may enjoy:

The Connections Of Mary Cassatt

Bend In the River, an oil painting

Silence In the City, a cityscape painting