(1828–1891)
Born in Rondout, New York, Jervis McEntee became an important yet under-appreciated member of the Hudson River School. Initially self-taught, he first exhibited his work at the National Academy of Design in 1850. He studied with Frederic Edwin Church in 1851, and in 1858 he took a studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York City, joining Church, Sanford Robinson Gifford, Worthington Whittredge, and many other landscape painters. McEntee’s important diaries chronicle his successes and frustrations, his interactions with fellow artists, and his efforts to successfully navigate the changing art market after the Civil War.
More than most Hudson River School painters, McEntee filled his landscapes with poetic mood. A contemporary critic wrote that McEntee was “endowed with a tender and pathetic genius, and…the tenderness is often merged into tears, and the pathos is so intense as to excite a protest.”[1] McEntee excited his viewers’ emotions not through bold, panoramic compositions, like Church or Albert Bierstadt, but through quieter and more contemplative views that recall the understated luminism of John Frederick Kensett. Unlike Kensett, however, McEntee charged his paintings with tightly controlled color relationships that reverberate with subjective feeling. He found the changing colors of the autumnal landscape ideal for expressing his moods, and Henry James praised his work as “a genuine piece of melancholy autumn.”[2]
McEntee’s poetic approach to landscape helped him weather the difficult period for American artists following the Civil War. As collectors’ tastes in landscape shifted from the highly descriptive Hudson River School tradition to the muted, suggestive work of the French Barbizon School, McEntee’s subjective landscapes continued to be well received. At the same time, he became increasingly involved with the National Academy of Design in order to support American artists.
McEntee exhibited his work at the National Academy of Design, Brooklyn Art Association, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Art Institute of Chicago, Boston Atheneum, Royal Academy, London, and the Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1867. He was a National Academician and a member of the Century Association. His work can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New-York Historical Society, National Academy of Design, and Brooklyn Museum, New York; Adirondack Museum, Blue Mountain Lake, New York; Newark Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; Mead Art Museum, Amherst, and Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; Smithsonian American Art Museum and Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.; Cleveland Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
[1] “Art: Exhibition at the National Academy of Design,” The Round Table, April 23, 1864, 296, quoted in McEntee & Company, 8.
[2] Henry James, “On Some Pictures Exhibited Lately,” The Galaxy (July 1875), 89-97.
