(1793–1856)
In 1820 the Philadelphian Thomas Doughty gave up his successful leather business and became the first native Anglo-American artist to specialize in landscape painting. Essentially self-taught, he learned to paint by studying instruction manuals, engravings, and the landscapes shown at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and in the collections of Joseph Bonaparte and his early patron, Robert Gilmor, Jr. Most importantly, he paid attention to nature and its moods, making close pencil studies on sketching trips in New England and the mid-Atlantic region that served as the basis of his finished paintings.
Doughty worked within the English picturesque conventions of his day, but he distinguished himself from the few other American landscape painters who were active at the time, such as Thomas Birch and Joshua Shaw, by offering excitingly immediate and recognizable portrayals of the American wilderness. By 1824 he had been made a member of the Pennsylvania Academy and was considered by the writer John Neal to be one of the best landscape painters of the day.[1] He became friendly with the Philadelphia artists Rembrandt Peale and John Neagle, went sketching with Thomas Sully and Alvan Fisher, and was admired by an aspiring landscape painter named Thomas Cole.
Despite this early recognition, Doughty had to struggle to make ends meet for his family of seven. The market for landscape paintings was very small, and unlike portraits—still the dominant genre of fine art at the time—landscapes were mostly painted on speculation, which made Doughty’s future quite uncertain. As a result, he left for Boston in 1828, where he eventually met with success in the 1830s, as the market for landscape painting caught up with him. He traveled to England in 1837 and 1838, then moved to New York, and visited Europe again from 1845 to 1847. Although esteemed by the critics for his accomplishments, by the mid-1840s Doughty appeared outmoded in comparison to the burgeoning Hudson River School movement for which his work had been an inspiration, and he died penniless in 1856.
[1] “Thomas Doughty,” in American Paintings in the Detroit Institute of Arts, vol. 1 (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with the Founders Society, Detroit Institute of Arts), 72.
