Hudson River School’s Unsung John Frederick Kensett
In the summer of 1872, a feverish sense of possibility infected John Frederick Kensett. In what would, fatefully, be his last summer, the Hudson River School painter seemed to perceive landscapes with a clarity and precision absent in his earlier Hudson River School canvases. His prodigious output that summer– nearly 38 works – glisten with a purity and lucidity that borrows as much from the emerging Barbizon school as it does from his own powerfully unfettered vision.
One of those works “Sunset on the Sea” is as clean, crisp and pellucid a landscape as Kensett produced. It is one of three Kensett works lent to the New Britain Museum of American Art by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while it renovates its American Paintings and Sculpture Galleries. The Met has lent New Britain seven of its prized Hudson River School works and while most eyes will gravitate to Frederick Edwin Church’s “The Parthenon,” it is the late Kensett works that should command attention.
That’s not to deride Church’s grandiloquent achievement. The six-footer “The Parthenon” is a majestic achievement, particularly if you prefer your art at high and xenophobic decibels. New Britain’s own, earlier Church, “West Rock, New Haven ” is a far more compelling and well-balanced work, devoid of Church’s overwrought lionization of the Ancients.
But the most stirring works here belong to Kensett, the Cheshire native long saddled with the moniker “second tier” Hudson River School painter. The distinction is unfortunate, but apt. Kensett never had the bravura of Church or Alfred Bierstadt and he lacked the innovation and sublimity of Thomas Cole. But Kensett possessed a captivating sense of the tranquility, as opposed the muscularity of nature.
Even in his works from the 1850s, like “Hudson River Scene,” (1857), Kensett balances the sense of nature’s power with a Claudean sense of pastoral serenity. The crusty hillocks on the banks of the Hudson become curtains that unveil the still, pewter river sprinkled with sailboats. In the dense, richly textured foreground, lichen-coated rocks secure tall, mottled oaks that lunge thirstily toward the water.
This is a more placid, less brawny work than the works of Durand or Cole, nearby. While Durand was able to give his work a pious potency, Kensett’s luminosity, which grows purer with time, reaching its apex in Kensett’s stirring “Eaton’s Neck, Long Island.”
Inaugurated by Englishman Thomas Cole, the Hudson River School saw in the country’s vast grandeur a sense of divine providence. Wilderness moved from the haven of deviltry to the font of holiness. Artists like Cole, and Asher B. Durand, who believed art was meant to promote “the moral perfection of mankind” invested their landscapes with a sublime sense of providence – the gargantuan icecaps of Frederick Edwin Church and the august benevolence of Kensett’s White Mountains – were signposts for the omnipresence of God. 
Of course, with that tacit blessing of the Almighty, came a sense of political sanctity. A country so abundantly blessed could do no wrong.
Except, of course, that it did.
The Civil War brought Americans sense of divine providence to a crushing coda. The bombastic, deified landscape not only did not play in a country bloodied by fratricide; it looked ridiculous. Perhaps realizing the absurdity, Church took off for more consecrated grounds and came bounding back with al sorts of images from the Andes to the Acropolis.
But artists like Kensett, and Winslow Homer, whose magnetic “Harvest Scene” has also been loaned to New Britain, stayed put. Like many Americans, he began to search out a private retreat as a kind of balm for the physical and psychic mayhem the war engendered.
That is what brought him to Contentment Island in 1867. Kensett’s friend, artist Vincent Colyer, had bought land along Long Island Sound the year before. The years spent by the Sound had an almost redemptive effect on Kensett; his paintings grew more luminous and limpid, and his output more prolific. His resplendent “Sunset on the Sea,” a reductive and radiant image of the dimming tangerine sun dissolving into the calm, caressing waters of the Sound epitomizes the still, ruminative peace we seek along the water’s edge. It is one of the 38 images Kensett painted in that productive summer of 1872.
In November of that year, as she was crossing a causeway to Contentment Island, the carriage that carried Colyer’s wife overturned. Her skirts were caught in the wheels of the carriage and she struggled under the weight of her dress in the icy waters. Kensett, who never married, came upon the scene and, horrified, plunged in after her. His efforts were in vain; Colyer’s wife, Mary Lydia, drowned. Exhausted by his efforts, Kensett contracted pneumonia. Recovering enough to return to New York, he set up a studio in the YMCA, and died later that day of heart failure. He was 52.
The exhibit continues at the New Britain Museum of American Art through 2010.