Between Man and Nature

The 1860 New York Gazetteer states: “Immense quantities of brick are manufactured on the Hudson for the New York and Southern markets.” Gignoux's panoramic view shows several brickyards and kilns along the western bank of the Hudson River at Haverstraw. Their industrial operations seem to coexist harmoniously with the natural beauty of the Hudson River and the pastoral landscape in the foreground complete with grazing cattle.

Born in Lyon, France, and educated at the Academie St. Pierre, Gignoux later attended the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris before studying with the noted history painter Paul Delaroche. When an American woman caught his eye, Gignoux followed her back to the United States where the two married. The American landscape captivated the French artist and he spent most of his life painting its woods, waterways, and wilderness areas. But he found the nation’s more cultivated and settled areas equally appealing. His winter landscapes caught the attention of art critics and patrons early in his career, yet, regardless of season, most of his landscapes exhibit the same delicate hand characteristic of his French training, and most show his subtle rose and lavender color palette. In 1870, Gignoux returned to France where he lived the rest of his life.

During the 1860s, the Delaware & Hudson Canal Company hired photographers to document its canal and gravity railroad that linked the rich coalfields of northeastern Pennsylvania with the Hudson River and the industrial centers of New York City, Albany, and Troy. The project resulted in a portfolio of thirty-two large-plate albumen photographs. Most of the photographs were taken by a mysterious “Johnson, Photographer, Scranton, Pa.,” very likely Thomas H. Johnson, who operated a photographic studio in Scranton in the 1860s.

The photographs of Grassy Island Shaft and the Von’ Storch Breaker are contemporaneous with the great Hudson River School landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church, John Frederick Kensett, Sanford R. Gifford, and others. In truth, landscape photography was emerging as an artistic medium during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Johnson’s views, however, capture a landscape succumbing to human intervention.

The artist Henry Ary was born in Rhode Island around 1807, but is associated mainly with the city of Hudson, New York, and the surrounding countryside, especially MountMerino, which stands just south of the Hudson River community. Ary left Rhode Island by 1831, at which date he lists himself in the Albany city directory as a portrait painter. Within a few years he moved to Catskill, New York, and by 1840 had crossed the river to settle in the thriving community of Hudson.

Ary took up landscape painting when he moved to Catskill around 1834, the same year Thomas Cole established a residence there. Cole influenced Ary and encouraged him to study landscape painting. Ary entered his first work at the National Academy of Design in 1845 and also exhibited at the American Art-Union. Even though he was actively painting landscapes by the mid-1840s, he continued to accept work doing portraits and decorative painting, which provided a steady source of income. In 1854, he was listed as an instructor of painting and drawing at the HudsonFemaleAcademy.

View of Hudson, New York, offers a look at a city entering the industrial age, as suggested by the several smokestacks that expel plumes of smoke into the air. The tallest and most prominent ones in the center of the painting belonged to the Hudson Iron Company, which was organized in 1848 and commenced operations in 1851. By 1878, the History of Columbia County noted, “in the construction of these works the furnaces were originally set upon piles in the South bay. The company purchased about ninety acres of the bay, and by filling in with débris and cinders from the furnaces, have reclaimed some ten or twelve acres, on which other manufactories have since been erected.”

In this small oil sketch of his childhood home of Hudson, New York, the artist Sanford R. Gifford juxtaposes a pastoral foreground against an urban and industrial background. The two, however, seem at harmony. Gifford may have painted the scene to illustrate his father’s business, the Hudson Iron Company, positioned in the center of the landscape with a wind-blown trail of smoke emanating from one of its smokestacks. Already in this small sketch, Gifford’s golden atmospheric light is apparent. It illuminates the shepherd and his flock, much like the warm glow that fills the pastoral paintings of seventeenth-century painter Claude Lorrain.