The Tourist's Gaze

The Albany artist Ezra Ames occasionally veered from his usual practice of painting portraits to engage in decorative painting, including mourning lockets, girls’ needlework projects, and home furnishings. His view of Lake George from the south end of the lake is one of his rare attempts at landscape art.

In 1812, when Ames painted his view, the United States had just entered a period of military conflict with Great Britain. Fear of British attack from Canada transformed Lake George and the small community of Caldwell, shown on the left-hand side of the painting, into a military outpost, as suggested by the two uniformed officers who stand on the earthworks of Fort George, located in the foreground. The scene, however, is not one of armed confrontation but rather the locus of tourist activities. One of the officers converses with two finely dressed women, who may very well be sightseers; and the canopied boat heading toward Caldwell is designed for leisure excursions, not military activities. Horatio Spafford commented in his Gazatteer of the State of New York (1813), “as a place of resort, in connection with the Springs of Saratoga County, Caldwell attracts considerable notice, and few similar waters in the world are more admired than Lake George.”

“Good Reader! expect me not to describe the indescribable . . . It was a vast and changeful, a majestic, an interminable landscape; a fairy, grand, and delicately-colored scene, with rivers for its lines of reflections; with highlands and the vales of States for its shadowings, and far-off mountains for its frame.” The American poet Willis Gaylord Clark wrote these lines for the Knickerbocker magazine after visiting the Catskill Mountain House.

Many visitors expressed the same inability to describe with accuracy the stupendous view from the hotel, but DeWitt Clinton Boutelle, more than most, succeeded in showing why the Mountain House was such a popular destination. Instead of focusing on the hotel building, or, conversely, on the expansive view from the hotel’s porch, Boutelle painted both. On the left he depicted the broad valley, the indescribableness that many visitors saw from the Catskill Mountain House, and simultaneously, on the right, he captures the hotel and its majestic location high on the mountain ridge.

Boutelle was only twenty-five when he completed this large canvas. Quite an achievement considering he was also self-taught! In 1853, he was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design, and in 1862 he became a member of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Boutelle moved frequently, living in Troy, New York City, Basking Ridge, New Jersey, and eventually ending in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he died in 1884.

Like many of her surviving works, Sarah Cole’s View of the Catskill Mountain House is a copy of a painting by her brother, Thomas Cole. It focuses on the hotel and its architecture, quite unlike DeWitt Clinton Boutelle’s view of the Catskill Mountain House (exhibited at left). In 1845, the hotel’s new owner, Charles L. Beach, added the long colonnaded porch shown prominently in this view; it overlooked the Hudson River valley to the east and offered the perfect platform for viewing the sunrise, one of the activities enjoyed by visitors to the hotel.

Sarah almost certainly knew the Catskill Mountain House firsthand since she and Thomas often ventured into the mountains. In 1838, Thomas recorded in his journal that he and Sarah went hiking with others in the Catskills and camped on the summit of High Peak.

Sarah exhibited her paintings regularly at the National Academy of Design and the American Art-Union. Living in Baltimore, she also exhibited at the Maryland Historical Society. In 1839, Sarah took an interest in learning the art of etching, and based on a letter written by her brother, she may have had some instruction from Asher B. Durand, who worked primarily as an engraver and etcher before turning to painting. None of Sarah’s etchings are known today, but three did appear in an 1888 exhibition at the Union League Club in New York City, long after Sarah’s death in 1857.

A more charming and beautiful location could scarcely be imagined than this view of Richfield Springs, New York, situated about sixty-five miles west of Albany. The small community enjoyed notoriety in the nineteenth century as a destination for summer vacations. The combination of delightful scenery and beneficial mineral springs attracted seasonal travelers who stayed at one of the town’s hotels and boarding houses. According to the 1874 publication, Richfield Springs and Vicinity, by W. T. Bailey, the “location is remarkable for natural beauty, not only in its immediate surroundings, but it occupies a position in the midst of the most charmingly diversified mountain and lake scenery.” Bailey also noted the “place has attained an exalted popularity by the efficacy of its mineral waters in the treatment of many forms of chronic diseases.”

M. De V. Martin, the publisher of the print, lived in Richfield Springs where he maintained a business as undertaker and furniture dealer. He probably sold the print at his James Street establishment and may have retailed it at local hotels where tourists would have found it an attractive souvenir of their visit. When compared with Hudson River School paintings of tourist sites, like the Catskill Mountains and Lake George, Martin’s print is much more topographical in character. It charts in detail the various aspects of the scenery, the town’s buildings and residences, fields, and roadways. Its main purpose was to provide a visual record of the community.

The travel writer Mrs. S. S. Colt said of Lake George in her book The Tourist’s Guide through the Empire State (1871), “its tranquility is something like the morning after a ball. There is nothing but to croquet or sit on the piazza, or go boating or fishing upon the lake . . . ‘Most of the visitors are guests of a day, but there are pleasant parties—poets and painters often—who pass weeks at the lake or at one of the private houses near.’” A few years earlier, the artist Alfred Thompson Bricher was one such painter in a pleasant party.

Bricher’s landscape captures the charms of the lake—the beautiful water, the scenic hills and mountains, and the boating and fishing opportunities. In the year that he painted Lake George, 1866, Bricher began working with Louis Prang & Co., a Boston printing business that specialized in chromolithographs, color-printed pictures that faithfully copied the color range of original paintings. Chromolithographic prints of Bricher’s work quickly earned the artist widespread notoriety.

In addition to painting in oils, Bricher also worked in watercolors, and in 1873, he was selected a member of the American Society of Painters in Water Colors. He became an associate of the National Academy of Design in 1879. Bricher died in 1908, in the house he built for his family in New Dorp, Staten Island.