Fishkill Mountain, 1871 (from Sketchbook) 1870

Daniel Huntington sketched Fishkill Mountain in 1871, a work now residing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s a modest pencil drawing, yet it speaks volumes about the cultural landscape of the time. Huntington, a celebrated portraitist, engages here with the American landscape tradition. The Hudson River School was at its peak in the mid-19th century, but it had waned in popularity by the 1870s. The sketch, with its quick, sure strokes, suggests a more personal, less grandiose vision of nature compared to the monumental paintings of artists like Church and Bierstadt. It makes me wonder about the changing role of landscape art in a rapidly industrializing America. Was Huntington consciously turning away from the sublime towards something more intimate? To understand this fully, one might delve into the artist’s writings, exhibition reviews of the period, and broader social histories of art and nature. We can appreciate this work as something contingent on its historical moment.