Jervis McEntee

Jervis McEntee painted the quieter moods of American landscape. Where other Hudson River School painters chose sunlit grandeur, he preferred late autumn, bare trees, grey skies and early snow, with a gentle, reflective melancholy.

He was born and died in Rondout, now part of Kingston, New York. In 1850 and 1851 he studied with Frederic Edwin Church, who remained a lifelong friend. From 1857 he had a studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York, where he and his wife hosted a well known artistic circle. His journals, now in the Archives of American Art, give a vivid picture of the art world of his time. His paintings are in the National Gallery of Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Detroit Institute of Arts.

In After the Storm and Autumn Idyll, look for the soft, muted colour and the feeling of a season coming to an end.