Along the Shore

John Frederick Kensett painted the American coastline with a restraint that his contemporaries mostly lacked. Where Church and Bierstadt reached for drama, Kensett emptied the canvas out. A headland, a stretch of flat water, a wide untroubled sky, and very little else. He trained as an engraver, which may explain the precision of the drawing beneath the quiet surfaces. After seven years in Europe he returned in 1847 and worked the coast from Newport to Long Island, along with the usual Catskill and White Mountain subjects. The late paintings from 1872, done around Contentment Island, push the emptiness furthest. He died that December after trying to rescue a friend’s wife from drowning. Those last canvases were left in his studio and are now considered his strongest work, though almost nobody thought so at the time.