Lake George. John Frederick Kensett
ca. 1870 Oil on academy board
36.2 x 61.9 cm. (14 1/4 x 24 3/8 in.) frame: 65.7 × 91.5 cm (25 7/8 × 36 in.)
Bequest of Elaine King in memory of her husband, Col. Herbert G. King, Class of 1922 y1994-151
During the 1850s, John Kensett’s imagery evolved away from the sweeping panoramas of the dramatic Hudson River School idiom to embrace, along with a number of its practitioners, the quieter, more contemplative aesthetic of Luminism. Aligned with the philosophical precepts of Transcendentalism and its imperative to integrate spirit and matter, Luminist painters sought to achieve that communion by infusing their work with a precise and meditative focus on the landscape, particularly as manifested through a concentration on the effects of light and atmosphere in the unpeopled, sparsely composed, asymmetrically oriented, horizontal canvases they favored. In all but its somewhat painterly facture — Luminist pictures typically suppress visible brushwork — Lake George embodies the traits of Kensett’s Luminist maturity, portraying the famously scenic site with an attention to the reflective properties of light as it glints in the background off the still waters between what is likely Black Mountain, on the left, and Deer Leap, at right, as seen from Sabbath Day Point.
Source Princeton University Art Museum
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