The Life and Art of
Introduction • Life • Art • Gallery • Learn More • Acknowledgments
Mount Washington from Thorn Hill in Jackson
Samuel L. Gerry (1813–91)
Signed, lower left: “S L Gerry”; undated, circa 1862
Oil on canvas (12 x 20 in.)
Private collection
The influential author Thomas Starr King, who was also an ordained minister, was sometimes rather critical of artists’ attempts to recreate on canvas what he believed was God’s work. In his 1859 guidebook The White Hills he wrote, “If a man could own all the landscape canvas which the first painters of the world have colored, it would not be a tithe so rich an endowment, as if Providence should quicken his eye with keener sensibility to the hues of the west at evening, the grace of trees, and the pomp of piled or drifting clouds.”
