“What a world of pleasure art gives” — S. L. Gerry

One of the most prolific White Mountain artists, Samuel Lancaster Gerry (1813–91) created during his lifetime hundreds of paintings of American landscapes. Many of them depicted majestic views of New Hampshire. Gerry’s work was realistic, yet it also idealized the natural world, emphasizing its grandeur and its vastness. 

From the mid-1830s, when Gerry took his first painting excursion to the White Mountains, until 1890, just a year before his death, he was a fixture of New Hampshire’s artistic community. He traveled nearly every summer from his Boston home to the White Mountains or the Lakes Region. There, he explored, sketched, and painted with fellow artists the pastoral splendor and sweeping vistas that surrounded them. His depictions of New Hampshire’s natural beauty, including such iconic sights as the Old Man of the Mountain and Mount Washington, helped shape the way Americans viewed the Granite State.

This exhibition provides an unprecedented look at the life and art of Samuel Lancaster Gerry, exploring the work of a remarkable painter over a career that spanned nearly six decades.