Introduction • Life • Art • Gallery • Learn More • Acknowledgments

Sometime around 1835, Samuel L. Gerry made his first trip to New Hampshire, returning year after year from June to October for the next six decades. He traveled extensively throughout the White Mountains and the Lakes Region, finding a natural world that, when he first started visiting, had been only lightly touched by people. In the years that followed, he painted more than 140 New Hampshire landscapes, which captured both quiet, rural scenes and grand, sweeping vistas.

Gerry was among a new order of American artists, many of whom were his traveling and sketching companions. They created views on their canvases that celebrated the purity and power of nature, promoting a belief in the unity of all creation as a means of revealing universal truths.

More than 450 artists came to New Hampshire during these years, drawn by the state’s beauty. Armed with their sketchbooks, camp stools, and white umbrellas, they created views of 19th-century New Hampshire that would become emblematic of the state. Their work captured a moment in our history—pristine, wild, majestic—and fueled the rise of a tourism industry that would ironically change the very landscapes the artists sought to memorialize. Gerry’s paintings, impressive in their own right, offer a window on the world of 19th-century American artists who came to the White Mountains seeking inspiration.