Dover Plains
Engraver James Smillie American
After Asher Brown Durand American
Publisher American Art-Union, New York American
Not on view
This idyllic upstate New York landscape reproduces a painting by the leading Hudson River School painter Durand. The latter's "Dover Plains, Dutchess County, New York" (1848; Smithsonian American Art Museum) represents figures climbing onto a rocky outcrop to admire the view. Cows graze at right, fields cover the valley below, with an expansive mountain-backed vista in the distance. The print was published by the American Art-Union, a New York institution that boasted nearly nineteen thousand subscribers at its height in 1849–50. For an annual fee of five dollars, each subscriber-member received a large, finely engraved print and was entered in a lottery to win original artworks exhibited at the Art-Union's Free Gallery. Aimed at educating the public about contemporary American art, the group's distribution network reached every state. This contributed to the creation of a national market for landscapes, genre paintings, and small bronze sculptures. The system flourished for a limited period, however, with no lottery taking place in 1851, the year that the Art-Union issued this work as part of a set of small engravings titled "Gallery of American Art," No. I."
