A River Glimpse

Doughty was among the first professional landscape painters working in the United States. Though he may have received some training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, he learned mostly from studying painting manuals and copying earlier landscapes. This explains his rather formulaic approach, which adapted eighteenth-century European pastoral tropes such as the winding path and heightened atmospheric effects. In this late painting, a lone hunter with a dog gazes out at a silvery river, glimpsed through a break in the dense foliage. Doughty’s picturesque compositions inspired the next generation of American landscape painters, including Thomas Cole.