William Sidney Mount 1807-1868

Thomas McElrath, Esquire, Publisher of the New York Tribune, 1847 (commissioned from the artist)
Josiah Mason, Mt. Holly, New Jersey, prior to 1914
By descent in the family to his granddaughter

New York, National Academy of Design, 1847, no. 115

Bartlett Cowdrey and Hermann Warner Williams, Jr., William Sidney Mount 1807-1868: An American Painter, New York, 1944, no. 48, p. 21
Alfred Frankenstein, William Sidney Mount, New York, 1975, pp. 30, 173-174, 471, 483
Deborah Johnson, William Sidney Mount, New York, 1998, p. 130

Very good original condition, unlined; original discolored varnish, a rectangular test clean at center left edge, some scattered dots on surface appear to be fly dirt, needs to be cleaned; under UV: no apparent inpainting.
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William Sidney Mount devoted his career to painting scenes of the country life he knew from his boyhood in Stony Brook, New York, the rural town on Long Island where he was raised. Born into a family of painters, he was encouraged at an early age to pursue an artistic career. In 1824, at the age of seventeen, William became an apprentice in his brother Henry's sign painting studio in New York City. Two years later he began formal studies at the newly established National Academy of Design in New York, but soon longed for his home in Stony Brook and returned there the following year. Though he resumed his studies at the National Academy for a short time and studied briefly under Henry Inman, he remained essentially a self-taught artist. His first works are primarily portraits and historical subjects, but by 1830 scenes of country life became his predominant focus. A number of patrons offered to send Mount to Europe to continue his studies and broaden his knowledge of European art, but Mount rejected these offers, preferring to remain on Long Island.

Mount's Stony Brook scenes form a lasting image of the customs, countryside, people and places of Mount's rural world. His paintings often depict the activities common to the area, including horse trading, cider making, and eel spearing, and feature local residents in settings near his studio. Mount frequently painted outdoors, preferring to draw the scenery around him directly from nature. As he wrote, "I shall endeavor to copy nature as I have tried to do with truth and soberness. There has been enough written on ideality and the grand style of Art, etc., to divert the artists from the true study of natural objects. Forever let me read the volume of nature – a lecture always ready and bound by the Almighty" (Cowdrey and Williams, William Sidney Mount,1944, p. 10).

Because Mount preferred to live and work on Long Island, he had to rely on his patrons to promote his work in New York and elsewhere. Mount's diary indicates that Thomas McElrath, a lawyer, state legislator and co-publisher of the New York Daily Tribune with Horace Greeley, purchased the present work from him for $50 just two days after he completed it. His previous entry of March 5^th, 1847 states: "I have just finished a picture, The ramblers. The principal light is on the shore on the left, light and dark figures for contrast. Clouds on the right reflect in the water. The opposite shore is a green meadow, skirted with woodland, which reflects partly in the river. Foreground in shadow. The effect is pleasing."

When McElrath and Mount displayed the painting at the National Academy of Design a few months later, one critic wrote: "The figures in this little picture are exceedingly fine, particularly that of the little girl – it is in Mount's very vein. The landscape portion of it is not altogether to our taste. It appears crude and cold and the horizontal line is place too high to be agreeable. This, however, is of little moment, since the line is subordinate, and he has managed it so that it is not obtrusive" Literary World, I (May 29, 1847, p. 397). Mount may have disagreed with this criticism because only a few months later he wrote in a letter to Charles Lanman: "If figures are the principal, everything else should be subordinate, depending on the taste of the artist. When landscape is primo, and figures are introduced, they are and must be secondo. See Coles and Durands landscape in the Art Union or look at Claude's landscapes. On the contrary, look at Murillos productions, all is sacrificed for the good of the figures."

Despite the fact that Mount's subject matter was based primarily on life in the country, he still kept current with the news of the day and scholars have observed that many of his paintings have political undertones, sometimes lost on today's viewers. Cider Making (1841, Metropolitan Museum of Art), for instance, depicts a jovial scene, but contemporary viewers would have immediately seen the political connotations referencing the 1840 election through the use of cider barrels, ubiquitous symbols of the Whig party. Thomas McElrath's second work by Mount, California News, which he commissioned in 1850, comments on the California gold rush while prominently displaying McElrath's own newspaper, The New-York Daily Tribune. As The Ramblers has remained in a private collection since its inception, scholars have not yet fully explored the possible undercurrents of the work.