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Harbor Landscape
Accession # 14.571
Artist Thomas Doughty
Title Harbor Landscape
Date 1834
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 26 1/4 x 35 15/16 in. (66.6 x 91.3 cm)
Signed Signed lower right: "T. DOUGHTY / 1834"
Credit Line Caroline H. Polhemus Fund
Location Visible Storage: Case 15, Screen J (Paintings)

Curatorial Remarks: Thomas Doughty was one of the first American artists to devote himself solely to landscape painting. Landscape after Ruisdael is based on a painting by the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Jacob van Ruisdael that Doughty copied during a visit to the Louvre in Paris. Copying played an important educational role for this self-trained artist.

His earlier Harbor Landscape presents a pleasing, albeit formulaic, vista of a calm lake framed by trees in the foreground. Rather than depicting any specific American locale, the painting reflects Doughty’s dependence on drawing manuals and European landscape traditions as models for his work.