Harbor Landscape

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.