Lockwood de Forest, Beach, Mountauc, Long Island, 1886
Courtesy Sullivan-Goss—An American Gallery, Santa Barbara
Lockwood de Forest: Poet of Place
The Greenville County Museum of Art announces the August 16 opening of an exhibition by the late nineteenth-century landscape artist Lockwood de Forest, whose paintings illuminate the “oil sketch” and its contribution to American landscape painting.
Lockwood de Forest was born in 1850 to a wealthy and prominent New York family. His youthful enthusiasm for the visual arts was encouraged by Frederic Edwin Church, a celebrated American painter who married into his mother’s family. Church welcomed young de Forest to his New York studio and exposed him to the New York art establishment, including his fellow painters of the Hudson River School, a group of artists who produced dramatic landscapes in the mid to late nineteenth century.
Landscapists and Impressionists were accustomed to painting en plein air. The French expression, translated “in the open air” means simply painting outdoors, on location. The Hudson River School artists created sketches and studies on location as part of this process, and de Forest no doubt began sketching in oil on journeys with Church, who often synthesized various scenes later into one grand painting. Lockwood de Forest, however, painted the oil sketch for its own sake, and his paintings are of interest as direct renditions of landscapes as the artist saw them. The artist Joseph Goldyne, in an essay on de Forest, wrote that he rendered the landscape “as found, not as interpreted.” De Forest accomplished his paintings in a single sitting, in as little as twenty minutes or as much as two hours.
De Forest enjoyed a successful career as an interior designer and collaborated for several years with Louis Comfort Tiffany. He traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East, painting wherever he went. His designs were especially influenced by the architecture and decorative arts of India.
The exhibition Lockwood de Forest: Poet of Place, will be on view through October 19. It was organized by Sullivan-Sullivan Goss—An American Gallery, Santa Barbara, CA.