Jervis McEntee
American, 1828-1891

Landscape with Snow, 1863
oil on canvas
24 x 19 7/8 in.

SBMA, Gift of Mary and Will Richeson, Jr.
1979.58.1

COMMENTS

American painter. McEntee’s only period of professional painting instruction was with Frederic Edwin Church in New York during the winter of 1850–51, after which his family steered him into business. By 1859, however, he had decided to devote himself to painting as a career; he took a studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York and travelled regularly between there and Rondout on the Hudson River. McEntee’s speciality was the sober autumnal and winter landscape (e.g. "Autumn Landscape", 1868; priv. col., see 1987 exh. cat., p. 278); he crafted his imagery from recollections of solitary walks taken in the Rondout area to palliate the effects of his own melancholic temperament. Simple landscape forms, narrow ranges of tone, and subdued atmospheric effects distinguish McEntee’s work from the dramatic topography and light preferred by many artists associated with the Hudson River school and link his sensibility with those American painters inspired by the Barbizon school. Following his sole trip abroad, to Europe, in 1868–9, he occasionally produced Italian subjects, such as the "Ruins of Caesar’s Palace" (c. 1869; Philadelphia, PA, Acad. F.A.), and experimented with figural imagery in the 1870s and 1880s. McEntee exhibited landscapes at the National Academy of Design, New York, almost every year between 1850 and 1890. Beginning in 1872 he kept a diary, chronicling two decades of the social life and views of the conservative faction within the National Academy of Design.

- David Steinberg, Grove Art Online, 2014

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

McEntee was a devoted student of Frederic Edwin Church, leader of the Hudson River Valley school. Interestingly, his investment in the idealized American landscape caused him to be quite hostile to European modernism, a cause which he helped to promote through weekly ‘salons’ for like-minded artists at his studio in Richard Morris Hunt’s Tenth Street Studio Building in New York. In this somber painting, he expertly evokes the contrast between the frigid wind, against which a lone traveler and his dog battle, and the beckoning warmth of a dwelling just beyond, where the flickering flames of a hearth can be discerned.

- Let It Snow, 2018