Valcour Island from Au Sable Point. 355 degrees North from 44.5727 x -79.4323. Watercolor and mixed media on paper. 3.5 x 10.5 inches. The body of water dead ahead was the scene of a naval battle fought on October 11, 1776 between a British fleet commanded by Sir Guy Carleton and an assortment of smaller vessels and gunboats led by Benedict Arnold.

The shoreline of Lake Champlain is girded with various types of marine-fossil limestone. Further inland, this shifts to carboniferous rock from which iron was extracted further south at Moriah and at other locations along the Boquet and Au Sable Rivers.

Limestone outcroppings at Crown Point, New York

Both of these formations stretch southward into the Alleghenies, from which coal and iron is mined in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky. Bearing a striking resemblance to outcroppings incorporated into His Majesty’s Fort at Crown Point, portions of Civil War-era Fort Negley in Nashville, Tennessee are in fact distant traces of the same fossil-reef.

More than 120 miles from its headwaters, the lower stretches of Lake Champlain reach their greatest width. Its waters are broken up by a number of islands forming a kind of delta in reverse. The outflow of the inland sea empties into the Richelieu River, which flows another eighty miles north-northeast, to its confluence with the Saint Lawrence. This system of lakes and rivers, which included Lake George and the Hudson Valley was, prior to the invention of mechanized transportation, one of the most strategic thoroughfares in North America. Indigenous Haudenosaunee, Abenaki, Mahican and Lenape had for centuries vied in bloody conflict to control these waterways. European colonials quickly saw it importance. In the summer of 1609 Samuel de Champlain and a handful of other Frenchmen accompanied a party of several hundred Abenaki, Montagnais and Wyandot warriors up the Richelieu River into the inland sea. Near the head of Lake Champlain they encountered a Haudenosaunee war-party. As the foes squared off against one another, Champlain stepped forward, lowered an arquebus loaded with buckshot and fired, killing with one shot three Iroquois war-chiefs. Terrified by this event, the Haudenosaunee scattered.

Champlain firing on the Haudeonsaunee war-party. July 29, 1609

French intervention in the region culminated with the construction of two fortresses; one at Pointe de Chevelure (Scalp Point), the peninsula where the lower portion of the lake widens significantly. The other was constructed on the rocky heights above the site of Champlain’s demonstration of firepower, at the mouth of river La Chute. Descending more than two hundred feet over the course of three miles, the outflow from Lake George was a major portage, or carrying-place linking the Saint Lawrence watershed with the Hudson Valley.

Both fortresses fell to the British in 1759, as did Quebec, the capital of New France. Sixteen years later, an American force led by Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold captured Ticonderoga and Crown Point, giving them control of the lakes and the backdoor to Canada. After capturing Montreal, the Americans failed to take Quebec, which was reinforced in the spring of 1776 with fresh troops from Britain and Germany. American forces defending Montreal and the Richelieu Valley were forced to retreat. Royal Governor Sir Guy Carleton poured over maps with General John Burgoyne, planning the recapture of the Champlain Valley before pressing south to take Albany.

South of the border, an arms race was underway. The quarrelsome, jealous and litigious Benedict Arnold was put in charge of shipyards at Skenesboro (today’s Whitehall, New York), building row galleys, gundalows and gunboats to augment ships captured at Crown Point during the previous year. British warships in the Saint Lawrence were dismantled, then transported in pieces up the Richelieu River to Saint-Jean, where they were reassembled, rigged and armed. The plan was to regain control of the lake and capture Crown Point and Ticonderoga. Both fortresses had been weakened by the removal of cannon (mostly from Crown Point), which were transported overland to Boston during the winter of 1775-1776. With the Gibraltar of the north once again in British hands, the capture of Albany would drive a wedge between New England and the middle-Atlantic colonies, forcing Washington’s rebels to sue for peace.

Benedict Arnold’s fleet in a watercolor ca. 1776 by Charles Randle. Left to right: Royal Savage, Revenge, Lee, Trumble, Washington, Congress, Philadelphia, New York, Jersey, Connecticut, Providence, New Haven, Spitfire, Boston & Liberty.

In late summer, Arnold’s fleet was ready. Sailing north, the force creeped down the Richelieu looking for any sign of the enemy. Receiving intelligence from his spies that British warship were preparing to depart, Arnold withdrew south to Isle la Motte, then Cumberland Bay, on whose waters in 1814 the U.S. Navy bested delivered the British a crushing defeat. Carleton’s squadron sailed into Lake Champlain on October 9. Arnold moved his force into position across the southern mouth of Valcour Bay. The eponymous island’s footprint provided cover, concealing Arnold’s deployments from the southbound British vessels. Around noon on October 11, advance elements of Carleton’s force cleared the southern tip of Valcour Island. Arnold’s ships opened fire. Outgunned and outnumbered, Arnold’s men fought into the evening.

Battle of Valcour Island. Watercolor by Henry Gilder, ca 1776.

By sundown, both combatants were running low on shot and gunpowder. Sometime after nightfall, Arnold’s surviving vessels raised anchor. Hugging the shoreline they slipped silently past the British fleet. Rounding Au Sable Point they proceeded south to Corlaer Bay. On Schuyler Island Arnold’s command regrouped, repairing whatever damage they could, scuttling two boats deemed beyond repair. At sunrise on October 12, the British were stunned to find open water where the American fleet rode at anchor the night before. Getting underway, Carleton doggedly pursued Arnold up the lake. Weather confounded both commanders. Arnold’s fleet disintegrated as Carleton picked them off one-by-one. One of Arnold’s subordinates ran his boat ashore and led his crew on foot to Ticonderoga. Arnold himself was pinned down in a small bay on the Vermont shore, but escaped to shore; hiking overland to the ferry that carried him to Crown Point. Abandoning that post, barracks and warehouses were put to the torch. What remained of Arnold’s forced rendezvoused at Fort Ticonderoga, digging in with the garrison to receive the full fury of British arms. As the British landed at Crown Point, the first snow was falling. With limited rations and materiel, and winter approaching, with his force more than a hundred miles from its nearest base of supply, Sir Guy Carleton postponed the invasion and withdrew down the lake. Arnold’s Fabian punch-and-run tactics had bought precious time for the American cause. Something else had been achieved. The newborn United States Navy had received its baptism of fire.

Chart of the Battle at Valcour Bay. October 11, 1776. Au Sable Poiint is visible neat the bottom of the drawing.

Valcour Island is uninhabited, except for an historic lighthouse on its western shore. Like much of the region Valcour Island is composed of marine fossil-reef limestone, in places rising twenty feet or more above the waterline. A peculiar feature of Lake Champlain is a mirage-like optical illusion that exaggerates the elevation of rocky cliffs girding its islands. Au Sable Point is formed by the sandy delta of the eponymous river. The south fork rises above Keene Valley, flowing through the town of Jay, once home to American painter and illustrator Rockwell Kent. The northern fork rises near North Elba, near the farmstead of Abolitionist John Brown, flowing eastward through Wilmington Notch at the foot of Whiteface Mountain. Both arms of the Au Sable River converge at Point of Rocks (today’s Au Sable Forks), flowing past Keeseville—where Louis Agassiz was given a hero’s welcome in 1858, by a crowd that paid no attention to his dour companion, celebrated author Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Keeseville, New York. Once a manufacturing hub producing nails and farming implements, it was also the gateway to the High Peaks of the Adirondacks. Agassiz, Emerson, James Russell Lowell and other Saturday Club lumniaries passed this way en route to “Camp Maple” on Follensbee Pond in 1858, at the behest of artist and writer William JAMES Stillman.

Bending northward the Au Sable crashes over Rainbow Falls, carving a deep chasm through half a billion years of the ubiquitous regional limestone, before looping east to pour its waters into Lake Champlain, a hundred yards behind my point of view in this sketch. The area is protected by the State of New York, maintained as a public beach and campground at the northern end of the point, and as a wildlife management area encompassing the delta wetlands to its south.

Map of Au Sable Marsh Wildlife Management Area,. thge red dot marks my POV. The arrow  indicates my line of sight. Valcour Island is off the map to the north

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Page from Claude Lorrain’s Liber Veritatis. ca 1630-1682. Collection British Museum

Claude Gellée, dit “Le Lorrain” (1600 to 1682) lived and worked in Rome. Having once developed a successful practice, Claude began to keep records of his sales in pictorial form. This was done partly to establish some means of authentication, and to protect his reputation from forgeries and imitators. Referring to this project as Liber Veritatis, his “book of truth” functioned as a living catalogue-raisonné. Apart from drawings of completed paintings, the book included a complete list of Claude’s works detailing when they were made and to whom they were sold. Following his death in 1682, the book passed to his illegitimate daughter Agnese. When she passed away in 1716, Claude’s nephew took possession of it. Many of Claude’s customers were British. Sometime in the 1720s the book was acquired by William Cavendish, second Duke of Devonshire. It remained in the family until 1957, when the Liber Veritatis was received by the British government, as an in-kind payment in lieu of unpaid taxes. It now resides in the British Museum.

Plate from Claude Lorrain’s Liber Veritatis. Engraved by Richard Earlon. Publishing by John Boydell. Published December 1, 1803. Private Collection

Readers today may be unaware that public art museums as we know them today did not exist in the eighteenth century. The only way for artists and art-lovers to gain access to masterworks would be to find them in churches or government buildings, or to gain access to the private homes of wealthy elites. Claude’s work had a profound effect on younger British artists like Richard Wilson (1714-1782), who had been lucky enough to encounter Claude’s paintings abroad, and in the private collections of aristocratic patrons. Like his contemporary Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714-1789),

Richard Wilson. Lake Avernus. On on Canvas. 1765

Wilson absorbed Claudian concepts while studying landscape-painting in Italy, where they found patrons among privileged travelers embarked on The Grand Tour. By the mid-eighteenth century, scenic vistas of faraway places were much in demand, as were paintings of the parks and great houses owned by wealth patrons. Print publishing made it possible to purchase works of art at affordable prices. A growing middle-class clamored for scenic engravings. Following the cessation of hostilities during the French and Indian War (1754-1763), British military officers Captain Hervey Smyth, Elias Durnford, Lieutenant Archibald Campbell and Massachusetts Royal Governor Thomas Pownall (1722-1805) traveled through the British possessions of North America, from Canada to the Caribbean, sketching picturesque views “on the spot” that were elaborated by professional artists like Paul Sandby (1731-1809), engraved by William Eliot, Paul Benazech and others, and published to great acclaim in 1768 by John Bowles and a consortium of printing-industry entrepreneurs.

A view in Hudson’s River of Pakepsey & the Catts-Kill Mountains, from Sopos Island in Hudson’s River Vue sur la Riviere d’Hudson dans Pakepsey et des Montagnes de Catts-Kill, prise de l’Isle de Sopos, situee dans cette riviere. sketch’d on the spot by his excellency, Governor Pownal; painted & engraved by Paul Sandby. 1761

Scenographia Americana was nothing less than a flag-waving celebration of Britain’s triumph over the French, declaring the insular kingdom’s new status as an imperial power. In the wake of its success, with a boom in art-publishing underway, the young fifth Duke of Devonshire (1748-1811) allowed the drawings from Claude Lorrain’s Liber Veritatis to be engraved by Richard Earlom and published in serial form by John Boydell. When Earlom’s prints first appeared on the market in 1774, their effect was to electrify and reinvigorate the practice of landscape painting. The task of reproducing Claude’s Book of Truth was completed by 1778. Over the decades that followed, a number of new editions were released, exerting a considerable influence on the practice of landscape-painting that only waned with the advent of photography and the rise of Impressionism.

From a modernist perspective, one might argue that Claude’s Liber Veritatis first proposed the notion that pictorial design was as much the subject of any painting as whatever else it portrayed. The early works of Kandinsky and Mondrian demonstrate how the genesis of abstract art is rooted in the landscape tradition.
Were we to consider the possibility that Scenographia Americana and the topographical tradition helped Claude make a comeback, we would broaden the narrative to include explorers, naturalists, military topographers and printmakers, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with poetic visionaries.

A view of the falls on the Passaick, or second river, in the province of New Jersey Vue de l’cataracte du Passaick, ou seconde riviere, dans la province du Nouveau Jersey / / sketch’d on the spot by his excellency, Governor Pownal ; painted & engraved by Paul Sandby. The height of the fall between eighty and ninety feet; the river about eighty yards broad = La hauteur de cette chŭte est de 80 à 90 pieds, et la largeur de la riviere d’environ 40 toises.1761

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Rock Formations at Dyer’s Point. Cape Elizabeth, Maine. Northeast from 44.5648 x 70.1978. March 20, 2018. Watercolor and pen on Moleskine watercolor journal. 3.5 x 10.5 inches.

Southeast of Portland, projecting into the Gulf of Maine, Cape Elizabeth divides Saco Bay to the south from Casco Bay to the north. Like other headlands and promontories girding the shores of northern New England, it has rocky formations that provide a time capsule of geological history shaped by sedimentation, plate tectonics, and volcanism. Visible today are fragments of the micro-continent of Avalonia, scattered along the Atlantic rim into Canada, Iceland, Cornwall, and Gibraltar. Exposed to intense heat and crushed between colliding land masses, sedimentary bedrock was folded and compressed into stratified formations resembling petrified wood. As it cooled, the rock became brittle. Fractured by pressure exerted by the continuing motion of continental plates, plumes of magma arose through the fissures, forming basaltic dykes similar to those found at Cathedral Rocks on Cape Ann, the Jersey Palisades, and the Spanish Peaks area of southern Colorado. Scoured by glaciation and eroded by the constant pounding by the sea, the rocky shoreline resonated with the romantic trope of the power of nature, inspiring awe and terror, embodied by the poetic Sublime. Built in 1828, a pair of masonry lighthouses alerted mariners to submerged ledges, which, combined with ten-foot tides, remain a constant threat to shipping. The original lights were replaced by cast-iron towers in 1874, at a time when the Maine coast was being developed as America’s vacation land. The ubiquitous Shingle Style seasonal homes were popularized by architect and erstwhile landscape painter John Calvin Stevens, who worked on the renovation of Winslow Homer’s home and studio at Prouts Neck.

During his New York City years, Winslow Homer would hide out in his studio with a sign on the door that read, “Mr. Homer is not at home.” Following a summer on Ten Pound Island and a two-year retreat in Cullercoats on the Northumbrian coast, Homer returned to the United States. During a visit to the Maine coast, he decided to establish a permanent residence and studio at Prouts Neck, renovating a carriage house on property owned by his brother. He moved the building closer to the shoreline and provided the modest structure with a wraparound porch for painting in all seasons. Prouts Neck is connected to the mainland by a bottleneck rimmed with sandy beaches; its geology is the same as that of Cape Elizabeth—folded and fissured Silurian bedrock crisscrossed by basaltic upflows. Revealed by ten-foot tides, crevasses draped with marine flora form tidal pools teeming with life. In violent weather, rough seas crash against the shore, launching great plumes of spray that fall like rain on glistening rocks. This tiny headland became Homer’s muse for the rest of his days. His studio has been preserved and is maintained by the Portland Museum of Art. A son of Irish immigrants later recalled watching Homer sitting out on the rocks, at work on a canvas. Working at the Gem Theater on nearby Peak’s Island, the teenage Sean Martin Aloysius Feeney fell in love with the movies. Hollywood later lionized him as the iconic film-director John Ford.

John Ford (left) with John Wayne during the filming of “Fort Apache” at Monument Valley in 1948

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During his New York City years, Winslow Homer would hide out in his studio with a sign on the door that read, “Mr. Homer is not at home.” Following a summer on Ten Pound Island and a two-year retreat in Cullercoats on the Northumbrian coast, Homer returned to the United States. During a visit to the Maine coast, he decided to establish a permanent residence and studio at Prouts Neck, renovating a carriage house on property owned by his brother. He moved the building closer to the shoreline and provided the modest structure with a wraparound porch for painting in all seasons. Prouts Neck is connected to the mainland by a bottleneck rimmed with sandy beaches; its geology is the same as that of Cape Elizabeth—folded and fissured Silurian bedrock crisscrossed by basaltic upflows. Revealed by ten-foot tides, crevasses draped with marine flora form tidal pools teeming with life. In violent weather, rough seas crash against the shore, launching great plumes of spray that fall like rain on glistening rocks.

This tiny headland had been developed as an affluent enclave by Homer’s brother. It was to become his muse for the rest of his days. Cultivating an image as a hermit, Homer remained very much in touch with the art-world; even lecturing art-dealers on market trends. Fitting to his reputation as a maritime painter, his drink of choice seems to have been rum. Once a visitor asked how so many empty bottles had gotten into the studio, Homer’s wry reply was that he had no idea. He never bought an empty bottle in his life. A child of Irish immigrants later recalled watching Homer sitting out on the rocks, at work on a canvas. Working at the Gem Theater on nearby Peak’s Island, the teenage Sean Martin Aloysius Feeney fell in love with the movies. Hollywood later lionized him as John Ford.
Homer’s studio has been preserved. It is maintained and interpreted for visitors by the Portland Museum of Art.

Homer’s Studio, Prout’s Neck. Courtesy Portland Museum of Art.

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This is a preview of (Volume Three) Sketchbook Traveler: New England. Schiffer Publishing. Publication date: Fall 2022

Sprague River from Morse Mountain, Phippsburg, Maine. August 1, 2019. Looking south from 43.7376 x -69.8260.

Looking at a map of the Maine coast north of Portland, one finds fewer coves and headlands. Crumpled upward by tectonic plates and sculpted by glaciation, a labyrinth of islands among narrow fingers of land reaches southward into the Gulf of Maine. Early settlements sprang up along this fringe in the shelter of intervening waterways. Prior to automobiles and the two-lane blacktop, getting from place to place in the region was accomplished by water. Travel time by land between some of these villages could exceed three or four times that of going by water at the same speed. Scouting motifs with a roadmap on the passenger seat, I have firsthand experience with a maxim of humorist Marshall Dodge, “You can’t get there from here.” It must have been equally vexing to early explorers, sailing up what seemed like a river only to find a rocky cul-de-sac. Divided by long ridges interspersed by marshes, the land on either side of the Kennebec River rises from the coast into rolling terrain once blanketed by forests. Located south of Phippsburg, the Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area was established by a local family and today is managed through a partnership between its nonprofit corporation, the Nature Conservancy, and Bates College, which uses the site as an outdoor classroom and summer residency. Viewed from the western slope of Morse Mountain, the marshy Sprague River meanders beside Small Point. Serpentine loops meander through verdant wetlands spill into a channel behind an alluvial sandbar known as Seawall Beach before mingling its waters with the sea.

Looking upstream on the Sprague River from the causeway, Morse Mountain Road. Photo by the author. August 1, 2019

Map of Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area. Courtesy Bates College, Auburn, Maine.

Along Morse Mountain Road just south of the causeway. August 1, 2019

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Paul Cézanne. Mont Sainte-Victoire. 1902-1904. Collection Philadelphia Museum of Art. An old friend since childhood, this painting was always at the top of my list of works to visit. Between the PMA and the Barnes Collection, Philadelphia is blessed with a greater concentration of works by Cézanne than anywhere else on earth.

In 1759, Captain Thomas Davies of the Royal Artillery made a drawing, ”…on the spot” of the encampment of Lord Jeffrey Amherst’s army from a position a few hundred yards southeast of His Majesty’s Fort at Crown Point. From what I could reckon by looking at maps of the period, today’s main parking-area just north of the fort had been covered by workshops and warehouses. General Amherst and his staff would have been lodged beside the little cove just beyond the foot of today’s Champlain Bridge. A picnic area and events-pavilion now stand on the site of an earthen French redoubt. Wooster’s Third Connecticut provincial regiment, including my ancestor, would have been encamped just to south behind a line of outworks along a natural uplift of the fossil-reef limestone that undergirds the peninsula. Rangers and indigenous forces were quartered in huts and wigwams further to the rear, near the site of the present-day park-ranger station and maintenance shed.

Thomas Davies. 1737-1812. View of Amherst’s army at Crown Point, 1759. Courtesy Wintherthur Museum, Delaware.

Embellished with picturesque touches, Davies’s finished watercolor is far from naïve in its rendering of the site. Twenty-first-century viewers might mistake topographical accuracy for a lack of optical verisimilitude. Davies was keenly aware that whatever artistic aims his painting might achieve, his primary goal was creating a chorographic vista one could read like a map. Eight years later professional watercolorist Paul Sandby took up a position to oversee the drawing curriculum at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich. It was believed that artistic training would make keener observers of future military officers, enhancing the value as military intelligence whatever drawings they might make “on the spot”. It also gave them the ability to editorialize, to downplay or call attention to features and landmarks which might be regarded as advantageous. A hallmark of expeditionary art is the distortion of scale to render more legible certain elements of terrain. I noted this on many occasions when my travels gave me the opportunity to compare an optical experience of terrain with historic depictions more focused on conveying specific data.

Richard Hovenden Kern’s 1849 view from Fort Marcy is a case in point. Looking south from a hillock along the northern margins of downtown Santa Fe, one’s gaze may seize first on the jagged Placer mountains, then the fall of the massive upthrusting Sandias. Panning right, we find the pinched summit of La Tetilla hill. Further on we find the Jemez range and Valles Caldera, looming up behind Ortiz Mountain and Montoso Peak. Viewed altogether in a single photographic exposure, these features become nothing more than illegible specks on the horizon.
By compressing the distance between these landmarks, while enlarging them and minimizing the foreground, Kern has chosen to privilege data over optics. His drawing provides a pictorial guide to prominent landmarks in ways that no still snapshot ever could.

Santa Fe from Fort Marcy. March 4, 2019. Photograph by the author.

Conditioned by photography, later vistas from the same point-of-view embrace optical verisimilitude at the expense of useful data. Kern’s approach is reprised thirty-three years later in an aerial fly-overview of Santa Fe, one of the countless townscape panoramas produced in vast quantities during the denouement of the golden age of popular lithography.

Looking east. Richard Kern’s point of view would have been from atop one of the hills visible along he left edge of this image, just beyond Bishop’s Lodge Road. More than three decades had passed since Kern visited the former Spanish possession, acquired from Mexico in 1848. The street grid has expanded. The downtown area between Rio Santa Fe and the row of low hills to the north filling up with new construction. Thirty years later Santa Fe had become a magnet for tourists, artists and writers. 19th-century Victorian and Spanish Revival architecture disappeared under the adobe façades of the Pueblo Revival style, expressing a strong regional flavor retained by the city today.

Frederic E Church. Cayambe. 1858. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

To the photo-conditioned eye, Kern’s drawing may seem naïve, but we find similar distortions in the works of professional artists like Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt and John Frederic Kensett. For the Ecuadorian volcano Cayambe to be visible from Otavallo, looming over Lago San Pablo as it does in Church’s painting, the mountain would have to dwarf Everest. Similarly, Albert Bierstadt frames a fictitious alpine peak in a nebulous porthole, hovering above the summit of Mount Rosalie (present-day Mount Evans, Colorado).

Albert Bierstadt. A Storm in the Rockies (Mt. Rosalie) 1866. Brooklyn Museum

John Frederick Kensett. Camel’s Hump. 1852. Hugh Museum. Atlanta

A recent photograph of Kensett’s perspective. 2021

Kensett’s view of Camel Hump Mountain in Vermont, as seen from Westport, New York is another foray into hyperbole. These artists followed the maxim that mere imitation can never attain the lofty realm of art, at the same time relying on the fact that their viewers were unlikely to question the data their pictures delivered. Later artists like Paul Cézanne employed a comparable intensity of empiricism. Eschewing traditional descriptive conventions, he developed idiosyncratic visual effects which superficial readings might confuse with style. Many of his watercolors read like maps of scientific knowledge; fragments of hard-won certainty, scattered across fields of unknowing, and yet legible as complete ideas.

Paul Cézanne. Bridge at Gardanne. 1885-1886. Lillie P. Bliss Collection. MoMA

As tastes and methods changed, the goal of painting what is there was, and is less important than portraying the experience of discovering, exploring, and then seeing it. Few landscape painters understand this because most are trained in a bubble, a hall of mirrors in which a painting is a painting is a painting. “Landscapes,” as J.B. Jackson put it, “do not occur in nature but are created when people adapt terrain to their use.” The landscape is thus not composed of the physical features we behold, but how we come to know them. In other words, as far as a painting might be concerned, it is the landscape. Topographical artists were well aware of this, which is why they say no need to compromise valuable data for the sake of optical verisimilitude. Neither did Cézanne. The man who died of a chill, after being drenched by a downpour in the parched land of Provence, would have laughed at the formalist fairy-tale that he turned away from nature to set the corner-stone of modern art. On the contrary, he gave us new ways to look at nature, making his contributions more relevant today than ever before.

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Looking north from the summit of Mount Equinox (43.1660414 x -73.1117056). Bastille Day, 2019

Rising five hundred feet higher than Mount Greylock fifty miles to the south, Equinox Mountain, at just under four thousand feet, is the highest peak in the Taconic range that marks the western boundary of New England. Gaining two thousand feet in elevation above the Batten Kill River just south of the upscale resort town and outlet mecca of Manchester, Vermont, the summit is a popular destination for motorists and hikers. The historic Equinox Golf Resort & Spa stands at its foot. The only Carthusian monastery in the country resides at its summit. Open to the public, the Charterhouse of the Transfiguration contains exhibits, chapels, restrooms, and open-air observation decks. Surrounding vistas reveal serried highlands stepping off to the west into the Hudson Valley.

Location: The summit of Mount Equinox. Skyline Drive. North side of Highway 7A, 4.3 miles south of Manchester, Vermont

Marching eastward, longitudinal mountain ridge divided by the Connecticut River arrive at Mount Monadnock ninety miles away before reaching northward into the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Summit vistas disclose the topographical history of New England. Most of its mountain ranges are aligned on a north-south axis, like the deserts of northern Nevada and western Utah without the intervening basins.
The depth of, and distance between heights and valleys is a corrugation of such regularity that it puts me in mind of a plowed field, or a theater curtain laid flat. Added to massive tectonic forces that formed the Appalachians, collision with the micro-continent of Avalonia brought to bear further compression in the process of mountain building in New England. Fifty thousand years ago, advancing ice sheets two miles thick smoothed jagged peaks into the rounded forms we behold today.

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Fort Gorges and Spring Point Light from Fort Preble. South Portland, Maine. March 21, 2018. The First day of Spring.. ENE from 43.649332 x -70.225533. Ink and watercolor 3.5 x 10.5 inches.

In searching for spectacular seaside vistas, one is often rewarded for their efforts by scaling the ramparts of seacoast fortifications. Overlooking waterways, these structures were built at strategic locations to afford maximum visibility. Delineating a physical and moral boundary between life and death, military defenses exploit advantageous conditions of terrain such as bluffs, swamps, rivers and streams. The introduction of gunpowder artillery in the fourteenth century rendered obsolete medieval motte-and-bailey castles, as well as the gated circuit-walls that enclosed urban centers since antiquity. The development of bastioned star-forts with outworks forced burghers to raze portions of their towns to lay down new street-systems allowing for the rapid movement of men, ordnance and materiel from one salient point to another.

Comte Sebastien le Prestre de Vauban.  (1633-1707) A new system of fortification. Vauban’s innovations led to the development of city planning and landscape architecture.

This gave rise to modern urban planning. Civil engineering techniques developed for the construction of gunpowder defenses combined moving large quantities of earth with impact-resistant masonry that found peacetime employment in the construction of formal gardens and city parks. The appearance of viable gunboats in the sixteenth century posed viable threats to landside targets.Seacoast forts were placed at the mouth of a harbor, on islands and at various point from which all could lay down overlapping fields of fire. This is the case with the historic defenses of Portland, Maine. During the nineteenth century, the city’s colonial batteries were augmented with new installations. The city had not always been so well defended.

Civil War-era map/chart of Portland, Maine and surrounding islands. New fortifications include Fort Gorges (white) Fort Scammel (blue) and Fort Preble (red).

Sailing into the Harbor on October 18, 1775, a small squadron of the Royal Navy under the command of Lieutenant Henry Mowat delivered an ultimatum to the residents of Portland, then known as Falmouth, Massachusetts. In retaliation for his humiliating capture by local militia he preceding may, Mowat ordered the settlement burned to the ground. Smarting from the lesson as Portland grew, coastal fortifications were established on the landside, and several harbor islands, making it one of the best-defended seaports in New England. Forts Sumner and Allen on Monroy Hill guarded the northeastern end of the city. Their guns corresponded with fields of fire laid down by Civil-War-era Fort Scammel, built on a rocky ledge at the north end of Falmouth Channel. Fort Preble sits at the northern tip of South Portland, across the channel from a small island defended by Fort Gorges. Further south on the landside beside Portland Head lighthouse, Fort Williams faces Fort Levett on Cushing’s Island. Downeast native Brigadier-General Seth Eastman produced canvases of Forts Scammel and Gorges as part of a painting commission for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Military Affairs. Not only those with an interest in military architecture, but anyone yearning for the satisfaction of magisterial vistas should visit historic fortifications. Chosen to command as much of the visible terrain as possible, these positions frequently overlook sweeping vistas. Landscape theorist John Brinckerhoff Jackson observed that as physical memories of failed endeavors, ruins admonish us to do better.

Seth Eastman (1808-1875) Fort Scammel and Fort Gorges. Oil on canvas. 24 x 36 inches. 1872. Collection U.S. Senate. Location: U.S. Capitol, Washington DC. For dramatic effect, Eastman has radically compressed the distance between Fort Scammel in the foreground, and Fort Gorges beyond it.

Available to own: Sketchbook Traveler: Hudson Valley. Schiffer Publishing. Atglen, PA. 2020

Explore my Quaranteam Dispatches, from April 1-June 8, 2020

White Mountains Compositions by Asher B. Durand and John Frederick Kensett. Pen and watercolor on Moleskine watercolor (landscape) sketchbook. 3.5 x 10.5 inches. 2021

Asher Brown Durand (1796-1886)
White Mountain Scenery, Franconia Notch, New Hampshire. Oil on canvas

John Frederick Kensett (1816-1872)
The White Mountains from Shelburne, New Hampshire.
Oil on canvas ca 1850-1860.
SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA

Before museums came into existence, an art student’s first encounter with landscape painting occurred by looking at prints. Prior to the invention of photography, engravings and etchings functioned as virtual reality. Paintings of scenic vistas were reproduced for popular consumption as black-and-white prints, that sometimes were hand-colored. Before art-students were allowed to draw live models, they were required to copy prints before advancing to drawing plaster casts of famous statues. Because most educated people received as much instruction in drawing as they did in writing, a basic level of proficiency in drawing might be expected. Today we have fallen behind. The drawings illustrated above are analyses of White Mountain compositions by Asher B. Durand and John Kensett. Both men worked as print-engravers before devoting themselves to painting full-time. They would have been keenly aware of Claude Lorrain’s Liber Veritatis. Published almost a hundred years after Claude’s death, the prints laid the groundwork for abstraction by making the composition the subject of each picture, as much as what was depicted. The journal-drawings above employ a technique rooted in antiquity that carried on through the Medieval period. Images were sketched out lightly with a red earth pigment were then elaborated in black, leaving a warm glow under the black lines. Updating that process, these drawings were mapped out using quadrants and thirds. Using orange Sakura Micron pens, the images were plotted and then further defined with a sepia fine-point Micron pen. Durand’s tonal scheme was explored en grisaille, while Kensett’s simultaneous contrasts of warm, cool, light and dark were investigated with black and yellow-ochre washes. This page spread was created for my forthcoming book Sketchbook Traveler: New England, due to be released by Schiffer Publishing in Autumn, 2022.

Now available to own: Sketchbook Traveler: Hudson Valley

Explore my Quaranteam Dispatches, from April 1-June 8, 2020

La Chute Falls. Ticonderoga, New York. May 24, 2021. Looking west from: 43.749520 x -73.419157. 17:15h

Moving overland through the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the Green Mountains of Vermont one finds the northeastern extremity of the Hudson watershed. Rising from its source near Dorset in southern Vermont, the Battenkill River flows into the Hudson River opposite Schuylerville. Thirty miles to the north is the southernmost part of the Saint Lawrence drainage-basin. Nestled within a slim declivity between two mountain ranges, the waters of Lake George descend by way of the La Chute River, a three-and-a-half-mile channel that tumbles over falls and rapids for two hundred and thirty feet before spilling into Lake Champlain beneath the walls of Fort Ticonderoga. Fifteen miles to the north, Crown Point had for centuries marked the boundary between Abenaki (Algonquin) lands to the east and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) territory to the west. Because of their strategic importance as defensible choke points in the water route between Montreal and New York, Crown Point and Ticonderoga were heavily fortified during the French and Indian War (1754–63) and the American Revolutionary War (1775–83).

Fort Ticonderoga from Mount Defiance. 40 degrees ESE from 43.8345644 x -75.405923. May 26, 2021. 14:30h

The summit today is accessible by automobile. A token obtained from the ticket-gate at Fort Ticonderoga raises the barrier to a vertiginous climb up the narrow blacktop road. One marvels at how in less than a day Burgoyne’s pioneers and artillerymen had manhandled heavy guns up these slopes. As I was packing up to depart, high winds churned through the foliage, straining the tree-branches from which were ripped fistfuls of leaves. Thundering black clouds rolled up the lake, dragging thick grey rain-sheets in their wake. Peppering the summit of Mount Defiance with a few drops, the storm battered Vermont farm-fields a few miles to the east.
A puff of white smoke appeared beside the citadel, followed by a sound like a cat passing wind; the distant report of a cannon.

Now available to own: Sketchbook Traveler: Hudson Valley

La Chute Falls. Ticonderoga, New York. May 24, 2021. 5:15 PM. Looking west from: 43.749520 x -73.419157

Explore my Quaranteam Dispatches, from April 1-June 8, 2020