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.

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