Charles F. Blauvelt was an important genre and portrait painter in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Judging from both the frequency and the empathy with which he painted immigrant subjects, especially in the 1850s, one might suppose that he was an immigrant himself. But he was born and reared in New York City. On the other hand, New York was the main portal through which approximately 4,000,000 immigrants entered the United States in the two decades between 1840 and 1860. Immigrants and their immediate descendants accounted for a large portion of America's phenomenal population increase during that same period, from 17,000,000 to 31,000,000. The greatest growth and the greatest immigrant settlement took place in the larger cities. New York's population, for example, quadrupled, jumping from just over 300,000 persons to 1,250,000 at the onset of the Civil War.

For Blauvelt, the stream of newcomers was a picturesque cavalcade of representative human types and cultures. It was also a story of patience, tribulation, and courage as many of the arrivals from foreign lands, impoverished and incapable of speaking English, endeavored to get about in their adopted country. Blauvelt's immigrant narratives fall chiefly into two thematic categories: (1) asking for directions and (2) a family's interminable waiting for transportation at a dock or depot, usually surrounded by their meager possessions. The Hunter Museum's small oil, The Immigrants, of c. 1850, is obviously in the latter group.

Blauvelt's rendering style is finely drafted and smoothly painted, while his genre subjectively tends to the sentimental -- characteristics he probably learned from his principal instructor, Charles Loring Elliot. In The Immigrants (which by their physical appearance have been sometimes identified as Dutch) the sober-faced young mother looks directly out of the picture to make eye contact with the viewer. She seems to wonder if the viewer might be the person for whom the family has waited. (Or, in any case, she arouses sympathy.) The dramatically lighted woman sits resolutely, holding an infant to her bosom. Like a domestic icon, the motif is reminiscent of the Madonna and Child theme in religious art. Another small child, seated nearby, looks up inquiringly at the mother and points outward, again toward the viewer. The composition is simple, but poses and properties are carefully arranged so as to lead the eye to the mother's embrace. The angle of the bale resting diagonally at the right is continued in the reclining position of the infant. The angle of a second bale, partially hidden and between the older child and the mother, similarly is continued by the woman's left arm. The four central figures together also form a pyramidal grouping, an often used pictorial device to create a sense of monumentality and stability.

The artist was active in his native New York City from 1847 to 1862. In 1859 he was elected to full membership in the National Academy of Design, and he was a frequent participant in Academy exhibitions. He worked in Philadelphia from 1862 to '67, and there in 1864 was elected to membership in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He returned to New York in '67 and two years after moved to the adjacent city of Yonkers. In 1878 Blauvelt joined the faculty as assistant professor in the art department at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. He died in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1900.