John Frederick Kensett holds an important position in mid-nineteenth-century American landscape painting. Highly talented and enormously well-liked by colleagues, he was both a creative and spiritual leader for artists of the second generation Hudson River School. Further, because many of his best works are scenes bathed in a soft poetic light and imparting a sense of contemplative quietude, he is also regarded as one of the most adept of the numerous figures identified with luminism.

Kensett was born in Cheshire, Connecticut, the son of an English immigrant engraver in whose New Haven shop a few years later he received his first instruction in drawing and engraving. In 1829, at age thirteen, he was supporting himself as an apprentice engraver at the shop of Peter Maverick in New York City, but he returned home later that same year upon his father's unexpected death. Back in New York in 1837, he was employed as an engraver of bank notes for Hall, Packard, Cushman and Company. These early experiences in intaglio graphics had substantial effect on young Kensett's developing style; later his paintings would be noted for their exceptional draftsmanship, precise detail, and pictorial accuracy.

In the late 1830s Kensett attempted, with good result, his first oils. He was greatly encouraged in 1838 when one of his works was accepted for exhibition at the National Academy of Design. At the Academy he befriended several prominent first generation Hudson River painters. With three of their number -- Asher B. Durand, John W. Casilear, and Thomas P. Rossiter -- he set out on a study and painting tour of Europe in 1840. Kensett remained in Europe until 1847, traveling in Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. He was particularly impressed on seeing English School landscape painting and in France by the arcadian country views of Claude Lorrain.

Upon his return to the United States he took a studio in a New York University building on Washington Square and he began making trips to paint the New England mountains and the Atlantic coast. His work met with swift and remarkable success. In 1848, only a year back from Europe, he was elected an associate of the National Academy and just a year after that elevated to full membership. In 1859 President Buchanan named Kensett one of three advisors for the decoration of the U.S. Capitol, an appointment that was suspended at the onset of the Civil War. In 1870 he was a founding trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Many Hudson River School painters from both first and second generations --Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, and Frederic E. Church, for example -- were caught up in the vastness, grandeur, and terrible power of nature; accordingly their better known works are grandiose scenic panoramas. Kensett on the other hand shared much with his older mentor Durand in the appreciation of nature close up, perceived in terms of human scale, readily approachable: nature to marvel and enjoy for its manifold intricacy rather than its breathtaking vista. (Kensett traveled extensively to the West in the 1860s. He visited the Rocky Mountains, but found them too immense and imposing and therefore unsuited to his more personal and intimate landscape sensitivities.) Consequently, Kensett produced not only conventional landscape overviews but also many small oils where the viewer feels enclosed by a private nature hideaway, where one becomes aware of the nuances of sunlight filtering through tree branches, striking colors, textures, and shapes of subtle yet infinite variety. Such a painting is View at Conway, a tranquil wooded spot in east central New Hampshire near the White Mountains and the Maine border. The piece is believed to have been painted about 1850. In 1851 it was purchased by the American Art Union to be awarded as a prize in the Union's periodic lottery for its membership.

Unfortunately, Kenseff did not have a strong physical constitution. After a vain attempt to save the drowning wife of artist-friend Vincent Colyer in Darien, Connecticut, he contracted pneumonia and died of heart failure in 1872. He was only fifty-six years old and his death was widely mourned. For the estate settlement a short while later, the contents of his studio, about five hundred paintings and drawings, were auctioned for $136,312 -- an extraordinary sum for the time, which additionally attests to the high regard that his contemporaries held for him and his work.