James McDougal Hart
James McDougal Hart
1828 - 1901
American painter of Scottish birth. He moved to America with his family in 1831. He grew up in Albany, NY, where he and his older brother, William Hart (1823–94), also a painter, were apprenticed to a coachmaker as decorators. He produced some amateur portraits during this time and cultivated his natural talent for landscape painting. In 1850 he went to study in Munich and Düsseldorf, where his principal teacher was JOHANN WILHELM SCHIRMER; in 1853 he returned to Albany, exhibiting for the first time at the NATIONAL ACADEMY OF DESIGN, New York. By 1857 he had established himself in New York, and he lived there for the rest of his life.
Hart rose to prominence during the 1860s and 1870s, when there was a vogue for his landscapes and pastoral cattle scenes. His landscapes are invariably endowed with tranquillity and a romantically poetic sense of time and place, as in On the Lake Shore (1864; Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.) and Pastoral Scene (1876; New York, Met.). Such pastoral cattle scenes as Threatening Weather (1875; Boston, MA, priv. col.) attribute identifiable human emotions to the bovine creatures (see also From Shifting Shade), frequently hinting at the moralistic themes that were then popular. In 1858 Hart was elected an associate and in 1859 a full member of the National Academy of Design. He subsequently served for three years as its vice-president and, among other places, exhibited there regularly from 1853 to 1900. His sister, Julie Hart Beers Kempson (1835–1913), was a professional landscape painter. [John Driscoll. "Hart, James McDougal." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 8, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T036775.]
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