James Hamilton

1819 - 1878

Biography(b Entrien, nr Belfast, 1819; d San Francisco, 10 March 1878).
American painter of Irish birth. He emigrated to the USA and at the age of 15 arrived in Philadelphia, where he was encouraged to study art by the engraver John Sartain (1808–97). Hamilton had drawing lessons with local teachers and studied from English artists’ manuals including that on oil painting by Samuel Prout; he was also influenced by the English watercolour technique of broad transparent washes. With these stylistic interests and his innate sensitivity to nature, Hamilton evolved a style that tended towards Romantic Impressionism, and he became known as ‘the American Turner’.

The use of watercolour dominated Hamilton’s early career, particularly as the preparatory medium for his designs for book illustration. Most successful were his haunting illustrations of the Arctic, based on the sketches made by the explorer Elisha Kent Kane during his voyages to the Arctic in 1850–51 and 1853–5. Some of the illustrations became the subjects of Hamilton’s major oil paintings, notably The ‘Rescue’ in her Arctic Ice Dock (1852; Seneca Falls, NY, Hist. Soc. Mus.) and Breaking up of an Iceberg in Melville Bay (1852; Healdsburg, CA, I. McKibbin White priv. col.), and inspired such artists as Frederick Edwin Church and William Bradford to make their expeditions to paint polar regions. Although Hamilton enjoyed popular and critical acclaim as an artist during his lifetime, his work was inconsistent; at his best, for instance in Foundering (1863; New York, Brooklyn Mus. A.), he followed his natural inclination to spontaneity and suggestiveness, while the influence of his American contemporaries caused him to produce tighter, more precise lines to which he was less well suited. He died on the first leg of what was to have been a world tour financed by the sale of his paintings in 1875. [Constance Martin. "Hamilton, James (ii)." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 8, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T036394.]

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