[From the catalogue-in-progress for “Landscapes & Livestock,” a loan exhibition for Agincourt Homecoming in the Fall of 2015]

Pictor Ignotus [dates unknown]

Hudson River Landscape

19th century

oil on canvas on board / 5 inches by 7 inches

As 19th century westward expansion tumbled across the Appalachians, Americans confronted the majesty of an unspoiled landscape. The Hudson River School— artists like Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt and George Innes—celebrated that understanding of our national manifest destiny with enormous canvases. Bierstadt’s “Among the Sierra Nevada” alone is six feet tall and ten feet wide. This miniature landscape, on the other hand, captures the school’s spirit in just thirty-five square inches.

This was one of the dozen paintings that constituted the initial GAR exhibition of 1912, lent by Clinton and Julia Warren. He was president of the Farmers, Mechanics & Merchants Bank. The Warrens’ home on East Agincourt Avenue has been replaced by apartments.