This landscape came into the collection with the title An Inlet of Long Island Sound. The setting has recently been identified as Almy’s Pond, near Newport, Rhode Island. This low-lying area of the Rhode Island coast, with its rolling hills and salt marshes, was a popular site with American artists at mid-century and was painted by Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904) and William Trost Richards (1833-1905) as well as Kensett. The numerous landscapes of the Newport vicinity listed in the sales catalogue of his estate indicate that Kensett often worked in the area. The museum’s painting may be one of the three Almy’s Pond scenes of similar size sold at auction in 1873 (New York, Association Hall, The Collection of Over Five Hundred Paintings and Studies by the Late John E. Kensett, nos. 366, 454, 559; another painting of the same subject and similar size believed to be one of these three is in the Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago). A very similar landscape painted around 1860 from the same vantage point that recently appeared on the art market (see Related Work) suggests that the museum’s canvas was painted about the same time. In the museum’s painting Kensett viewed the pond, which once was an inlet of the Rhode Island Sound, looking toward the nearby sound, indicated by the large sailboats in the distance. The topography well suited Kensett’s temperament for serene, open landscapes. The museum’s painting typifies the artist’s mature luminist images of the 1860s. It is a tranquil view of nature on a sunny day with a clear, almost cloudless sky dominating the horizontal composition. Little activity occurs. The cattle grazing do not disturb the harmony of the composition, allowing the viewer to attain a transcendental unity with nature; even Kensett’s thin, smooth brushwork keeps from intruding upon the illusion of contact with nature.

The art of the early Federal period did not greatly differ from that of the late colonial era. Portraits dominated the small field of painting. Victories on land and at sea in the War of 1812 brought the fledgling democracy greater confidence and new national pride. By 1829, when Andrew Jackson assumed the presidency, the foundations for an independent culture were securely laid. The philosopher-poet Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed the mood of the country in 1837: “our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close.” The following decades would bring a swell of artistic creativity, focused on native themes that extolled the seemingly limitless bounty of the New World.
Portraiture, and to a lesser extent history painting, continued to occupy American artists, but increasing numbers turned to views of the local countryside and its inhabitants. Although the industrial revolution only began in the United States after the War of 1812, the following three decades witnessed economic changes, especially in the north, that significantly affected working conditions, family structure, and even religion. Paintings illustrated American virtues like ingenuity and industry as well as the pleasures of country life. The new taste for genre pictures—scenes of ordinary people involved in everyday activities—seemed ideally suited to the egalitarian attitude of the Jacksonian era.
This period also saw the rise of the country’s first truly national school of landscape painting, ultimately known as the Hudson River school. Its earliest, best-known exponent, Thomas Cole, sometimes painted romantic literary subjects in European settings, but his dramatic depictions of the American wilderness helped spur the popularity of American views. As the country developed, paintings of uninhabited wilderness were replaced by views of farms, towns, and factories, but American artists retained their sense of awe about the land.

• About the Era.
• Moure, Nancy Dustin Wall.  Pertaining to the Sea.  Los Angeles:  Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1976.
• Driscoll, John Paul; John K. Howat.  John Frederick Kensett:  An American Master.  New York:  W. W. Norton & Company, 1985.
• Fort, Ilene Susan and Michael Quick.  American Art:  a Catalogue of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Collection.  Los Angeles:  Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991.