John William Casilear was one of the pioneers of landscape painting in the American style of painting. He honed his skills in the European method but adapted it to American style later on.

Early Life

John William Casilear (1811-1893) was born in New York City, New York, USA, in 1811. He received professional training under the well-known engraver called Letter Maverick in the 1820s. Thereafter he was trained under engraver, Asher Durand, who was a famous painter himself. Their profession as engraver brought them together in the 1830s and they became friends. Later, his friendship with Thomas Cole, who was a popular landscape painter of that time, attracted his attention to painting.

As his interest in landscape painting grew stronger, his association and friendship with other noted painters of that era provided the impetus to his growing desire to develop landscape painting. He along with the other popular painter’s friends, such as Asher Durand, John Frederick Kensett and Thomas Prichard Rossiter went on a trip to Europe in search of new exciting locales as subjects of painting.

During his study tour of Europe with his friends, who are also his associate painters, he studied and copied the artworks of old masters of Europe, such as Claude Lorrain, and made sketches of some of the most beautiful natural locations in Europe. After his return from Europe in 1843, he restarted his profession as an engraver.

In 1854, he opened his own studio in New York and started painting as a full-time profession. Casilear started submitting his engravings to the National Academy of Design Exhibition in 1832 and, in the subsequent year, he was elected an associate on the Academy. He was able to acquire full academic status in 1851.

He created his own style of painting which later came to be known as the Hudson River School by the middle of the 1850s.

Hudson River School

Hudson River school is referred to as the foremost representative of nineteenth-century American landscape painting. It was a tussle between the old and new styles of painting landscape. The old represented by National Academy of Design with many of its painters following a self-taught monopolistic attitude of painting landscapes. The younger men, returning home from European art schools, worked more with figure, employing the then fashionable trends of bold impressionism. The earlier school was later named as New York School or sometimes even American or even Native. The newer school came to be well known among the art-loving public as the Hudson River School.

The name came about as many of the academics of this school of art, Asher B. Durand, Frederic E. Church, Albert Bierstadt, Sanford R. Gifford, T. Worthington Whittredge, Jasper F. Cropsey, among others had worked and socialized in New York, Hudson’s port city. They had painted the river, its shores with varying frequency. Their style is considered sympathetic to that of artist Thomas Cole. Hudson River, then was a very popular sketching ground for many painters at that time.

The competition between the old and the new schools turned bitter at many occasions. The new upstarts, who, having studied the foreign style of painting, were not considered “American” enough by the Academy painters. They were called names such as “American society of Munich Artists”.

Many art critics appear to have mentioned the quarrels over preferential hanging policies etc.. that appears to have captured the public’s attention at that time. Over time some painters converted from the old school to the new school.

This marked the beginning of the popularity of this new style of painting. The name itself found wide use by 1879 where it was first recorded in the annual National Academy exhibition, written by Earl Shinn.

Casilear along with many famous painters of the American landscape such as George Inness, John Kensett, Thomas Rossiter among others formed the second generation of the Hudson River School of landscapes.

By then he had completely discarded his engraving career and had taken up full-time painting initially and thereafter, painting landscapes as his profession.

His painting talent came to be widely recognised and appreciated by the painter fraternity.

His paintings brought him both name and fame and fortune as some of the leading collectors of arts and paints started purchasing them.

He went to Europe again in 1857, especially to nature-rich Switzerland, where he painted nature in some of the impressive locations.

Thereafter, he started travelling to his favourite sites in Europe regularly and the length and breadth of his own country during the 1860s and 1870s looking for some of his favourite locations as subjects for his painting.

He kept painting beautiful nature’s locations until the early 1890s and finally breathed his last in the year 1893.

Some of his famous works of art are, ‘View on Lake Geurde’, ‘Bridge Over Rocky Rocky Stream’, ‘Rocks Along a Lake Shore’, ‘Lake George’, Alpine Lake’, ‘Moonrise on the Coast’, etc.