Background
Thomas Doughty was born on July 19, 1793 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.
Thomas Doughty was born on July 19, 1793 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.
Doughty taught himself to paint, took some drawing classes, and exhibited his work publicly for the first time in 1816 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
Doughty began work in the leather business at the age of sixteen, and continued in this occupation for some ten years. Then, at the age of twenty-seven, he resolved to pursue painting as a profession. “My mind, ” he wrote, "was firmly fixed; I had acquired a love for the art which no circumstance could unsettle. ”
He realized that the financial prospect was anything but bright at the start, but he was buoyed up by the hope that as he acquired skill and knowledge his worldly circumstances would be bettered. He seems to have had little other training than that afforded by a short term of instruction in sepia drawing. Nor was he mistaken in anticipating economic privations. However, his love for the art, which “no circumstance could unsettle, ” combined with an unquestionable talent and good courage, did at length prevail. His reputation grew, and he was for a time rated as the foremost landscape painter of the famous Hudson River school. This was at the time when the men of 1830 were giving new life to landscape work in France. It is recorded that Doughty worked for a long time in Paris, where he painted some of his best canvases, and he also lived in London for a relatively short period, finding some congenial subjects in the suburbs.
The most prosperous years of his career were the early thirties, when, in 1833, in company with Chester Harding, Francis Alexander, and Alvan Fisher, he held an exceptionally successful exhibition in Boston. He had a studio in that city for several years, and was a regular exhibitor in the annual exhibitions of the Athenaeum.
He also exhibited in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and National Academy of Design. He produced but few pictures, and these met with ready sale. The British minister to the United States paid him $2, 500 for one of his landscapes, a price which was considered notable then. But for some unexplained reason his popularity seems to have waned in his later life, and, toward the end, when he was living in New York, neglect, poverty, and sickness made him very unhappy. His landscapes are rather small, and are usually in a delicate gray tone, the motives being simple river scenes, with the inevitable woody foreground of the period. The most admirable part of a typical Doughty is the sky, which is more subtly observed and more atmospheric in its values than are those of his American contemporaries. He was felicitous in the rendering of silvery effects of light, somewhat akin to those which are associated with the work of Corot, though far less perfect. He found the majority of his subjects along the banks of the Hudson, the Delaware, the Susquehanna, the Seine, and the Thames, being apparently as devoted to river scenery as was Daubigny.
His works are to be seen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Tork City; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; and in many private collections. The two landscapes belonging to the Pennsylvania Academy were shown in 1915 at the Panama-Pacific Exposition, San Francisco.