KENSETT, JOHN FREDERICK

born March 22, 1816, Cheshire, Conn., U.S. died Dec. 14, 1872, New York, N.Y. American landscape painter, the leader of the second generation of the Hudson River school. Kensett was trained as an engraver by his father, Thomas Kensett, and his uncle, Alfred Daggett, a bank-note engraver. In 1838 Kensett went to New York City to work for a bank-note company. Two years later, together with Asher B. Durand, John W. Casilear, and Thomas P. Rossiter, he went to Europe, where, in the manner of artists of his generation, he received his artistic education by traveling, looking at pictures, and visiting leading artists in their studios. When Kensett returned to the United States in 1847, he found his reputation had been established through paintings he had sent from Europe. In 1849 he was elected to the National Academy of Design and was a founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Though Kensett's painting never lost the engraver's sense of draughtsmanship, his major concern was the depiction of light, using colour values to render minute gradations in intensity (e.g., Storm over Lake George, 1870; Brooklyn Museum). His palette was low in key, and much of his work has a silvery paleness. Whether his painting is of the White or Green mountains, the Catskills, or a lonely strip of Atlantic shoreline, the sense of locale is conveyed through the careful observation of detail and a deep sensitivity to the nuances of atmosphere.