Known as "the Father of the White Mountain School," Benjamin Champney was among the earliest and most prolific of the many artists who depicted New Hampshire's mountain scenery. He was born in New Ipswich, New Hampshire, and began his career as an apprentice in the lithography firm of Thomas Moore in Boston. At the age of twenty-two, he made his first trip to the White Mountains in the company of Robert Cooke (c. 1810-1843), a friend and fellow artist who had provided some earlier instruction in drawing.

Acting on the advice of Washington Allston (1779-1843), Champney in 1841 went to Europe, where he remained for much of the decade, sketching and gathering material for a large panorama of the Rhine. Although financially unrewarding, Champney's panorama established the artist as a talented figure in the field of landscape painting. Champney returned to New Hampshire in 1849, and from about 1850 onward he made a specialty of White Mountain scenery. Through his efforts, numerous artists in Boston and New York discovered the region. For many years, Champney maintained a summer studio at North Conway, which served as a rendezvous for painters visiting from all over the Northeast.

Completed in 1874, Picnic on "Artist's Ledge" overlooking Conway Meadows, NH is a familiar Champney mountainscape enlivened by vignettes of group recreation. A warm, atmospheric light envelops the mountains and vale in the distance. On a granite ridge in the foreground, a party of sightseers has paused to engage in various activities. Lunch pails resting on the rock indicate that a picnic is in the offing. To the right, a pair of young people prepares lunch while others appear to be gathering berries or perhaps flowers; on the left, a standing couple and a seated boy gaze out over the meadows. The man carries a folded easel, identifying him as an artist and providing the viewer with a clue as to the location of this well-known site near North Conway. Champney's decision to include such a figure is at least partly self-referential, and at one time, it was believed that the individuals in this painting represented the artist and his family.

Ironically, by the mid-1870s images of the White Mountains had become somewhat hackneyed. No longer the sublime wilderness depicted by Thomas Cole (q.v.) some fifty years earlier, the region had instead become an easily accessible summer resort whose scenery had become fully domesticated in the minds of visitors. Iconic images of Mount Washington and Mount Chocorua were losing currency at art exhibitions, and for a painter to remain viable in the White Mountains, it became increasingly important to focus, not on spectacular views, but on the sensory charms of the place.(1)

Champney recognized the need to change emphasis, and in Picnic on "Artist's Ledge" he highlights the pleasant dreaminess of an afternoon spent in what White Mountain panegyrist Thomas Starr King called "a suburb of Paradise." As early as 1860 King compared the North Conway area to the Italian Campagna, asserting that both shared the same bliss-inducing and reposeful quality.(2) Champney himself had visited Italy while touring Europe in the 1840s and was clearly inclined to agree. In his painting, the Italian referents are unmistakable: the blue-gold skies and picturesque pines closely parallel those depicted in Italian scenes by such artists as George Loring Brown (1814-1889) and George Inness (1825-1894).(3) As is frequent in those artists' renditions of the Italian landscape, a mood of warm languidness characterizes Picnic on "Artist's Ledge." The view is panoramic, yet the sense of the sublime is largely absent. In place of worshipful awe, Champney substitutes the pleasures of sunlight, sultry air, scenic beauty, and simple recreation.

The original owner of Picnic on "Artist's Ledge" remains unknown. The painting has a history on the Boston art market, however, and it appeared there at least once in the 1930s before it was purchased by Henry Melville Fuller in the early 1960s. Fuller bequeathed the painting to the Currier Museum of Art in 2002.

VSD

NOTES

1. Along similar lines, Champney and other artists in the White Mountains had begun to depict more "ordinary" and less spectacular subjects, generally choosing to emphasize views closer at hand rather than grand panoramas. This shift began as a reaction by younger painters against the Hudson River School aesthetic of Thomas Cole and his followers. Champney, who belonged to the generation of Cole, was somewhat reluctant to cast his lot with the newer mode, as can be seen in his many compositions that attempt to combine modest subject matter with expansive vistas. See Hilary Anderson, Donna Bell Garvin, Donald D. Keyes, and Charles O. Vogel, "Beauty Caught and Kept: Benjamin Champney in the White Mountains," Historical New Hampshire 51, nos. 3-4 (Fall-Winter 1996): 120-121.

2. See Thomas Starr King, The White Hills; Their Legends, Landscape, and Poetry (Boston: Crosby, Nichols and Company, 1860), pp. 154-155.

3. Champney also painted scenes of the Italian Campagna. One example is the Currier's Roman Landscape, painted in 1846. At the Boston Athenaeum in 1847, Champney exhibited a painting entitled Morning on the Campagna. A View Taken from the Garden of the Villa Pamfilli Doria, near Rome. See Robert F. Perkins Jr. and William J. Gavin III, eds., The Boston Athenaeum Art Exhibition Index 1827-1874 (Boston: The Library of the Boston Athenaeum, 1980), p. 32.


REFERENCES

Hilary Anderson, Donna Bell Garvin, Donald D. Keyes, and Charles O. Vogel. "Beauty Caught and Kept: Benjamin Champney in the White Mountains." Historical New Hampshire 51, nos. 3-4 (Fall-Winter 1996).

Benjamin Champney. Sixty Years' Memories of Art and Artists. Woburn, MA: privately printed, 1900.

William G. Hennessy and Frederic A. Sharf. "Benjamin Champney and the American Barbizon, 1850-1857." Antiques LXXXIV, no. 5 (November 1963): 566-569.

Thomas Starr King. The White Hills; Their Legends, Landscape, and Poetry. Boston: Crosby, Nichols and Company, 1860.