Harbor Islands, Lake George, New York

Object Details

Object Essay

A third-generation Hudson River School artist, Horace Wolcott Robbins was accomplished and conservative. Born in Mobile, Alabama, he was raised and educated in Baltimore, where he studied drawing with August Weidenbach, a German landscape painter. In 1860, he opened a studio in New York City, where he had studied painting with James M. Hart. In 1865, he accompanied Frederic E. Church to Jamaica, and then he went to Europe for two years, spending much time in Holland studying Dutch landscape painting of the 17th century. Upon opening a studio in Paris, “he was fortunate enough to receive some instruction from Rousseau.” He also sketched in Switzerland. Back in New York, Robbins was active at the National Academy of Design (full member, 1878) and was especially admired for his watercolors.^{1_{A reliable biographical sketch written when Robbins was only thirty-nine was published by Sheldon, 133–35. See also Groce and Wallace, 539.}}

This painting, simply called Lake George in recent years, is almost certainly the “large picture of ‘Harbor Islands, Lake George,’” that Robbins exhibited at both the National Academy of Design and the Paris World’s Fair in 1878.^{2_{Sheldon, 134.}} The middle stretch of the long slender lake—a distance of some seven miles—is the constricted Narrows. In 1873, S. R. Stoddard described “the beauties of the Narrows . . . the wildest portion of the lake,” and in particular, “the Harbor Islands . . . near the center of the lake. . . . The group is the first of any considerable size north of the Narrows.” A page in a Stoddard photograph album of 1888 suggest that Robbins’s view is from the lower slopes of Black Mountain, southwest across the islands, with the Narrows to the left.^{3_{DeCosta, 24–25; Stoddard, 85–87; Stoddard, Lake George, A Book of Pictures (Troy, N. Y.: Nims & Knight, 1888), 7. I am indebted to Colletta and Walter Sperling for directing my attention to these sources.}}

Robbins continued the tonal tradition of many American landscape painters, such as Asher B. Durand and John F. Kensett. Most of his effort in Harbor Islands, Lake George is expended in distinguishing the spatial planes by tonal gradation. The distant hills, brushed in broad patches, resemble a photographic negative at first glance. Most striking, given the emphasis placed by many American landscapists on large areas of reflecting water (that Thoreau called “sky-water”), is Robbins’s preference for land.

This painting seems to be much influenced by photography and by the taste for the “view” in landscape, a taste born with increased tourism among the American middle class after the Civil War. Trips to the romantic West were impractical for most tourists, so “summer vacations and travel were largely directed toward the accessible. . . —and somewhat ‘wild’—resort regions of the East.”^{4_{O’Brien, 219.}} Robbins is not interested in manipulating the landscape for artistic effects or in recording the wilderness but in rendering the view as a “souvenir” for his prospective patron.

The place of Harbor Islands, Lake George in late Victorian taste is doubly emphasized by its gorgeous original frame, which resembles furniture more than the surround of an imaginary window and whose size actually diminishes the painting’s subject, so that it impresses us as expensive rather than expansive.

William Kloss

Excerpted from Clement E. Conger, et al. Treasures of State: Fine and Decorative Arts in the Diplomatic Reception Rooms of the U.S. Department of State. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1991.