Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
John Frederick Kensett
American; 19th-century
New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art
86%
Sunset on the Sea. 1872. Oil on canvas
Kensett's late seascapes tend to be worse than his earlier landscapes because, by way of their simplicity, they cheat to get at the effects which his other paintings win fair and square. Not so for this painting, whose slightly sloped horizon, buried setting sun, and excruciatingly rendered waves imbue it with just enough representation to make its eventual lapse into pure color and form seem a feat. But then, it's not a lapse into abstractness, but rather a tryst with it that's abandoned, ultimately, in favor of a marriage to depth and illusion. What lingers in this painting is the fact of that horizon as not just a beautiful line, but as an ungraspable line off in the distance. Everything in this painting is right on the surface of the canvas, but everything is also — and even more so — impossibly far away. (TFS, 2025)
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
86%
View on the Upper Mississippi. 1855. Oil on canvas
The hardness of Kensett's surface — look at how impermeable that water is! look at how far back the sky goes even though it's also right the fuck up front on the picture plane! — belies how capaciously he paints. You could fit ocean liners in all the space he fosters by bounding those in-reaching mountains at bottom with the flat river, but on all their other sides with nothing. The orb of emptiness which this creates, absorbing every inch of the painting from just above that first repoussoir-triangle of trees all the way out to the horizon and back around to the crop of brown flotsam at bottom right, is simultaneously sliced in half and infinitely expanded by the endless water's top. And despite this commanding bigness to everything that isn't pictorially there, there's also a remarkable literalness to the painted surface: the bits of slight impasto that make up the horizontal bands of rippling water define Kensett's illusion, but are also disquietingly extensions into the real world outside the image. (TFS, 2025)
New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art
75%
Lake George. 1872. Oil on canvas
The compositional point of this picture is to make that large and ungainly wedge of lake that's the foreground into, simultaneously, a literal and a fictive surface. In fact this tends to be Kensett's MO in general: offer up an image that begs to join a huge part of itself to the picture plane, but that always ends up falling away into illusion. The way the hills collapse backwards into each other, the repoussoir of rocks and twigs at right, the sketchy rendering of the sky against the glassy top of the water — all of this contributes both to removing that swath of blue from the reality of the picture at the same time as it's fixed firmly in illusionistic space. Kensett's fast handling of the paint, however, does this artwork no favors — he's better when he's more finished. (TFS, 2025)
New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art
67%
Sunset Sky. 1872. Oil on canvas
It’s easy to get wrapped up in the proto-modernist appearance of Kensett’s final seascapes — they can look sort of like maritime Newmans — and say that these paintings are radical departures. But in fact, they accomplish much the same thing that many of the earlier paintings do, and they do so through less subtle means. Namely, they give over an enormous swath of the image to a large, undifferentiated plane that ought, it seems, to approach simultaneity with the picture plane, but by dint of the way it’s been rendered (usually there are wisps of paint that hover just on its surface) ultimately refuses to. Here, it’s the creamy oceantop, through which you can even see the weave of the canvas. The effect is that the picture, despite its immediate appearance of flatness, pushes ever further and ever more paradoxically into depth towards that immaculate line of horizon. What makes this painting worse than some of the earlier, more explicitly realistic landscapes is that its dalliance with (and ultimate rejection of) the picture plane seems that much more easily won since it didn’t have to work through much of the stuff of representation to get where it gets. (TFS, 2025)