Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
John Frederick Kensett
American; 19th-century
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. (2025)