Biography
James McDougal Hart (1828–1901)
James McDougal Hart was born into a family that would become widely known for its artistic ability. James was the brother of William Hart and Julie Hart Beers; this talented trio of siblings eventually formed part of the Hudson River School, taking their subject matter from the American landscape. In an 1892 newspaper article entitled “A Veteran Landscape Artist,” James Hart described his life and artistic training. He proudly noted that he was born at Kilmarnock in Ayrshire, Scotland, and came to the United States as a child. According to the artist, he then received his first professional training while attending the Düsseldorf Academy under the instruction of Johann Schirmir. Schirmir’s artistic theories, which focused on Realism, greatly influenced the young Hart, who transported his teacher’s ideas to American soil when he returned in 1852. Hart settled in Albany, New York, and began teaching in order to make a living. He moved to New York City in 1857, joining the countless artists who migrated to this urban mecca during the nineteenth century.
Hart received a number of accolades early in his career, exhibiting at the National Academy of Design (of which he was Vice-President in 1859), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Boston Athenaeum, and the Paris Exposition of 1867, where his New England landscape was hung among works by the finest American painters, including Frederic Edwin Church, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Asher B. Durand, John Frederick Kensett, George Inness, and Winslow Homer. Hart was noted for his “ability to see and portray the poetry of nature” and for his keen depiction of picturesque scenes, especially those including cattle. Today his works form part of the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the New-York Historical Society, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
“A Veteran Landscape Artist,” The Art Amateur; A Monthly Journal Devoted to Art in the Household 27 (September 1892): 4.
“A Veteran Landscape Artist,” 4.
For a complete list of American works shown at the Paris Exposition of 1867, see the appendix in Carol Troyon, “Innocents Abroad: American Painters at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, Paris,” American Art Journal 16, no. 4 (Autumn, 1884).
From the Albany Evening Journal, quoted in Mark Sullivan, James M. And William Hart, American Landscape Painters (Philadelphia: John F. Warren, 1983), 3.
