Louis Rémy Mignot

Multi-faceted landscape painter embracing styles of both realism and aestheticism to capture transient moments.

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I. Biography

The career of Louis Rémy Mignot defies easy categorization. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, Mignot studied painting in the Netherlands, receiving instruction from Andreas Schelfhout. Upon his return from Europe, he settled in New York City, living among artists in the Tenth Street Studio Building, and began his professional career in the fold of the Hudson River School. While living in New York, Mignot traveled throughout Upstate New York, the White Mountains, and the Adirondacks as well as to Central and South America with Frederic E. Church. With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Mignot moved to London, where he was exposed to European aestheticism and spent the rest of his life traveling between Paris, Switzerland, and London, painting the landscapes of his new surroundings and the scenery of his past from memory.

During his training in the Netherlands, Mignot gained a strong understanding of compositional frameworks and systems of perspective that continued to guide his artistic practice over the course of his career. After returning to America, he immersed himself in the natural landscapes of the greater New York region, devoting attention to studying the light, color, and atmosphere of these vistas. Celebrated for his delicate use of color and depiction of space, Mignot was held up as the equal to Church himself. After the pair’s South American sojourn, a critic summarized the prevailing feeling that “Mignot has fearlessly entered on a race with Church…It may yet be ‘neck and neck.’”¹

The mutability of place that defined Mignot’s life and career also forms a significant theme in his work. Mignot’s boundless imagination led him to mix real and fantastic elements into romantic, ethereal visions. He experimented with composite landscapes after journeying to Panama and Ecuador with Church in 1857, creating a group of paintings that combined the most dramatic elements of different South American sites. The technique recurred in the last eight years of his life, when the Civil War forced the Southerner into European exile. The move pushed his work in new directions: Mignot befriended James McNeill Whistler in Paris and became one of the only members of the Hudson River School to embrace the nascent aestheticism of Europe. His late work bears a mysterious, dramatic force heightened by his increasingly atmospheric technique. 

Despite the fame that he achieved during his lifetime, Mignot inherited varying posthumous critical fortunes. This is now attributed to the premature nature of his death, just four months before his fortieth birthday, and to the historical complexities surrounding his peripatetic career. The major retrospective of his life and work mounted by the North Carolina Museum of Art in 1996, which was also installed at the National Academy of Design Museum, restored Mignot to his rightful place in the canon of nineteenth-century art.

During his tenure in New York, Mignot sat on the admissions committee of the Century Association, helped to form the Artists’ Fund Society, and was named an academician of the National Academy of Design. In Europe, he exhibited at the British Institution, the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and the Paris Salon. His paintings are now in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Newark Museum, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the National Academy of Design Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

II. Chronology

• 1831 Born on February 3 in Charleston, South Carolina
• 1848 Receives artistic training in the Netherlands at the Academy of Fine Arts at The Hague, taking drawing classes and receiving painting instruction in Andreas Schelfhout’s studio
• 1851 Collaborates with Eastman Johnson while Johnson is visiting The Hague
• 1854 Leaves Europe and moved to New York City
• 1855 Sketches and paints throughout his travels to Upstate New York and the Catskills
• 1857 Journeys to Panama and Ecuador with Frederic Church 
• Moves into the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York, along with Church, Sanford Gifford, Régis Gignoux
• 1858 Participates in the Artists’ Excursion over the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, sketches and admires scenery on the journey with John Whetten Ehninger, Edward Hicks, Thomas Prichard Rossiter, and Gignoux
• 1860 Marries Zairah C. Harris in Baltimore, Maryland
• Sketches in Maryland and along the Passaic River, New Jersey during the summer 
• 1861 In late summer and into the fall, travels throughout northern New England, sketching Lake George and the White Mountains
• 1862 Spends early summer in western New York, making studies of Niagara Falls
• Left America on July 26, moving to Great Britain with his wife, son, and mother-in-law
• 1863 Debuts at the Royal Academy of Arts in London where he exhibits eight times between 1863 and 1871
• 1867 Begins dividing his time between England and France, spending an increased amount of time in Paris where he befriends James McNeill Whistler and exhibits in the Exposition Universelle
• 1868–69 Travels to Switzerland in the summers
• 1870 Makes his first and only appearance exhibiting in the Paris Salon
• Leaves Paris with the onset of the Franco-Prussian War, contracts smallpox and dies in Brighton soon after his return
• 1876 Zairah Mignot organizes a memorial exhibition of Mignot’s works at 25 Old Bond Street in London and the Masonic Rooms of the Pavilion in Brighton

III. Collections

• Art Museum, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
• Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME
• Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY
• Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH
• Century Association, New York, NY
• Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI
• Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA
• Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
• Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Museum of Art, Utica NY
• National Academy of Design, New York, NY
• Newark Museum, Newark, NJ
• New York Public Library, Robert L. Stuart Collection, New York, NY
• North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC

IV. Exhibitions

• 1853 National Academy of Design, New York, NY (also in 1856, 1857, 1858, 1859, 1860, 1861, 1867, 1870)
• 1856 Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA (also in 1857, 1858, 1859, 1861, 1863, 1864)
• 1857 Washington Art Association, Washington D.C. (also 1859)
• Maryland Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts, Baltimore, MD
• 1858 Young Men’s Association, Troy, NY (also 1859, 1862)
• Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, MD (also 1868)
• 1859 Century Association, New York, NY
• Boston Athenaeum, Boston, MA (also 1860, 1861, 1862)
• Allston Association, Baltimore, MD (also 1860)
• 1860 Artists’ Fund Society of New York, New York, NY (also 1861, 1862, 1863, 1864, 1865, 1867)
• 1861 Young Men’s Association, American Hall, Buffalo, NY
• 1862 Brooklyn Art Association, Brooklyn, NY (also 1863, 1864, 1868, 1872, 1873)
•  International Exhibition, London, England
• 1863 Fine Art Institute, Derby Galleries, New York, NY
•  British Institution, London, England (also 1864, 1865, 1866, 1867)
•  Royal Academy of Arts, London, England (also 1865, 1866, 1867, 1870, 1871)
• Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts, Glasgow, Scotland (also 1865, 1867)
• 1864 Bristol Academy for the Promotion of the Fine Arts, Bristol, England
• Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, Buffalo, NY
• 1865 Art Association of Montreal, Quebec, Canada
• 1867 Exposition Universelle, Paris, France
• 1870 Salon, Paris, France
• Yale School of Fine Arts, New Haven, CT
• 1876 25 Old Bond Street, London, England
• Masonic Rooms of the Pavilion, Brighton, England
• 1996–97 North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC and National Academy of Design, New York, NY
• 2012 Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Catskill, NY

V. Memberships

• Century Association, Member 1857, Admissions Committee 1861
• National Academy of Design, Associate Academician 1858, Full Academician 1859
• Artists’ Fund Society of New York, Founding Member 1859, Committee of Inquiry 1861

VI. Notes

1. “Topics Astir: National Academy of Design,” Home Journal, June 13, 1867, 2.

VII. Suggested Resources

• American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987.
• Manthorne, Katherine E. Tropical Renaissance: North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839-1879. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989.
• Manthorne, Katherine E. Worlds Between: Landscapes of Louis Rémy Mignot. Thomas Cole National Historic Site, 2012.
• Manthorne, Katherine E., and John W. Coffey. The Landscapes of Louis Rémy Mignot: A Southern Painter Abroad. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996.
• Novak, Barbara. Next to Nature: Landscape Paintings from the National Academy of Design. National Academy of Design, 1980.