Thomas Doughty

American (1793-1856)

Born in Philadelphia in 1793, Hudson River School artist Thomas Doughty was one of the first American artists devoted to landscape painting and is known for his quiet, atmospheric renderings of rivers and mountains in Pennsylvania, New York, the Hudson River Valley, and New England.

Encouraged by Thomas Sully, Doughty painted the scenery around Philadelphia where he learned to master the effects of light and shade and use of color. Doughty was elected into membership at the National Academy of Design and exhibited at the National Academy, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and at the Boston Athenaeum. One of the first artists of his time to reproduce his work as lithographs, Doughty published a selection of these works for a journal entitled the Cabinet of Natural History and American Rural Sports. 

Doughty’s works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Corcoran Gallery, Peabody Institute, Shelburne Museum, Detroit Institute of Art, Newark Museum, and Harvard University.