Jervis McEntee was one of the most sensitive artists of the Hudson River School, praised for his ability to invest landscape with understated emotion. Henry Tuckerman wrote that “McEntee is fond of rendering landscape subservient to, or identical with, a special sentiment”—a sentiment that McEntee himself described as a “preference for the soberer phases of Nature.”

Autumn, with its hues of loss and maturity, seemed to bend itself to McEntee’s brush, and he became known for his “sober” evocations of the season. This was his greatest gift as an artist: his sensitivity to nature’s transformations, his receptivity to the melancholy season that compelled his creativity. From the precise outlines of his early paintings to the impressionistic atmospherics of his late work, McEntee consistently adapted his painterly task to the demands of the landscape in sight. The virtuosity of his technique is apparent in his oeuvre as a whole; his force is in the strength of hand with which he restrains himself.

McEntee’s technique was a product of great talent fostered by strong training. In 1851, the young artist studied under the leading painter of the day, Frederic Church, who would remain his friend throughout the remainder of his life. By 1857, McEntee had given himself over to his art, settling in New York’s Tenth Street Studio Building alongside Sanford R. Gifford and John F. Kensett, who were his closest artistic kin. Despite his tendency toward melancholia, he and his wife became amicable hosts to some of the finest writers and artists of the time. As McEntee’s association with the Hudson River School grew, he was seen as one of its most original talents.

McEntee was an academician of the National Academy of Design and exhibited at the Brooklyn Art Association, the Boston Art Club, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Art Institute of Chicago. His work was also selected for the Paris Exposition of 1867 and was featured at the Royal Academy of London. His paintings are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.