The Cottage Door

John Frederick Kensett painted this tribute to his friend and fellow National Academy member William Sidney Mount, based on Mount’s 1834 work The Studious Boy (now lost). The painting was owned, for a time, by prominent engraver, publisher, and art collector Samuel P. Avery. Active, rambunctious childhood provided great subject matter in the developing American Art world of the 19th century, and also was a topic written about by Walt Whitman in the years after his time as a schoolteacher.