Glimpses from the Forest

Originally listed in Daniel Huntington's account book as "A Look out from the Woods," this painting demonstrates the artist's early interest in landscape painting, which he would largely abandon during the later 1850s for a distinguished career in portraiture. Such pristine forest was increasingly rare in the northeast during mid-century as Americans' voracious need for lumber, farmland, and pastures rapidly stripped the area of its old-growth trees. Huntington's landscape, like his genre paintings in Suydam's collection, depicts a bygone moment in America, rather than the treeless shorelines of Suydam's own contemporary views.