Jervis McEntee Paints the View (c:1863)

As a boy growing up in Rondout, Jervis McEntee would climb up to the attic and pretend it was an artist's studio. His father, James, an axeman and surveyor on the Erie Canal before becoming resident engineer for the Delaware and Hudson, seems to have been a practical man keen for any new challenge: coal mining, hotel-keeping, ship captaining, railroad building, farming. The younger McEntee, under the influence of America's new painters of nature, became the student of Frederic Edwin Church and by 1855 had his own showing in New York City in the famous Studio Building.

By 1858, McEntee and his new wife had commissioned Calvert Vaux, an architect recently arrived from England, to build a studio house next to his father's house on Chestnut Street in Rondout. For the rest of their lives, the McEntees would spend much of the winter in the Studio Building and week-ends and summers at the family "compound" in Rondout, often going for long walks in the environs of Kingston and the Rondout Creek. The undated painting shown above, probably from about 1863, is titled "Sunset over the Catskills from My Studio."

Another notable Kingston painter was John Vanderlyn , a French-trained artist whose education was financed by Aaron Burr. Many of Vanderlyn's paintings can be seen in the Senate House Museum .