John Williamson

As a boy, painter John Williamson emigrated from Scotland to Brooklyn, and though he worked in still life and the occasional genre scene, much of his practice focused on the rural landscapes of his adopted New York. Like other painters of the Hudson River School, he painted naturalistic scenes directly from life, and strove to imbue his paintings of the region’s mountains, rivers, and forests with deeper allegorical meaning. His careful compositions, including use of trees as framing devices, draw comparisons to the work of Asher B. Durand, while his lyrical evocation of atmosphere call to mind Luminists Sanford Robinson Gifford and John Frederick Kensett.