Summer Day on Conesus Lake
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
24 1/8 x 36 3/8 in. (61.3 x 92.4 cm)
Classification
Painting
Culture
American
Department
The American Wing
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Bequest of Collis P. Huntington, 1900
Accession Number
25.110.5
Tags
Art Historical Context
John Frederick Kensett's *Summer Day on Conesus Lake* (1870) invites visitors into a serene slice of 19th-century American paradise. This oil on canvas, measuring 24 1/8 x 36 3/8 inches, depicts the calm waters of Conesus Lake in New York's Finger Lakes region, dotted with boats under a luminous summer sky. Painted at the height of the Hudson River School's influence, it reflects a post-Civil War yearning for nature's tranquility amid rapid industrialization. Kensett, a master of Luminism—a style emphasizing ethereal light and atmospheric effects—employed meticulous glazes and subtle tonal sh...
About the Artist
John Frederick Kensett · 1816–1872
John Frederick Kensett (1816–1872) was one of the most admired American landscape painters of the nineteenth century, a central figure of the Hudson River School whose late work pioneered the atmospheric, light-saturated style now known as Luminism. Born in Cheshire, Connecticut, into a family of engravers, Kensett learned the craft of engraving in his youth, a discipline that gave him an early tr...