Jerome B. Thompson : “The Belated Party on Mansfield Mountain” (1858)

Passion vies with reason in this large genre painting by Jerome B. Thompson. As the sun sets over the hills of New England, a party of day trippers linger at the summit of Mansfield Mountain, Vermont’s highest peak. While the three figures in the background are entranced by the view, the three in the foreground observe the passage of time, and the implicit dangers of descending by dark.

The son of an itinerant portrait painter, Thompson took up genre subjects as early as 1848. He became acquainted with the Hudson River School painters Asher B. Durand and Jasper Cropsey during the 1850s, earning a reputation as a specialist in picnicking and harvest scenes. In 1857, a critic for Cosmopolitan Art Journal wrote that “No living artist…catches the lights and shades of American life and humor; and consequently, none is more truly popular. With the true hand of the master, and a taste skilled and trained by much study, he adds that intangible faculty of seizing the most picturesque view of things, and succeeds in producing pictures which literally talk with reminiscences and life. Born and bred on a New-England farm, he has pierced to the very spirit of country realities.”