Authored by Noah McKee
Jervis McEntee was born July 14, 1828. Very little is known about McEntee’s early life. McEntee comes from the Hudson River School, which was an art movement that reflected romanticism through American landscape paintings. The Metropolitan Museum of Art described the Hudson River School as “America’s first true artistic fraternity” (Avery 2004, par. 1). Of this popular art movement, McEntee is regarded as a lesser-known figure within the Hudson River School, and the art world as a whole (Levine 2015).
McEntee largely worked in New York, and his art was known for his portrayal of the Hudson River Valley. While McEntee loved his chosen profession, he often lamented over the fact that he had not reached the level of acclaim he wanted. The writings of McEntee show the rather melancholy and apprehensive nature of the artist with regards to his dealings in the art world (Schuyler 2012, 111).
While McEntee was a successful artist, he is known by historians and cultural researchers more so for his journals (Levine 2015). The document depicted is page 15 of Jervis McEntee Diaries and Letters: Diary, Volume II, 1874 November 26–1878 December 8. This page was chosen because it depicts the life of an artist in the 1800s. McEntee describes the process of trying to sell one of his paintings and how one has to find the proper channels to sell to someone that has the authority to buy. An interesting note in this page of the journal is that McEntee is describing how he tried to sell his painting without a frame for $125, which equates to roughly $3700, as of March 2023. McEntee was quoted as saying “my pictures accumulate on my hands and there seems no one to buy them,” (McEntee 2018, 4). The desperation to find buyers and frequent economic hardship demonstrated a true passion for the arts as McEntee struggled to provide for himself on art alone. As such, these diaries provide a unique insight into the life of an artist that has little precedent, given that McEntee had 4,500 diary entries (Loll 2004). Jervis McEntee was a successful artist and a prolific writer, capturing the life of an American artist during the Gilded Age. While he did not reach the heights he aspired to in life, his art hangs in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, showing how his perseverance and passion ultimately paid off.
References
Loll, Ellen. 2004. “A Finding Aid to the Jervis McEntee Papers, 1796, 1848-1905, Digitized Collection.” (text) Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 2004. https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/jervis-mcentee-papers-7251.
Avery, Kevin J. 2004. “The Hudson River School, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art. October 2004. https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/hurs/hd_hurs.htm.
Levine, David. 2015. “Jervis McEntee: The Hudson River School’s Forgotten Star.” Hudson Valley Magazine (blog). August 27, 2015. https://hvmag.com/things-to-do/jervis-mcentee-the-hudson-river-schools-forgotten-star/.
McEntee, Jervis. 1991. “Jervis McEntee’s Diary, 1874-1876.” Archives of American Art Journal 31 (1): 2–19. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1557696.
Schuyler, David. 2012. “Sanctified Landscape: Writers, Artists, and the Hudson River Valley, 1820–1909.” 2012. https://web-s-ebscohost-com.jerome.stjohns.edu/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook/bmxlYmtfXzY3MTU5NV9fQU41?sid=26c5ee99-1826-478a-9a66-145c7a04604e@redis&vid=0&format=EB&rid=1.