Joshua Shaw

American landscape painting was in its infancy in the first two decades of the nineteenth century; there were few artists and patrons interested in the subject. Although British by birth and primarily self-taught, Joshua Shaw (1776–1860) was a key figure in the development of a native landscape tradition. Born in Bellingborough, in rural northeast England, Shaw was orphaned as a child. Following his three-year apprenticeship to a house and sign painter, he lived in Manchester for a brief time, teaching himself to paint a variety of subjects. At age twenty-six he moved to London and, at the Royal Academy, exhibited several paintings rendered in the fashionable “picturesque” style, which was characterized by a theatrical approach to compositional arrangement and an idyllic conception of man’s dominion over the land. His 1813 masterpiece The Deluge, Toward Its Close, Metropolitan Museum of Art, was honored with a prize at the British Institution and soon Shaw was being favorably compared by critics and jurors to the leading English landscape painter of the day, Joseph Mallord William Turner.

American expatriate Benjamin West, who was president of the Royal Academy as well as an acclaimed history painter, took note of Shaw and the two became friends. West encouraged the younger artist to travel to the United States. In 1817, Shaw immigrated to Philadelphia where he became one of the first artists to record American topographical features for widespread distribution through engravings. An early endeavor was his collaboration with printmaker John Hill, Picturesque Views of American Scenery, 1820–1821.

Awed by the rich and varied landscapes that America had to offer, Shaw stated in the introduction of Picturesque Views: “In no quarter of the globe are the majesty and loveliness of nature more strikingly conspicuous than in America. The vast regions which are comprised in or subjected to the republic present to the eye every variety of the beautiful and sublime.” [1] He planned to portray thirty-six views of America in a single publication, moving from the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia to the swamps of Savannah but only eighteen of the planned views were realized as engravings. Matthew Carey, the publisher of Picturesque Views, stopped production before all of the paintings were translated into print. At the time, illustrated travel books were popular in Europe, but Shaw’s project was the first of its kind in the United States, making it a risky business venture. [2]

Shaw was a man of varied talents and interests. An advocate for the arts, he helped establish the Artists’ Fund Society in 1835 and the Artists and Amateurs Association in 1837. He was also an active inventor who profited from his development of a copper percussion device to improve the functionality of firearms. Shaw wrote two instructional books; the first was an artist’s manual, A New and Original Drawing Book, published in 1816, and the second, a mercantile travel guide, United States Directory for the Use of Travelers and Merchants, was issued in 1822. While these achievements were of note at the time, Shaw’s most enduring accomplishment was his art; his romantic picturesque style ignited popular interest in American landscape and served to promote patronage of the art form.

The preparations for Shaw’s Picturesque Views did not go to waste; he exhibited several of the small-scale oil paintings at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts along with new work. He continued to be active in the Philadelphia art world but never attained the national popularity of his contemporaries Thomas Cole and Thomas Doughty, who were centered in New York. His career as a painter ended in 1853 when he was stricken by paralysis; he died seven years later. Shaw’s representations of southern landscapes document scenes rarely depicted by other artists and for this reason he remains an important figure in the development of American landscape painting.

Notes:

[1] Shaw, Picturesque Views of American Scenery (Philadelphia, PA: Matthew Carey and Son, 1820) preface.

[2] See Martha R. Severens, A Paradise of Riches: Joshua Shaw and the Southern Frontier. Greenville, SC: Greenville County Museum of Art, 2008.