William Sidney Mount

Born in Setauket, Long Island, in 1807, William Sidney Mount received informal artistic training from his brother, a sign painter, and then more formal instruction at the National Academy of Design in New York City. After failing to sell paintings with historical and biblical subject matter, Mount turned to genre art, or scenes of everyday life, after 1830. He specialized in lively scenes of country life, often presented with a satirical edge. They proved immensely popular.

Mount never went to Europe for training, preferring to preserve a purely American point of view in his work. Although he is strongly associated with rural Long Island, the place of his birth and his home, the artist traveled back and forth over the years between New York City and the countryside, and he was keenly aware that sophisticated urbanites were his target audience. For them, he painted images of country bumpkins, sometimes shrewd and calculating, sometimes foolish and contemptible. Mount often used keen humor and sly inside jokes to reference the contentious state of politics in antebellum America.