If not for an errant swing of an ax, Vermont might have been deprived of one of its most important artists.
James Hope probably attracted little attention in Castleton when he arrived there in the early 1840s as a newly married schoolteacher. If anything was noteworthy about him, it might have been that he spoke with a slight lilt, a vestige he may have carried from his childhood in Scotland.
It’s probable that few people in town, if anyone, knew of his tragic past. Hope’s mother died when he was a year old. When he was 9, Hope and his father moved to the wilderness of Eastern Canada. Tragedy struck again four years later, when Hope’s father died of cholera during an epidemic. Biographical sketches of Hope don’t mention who cared for the orphaned boy during this period or why he decided to leave Canada two years later.
Whatever his reasoning, at the age of 15, Hope headed south to Vermont. On foot. He walked the 150 miles to Fair Haven, where he found work as an apprentice to a wagon maker.
The trade would have earned him a decent living, but he wanted something else. His real interest was art. He squirreled away what money he could to pay for an art course at the nearby Castleton Seminary. Then he took a job in West Rutland, teaching various subjects, including art.
In 1841, while in his early 20s, James Hope married Julia Smith of Rutland and the newlyweds moved to the nearby town of Castleton.
Soon afterward, Hope had his run-in with the ax. His ankle bore the brunt of the blow, so he was bedridden while the wound healed. As a distraction, Hope grabbed some house paint and a wooden plank and began to paint.
He decided to paint a portrait and chose for his subject the one person with nothing better to do than pose: himself. He was pleased with the results, as were others who saw the crisply rendered, realistic self-portrait.
Word of Hope’s talent spread quickly and people began to ask him to paint portraits. Previously, Castleton residents had to rely on itinerant artists if they wanted a portrait. Now, people had a portraitist in their midst whose skill far outstripped the abilities of the traveling painters.
Quitting teaching was a gamble, but Hope devoted himself full time to painting portraits. He decided to charge the then-high fee of $100 a head for his works and found that people were willing to pay.
But Hope needed more well-heeled patrons, so he moved his family to the more lucrative market of Montreal. The colder climate, however, didn’t agree with his family. He later explained: “The health of my family made it advisable to return to the warmer climate of Vermont.” Which says something about Montreal’s weather.
Returning to Castleton after two years away, Hope supported his portrait work by teaching painting and drawing at the town’s seminary. But portraiture wasn’t his true passion. He preferred landscapes, though at the time they weren’t as fashionable, and therefore as marketable, as painting portraits.
Serendipitously, around this time James Hope met one of the nation’s great landscape painters. Frederic Church spent the summer of 1849 at the spa in nearby Clarendon Springs. How the two men met is unknown. Perhaps Hope heard of Church’s presence and sought him out, or perhaps it was pure happenstance.
Either way, Hope learned a great deal from Church, who just the year before, at age 22, had been named academician at the prestigious National Academy of Design in New York.
The encounter proved a turning point for Hope. He began to paint more landscapes, using the refined style Church taught him. In the coming years, Hope would produce some of the finest Vermont landscapes of the 19th century.
For subjects, he chose the nearby countryside. His large, finely detailed rendering of Bird Mountain in Castleton, completed in 1855, now resides at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Another 1855 painting by Hope, “Tavern in New Boston, Vermont,” is owned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
He also executed charming portraits of nearby towns. Depicting communities from a bird’s-eye perspective, Hope painted towns — including West Rutland, Poultney, Castleton and Clarendon Springs — nestled amidst the surrounding hills. Those paintings proved popular enough that he painted multiple versions of some scenes, which explains why the Shelburne Museum and the Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, own nearly identical views of Clarendon Springs.
Years later, reflecting on his career, Hope wrote that two artists helped him develop his craft, “the one (presumably Church) through color power — the other through majesty of line … helped me with the most grateful results. It was only their subtleties of technique I had needed. From then on the transcription of nature was the transcription of my own thoughts.”
Who this second artist was remains a mystery. Looking at artists who Hope might have encountered, researchers have suggested famed landscape painters Asher B. Durand and Albert Bierstadt as possibilities.
Church, and perhaps this unidentified second artist, convinced Hope that, to be part of the larger art world and make money, he should set up shop part-time in New York. Hope began spending his winters in the city, leaving Julia to care for their four children.
As he had hoped, his move to New York drew the attention of the art world. The New York Independent newspaper claimed he had “no rival in Europe in forest or brook scenery” and the Philadelphia Evening Telegraph, perhaps overstating things a bit, called him the “father of the realistic school of landscape painters in America.”
Hope tried to turn the praise into sales. In an 1854 letter, now in the collection of the Vermont Historical Society, Hope wrote Julia about a prospective client who he had heard “is not stingy; his income is from 30 to 40 thousand a year (that is encouraging).”
Hope found that painting for a living wasn’t always liberating. Writing to Julia about what he was working on, Hope mentioned “a copy of Castleton, which I suppose I shall have to do.”
The separation was hard on James and Julia. She wrote him in 1855: “Sabbath eve. and I am so lonesome I don’t know what to do.” She shared stories about their children, family and friends. In one, she enclosed a stick-figure sketch by their young son Douglass, who was perhaps trying to emulate his artist father.
Hope wrote back that he missed them all, and even composed poems to his children. But he asked Julia whether he could stay in the city a few weeks longer than planned.
In 1861, he was taken farther from home, this time by war. Hope helped recruit a company of volunteers for the Union Army and was named its captain. Recognizing his talents, the Army assigned Hope to work at times as a topographical engineer.
Still, he saw action in 13 battles. In his spare time, Hope sketched the battles as he recalled them. He used the sketches as references for 12-to-16-foot-long panoramas that toured widely after the war. The National Park Service has since preserved at least five of the panoramas, which are on display at the Antietam battlefield in Maryland.
After leaving the Army, Hope again divided his time between Castleton and New York. Money was seemingly always tight. He became an agent in New York for Middletown Healing Springs Water, a Vermont company, to subsidize his art.
Then, perhaps hoping that a change of scenery would help his sales, Hope and his family moved in 1872 to Watkins Glen, New York, continuing a career that had started in Vermont because he was more adept with a brush than with an ax.