Spanierman Lockwood de Forest

2 Lockwood de Forest was born in New York in 1850 to a prominent family. He grew up in Greenwich Village and on Long Island at the family summer estate in Cold Spring Harbor. Encouraged by his parents, Henry Grant de Forest and Julia Mary Weeks, Lockwood and his three siblings developed lifelong interests in the arts. The Eldest Son Robert Weeks (1848–1931) became a lawyer and served as a trustee and later as the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Julia Brasher (1853–1910), a devotee of painting and sculpture, wrote a book on the history of art, and Henry Wheeler (1855–1938), also a lawyer and Chairman of the Board of the Southern Pacific Railroad, was an avid art collector. As was customary for a cultivated family in the Gilded Age, the de Forests made frequent trips abroad. Excursions to the great museums, which were prominent on the de Forest’s agenda, deepened the young Lockwood’s familiarity with European painting and sculpture. Though he had begun drawing and painting somewhat earlier, it was during a visit to Rome in 1868 that eighteen-year-old de Forest first began to study art seriously, taking painting lessons from the Italian landscapist Hermann David Salomon Corrodi (1844–1905). More importantly, on the same trip, Lockwood met one of America’s most celebrated painters, (and his maternal great-uncle by marriage) Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), who quickly became his mentor. De Forest accompanied Church on sketching trips around Italy and continued this practice when they both returned to America in 1869. Early on in his career, de Forest made a habit of recording the date and often the place of his oil sketches, as to create a visual diary of his travels. Lockwood’s profession as a landscape painter can be primarily attributed to Frederic E. Church and his belief in the young artist’s talent. De Forest often visited Church in the Hudson River community of Catskill where, in addition to sketching trips and afternoons of painting, he assisted with the architectural drawings and planning of Olana. In 1872, de Forest took a studio at the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York. During these formative years de Forest counted among his friends artists such as: Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823–80), George Henry Yewell (1830–1923), John Frederick Kensett (1816–72), Jervis McEntee (1828–91), and Walter Launt Palmer (1854–1932). In the nineteenth century, the issue of truth in painting was very much at the forefront of artistic discussion, being one of the guiding principles that Ruskin touted in his groundbreaking writing, Modern Painters. In the United States, Ruskin’s ideas were liberally espoused by The Crayon, a well known American art journal established in 1855 by William J. Stillman and John Durand. Ruskin’s ideology extolled the virtues of landscape painting as a method for communicating a faithful conception of nature. Church drew inspiration from the German Naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt and his book Kosmos, which first appeared in 1845. Equally significant was the imprint of Church’s philosophy in shaping young Lockwood’s artists methodology, which was to act as a conduit through which the glories of nature and power would be shown. Church’s chief ambition was to “transfer to canvas the vanishing forms and tints of shadows thrown upon the eye unaffected by the medium through which they passed.” Observer of Nature Lockwood deForest (1850–1932)