View of a Lake (c. 1830s): Art, History and Details

View of a Lake (c. 1830s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Thomas Doughty (American, 1793–1856).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Largely a self-taught artist, Thomas Doughty often painted landscapes that include a body of water. In this example, the artist inserted figures of two hunters, accompanied by a dog, at the edge of the lake in the middle of the composition. Humankind is also present in the form of distant sailboats dotting the lake's surface.

Object facts

• Title: View of a Lake
• Date: c. 1830s
• Creator attribution: Thomas Doughty (American, 1793–1856)
• Culture: United States
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 53.3 x 69.6 x 7.6 cm (21 x 27 3/8 x 3 in.); Unframed: 38.5 x 55 cm (15 3/16 x 21 5/8 in.)
• Collection: American - Painting
• Department: American Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1963.574

A detail from the museum

According to a Boston newspaper account, Thomas Doughty died "of a softening of the brain."

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Talbot, William S. “American Visions of Wilderness.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 56, no. 4 (June 1969): 151–166. Published as: Landscape

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.