The Artist

Francis Seth Frost was a well-respected landscape painter who worked during the second half of the nineteenth century. His reputation appears to have been overshadowed by his one-time teacher and traveling companion, the artist Albert Bierstadt, whose painting Echo Lake, Franconia Mountains, New Hampshire, 1861, is in the Museum’s collection. Frost’s style and his connection with Bierstadt link him to the Hudson River School of landscape painters. Both Frost and Bierstadt painted scenes of the American West as well as the mountain regions in and around New England. Although only one photograph taken by Frost has come to light, he was also known as a highly proficient photographer.

Born in West Cambridge, Massachusetts, Frost ventured to California in 1849 at the age of 23, drawn there by the discovery of gold the year before. Besides accumulating a large amount of gold dust worth four years’ wages, he made sketches of his travels, which he brought back upon his return to Massachusetts in 1851, exhibiting paintings based on them in 1955.² Frost also traveled extensively throughout the northeast, painting scenes of the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the Maine coast, the Catskill Mountains and the Hudson River Valley of New York State. Currently, the location of all but about a dozen of Frost’s paintings is unknown.

In April 1859, Frost and Bierstadt went to the Rocky Mountains in what became a famous trip in the career and history of Bierstadt. They first traveled to Missouri where they and several other artists joined the engineering party of Army Colonel Frederick Lander, whose task was to find improved routes for travel west of the Continental Divide in the Rocky Mountains utilizing South Pass in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming. After five months on the Oregon Trail, the two artists returned to the Boston area and produced their large-scale paintings of the western frontier based on sketches made during the journey, as well as on a series of stereoscopic photographs.³

Frost and Bierstadt occasionally exhibited their Rocky Mountain pictures together. For Bierstadt, the expedition was a major turning point in his career as a landscape painter. Frost’s reputation and importance in the field of landscape painting waned, however, after the 1860s. He turned to painting the smaller, more intimate vistas of New England in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and around his home in Arlington, Massachusetts, where he settled in the 1860s with his family. From 1869 on, he owned and managed Frost and Adams, an art supply firm located in Boston which became the unofficial meeting place for the Boston Art Club, of which Frost was a member. He subsequently considered himself a "dealer in artists materials,"⁴ rather than a painter, although he continued to paint into the 1890s.

The Painting

Landscape painting became a major force in American art in the nineteenth century, beginning with the influence of Thomas Cole in the 1830s. Many of the landscape paintings from the first half of the nineteenth century reflect the belief of the Romantic and Transcendentalist movements that nature is a manifestation of a divine spirit, and accordingly, these landscapes depict the sweeping power, beauty or majesty of nature. An important group of painters in this style was the Hudson River School, so named for the Hudson River Valley of New York State, one of their favorite subjects. Hudson River School artists (Albert Bierstadt among them) also worked throughout New England during the 1840s and 1850s, and ventured west with frontier explorers in the 1850s and 1860s to paint majestic scenes of the Rocky Mountains and other locations.

In South Pass, Wind River Mountains Frost showed Eastern viewers the vast, open spaces of the Far West, choosing a time of day when the sun shone strongly across the flat plains and hilly plateaus, thereby emphasizing the broadness of the landscape. By contrast, Eastern landscape scenes were generally more intimate in scale, observed from closer vantage points that featured the shorter vistas inherent in a region of lower peaks and shallower valleys.

The painting is composed in three horizontal registers that form the foreground, middle ground, and background. Each is defined by both terrain and color, which, in turn, have been defined by light. The overlook in the immediate foreground is darkest, with thick strokes of rust and dark green suggesting the branches of low bushes amidst the rocks. Highlights of white give evidence of the sun’s intensity in this treeless environment. A small group of figures waits and watches the valley, their dress suggestive of Native American clothing. Across the valley, a line of people on horseback led by a woman on foot moves towards the waiting group. The blanketed outlines of the mounted people and the absence of accoutrements of a major exploration party such as pack animals and supply wagons suggest these are another group of Native Americans. The watchers observe attentively but casually, making no attempt to shield themselves from view. At the far side of the valley lies a lake with a wisp of smoke rising from its edge. In the background, the crests of plateaus and peaks are silhouetted against the white-hot sun, their forms depicted in shades of light blue. An even but swift progression from warm to cool colors in the movement from foreground to background gives the scene a great sense of distance. In this large expanse, Frost maintains a sense of focus by placing the foreground rocks across the width of the canvas in a shallow curve which cradles the central scene of the procession across the plain, and the watchers at the far right further focus the viewer’s attention on the central procession.

Of the three western paintings by Frost that have been located, all include Native Americans. The Lander expedition encountered many Native Americans, as Bierstadt recorded in a letter to the popular art journal The Crayon; their presence, coupled with the mountain scenery, reinforced the travellers’ sense of the West being a very different world from the East:

"...We see many spots in the scenery that remind us of our New Hampshire and Catskill hills, but when we look up and measure the mighty perpendicular cliffs that rise hundreds of feet aloft, all capped with snow, we then realize that we are among a different class of mountains; and especially when we see the antelope stop to look at us, and still more the Indian, his pursuer, who often stands dismayed to see a white man sketching alone in the midst of his hunting grounds."⁵

1. For many years it was thought that Frost’s middle name was Shedd, which is incorrect. For biographical information, see Jourdan Houston, American Art Review, vol. 6, no. 4, 1994, pp. 146-57; also see Betsy B. Jones, entry on this painting in a forthcoming catalogue of the Museum’s American painting and sculpture collection.
2. Houston, p. 146.
3. It is not clear to what extent Frost actually participated in the making of these photographs.
4. Houston, p. 156.
5. Albert Bierstadt, letter of July 10, 1859, in The Crayon, vol. 6, no. 9 (September 1859), p. 287.