Worthington Whittredge, Sanford Gifford & John Frederick Kensett

The diary of Jarvis McEntee from the 1870s provides us with first-hand accounts of the interactions of some of the most accomplished landscape painters of the second half of the nineteenth century. An entry from August 1872—the same year that Home by the Sea was painted—for example, tells us about a trip that Thomas Worthington Whittredge and Sanford Gifford took to Hudson, New York and Gloucester, Massachusetts. During the second half of the nineteenth century, Gifford, Whittredge, and Martin Johnson Heade all occupied studio space in the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York—as did Frederic E. Church, Emanuel Leutze, Albert Bierstadt, William Merritt Chase, Winslow Homer, and John La Farge. As the tenant with the longest occupancy, Whittredge became the link between many of these artists. Several works in this section, such as Moonlight Harbor Scene by Gifford and Home by the Sea by Whittredge, would have been painted in the artists’ Tenth Street studios.