Who is a more soulful painter than Jervis McEntee? He was part of the Hudson River School of artists, good friends with Sanford Gifford, John Kensett, Frederic Church, Worthington Whitteredge and many more great landscape painters. Just look at these trees…
McEntee split his time between his Manhattan studio and his family home in Rondout, New York (today a suburb of Kingston). He had many connections to today’s NYC Watershed. Here’s one: he grew up on Rondout Creek, which is today part of the NYC Watershed system. In McEntee’s time Rondout Creek was important for commercial navigation, particularly for bluestone, quarried in the mountains and barged to Roundout docks, destined to become sidewalks and curbs in New York City.
McEntee and his artist friends were incredible walkers. He and Gifford walked from Rondout to Boston, Mass., for example, taking several weeks and painting at sites all along the way. They knew the Catskills rivers and mountains intimately.
Today Rondout Creek still reaches the Hudson River, as tailwaters from the Rondout Reservoir to the north, where the Delaware Aqueduct begins.