After several years of study abroad, John F. Kensett returned to New York in 1848 to devote the rest of his career to American subject matter and quickly distinguished himself as one of the finest landscape painters of the Civil War era.  Beginning in the mid-1850s and continuing through the end of his career, Kensett turned his attention to painting the New England coast, preferring the qualities of light and atmosphere to those of the Hudson River Valley.  John Paul Driscoll and John K. Howat write that during the mid-1850s, “Kensett shifted from the more conventional anecdotal picturesque mode derived from the tradition of Cole and Durand, to the quiet openness, light, and simplification of form, color, and composition that is now recognized as his mature style and associated with the phenomenon of ‘luminism.’. . .  The artist’s fidelity to nature is asserted not so much in the details as in the clarity of the light, which heightens the sense of realism. . . . Light takes on not only substantiality but also an almost iconographic significance as it isolates a particular time and setting and suggests the eternity and universality of nature” (John Frederick Kensett: An American Master, Worcester, Massachusetts, 1985, p. 99, 108).

After Kensett’s death in 1872, the painter Daniel Huntington remarked, “As an artist his rank was of the highest.  He had that rare assemblage of qualities which combine to make a great painter: an enthusiastic love of beauty, a marvelous eye for color, sustained by a calm, persistent, patience in its pursuit, and a hand obedient to his trained eye, a hand which expressed his thought with wondrous spirit and felicity . . .” (John K. Howat, John Frederick Kensett: 1816-1872, New York, 1868)