Landscape
THOMAS DOUGHTY (1793–1856)
Gilpin’s Mill on the Brandywine, about 1830–37
Oil on board, 7 3/4 x 11 3/16 in.
EX. COLL.: [Norton Asner, Baltimore, Maryland, 1967]; to private collection, until 2018; to private collection, until the present
For Doughty, a young, aspiring Philadelphia landscape artist, the Brandywine Creek in Chester County offered attractive and logical subject matter. The scenic region was a scant thirty miles distant, its local society dominated by the same Quaker elite who directed business and government in Philadelphia. Doughty appears to have painted at least three views of Gilpin’s Mill on the Brandywine, all of which are essentially composed identically. The Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina, owns an oil painting on a panel that is signed and dated 1827 and measures 12 x 17 1/4 in. There are two figures in the center foreground, one, having left his clothes on the bank, is in the water, while his companion stands in shallow water holding a log. The Brandywine River Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, has a second painting of the subject that is signed and dated 1830 (oil on canvas, 7 1/4 x 11 in.). That painting also shows two figures, now moved to the left foreground, one standing with a fishing rod, the other, seated.
The present painting is a third version of the subject, close in size to the Brandywine painting. It is extremely close in composition and detail to the Gibbes painting, including the crossed trees in the left foreground, the tree stump at their right, and the tree at the right. As it is unsigned and undated and without figures, it is likely the original sketch made on the spot from nature that served as the direct basis, first for the Gibbes painting, and, a few years later, for the variant at the Brandywine Museum.
For Doughty’s intended audience of Philadelphia art connoisseurs, the Gilpin name commanded universal recognition and respect. There is no mystery, then, as to why, when Doughty made his serious entry into the Philadelphia art world in the 1822 annual exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, one of the eight works he showed was View of Gilpin’s Lower Mills on the Brandywine, near Wilmington, Delaware (no. 212). He exhibited this same picture again in 1823, 1825, 1826, 1828, 1829, and finally, in 1835 at the exhibition of the Artist’s Fund Society, when it was owned by G. W. Mason. Throughout his career, Doughty characteristically returned to the same subject repeatedly, offering differing views, sometimes in a different medium.
Gilpin’s Mill was the first paper mill in the state of Delaware. It was established by Philadelphian Joshua Gilpin (1765–1841), who had inherited flour mills in Maryland and Delaware and a mercantile business in Philadelphia. The paper mill was established in 1787. Joshua Gilpin made two lengthy trips to England and the Continent to study the latest advances in technology, which provided the information that his brother needed to make and patent the first continuous papermaking machine in the United States in 1817, in which year they gave up their mercantile business to devote all of their time to the papermaking endeavor. The mill remained in business until 1837. The building was subsequently used by one of the largest textile mills in the world, but it was destroyed in a flood in 1839.