“Nature, to the thoughtful, will ever remain a vast and delightful storehouse, and the love that we bestow upon her is not to be accounted as lost. She will remain forever the fountain of ‘inspiration material.’”

-John F. Carlson, Elementary Principles of Landscape Painting

While he proclaimed that art could not be taught, but only learned through practice, John F. Carlson, nonetheless, was one of the most important teachers of landscape painting in the early decades of the twentieth century. He was born in a tiny town on the eastern coast of Sweden and immigrated to the United States with his family in 1884. In 1902, he found his way to the Art Students’ League in New York, where he studied painting with Frank DuMond and Birge Harrison. The following year, Harrison joined the teaching staff at Byrdcliffe, a newly-founded arts and crafts community in Woodstock, New York, and Carlson followed.

The hills, pastures and woods of Woodstock provided ideal subject matter for them both, and at Carlson’s urging, the Art Students’ League established a summer school in Woodstock, where he taught from 1906 to 1918. In 1920 Carlson co-founded the Broadmoor Art Academy in Colorado; two years later he returned to Woodstock to establish his own school, the John F. Carlson School of Landscape Painting. In addition to directly teaching hundreds of students, Carlson reached countless more with his book, Elementary Principles of Landscape Painting.

We are pleased to present our fourth exhibition of paintings by John F. Carlson. Inspired by Nature will be viewable in the gallery and online from June 17- July 31. Please call or e-mail the gallery for a pricelist of works.