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Attr. John Frederick Kensett (1816 - 1872) Beacon Rock, Newport Beach New Jersey. Oil on Canvas. Sight Size: 14 x 24 in. With Kennedy Galleries (NY) label Verso. Initialed and dated lower right "JK '59". Among the Hudson River School artists, John Frederick Kensett is the acknowledged master of the mode termed "luminism" in American landscape painting.The pictures that best manifest Kensett's singular contribution to second-generation Hudson River School painting, however, may well owe a debt to Curtis's influence. About 1851–52, Kensett supplied illustrations for Curtis's Lotus-Eating: A Summer Book (1852), which described and critiqued old and new resorts including rising seaside havens such as Newport, Rhode Island. At Curtis's suggestion, the two also visited Shrewsbury, New Jersey. Possibly as early as 1853, but certainly by 1855, Kensett began producing markedly reductive views of these and other shoreline locales, spare compositions of simple terrestrial profiles against expanses of calm open water delicately punctuated with a few sailboats on the horizon. They became almost instantly popular with collectors, so many of whom vacationed at the coastal resorts, and Kensett turned them out increasingly until his death in 1872. They are well exemplified in two Metropolitan paintings believed to have been made about that year, Newport Rocks and Eaton's Neck, Long Island. Correspondingly, even Kensett's inland scenes grew more distilled in the number and placement of motifs. This was nowhere more visible than in the artist's abundant views of Lake George, which rivaled Newport as his most oft-repeated subject. The Metropolitan's large Lake George, 1869, painted for the wealthy New Yorker Morris K. Jesup, is perhaps the masterpiece of Kensett's renderings of this site. In general, however, the artist was usually most effective on canvases of thirty inches wide or less. In those, the delicate texture of his brushwork was concentrated to produce pure and exquisite states of light and atmosphere, today referred to as luminist.