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About John W. Mansfield
After growing up in Chelsea, Massachusetts and serving briefly in the Union Army during the Civil War, Mansfield went to study art in New York. He received instruction from Lemuel Wilmarth (1835-1918) at the National Academy of Design, then he traveled to Europe in 1871. Mansfield entered the atelier of Léon Bonnat but like many, failed the demanding exams of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Surely Mansfield would have seen the sensational first group show of the French impressionists in the spring of 1874. That summer he was in Barbizon and the following year he may have met Charles-François Daubigny (1817-1878), a leading Barbizon School painter who captured the fleeting aspects of nature. A year later Mansfield was executing etchings at Auvers-sur-Oise; Stephanie R. Gaskins believes he would have encountered the students of Carolus-Duran at GrPz in the Forest of Fontainebleau. If this is true, in the summer of 1876 he could have met Robert Louis Stevenson and Will H. Low. Having returned to New York, Mansfield exhibited two landscapes of the Oise Valley at the National Academy in 1877 and a View near Auvers in 1878. That year he developed an interest in winter scenes in the New England woods and mountains. While another Barbizon landscape showed up at the Boston Art Club in 1880, two works: An Adirondack Brook and Sunshine and Shadow among the Berkshire Hills were exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy the following spring. By 1885, Mansfield was teaching in Boston’s New England Conservatory of Fine Arts but two years later he moved to Ipswich.
We know that Mansfield painted en plein air at Niagara Falls in the summer of 1904, however he worked on his Niagara paintings in his studio into the year 1906. For Frederic A. Sharf, these works "indicate a drama which had never been present in his landscape work." David Huntington wrote how Niagara was "visited, described, photographed and painted more than any other scene on this continent." John Trumbull, Thomas Cole, Alvan Fisher, Samuel F. B. Morse, John F. Kensett, Albert Bierstadt, George Inness, and many others painted Niagara Falls but Frederic Edwin Church’s 7½- foot-wide panoramic version in the Corcoran Gallery, dated 1857, is the most famous of all renderings. Some of Church’s "grand and sublime" naturalistic effects may be recalled in viewing Mansfield’s vertical format, in which the edge of the falls is the focus. Like Church, who abandoned "Old World" landscape compositional prototypes, Mansfield omitted the ledge or safe foreground zone where the viewer could look on from a distance. Instead, there is no foreground "buffer" area, and we hover directly over the water. Inness also achieved this effect in his version. One almost thinks of Turner in the outstanding rendering of foam, fine mist, rainbow and clouds, all different forms of moisture flowing marvelously together. Mansfield also suggests the thunderous noise of the falls, which seems less emphatic in Church’s sweeping panorama. |
Paintings by John W. Mansfield
| Niagara Falls with Bridge and Rainbow |
| oil on canvas: 43 x 29½ inches |
| signed: lower right |
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