The White Mountain School of Painters
Near North Conway, New Hampshire
Long before this valley filled with tourists, it filled with painters, and the painters are the reason the tourists came. In the late eighteen twenties, Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School of American landscape art, was among the first to sketch these mountains, and his dramatic paintings of Crawford Notch helped fix the White Mountains in the national imagination. But the artist most bound to this valley was Benjamin Champney, born in New Hampshire in eighteen seventeen and remembered as the dean of the White Mountain School.
Champney first visited the Conway area in eighteen thirty-eight, and in eighteen fifty-three he bought a summer home and built a studio right here in North Conway. Through his enthusiasm and his gift for drawing others in, North Conway became arguably the first artist colony in the United States. By eighteen fifty-five one writer called this the pet valley of the nation's landscape painters, and each summer more than a dozen artists set up their easels outdoors along the Saco River.
Champney drew major figures to the region, among them the great painter Albert Bierstadt. And the art did more than decorate walls. Artists worked as artists in residence at the grand hotels, selling their mountain scenes to wealthy guests as souvenirs.
Those paintings, carried home across America, became advertisements, luring the next wave of visitors to see the mountains for themselves.
