Forest Interior with White Birch

Artist Julie Hart Beers (American, 1835 - 1913)

Datemid 19th Century

DimensionsFrame: 25 1/2 × 13 1/2 × 2 1/2 in. (64.8 × 34.3 × 6.4 cm)

Mediumoil on canvas

ClassificationPaintings

Credit LinePurchased with funds given by Cheryl (Gurecky) and Richard O'Connor

Object number

2023.333

Not on View

Label TextJulie Hart Beers was one of the first women in the United States to work professionally as a landscape painter. Beers belonged to a group of women artists within the Hudson River School movement alongside male contemporaries like Sanford Robinson Gifford and Jasper Francis Cropsey (also on view in this gallery). Her older brothers, both accomplished landscape artists, provided her with an art education informed by their training in Europe. Though they tried to persuade their sister away from painting outdoors in remote locations, Beers wrote that she “tramped on after them many a weary mile through mud and wet.” Beers’s artistic success allowed her to support herself and her children. This was accomplished in part by taking groups of women on outdoor sketching trips in the Adirondacks and New England, where they could encounter natural scenes like the birches and ferns depicted here.