Originally from Tottenham, England, George Harvey came to the United States at the age of 20 and spent several years in the West (Ohio and Michigan in the US and Ontario, Canada) before establishing himself as an artist in New York City. In 1828 he was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design. That same year his address in the Academy records was listed as being across the East River in Brooklyn. The following year he moved to Boston where he painted miniature portraits, as such he developed a unique, almost pointillist type of stippled brush work. Shortly thereafter he returned to England, apparently to study.
In 1833 he returned to America and helped design Sunnyside, the home of his close friend Washington Irving. Three years later in 1836 he built his own home in nearby Hastings on Hudson. It was at Hastings that Harvey planned his notable series of atmospheric views of American scenery in watercolor. His intended title for them? It was to have been the “Superb Royal Folio Work of American Scenery” which he intended to eight parts of five plates, ultimately forty of them, engraved and published by subscription. The next decade he shuttled back and forth between England and America as he sought out patronage and financial backing for this project, which eventually failed for lack of subscribers. Of Harvey’s series, only four were eventually engraved by William J. Bennett and published in London in 1841 under the title of “the Four Seasons” or “the Epochs of the Year.” The collection of watercolors was preserved intact in an English branch of the family until 1940, and about half of them are now owned by the New-York Historical Society.
Harvey’s career after 1850 is obscure, he apparently returned to England, but was known to have made extended painting trips in America. This continued production of landscapes is established by various letters, pamphlets and catalogues that were known to have survived and refer to “works on Florida, 13 landscapes done in the vicinity of Newport, RI and 26 sketches of Bermuda.” It was said that he continued to paint until about two years before his death in England in 1878. While he might have not looked back on his career with great satisfaction, in his peregrinations around the American countryside, George Harvey left a remarkable body of topographical landscapes behind. While his style and color anticipate the work of Fitz Hugh Lane, whom he may have met in Boston in the 1830’s and 1840’s (Lane was an engraver and Harvey certainly sought the use of one), Harvey’s lifestyle and travels were more in accordance with such noted intellectuals as Alexis DeToqueville. DeToqueville was the European writer whose travels and stories about this young nation lead to emboldened predictions of a future superpower on this side of the Atlantic. Much like DeToqueville, Harvey traveled all about the nation, and having living in the old northwest (Ohio and Michigan) prior to the Erie Canal he could greatly appreciate the changes wrought by that the most vital of North American waterways.
R.A.B. (originally published in Glorious Quest III, 2000, Godel & Co. Fine Art)
