ABOUT THE LITHOGRAPHS

Ebenezer Emmons was a prominent American geologist in the nineteenth century and is best known for spearheading the Geological Survey of New York State in 1836, the first state-funded scientific survey of the Adirondack region. Emmons named and summitted many prominent Adirondack peaks, including Mt. Marcy, of which Emmons holds the first recorded summit. Additionally, Emmons cataloged the landscape through drawings, recruiting Irish artist Charles C. Ingham to make sketches of the Adirondack wilderness. It is still unclear whether View at Lake Colden was done by Emmons or Ingham. Emmons’s survey of the Adirondacks took place before industry in the region was well established, and the data that he gathered provided for the popularization of recreation and exploitation of the area.

Emmons’s was the first survey of the Adirondacks, but others followed, including Verplank Colvin’s survey in the 1870s. Ultimately, these efforts to map the Adirondack wilderness facilitated the economic development of the region. These drawings were replicated using lithograph printing, a process that involves etching a polished limestone slab and using oil-based ink to transfer the print. The printing was done by John Henry Bufford, a late nineteenth-century lithographer based in Boston, Massachusetts.

These two prints are representative of many of the other drawings from Emmons’s survey, which focused largely on the natural beauty of the Adirondacks. Distant View of Mt. Marcy presents a lake in the foreground, with mighty Mt. Marcy in the center of the painting. Many of Emmons’s drawings follow this theme, highlighting natural landscapes by drawing one’s eyes to the centermost point of the page. In View at Lake Colden, the drawing’s focus is on the valley where two mountains meet, this point being accentuated by the reflection on the water. Both drawings have small shrubs in the foreground, several trees standing out among the others, and several more falling over. Overall, Emmons’s drawings emphasize the untouched wilderness that they encountered during the survey, generating an almost eerie stillness. In a time of industrialization and development, these drawings celebrate the sparsely populated wilderness that once existed in the Adirondacks. -Morgan Barnard ’28

Ebenezer Emmons
Distant View of Mt. Marcy, c. 1830s
Lithograph by John Henry Bufford
Richard F. Brush Art Gallery
SLU 2013.2

View at Lake Colden, after a drawing from Ebenezer Emmons’s survey, c. 1830s
Lithograph by John Henry Bufford
Richard F. Brush Art Gallery
SLU 2013.3

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