Benjamin Champney “Father of the White Mountain School of Art”

Benjamin Champney was not the first to paint in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, but his love of the mountains and promotion of the area to other artists of the day will forever connect him to North Conway and the notches. Called the Father of the White Mountain School of Art, he is credited with making North Conway one of the first artists’ colonies in America. Over 400 artists from the Hudson River School painted in the White Mountains from the 1800’s through the early 1900’s.

In 1838, a 22-year-old Champney made his first trip to North Conway, from Boston. The industrial revolution was in full swing and cities like Boston were filthy and unpleasant places. A population that had grown up in the agricultural countryside came to the cities to work in the mills and factories. They were greeted with overcrowded tenement houses, horse manure in the streets, air choked with coal dust and the Charles River as an open sewer. The high mountains of New Hampshire, with cool mountain air and clear streams and rivers full of trout would have been another world, an American Eden. 

On Champney’s return to Boston he painted in the style of the artists he had seen at the Boston Athenaeum, the American Romantic Landscapes of the likes of Alvan Fisher and Thomas Doughty. These romanticized landscapes were of the America they wanted to see, not the harsh urban development they were confronting. In fact, the town of North Conway was founded in 1765, but, as was often the case, artists like Champney would paint the valley devoid of houses, farms, churches and taverns. These beautiful, sublime mountain landscapes were well received and credited for the development of North Conway as an early tourist destination.

In 1841-1846, after his initial success, Champney travelled to Paris to study the masters and refine his skills. There he met up with John Fredrick Kensett, who would become his lifelong friend. In 1843 he painted one of the White Mountain Museum’s earliest Champney paintings, a copy of Aelbert Cuyp’s “Paysage près de la ville de Rhenen : vaches au pâturage et berger jouant de la flûte”, the original of which still hangs in the Louvre. They went on to travel through Italy and Germany meeting with other artists and expats. Champney’s second trip to Europe in 1847-1848 with Winkworth Allen Gay was cut short by the bloody 1848 revolutions. It was on this trip he painted the “Panorama of the Rhine”. The moving diorama was later destroyed while being exhibited at the Crystal Palace in New York in the 1858 fire.

Champney married Maria Caroline “Carrie”. Brooks, from Indiana, in 1853. After a honeymoon in Vermont and the Hudson River Valley they stayed at the Kearsarge House Inn in North Conway for the Summer. In the Fall Mr. Lewis Eastman came to the Inn to inquire of the Owner, Mr. Samuel Thompson, if he knew of anyone interested in buying his house at the base of Sunset Hill. The newlyweds bought the home and summered there for the next 50 years. They had two children, Kensett Champney and Alice Brooks Champney Wyer. The home  is still in the Champney family and sits on the corner of Locust Street and White Mountain Highway. The shed was converted into Champney's studio and welcomed hundreds of artists and visitors over the years. The Champneys split their time between Summers in North Conway and Winters in Woburn Massachusetts. Champney was one of the founders of the Boston Art Club, and was one of its early Presidents.

At the end of the Civil War in 1865 Champney took his last trip to Europe, this time with his wife “Carrie”. They retraced his previous trips starting in Paris, heading down the Rhine to Switzerland, through the Gotthard Pass to Italy. Champney was clearly interested in studying the new style of the early Impressionists. It had been two years since the Salon des Refusés, sanctioned by Emperor Napoleon III, elevated the impressionists like Édouard Manet and James McNeill Whistler's use of light and the direct observation of nature. Champney went on to enjoy plein air painting and adapted his use of light and shadows, but never totally embraced Impressionism. “That this impressionistic school has been productive of great good we are all willing to admit. It has taught the younger artists to look after simplicity and breadth to attempt the luminous qualities seen in out of door study and which are so difficult to express.” He said, “In fact I believe that the extreme fad has gone by, not to be resuscitated.”

Maria “Carrie” Champney died ten years later in 1876. In 1879 Champney married Margaret Stevenson. Little is known of his personal life during this period, but he remained an active and revered painter till his death. Champney celebrated his 90th birthday surrounded by hundreds of friends, and dozens of his recent paintings were on exhibit. He fell ill immediately after the party and 21 days later died at his home in Woburn, Massachusetts, on December 11, 1907.