In the mid-1920s, newly returned from an illuminating stint studying art in New York City, an aspiring painter named Harlan Hubbard (1900-1988) sought his unique creative voice in the steep hills and quiet waterways of his native Northern Kentucky. Following the advice of other artists he admired—like Frenchman Claude Monet or fellow Ohio River Valley visionaries such as John Henry Twachtman—Hubbard found inspiration in what Asher Brown Durand called “the studio of Nature.”
“I must work with real materials, the earth and sky, sun and wind,” Hubbard wrote in the 1930s, “[…] I must not paint through a window, but out in the sun and rain.” His words echo the exhortation made by Monet in the 1870s, while gesturing at the river Seine: “I don’t understand why anyone would want to shut themselves up in some room. That’s my studio.”
Where Monet had the Seine and the sea to inspire him, Hubbard had the Ohio River. He established “studios” for painting in bankside camps shielded by willows or in his hand-built canoe. Hubbard took his portable thumb box everywhere, loaded with alizarin red, cadmium orange, yellow ochre and phthalo blue, using river water to mix pigments and create watercolor sketches en plein air.
When he wasn’t on the river, he rambled on foot or on his bicycle—over Three Mile Road, Dead Timber Road and Winter’s Lane in the countryside near Fort Thomas, Bellevue and Covington—in all seasons. Capturing the diffuse light of winter in the snow-covered highlands or recording the verdant hollers folding on either side of the country roads winding back down toward the river, Hubbard made hundreds of sketches on his pilgrimages, immersing himself in the landscape he called home—his personal wilderness.
Plenty of artists who preceded Hubbard—such as Lewis Henry Meakin, Paul Sawyier and Thomas Jefferson “T.J.” Willison—saw the value of Kentucky’s quiet charm for landscape painting. But Hubbard is, perhaps, one of the most ardent recorders of Kentucky’s natural landscape. His grasp of the Ohio River’s unique genius loci—spirit of place—is evident in the hundreds of immediate sketches he made in nature over the course of his life—sketches filled with the river and the surrounding countryside, shown in all moods and weather.
Hubbard’s sketches in watercolor, like Monet’s rough color-blocking studies made on his canvases, were done swiftly in the elements, capturing impressions of color and light for posterity. They are emotive, even expressionistic: Hubbard deploys line and color with a frenzied and free gestural quality that betrays his passion for what he sees. We know from the vigor of his hand that we are witness to the fruits of inspiration.
Hubbard also shows us his working mind in the studies. Through them, we know the essential elements he needed to record in order to understand and remember a particular land or riverscape. Sometimes just a few lines—a horizon or a rippling reflection of sun on water or a string of steam rising from a boat’s stack—are enough to preserve the freshness of the scene for later.
Even though Hubbard believed, like Monet, that the best studio an artist could find was outdoors, Hubbard still curated indoor spaces in which to create his finished work. (Incidentally, Monet did, too.) Hubbard maintained four different structural art studios in Northern Kentucky between 1925 and 1944. In these more traditional studio spaces, Hubbard took his sketches and translated them into more finished works in oil or acrylic on canvas or Masonite.
Despite being created under a roof instead of under a canopy of trees, Hubbard’s finished paintings still honor the experience of being alive to nature and the spirit of place. We recognize it in a blossoming redbud set against a backdrop of distant blue-green hills, or in the silver riffles of river water against the shoreline that then flatten and stretch into a darkened mirror on their way to the opposite bank, or in the scrubby rise of a steep dirt path to a dark barn silhouetted against the horizon. The raw emotion of his sketches becomes somewhat subdued when he exits the “studio of Nature,” but his genuine love for his subject—for the land he knew so well—is never lost.
Fundamentally, Hubbard believed that the Ohio River Valley deserved to be rendered with the same devotion as other, more dramatic landscapes of America. In a letter to The Cincinnati Enquirer submitted in 1933, Hubbard wrote, “In gathering material and studying the country, I have covered much of it on foot, and travelled up and down the river in all sorts of boats, sketching its hills and bends, towns, boats and people. To me, it is beautiful country and worthy of great art.”
Jessica K. Whitehead is the author of the new biography Driftwood: The Life of Harlan Hubbard and served as a founding board member of the nonprofit organization Payne Hollow on the Ohio.