Thomas Chambers paintings at Art Museum

A simple comparison of Boston Harbor, painted by Thomas Chambers between 1843 and 1845, and Thomas Birch's Philadelphia Harbor (c. 1835-1850), explains the difference between craftsmanship and vision. Chambers depicts a harbor as seen in a dream: Everything is bright and sharp and all the more unreal for it. Birch gives you atmosphere and depth of vision— you can almost smell the salt in the air— but Chambers gives you an image that corkscrews its way into your brain and remains there.

His several versions of ships in a storm— the U.S.S. Constitution triumphing over the H.M.S. Guerrière, an oddly placid-looking Shipwreck Off Rockaway Beach, and a sunset view of Nahant under skies as lurid as any in the work of John Martin— all strike you with an immediacy more akin to graphic art than the art of the oil painting.

Chambers (1808-1869), who boasted that he could execute "Fancy Painting of every description done to order," was both younger brother to a successful British painter and wanderer who left his native England to land in New Orleans in 1832, another penniless young man in search of a future. His career would take him from New Orleans to New York to Baltimore to Boston then back to New York and finally home again to die in England. It could almost be considered a success story, except that Chambers died in a workhouse and was buried in a pauper's grave.

Rescued from obscurity

His work appeared headed for a similarly obscure ending, but Chambers was saved by a growing interest in Early American folk art among scholars and collectors during the 1930s. Gradually, Chambers emerged from the shadows, and although we still know precious little about the man, his surviving works speak volumes.

Unlike his older brother George, who remained in England and exhibited at the Royal Academy, Thomas Chambers was an itinerant artist. He traveled the back roads, offering his works for sale in second-ranked cities and prosperous towns. He sold direct to the public and was determined to give it what it wanted—landscapes that celebrated the beauties of rural America, stirring seascapes— often illustrating incidents from the novels of James Fennimore Cooper and Captain Marryat, patriotic-themed pieces.

If a war with Mexico loomed, he would paint imagined landscapes of that exotic land. If a big ship ran aground off Rockaway Beach, he would report on it. He had to give the public what it wanted because, if the public didn't buy his work, he'd starve. Chambers was a true workingman, but instead of making cabinets or sewing suits, he painted images. The fact that several hundred of his works survive suggests that people liked what they saw.

A folk artist or a fine artist?

Thus Chambers finds himself classed as a folk artist rather than a fine artist. I suppose he's the painterly equivalent of William MacGonigal, who, because he wrote of "the beautiful bridge on the Tey," rather than King Arthur and his Round Table, was classed as a popular entertainer— a "jingle-man"— rather than a poet. Well, I say, if art is to be worth the studying, it must accommodate both the sheep and goats—and in Thomas Chambers we have a goat of rare attainments.

What elevates Chambers above, say, a simple sign-painter or a decorator? Well, for one thing, he has a vision. His sculpted clouds, his white-capped waves are more than the simple rendering of reality that Thomas Birch provides in his Philadelphia Harbor. Then too, Chambers's work has an undeniable rhythmic feel to it. Even his lesser works, like Two Ships off a Rocky Coast or Coast with Lighthouse, convey a definite sense of inner forces at work. In this way Chambers fulfills Walter Pater's famous dictum that all art aspires to the condition of music.

Henri Rousseau's precursor

Chambers's imagined landscapes of places like Mexico and Naples, even more than his marine paintings, work as symphonic dream-images. He is Henri Rousseau before the fact.

Chambers was an American original, and he rode the American tiger of economic forces. As long as he gave the public what it wanted, at prices it was willing to pay, he survived. When the chromolithograph began cutting into the low-end of his market, and the photograph began cutting into the high-end of his market, his living became more precarious.

In the end his adopted country took him back, squeezed him dry and left a broken man to return to his native land and die. But what splendid tokens of his esteem he left us!