Esteemed by his peers as "our ablest marine painter," James Hamilton won fame as an artist who, "in his best works, exhibited the higher mental powers of the poet, as well as rare technical skill." Born in Entrien, near Belfast, Ireland, Hamilton emigrated with his family to the United States in 1834, settling in Philadelphia. He exhibited his first paintings six years later, having secured instruction in drawing along with advice from older artists and lessons from engravings and books. Philadelphia boasted a strong tradition of marine painting in the figure of Thomas Birch (1779-1851), from whom Hamilton likely drew inspiration. Hamilton also learned of the contemporary school of English landscape painters through printed sources. His admiration for Samuel Prout and J. M. W. Turner was established well before 1854, the year Hamilton traveled to England and had the opportunity to study those artists' work directly.
By 1850 Hamilton had demonstrated a proclivity for marine subjects. While selling and receiving commissions for paintings, he also worked as an illustrator. Between 1853 and 1856 he collaborated on publications by the arctic explorer Elisha Kent Kane, transforming rough field sketches into artful illustrations. Continuing to work out of Philadelphia, Hamilton apparently traveled no farther north than Boston in search of coastline scenery. Literature, engravings, and poetic imagination inspired his paintings of foreign coasts and historic naval battles, images which Hamilton animated with distinctive brushwork and dramatic color.
In 1875 Hamilton sold most of his books, engravings, sketches, and paintings, anticipating a journey around the world. Arriving in San Francisco the next year, he received a warm welcome from the artistic community there. He was still in San Francisco when he died unexpectedly in 1878.
From Sail to Steam may well record a view looking west across the swells of the Pacific Ocean. Yet the very absence of landmarks in Hamilton's painting serves to underline the central role of light. The long, hot rays of a dying sun, stretching across the water below a low horizon, gently and gradually coloring the sky above, align Hamilton with the luminist tradition in American landscape painting. This same light, however, divides the composition vertically, recalling the legacy of Turner. Likewise, the choppy waves suggest an underlying turbulence antithetical to luminist repose. Contrasts beloved by the earlier Romantics still linger: the dark sea below an atmospheric sky; two white birds, one above, one below the horizon; weighty steamers, pushing into the wind with their sails furled, juxtaposed against small and spritely craft with their sails open. The title From Sail to Steam is not one that Hamilton would have given to this painting, but the phrase still suggests its central theme: the passage of time and the undeniably altered mood of post-Civil War America, blessed with technological prowess but nostalgic for innocence lost.
SALLY MILLS
