Thomas Chambers (1808, Whitby, Yorkshire - 1869, Whitby) was an English-born painter who spent most of his life in the United States. He is generally classified as a Primitivist, but has also been called the "First American Modern". Most of his paintings were unsigned, which delayed his …

In the 1930s and 1940s, with the discovery of the Museum’s signed painting, Chambers emerged as a folk original, embraced posthumously by modern art enthusiasts as the “American Rousseau.” Here, Chambers focused his attention on a well-known marine battle in the War of 1812 featuring the U.S.S. Constitution, also known as Old Ironsides.

Artist: Thomas Chambers (1808–after 1866) Date: ca. 1850s. Culture: American. Medium: Oil on canvas. Dimensions: 22 1/2 x 30 1/2 in. (57.2 x 77.5 cm) Credit Line: Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, 1966. Object Number: 66.242.17

Thomas Chambers was born in London in 1808 and emigrated to the United States in 1832. A painter of both landscapes and marine scenes, Chambers did not confine his artistic subjects to views that he knew firsthand but made liberal use of …

Obscure in his own lifetime, Thomas Chambers found fame in the twentieth century with the discovery of The “Constitution” and the “Guerriere,” a rare signed painting of his that unlocked the identity of the artist behind a singularly flamboyant group of mid-nineteenth-century American marine and landscape paintings. Chambers’s ...

This landscape by Thomas Chambers probably shows a view along the Hudson River in New York, where Chambers lived and worked in the 1830s and again in the 1860s. He combined actual features of the landscape with elements from his imagination, heightening the colors and emphasizing the linear edges of natural forms.

View Thomas Chambers’s artworks on artnet. Learn about the artist and find an in-depth biography, exhibitions, original artworks, the latest news, and sold auction prices.

Since the 1940s, Thomas Chambers has been a publicly recognized artist, known primarily for his marine paintings and scenes of the Hudson River Valley. Although some of his work is known to be based on prints by W. H. Bartlett and others, Chambers's compositions are not imitations.

The mysterious Thomas Chambers arrived in the United States from England in 1832, worked for three decades as a marine and landscape painter, and then disappeared after 1866, leaving behind a boldly expressive and puzzling body of work.

Thomas Chambers most likely painted this vibrant view of West Point military academy when living in the Hudson River valley, in New York. The bold, colorful patterns in the trees, cliff face, and flowers, and some inconsistencies in scale, display the originality of his self-taught style.