Montgomery Livingston (1816 – 1855)

Montgomery Livingston was an artist who lived most of his life at Clermont, the estate built by his great-grandfather, Chancellor Robert R. Livingston (1746 – 1813). He was principally a landscape painter, and although his artistic career coincided with the peak of American landscape painting, he was not strictly aligned with the Hudson River School. Between 1831 and 1838 he studied art in Europe, primarily Geneva, Switzerland. He enjoyed some success as a painter, but is not recognized as one of the great landscape painters of the time. His paintings and drawings of the landscape reveal careful composition, attention to light, shade, and texture, and an appreciation for the ordered beauty of nature.