Attributed to Thomas Doughty (American, 1793-1856), "Lake George from Saratoga Side", c. 1820, oil on canvas, formerly signed (signature effaced), titled and indistinctly dated in ink on reverse of stretcher, 11 3/8 in. x 15 7/8 in., in a fine period giltwood frame. E2500-3500 Note: Thomas Doughty is one of the progenitors of American landscape painting, and indeed it was an 1826 exhibition of his paintings at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts that provided an early inspiration for Thomas Cole, one of the founders of the Hudson River School. The enamel-like delicacy of this charming canvas, lot 421, is remarkably close to Doughty's "Girls Crossing the Brook" of 1829 (private collection: Edward J. Nygren, Views and Visions, Washington, 1986, pp. 69, 253-254), which features the same girls in virtually identical costumes, and a similar landscape interpreted in the same idyllic, atmospheric style. This highly appealing picture is contemporaneously labeled as a view of Lake George, NY from its southern end (near the modern town of Lake George, formerly Caldwell); but its landscape is more imaginative than topographical, as was Doughty's consistent practice. The artist is documented to have traveled frequently in 1836-1837 from his then residence in Boston to the mountains of New York State; at the same time the first pictorial survey of the Adirondacks was being compiled by a group of artists whose views were issued as lithographs by John Henry Bufford in New York (1838). This painting's exaggeratedly close shorelines and steeply conical hills strikingly recall several of those lithographic prints, which are significant in having first drawn many artists' attention to these more northerly environs of the Hudson River Valley. A more naturalistically rendered version of almost this same scene, however, was painted by J. W. Casilear in 1857 as a "View on Lake George" (National Gallery of Art, Washington).