Painting New Hampshire.(Books about antiques)(Consuming Visions: Art and Tourism in the White Mountains, 1850-1900)

The pristine wilderness of New Hampshire, particularly the region that surrounds the White Mountains, was a beacon to nineteenth-century artists and writers, who described the alluring natural scenery in words and pictures. As the region became more accessible through improved transportation and better known through travel literature, tourists flocked there as well. A recent exhibition and its accompanying catalogue examine the rise of New Hampshire as a travel destination, most particularly for artists. Organized by the New Hampshire Historical Society in Concord, where it is on view at its Museum of New Hampshire History until October 8, the exhibition and catalogue consider thirty-seven paintings of identifiable locales by thirty-two mostly little-known or forgotten painters. The show and book are entitled Consuming Visions: Art and Tourism in the White Mountains, 1850-1900.

Over the course of the nineteenth century more than four hundred artists are known to have depicted scenes in the White Mountains. According to Wesley G. Balla, the author of the catalogue's introduction, artists and writers started to make pilgrimages to this beautiful part of New England as early as the 1820s. Not long thereafter, ghoulish tourists and curiosity seekers were drawn by macabre press accounts describing an avalanche at Crawford Notch that took the lives of the Samuel Willey family in 1826. But by 1862 the European visitor Anthony Trollope could write: "That there was a district in New England containing mountain scenery superior to much that is yearly crowded by tourists in Europe, that this is to be reached with ease by railways and stage-coaches, and that it is dotted with huge hotels, almost as thickly as they lie in Switzerland, I had no idea.... I know nothing ... on the Rhine equal to the view from Mount Willard, down the mountain pass called the Notch."

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Early on, travel to the White Mountains was accomplished by stagecoach, steamboat, or a combination of the two, but the laying of railroad tracks in the second half of the nineteenth century made the journey far less arduous and time consuming. The first railroad line, installed to transport grain from Canada to New England in 1851, connected Portland, Maine, to Gorham, New Hampshire. This was followed by the construction of the Boston, Concord, and Montreal Railroad two years later, which took the train as far as Littleton, New Hampshire, and by 1875 the Portland and Ogdensburg Railroad ran to Crawford Notch. Hand in hand with the railroads came hotels and boardinghouses and, with them, guidebooks and other forms of travel literature, the most popular of which was The White ...