William Sidney Mount

1807-1868 American

William Sidney Mount

First American genre painter of rural life

William Sidney Mount was a 19th-century American genre painter. Born in Setauket in 1807, Mount spent much of his life in his hometown and the adjacent village of Stony Brook, where he painted portraits, landscapes, and scenes inspired by daily life from 1828 until his death in 1868 at the age of sixty. During that time he achieved fame in the U.S. and Europe as a painter who chronicled rural life on Long Island. He was the first native-born American artist to specialize in genre painting. Mount was also passionate about music and a fiddle player, a composer and collector of songs, and designed and patented several versions of his own violin which he named the "Cradle of Harmony". Many of his paintings also feature musicians and groups of people engaged in dance in rural settings. The Long Island Museum of American Art, History, and Carriages owns the largest repository of Mount artwork and archival material, and regularly exhibits his paintings.

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