Joseph Hekking Art

Antique American Hudson River School oil painting by Joseph Antonio Hekking (1830 - 1903). Oil on board, circa 1870. Signed. Displayed in a giltwood frame. Image, 6"L x 8"H.

Signed lower left American landscape painter Joseph Antonio Hekking was born in 1830. He emigrated from the Netherlands to the United States with his family and settled in Cherry Valley, New York, where he received his early education. Hekking appears as a marine and landscape painter in New York City in the 1850s. In 1859 he exhibited several paintings of the Adirondack Mountains at the National Academy of Design, New York City. Hekking’s early landscapes of the White Mountains and seascapes of the New Jersey shore were appreciated for their detailed naturalism and refined draftsmanship. Hekking studied in Paris, France in the 1860s. Upon his return he began a new series of panoramic and romantic views of mountain scenes throughout New York State and Connecticut in the style of the Hudson River School painters, Thomas Cole and Jasper Cropsey, who were romanticizing and elegizing the American wilderness landscape as a visual analog to a new and popular cultural movement known as Manifest Destiny. Under this philosophical and political doctrine, America was destined by Almighty God...