Levi Wells Prentice

Levi Wells Prentice, a young painter from Syracuse, NY, visited the Beaver River country during a five-week sketching trip in 1873 that followed an established circuit up the Fulton Chain of Lakes to Raquette Lake and Blue Mountain Lake, then down the Raquette River to the Saranac Lakes, returning by way of Tupper Lake, Little Tupper, Smith’s Lake, Albany Lake and out down the Beaver River. Prentice made dozens of sketches on that trip, some of which he later developed into fully realized oil paintings.

Prentice was born on Dec. 18, 1851 on a farm in the town of Harrisburg in Lewis County, NY, the second son of Samuel and Rhoda Robbins Prentice. He grew up on the family farm then moved with his family to Syracuse in 1870. Not much is known of his early life. Doubtless, like all farm boys, it included a great deal of physical labor, outdoor activity and practical education. He must have dabbled in art but there is no record that he ever received any formal art education.

 

Not long after moving to Syracuse, Prentice set up an art studio at #14 in the Weiting Block Building downtown. According to his grand-niece, some of his earliest paintings were copies of portraits of famous people and some were landscapes. The first painting he exhibited was a large canvas of the Mariposa Trail in Yosemite, California. Since he never visited that location, the scene must have been based on a photograph, etching or painting. This painting was displayed from Jan. 21 – 23, 1873 the front window of Kent and Miller’s Clothiers at 18 S. Salina St. not far from his studio. The painting received very positive reviews in the newspapers and was later sold to a local buyer for $1000, an amazing sum for an unknown young artist.

 

Encouraged by his success with landscape painting, Prentice embarked on an Adirondack sketching trip that was noticed in the June 12, 1873 issue of Northern Christian Advocate. It appears that he spent most of this trip exploring and sketching on the Moose River and the Fulton Chain of Lakes. The Syracuse Journal, Nov. 1, 1873, noted that Prentice returned to the Adirondacks later that year for the more extended circuit of the lakes of the central Adirondacks that included the upper Beaver River.

 

Prentice gradually turned the sketches from this trip into finished paintings. Many of these paintings were stylized views of the wilderness and some were of recognizable scenes labeled with the location. His Adirondack landscape paintings attracted the attention of fellow Syracusan and guidebook author, Edwin R. Wallace, who placed a favorable notice about Prentice’s landscapes in the 1875 and subsequent editions of his popular Descriptive Guide to the Adirondacks.

 

Prentice also made two trips to the Adirondacks in 1877, both centered on Blue Mountain Lake. On these trips he painted views of the lake and the popular hotels that had been recently built along its shores. Prentice continued to make paintings based on his Adirondack trips well into the 1880s. In all he painted 70 known Adirondack landscapes. Of these, seven are camping scenes and two of these are of the upper Beaver River. Three of the landscapes are of Smith’s Lake. Since we know Prentice visited the upper Beaver River in 1873, these five painting were probably first sketched on that trip and later finished in his studio.

 

The two Beaver River camping scenes were displayed in the front window of Kent and Miller’s clothing store in Syracuse in 1878. The paintings received a favorable review in the Syracuse Courier, April 23, 1878. Towanda Camp, Smith's Lake, Adirondacks [top of post] shows three campers at twilight, a bark covered lean-to and a dining shelter. Watertown Camp, Albany Lake, Adirondacks [below] is a similar composition showing a bark lean-to, a log cabin, a dining shelter, and a work table. This scene is in broad daylight with two men in camp, a man by the shore and a man in a guideboat. Together these two paintings provide an excellent idea of backwoods camping in the upper Beaver River at that time. Both paintings still exist in private collections and reproductions are available from multiple sources.

Prentice also painted three views of Smith’s Lake. The Adirondack Experience Museum at Blue Mountain Lake owns one of these that shows a dramatic view of the lake as seem from a nearby summit, possibly Mt. Frederica. A similar, smaller view is in the collection of the Shelburne Museum in Vermont. A panoramic lakeside view is in a private collection. A retrospective of Prentice’s work mounted by the Adirondack Museum [now Adirondack Experience] in 1993 included three of these five paintings.

 

Prentice later moved to Buffalo, NY where he met and married an English woman, Emma Roseloe Spark, in 1882. They had two daughters, Leigh and Imogene. Prentice started painting still life subjects while he briefly lived in Brooklyn, NY in 1883, focusing on fruit of various kinds, often apples, piled high in baskets, pots or in natural settings. These paintings proved to be popular and constitute most of his later work. The Prentice family moved around from 1903 to 1907 before settling in Philadelphia. A skilled craftsman, Prentice also made his own frames, brushes, and palettes. He was able to remain an independent artist all his life. He supplemented the income from selling paintings by teaching painting and by doing decorative interior wall decoration. He died on November 28, 1935.

The facts of this article are drawn primarily from Barbara L. Jones, Nature Staged: The Landscape and Still Life Paintings of Levi Wells Prentice, Adirondack Museum, 1995.