Du Bois Fenelon Hasbrouck, Autumn Landscape, 1886, oil on canvas, 24 1/4 x 16 1/4 in. (61.5 x 41.4 cm.), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Frederick Fairchild Sherman in memory of Eloise Lee Sherman, 1913.7.1
Catskills Past
The catskills through his eyes By T.M. Bradshaw
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uBois Fenelon Hasbrouck was born July 1, 1860 in Pine Hill, New York. He was the fourth of eight children of Josiah L. Hasbrouck and Mary Smith Hasbrouck. His father was listed on various censuses as a farmer and as a carpenter. By the 1870s, the family was also running a boardinghouse, as it was a time of burgeoning tourism in the Catskills. When J. G. Brown, an artist with a successful career painting street urchins, stayed at the Hasbrouck establishment, Crystal Spring Cottage, he spent his time sketching and painting landscapes, a subject he preferred to his highly popular waifs. Young DuBois was fascinated. He cobbled together his own supplies—house paint, scrap lumber, and brushes fashioned from animal hairs—to try his hand at the art form. Brown was so impressed by the boy’s efforts, he gifted him with brushes, tubes of paint, and canvases. Josiah Hasbrouck thought that his son should be paying attention to responsibilities around the farm instead of painting pictures and smashed his paint box. DuBois was not deterred by this. 8 • issuu.com/catskillmtnregionguide
Another summer boarder, the Reverend Howard Crosby, Chancellor of the University of the City of New York (now NYU), purchased a few paintings by DuBois and encouraged him to study art and make it his career. Crosby arranged for room and board in New York City, which allowed Hasbrouck to spend three months studying perspective drawing at Cooper Union in 1878, the only formal art training he would ever have. For the next six years Hasbrouck lived part time in the city and part time in the Catskills, doing photoengraving work for a living and painting for himself. On the 1880 census, at the age of 19, he reported his occupation as “painter.” In 1884 Hasbrouck exhibited a painting for the first time, in the National Academy Exhibition. He is listed in the Academy’s exhibition catalogs through 1889 at various addresses in Manhattan, all in the vicinity of Lexington Avenue with cross streets in the 20s. One author who has written about Hasbrouck, Clara Baur, became interested in him because her husband’s grandfather, who owned a tavern on East 23 Street, owned a number of
