Sold at Auction: Joseph Antonio Hekking

Joseph Antonio Hekking was a landscape and marine painter born in 1830 in the Netherlands and died in New York in 1903. He studied in Paris and was a talented draftsman who lived in Cherry Valley, NY (1859), Hartford, CT (1873-78), Detroit, MI (after 1878) and Washington, D.C. As early as 1859 he exhibited paintings of the Adirondacks at the National Academy of Design (NYC). He served in the Civil War with a New York regiment and exhibited in the Detroit area after the war.In 1861, Hekking was such a good landscape painter he taught painting at the Cherry Valley Female Academy. He was a versatile and talented painter was active from the early 1850s to the later 1870s and he participated in major exhibitions. His paintings were inspired by visits to the Adirondacks and White Mountains, where Two Figures on a Bridge Against a Sunset Sky was painted. He worked with Frederick Rondel and his paintings were acquired by important collectors including J.S. Farrand, Sarah Holderby, N.L. Lindsey, T. Foster and George Watter Vincent Smith.Hekking is listed in the exhibition records of the National Academy, Penn. Academy of F.A. and the Groce & Wallace N.Y. Historical Society account of early American painters Dictionary of Artists in America. He is considered an important and relevant early American landscape painter who was intimately connected to the Hudson River School.