Of the Hudson River School painters, Elizabeth Gilbert Jerome is one of the most underrated—and least known. Unlike her contemporaries, among them Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church, the New Haven–born artist appears as a mere footnote in exhibition catalogues of the period, her lush oils filed away under the heading of “women’s art.” But her pictures, especially American Landscape, are exuberant, hinting at a marvelous spirit of trial and invention. Through the little of her life we do know, along with writings from her contemporaries, we can reconstruct the art world she lived in.

As a schoolgirl, Jerome had filled her notebooks with sketches, her passion for art spilling over onto their pages. After class, she took lessons with a teacher. But at home, she was discouraged—especially by her stepmother, who destroyed the young artist’s drawings. She was just 15 at the time.

Other challenges followed her as an adult. Obligated to wear skirts and stockings, petticoats and heels, women artists in the 19th century were at a clear disadvantage, especially in landscape painting. As the artist Eliza Pratt Greatorex wrote of hiking in Colorado, she “went sliding, slipping, tripping, tumbling,” then “whirling down that awful slide.” Hiker Marian Pychowska, niece of painter Edith Wilkinson Cook, recalled of climbing trees: “Getting up is very easy as the skirts come naturally after. A graceful descent is more difficult.”

Despite the difficulties, Jerome was resolute. At 27, after a few years away from artmaking, she returned to her practice. She studied first under painter Julius Busch in Hartford, Connecticut, then Emanuel Leutze, best known for his triumphant Washington Crossing the Delaware, in New York. Jerome studied the great painters closely to learn about “their individual charms,” writer Henry Willard French noted, and immersed herself in nature “for freshness and inspiration.”

Jerome exhibited her work at the National Academy of Design and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts—sometimes under the name E. Gilbert Jerome or G. Jerome, as she signed American Landscape.

Jerome’s oils have a depth to them, her technical skill revealing the beauty of the natural world. In this, she tapped into a broader movement among Hudson River School painters, where American landscapes symbolized not just the splendors of the outdoors but a sense of spirituality, of transcendence.

Jerome occupied a unique place in the Hudson River School. She was a contemporary of Church and saw works by the school’s major figures in New York and Hartford. In American Landscape the lone boatman, almost imperceptible—a nod to Cole and Church—draws the viewer into the wistful unknown.

But her pictures are imbued with a grandeur all their own. In American Landscape, for instance, Jerome arranged the scene in a set of neat parallels—the sky, mountains, and foreground on separate planes—a compositional format unlike that of her Hudson River School counterparts. And while large- scale compositions were typical of her male counterparts, few women at the time made paintings as large as her expansive works, which sometimes measure over four feet in length.

Jerome also had a gift for portrait and figure studies, each deliberately, exquisitely conceived. She was a “painstaking artist,” one critic pronounced, and her meticulous attention to detail is clear.

Her cabinet pictures, or small paintings made for display in a case, were especially fanciful, drawing on Charles Dickens characters like Nell Trent (The Old Curiosity Shop) and Dolly Varden (Barnaby Rudge). The Hartford Courant called one such picture, of a winter scene, “a gem [which] deserves a high place in some choice collection.”

Despite considerable setbacks—among them the death of a daughter—Jerome never tired in her abiding passion. At 80, she tried her hand at miniature painting, her deftness brilliantly, exquisitely alive. She possessed an irrepressible stirring, a belief in the power of art to buoy her.