Richard Hubbard's mother died when he was a child, and his father, a cashier at the Middletown Bank, reared him. After graduating from Middletown Academy in 1837, Hubbard entered Yale College but soon left to become an artist. In 1838 he moved to New York and enrolled in the National Academy's antique class. That same year he applied to study directly under Samuel F. B. Morse, who advised him that his interest in portrait painting could best be met by studying under Washington Allston in Boston. Allston, however, was not inclined to take Hubbard on and referred him back to Morse, who eventually accepted him.
Hubbard's study under Morse must have been brief, as he went abroad in 1840. He spent two years in England and France, where he was influenced by the landscapes of Claude Lorraine. Upon his return to the United States he began studying under Daniel Huntington. By 1850 he had taken a studio in the New York University building, which continued to be his working address until 1859, when he moved to the Tenth Street Studio Building; there he remained for the rest of his life. He traveled extensively along the Hudson River Valley and in Vermont and Connecticut in pursuit of subjects for his landscape paintings, for which he usually chose humble or commonplace settings noted for their pensive mood. Hubbard was closely associated with second generation of Hudson River School artists, including John W. Casilear, Frederic E. Church, Sanford R. Gifford, and John F. Kensett.
Hubbard's landscapes first appeared in an Academy annual exhibition in 1842, the year he returned from his extended travels abroad. Thereafter he rarely missed participating in an annual exhibition. He was a jury member for the exhibitions of 1855 and 1856 and served on the Academy's Council for 1861-62. Hubbard's activities in artists' organization were not confined to the Academy: in 1859 he was a founding member of the Artists' Fund Society, and in 1873 he was elected president of the Brooklyn Art Association, a post he held for nine years.
The Council accepted Hubbard's diploma presentation painting on February 7, 1859, thereby affirming his election to Academician. William Hart's diploma work was accepted at the same meeting. Neither work was named or described in Academy minutes, though it is safe to assume both were landscape subjects. No diploma work by Hart was included in the 1911 inventory of the Academy's collection, whereas Hubbard was credited with a work entitled White Face, Adirondack Range. In the collection review conducted prior to the publication of the present catalogue, the painting associated with that title was attributed to Hart, and it is now Hubbard's diploma presentation work that is assumed to have been lost sometime in the later nineteenth century.
JPH
