Gilbert Munger

Gilbert Munger (April 14, 1837 – January 27, 1903) was a late 19th century American landscape painter whose romantic yet topographically accurate landscapes helped to introduce the newly opened West to the American public.

Gilbert Davis Munger was born on April 14, 1837, in Madison, Connecticut, to Sherman and Lucretia (Benton) Munger, the last of five children. He was a distant cousin of the American engraver and artist George Munger. When he evinced artistic talent at an early age, his family sent him to Washington, D.C. at the age of just 13 to apprentice with William H. Dougal, who was then senior engraver at the Smithsonian Institution. Among his tasks was to produce engravings for government reports, and he turned out plates of animals, birds, fish, reptiles, and plants related to the scientific work of Louis Agassiz and the explorations of Commodore Charles Wilkes. As a painter, however, he was largely self-taught and was inspired in the development of his style by reading the work of John Ruskin and studying the painters of the Hudson River School. During this period of his life, he began to make friends with other artists, including John Mix Stanley and John Ross Key.

Munger served in the Union Army as a military engineer helping to build the fortifications around Washington, D.C., during the Civil War. After the war he moved to New York, but he also began to spend time in the West as two of his brothers had settled in Minnesota. By the mid 1860s, he was beginning to gain some recognition for his landscapes.

A turning point in Munger's life came in 1869 when he joined Clarence King's famed Fortieth Parallel Survey as a guest artist. Munger's association with the expedition's scientists and with photographer Timothy H. O'Sullivan was instrumental in shaping him as one of a new generation of artists who foregrounded optical accuracy over allegory in their landscape work. During his two years with the survey, he painted the Wasatch Mountains in Utah and the Cascade Mountains in northern California, paying special attention to these areas' unique geological formations. Ten of Munger's survey paintings were later printed as chromolithographs in King's report on the survey's activities.

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