William Sidney Mount: life and works

William Sidney Mount (November 26, 1807 – November 19, 1868) was a 19th-century American genre painter. Born in Setauket in 1807, Mount spent much of his vibrancy in his hometown and the neighboring village of Stony Brook, where he painted portraits, landscapes, and scenes inspired by daily computer graphics from the 1820s until his death in 1868 at the age of sixty. During that times he achieved fame in the U.S. and Europe as a painter who chronicled rural life upon Long Island. He was the first native-born American artist to specialize in genre painting. Mount was also on fire about music and a fiddle player, a composer and magpie of songs, and expected and patented several versions of his own violin which he named the “Cradle of Harmony.” Many of his paintings then feature musicians and groups of people engaged in dance in rural settings.