Dubois Fenelon Hasbrouck

1860- 1917

 

D.F. Hasbrouck was born in Pine Hill, Ulster County, NY, into a family descended from the original settlers of the town of New Paltz, NY. He grew up on the large working farm owned by his parents, and it was expected by his father that he would carry on in the farming tradition. 

In the summer months the Hasbroucks also took in guests on the farm, and in the year 1876 Dubois met one of these lodgers, the artist J. G. Brown, who came to Pine Hill on a sketching tour. Brown saw some of Hasbrouck’s early attempts at painting and felt that he showed some potential. Consequently, before returning to his studio in New York City he gifted Dubois with a supply of paints, brushes and canvas, and encouraged him to begin to study art in earnest. To the dismay of his family, Dubois continued painting, and created a few finished works before his father destroyed his materials and insisted that he return to his farm labors.

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Shortly after this one of the summer guests, Rev. Howard Crosby of New York City, purchased some of Dubois’ pictures. He then secured room and board for him in the city, and by the age of eighteen Dubois was enrolled at the art school at Cooper Union. From 1876 to 1884 he lived intermittently between the city and his family home in the Catskills. On one of these visits home he met a guest, Ada B. Cook, an older woman with three children who was separated from her husband. Despite their age difference they fell in love, she secured a divorce, and they eventually married.

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By 1888 Hasbrouck’s career was in full flower. In that year he exhibited a painting entitled “Winter Morning in the Catskills” at the National Academy of Design. This painting was later shown at the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893, where it was purchased for a good price of $1,500 by James Ellsworth of Chicago.

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Shortly after 1893 Hasbrouck moved back to the Catskills. He often travelled the Ulster and Delaware Railroad from Kingston to Stamford, selling his artwork along the way. He was also hired by the railroad to illustrate a brochure which advertised the many summer resorts along the train line. In 1898 he bought a piece of property in Cold Brook on the Esopus Creek with the intention of building a home and to groom the property into a nature park.

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These plans never came to fruition, and after some years of excessive drinking and turbulence Hasbrouck developed a violent mental condition and was confined to the Middletown State Psychiatric Hospital in 1901. He was eventually released into his wife’s custody and in 1904 the Hasbroucks moved back to Stamford where he built a studio and continued to sell paintings to the tourists and locals in the area. He also developed a great interest in wood working and assembled a large assortment of tools that he used to create and restore old furniture. The studio was also filled with collections of Native American artifacts and a group of Japanese lanterns.

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Over the next decade Dubois suffered two strokes and was again hospitalized in Middletown. Although he could not work much during this time, at one point Patrick Woods, a wealthy patron from Brooklyn, NY, had enough faith in him to offer an advance on future paintings. Hasbrouck continued to live in the area with his wife and stepsons, and did exhibit a painting at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. 

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After another stroke in September of 1917 Hasbrouck passed away and all his paintings became the property of his wife. Many of these were incomplete and it was said that she destroyed some containing religious symbols and snakes that she felt were related to his periods of insanity. A brief obituary that appeared in the Poughkeepsie Journal noted that he died of “religious mania”. Dubois Fenelon Hasbrouck is listed in The American Art Manual and Who’s Who in American Art and is buried in the cemetery in Stamford, NY. 

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