John T Young

John T. Young, the Morses unquestionably availed themselves of the best budding landscape talent in a city not at the time disposed to favor artists working outside the field of portraiture. Young, from the island of Guernsey, had settled in Rochester probably in 1835 and quickly gained a sound reputation for the ability and accuracy of his draftsmanship. It was he who was chosen by Henry O'Reilly to provide the drawings for the forty-two wood engravings of scenes and buildings that illustrate his Sketches of Rochester, published in 1838—illustrations that helped considerably in making this one of the best of early nineteenth-century city histories. It is the lithographs, however, that better show the artistic promise of the youthful landscapist—whose career was cut tragically short by his death from consumption in 1842, at the age of twenty-eight. Not for some years thereafter would a draftsman of equal ability make his home in Rochester. Howard Merritt.