Jane's Walk: Site 19

The artist Henry Ary moved to Hudson from Providence, Rhode Island, in 1844. As a resident artist of Hudson, he painted many views of Mt. Merino, South Bay, and the Hudson River, including this one of South Bay from a vantage point very near the Robert Taylor House. 

Ary taught drawing and painting to fourth-year students at Rev. Hague's Hudson Female Academy at 400 State Street. He was Sanford Gifford's frequent sketching partner. He painted the portrait of George Washington that still hangs in the Common Council chamber at City Hall.

When he died in 1859, Ary was living in a house located at what is now 420 Warren Street, but the house he lived in was not the ornate brick Queen Anne structure that now occupies the site. 

Ary lived instead in a clapboard house that once stood on the site. Because the rear part of the house that is now there is clapboard, it has been theorized that the brick Queen Anne structure was added to what had been Ary's house, and the clapboard house still survives, beneath and behind the brick Queen Anne house. This, however, remains a theory still to be proved.