In the 1850s through 1860,
John Frederick Kensett, painted a series of at least five landscapes of the
"Shrewsbury River" (now the Navesink River) along the New Jersey
shore. Art historians have described Kensett’s paintings of the river as having
evolved from a trip in the fall of 1853 at the invitation of Kensett's friend,
author and lecturer George Curtis. However, letters viewable at the Smithsonian
Archives of American Art website make it clear that Kensett had become
acquainted with the area over a year earlier, most likely in connection with
fellow artist and friend Thomas Prichard Rossiter.

Kensett and Rossiter had been
friends since at least the 1830s. As aspiring artists, they had traveled to
Europe together in the 1840s. In 1851 Rossiter married Anna Ehrick Parmly, then
in her early 20s, and Kensett attended the wedding. Anna was one of four
daughters of Eleazer and Anna Maria Parmly. Eleazer, one of the major figures
in American dentistry history, was a wealthy and accomplished member of New
York society.

When not in the city, the
Parmly family gathered at Bingham Place, a sprawling estate on 275 pastoral
acres spanning the peninsula between the Shrewsbury and Navesink Rivers along
the New Jersey shore. The Bingham Place estate encompassed much of what is now
Rumson, then known as Oceanic, N.J. It was a wide-open landscape of ocean
views, orchards, lawns, and cattle-dotted pastures. There the Parmlys opened
their doors to family, friends, and the summer breeze.

Rossiter, newly-married into
the Parmly family, was likely the reason that Kensett paid a social visit to
Bingham Place in the summer of 1852. On July 11, 1852, having reluctantly
departed, Kensett wrote Rossiter who was still at Bingham Place:

New York to me now is that of
a deserted place…marking a dismal contrast to the green lawns at Bingham Place.
I saw the receding shores of Shrewsbury & the line of dust which marked
your homeward course & finally the last glimpse of the Locust trees that
shade the pleasant mansion & happy inmates at Bingham with any thing but a
joyous spirit.