Elliott Daingerfield photograph by Charles Harris

Deep chimes from an organ ring throughout St. Mary of the Hills Episcopal Church. The music quiets the parishioners and guides the procession of clergy and others alongside the pews. They slowly walk beneath wooden beams, one marked with a psalm written in gold: “O Ye Mountains and Hills, Bless Ye the Lord.” As the group approaches the altar, an acolyte lights the candles, which cast a subtle glow on the altarpiece that has hung in this church for more than a century.

Madonna of the Hills depicts a statuesque Mary cradling baby Jesus in one arm and raising a blooming white lily with the other. Rhododendrons grow beside her, and behind her, layers of blue mountains fade into the distance among the ethereal clouds that frame Mary’s figure, placing her and her babe right here in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The painting is the work of the late parishioner Elliott Daingerfield, an artist who grew up in Fayetteville and, as an adult, spent his summers in Blowing Rock from 1886 until his death in 1932. The piece was painted at the request of Daingerfield’s friends William and Susie Stringfellow, then-owners of nearby Chetola Resort and benefactors of St. Mary. Daingerfield was a devout Episcopalian and attended services at the church each summer after it was dedicated in 1921.

After the final hymn is sung and the congregation dismissed, families file out of the stone church and onto Main Street. Just across the road, in front of the Blowing Rock Art & History Museum (BRAHM), sits Daingerfield’s earliest home in this mountain town.

Daingerfield’s Edgewood Cottage was moved to its current location, next to the Blowing Rock Art & History Museum, in 2008. photograph by Charles Harris

Edgewood Cottage was built for the painter in 1889 and 1890 as a modest retreat and studio. Today, it hosts an artist-in-residency program coordinated by Lynn Armbrust, a member of the Blowing Rock Historical Society, which manages the cottage. The program was created in tribute to Daingerfield’s extraordinary art.

“But it’s really more than that because he was more than an artist,” Armbrust says. “He was someone who was engaging and encouraging of other artists. That was a huge part of his mission and his life.” And his cottage was just the beginning of a wide-ranging legacy of creativity and beauty in Blowing Rock — one that would long outlive the artist himself.

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Daingerfield and his first wife, Roberta, were living successful lives in New York City when the 27-year-old painter was diagnosed with diphtheria. He and Roberta, who was raised in Wilmington, came to the North Carolina High Country due to its reputation for healing respiratory illnesses.

In summer 1886, the couple boarded a southbound train to Lenoir. From there, they packed themselves and Daingerfield’s painting materials into a stagecoach and wagons for a daylong trip up the rugged, unpaved Lenoir-Blowing Rock Turnpike. The Daingerfields spent hours riding along the dusty mountain road in a rattling carriage, eventually reaching the spectacular views around Blowing Rock, later advertised as “Cloudland.”

Daingerfield’s moody “tonalist” style can be seen in works like The Last Gleam. photograph by Charles Harris

Daingerfield’s ties to North Carolina ran deep. Though born in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), he was raised in Fayetteville during the last years of the Civil War. He was a preschooler when he watched Sherman’s troops burn through the town, torching his childhood home.

“The troops gave warning to his mother that the house was going to be burned,” says Shelley Crisp, a docent at BRAHM and a retired humanities scholar who has taught a course on Daingerfield’s life and the lives of his students through the Duke University Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. “I have to believe that as a 5-year-old,” she continues, “those images stayed with him in some very fundamental way.”

After the war, Daingerfield left school at age 12 to help provide for his family. While working in his father’s photography studio, Daingerfield continued his education independently, reading the Bible cover to cover and taking painting lessons from a neighbor. For Christmas one year, his older brother, Archie, gave him a set of watercolors.

“Daingerfield believed that the artist was the genius who interpreted the spirit that came through nature.”

In 1880, Daingerfield journeyed to New York City, where he taught art and developed his atmospheric “tonalist” style of painting. His work often depicted scenes from his travels, both to Blowing Rock and beyond. “What he found in the mountains was a manifestation of spirit,” Crisp says. “He believed that the artist was the genius who interpreted the spirit that came through nature.”

Daingerfield painted Grandfather Mountain at twilight. He painted moonscapes and sunrises and sunsets. And he painted religious figures. “He used orange and amber like no other artist I’ve seen,” says Ian Gabriel Wilson, BRAHM’s curator of exhibitions and collections. “When you look across Daingerfield’s career, he wasn’t a purist when it came to anything except for the sacredness of the act of painting nature. I think that’s because he saw a certain sacredness in the landscape.”

A sculpture of the artist stands outside of his former Edgewood Cottage. photograph by Charles Harris

Once Edgewood Cottage was built, the artist encouraged his Northern students to venture down to Blowing Rock to explore the vistas that he had come to love. A group of women from Philadelphia, who became known as “The Painting Ladies,” traveled for many summers to learn from Daingerfield and to paint with him. During this period, women were barred from studying with men at the major academies, but Daingerfield was encouraging. “He supported their dreams to be artists creating museum-quality work,” Crisp says, “not just women drawing.”

Several of The Painting Ladies — including Theresa Bernstein and Mary-Russell Ferrell Colton — later became notable artists themselves. Bernstein told stories of her time as a cosmopolitan woman painting in the rugged mountains of North Carolina. Some of her tales involved precarious run-ins with moonshiners and unwelcome wildlife. “There’s a story where [Bernstein] talks about throwing her paint box at a rattlesnake,” Crisp says with a laugh. “It was a six-foot rattlesnake, and she nailed it.”

Daingerfield’s Westglow estate, now a boutique lodge, opens to overlook views of Grandfather Mountain.  photograph by Charles Harris

Daingerfield experienced tragedy in 1891, when both his wife and newborn baby died in childbirth. He soldiered on, continuing to work and find professional success. He built a new residence and studio in Blowing Rock called Windwood in 1900, the same year that his first daughter, Marjorie, was born to him and his second wife, Anna, whom he’d met at the Watauga Hotel and married in 1895. It was at Windwood that Daingerfield painted the St. Mary of the Hills altarpiece, using Anna as his Madonna model.

The porch of Windwood was grand, but it offered limited views of the mountains. So in 1915, Daingerfield began work on his final mountain masterpiece: Westglow, a Greek revival-style mansion named for its perfect view of Grandfather Mountain at twilight. From Westglow, the artist was able to capture the serenity and divinity of the sunsets that, in his own words, are “never glaring, always glowing.” Daingerfield spent the remainder of his summers there until his death at age 73. He was buried at Cross Creek Cemetery in Fayetteville.

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At a table in the center of Westglow’s new restaurant, aptly named Daingerfield, a group of couples gathers by the fireplace, which is framed by columns matching those supporting the portico overlooking Grandfather. The view from the table presents the same lush landscape that’s captured in the painting above the fireplace, Sunset Through the Greenwood.

Completed in 1918, Sunset was likely painted by Daingerfield right here in this house, which is now home to boutique lodging, a spa, and the restaurant. The dining room features five other Daingerfield works, as well as a small portrait of a young girl believed to have been painted by his daughter, Marjorie, who later became a talented sculptor.

The artist’s 1918 painting Sunset Through the Greenwood is now on display inside his former Westglow estate. photograph by Charles Harris

Daingerfield’s other homes have been given new life, too. Windwood remains a private residence and Edgewood Cottage, of course, is an artists’ haven once again. In 2008, restoration of the cottage, which had to be dismantled and rebuilt, was completed. Now, visitors can walk up to its porch, where Daingerfield once hosted demonstrations for The Painting Ladies, and enter the home to find contemporary artists painting, weaving, carving, and quilting. Its walls are covered with those artists’ works, along with a few sculptures of Daingerfield that Marjorie created.

Behind Edgewood sits the 25,000-square-foot Blowing Rock Art & History Museum, a striking building. Its stone details and towering windows speak to Daingerfield’s outsize influence in this mountain town.

An Arcadian Huntress can be viewed at Blowing Rock Frameworks & Gallery. Photography courtesy of Blowing Rock Frameworks & Gallery

BRAHM is the centerpiece of the community’s reverence for its art and its history, and in a place as beautiful and inspirational as Blowing Rock, those are one and the same. “Everyone who walks into our museum is eager to learn about Daingerfield,” Wilson says. Upstairs is the history exhibit, where visitors can see vintage tourism advertisements.

Look through Daingerfield’s prolific canon, and the influence that the North Carolina mountains had on him is apparent. Spend a day in Blowing Rock, and the impact that he had on this mountain town is impossible to ignore.

“To this day, plein air artists still flock to Blowing Rock on their own,” Wilson says. “We have the Plein Air Festival, but that’s not the only time they’re here. I think so much of the magic and mystique of this specific landscape is because Daingerfield chose to paint it. He committed to it; he built three homes here.”

Inside St. Mary of the Hills, Madonna of the Hills serves as the altarpiece. photograph by Charles Harris

A statue of Daingerfield in the act of painting stands just outside Edgewood Cottage. It’s modeled after his grandson Joe Dulaney, now 87, who spends his summers in Blowing Rock just as his grandfather once did. On the canvas is an image of St. Mary of the Hills, just across the street, where Daingerfield’s Madonna of the Hills masterpiece helps guide worshippers in prayer.

“He is a North Carolinian,” Crisp says of the artist. “He’s one of ours. I don’t care how long he was in Philadelphia or New York.” In the statue, in his homes, in his works displayed in private residences, galleries, and now the museum, Daingerfield continues to color this town, where art not only imitates but is also inextricably part of High Country life.