mos Sangster (1833-1904) Amos Sangster was born in Buffalo, the second of eleven children. His father Hugh Sangster had a lantern shop on Seneca Street. In his father's shop, Amos Sangster and his brother James painted, carved, and tinkered with mechanical gadgets and inventions. Eventually, the Sangsters were granted several patents for successful inventions, and Amos Sangster was able to give up business and devote himself to art. Sangster had begun painting in 1858, and had his first success with the watercolor Summer Morning, which won a prize at an early exhibition of the Buffalo Society of Artists. With other Buffalo artists, he established an etching club in the 1870s, and began his monumental series, The Niagara River from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario soon afterwards.

By this time, Sangster was well known in Western New York as a landscape artist, watercolorist, and respected art instructor. Almost all of Sangster's works depicted scenes within fifty miles of Buffalo; he was noted for making simple, true to nature pictures, which showed a poetic appreciation for the scenery of the Niagara region. Works by Sangster are in the collections of every major Western New York art museum, as well as many historical collections. Sangster is considered to be an artist in the tradition of the French Barbizon movement in painting, emphasizing direct observation of an essentially tranquil scene in nature. Sangster's ideal of landscape was that of peaceful harmonies combining the elements of beauty with gently asymmetrical and piquant aspects of the picturesque.