Hart returned to America in 1853. He exhibited his first work at the National Academy of Design in 1848 and became an associate in 1857 and a full member in 1859. He was particularly devoted to the National Academy, exhibiting there over a period of more than forty years and serving as vice president late in his life from 1895 to 1899. Like his brother William, James also exhibited at the Brooklyn Art Association (he lived for a time in Brooklyn) and at major exhibitions around the country.
Along with most of the major landscape artists of the time, Hart based his operations in New York City and adopted the style of the Hudson River School. While he and his brother William often painted similar landscape subjects, James may have been more inclined to paint exceptionally large works. An example is The Old Homestead (1862), 42 x 68 inches, in the collection of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. James may have been exposed to large paintings while studying in Düsseldorf, a center of realist art pedagogy that also shaped the practices of Albert Bierstadt and Worthington Whittredge.
Like his brother William, James excelled at painting cattle. Kevin J. Avery writes, "the bovine subjects that once distinguished [his works] now seem the embodiment of Hart's artistic complacency." (p. 250 in American Drawings and Watercolors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Volume I: A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born Before 1835) In contrast with the complacency of some of his cattle scenes, his major landscape paintings are considered important works of the Hudson River School. A particularly fine example is Summer in the Catskills, now in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, Spain.
Among Hart's students was the Hudson River School painter Evelina Mount.[2][3]
Sullivan, Mark W. James M. and William Hart, American Landscape Painters. Philadelphia: John Warren, 1983.
Sabine Morgen: Die Ausstrahlung der Düsseldorfer Schule nach Amerika im 19. Jahrhundert. Düsseldorfer Bilder in Amerika und amerikanische Maler in Düsseldorf mit Künstlerlexikon auf CD-ROM, Edition Ruprecht, Göttingen 2008, ISBN978-3-7675-3059-1 (= Göttinger Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte, Band 2) [Hart's painting and biography discussed]