Hudson River school
Encyclopedia
The Hudson River School was a mid-19th century American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 art movement embodied by a group of landscape
Landscape art
Landscape art is a term that covers the depiction of natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, and especially art where the main subject is a wide view, with its elements arranged into a coherent composition. In other works landscape backgrounds for figures can still...

 painter
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

s whose aesthetic vision was influenced by romanticism
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

. The paintings for which the movement is named depict the Hudson River Valley
Hudson Valley
The Hudson Valley comprises the valley of the Hudson River and its adjacent communities in New York State, United States, from northern Westchester County northward to the cities of Albany and Troy.-History:...

 and the surrounding area, including the Catskill
Catskill Mountains
The Catskill Mountains, an area in New York State northwest of New York City and southwest of Albany, are a mature dissected plateau, an uplifted region that was subsequently eroded into sharp relief. They are an eastward continuation, and the highest representation, of the Allegheny Plateau...

, Adirondack
Adirondack Mountains
The Adirondack Mountains are a mountain range located in the northeastern part of New York, that runs through Clinton, Essex, Franklin, Fulton, Hamilton, Herkimer, Lewis, Saint Lawrence, Saratoga, Warren, and Washington counties....

, and the White Mountains
White Mountains (New Hampshire)
The White Mountains are a mountain range covering about a quarter of the state of New Hampshire and a small portion of western Maine in the United States. Part of the Appalachian Mountains, they are considered the most rugged mountains in New England...

; eventually works by the second generation of artists associated with the school expanded to include other locales.

Overview

Neither the originator of the term Hudson River School or its first published use has been fixed with certainty. The term is thought to have originated with the New York Tribune art critic Clarence Cook
Clarence Cook
Clarence Chatham Cook was a 19th-century American author and art critic.Born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, Cook graduated from Harvard in 1849 and worked as a teacher. Between 1863 and 1869, Cook wrote a series of articles about American art for The New York Tribune...

 or the landscape painter Homer D. Martin As originally used, the term was meant disparagingly, as the work so labeled had gone out of favor when the plein-air Barbizon School
Barbizon school
The Barbizon school of painters were part of a movement towards realism in art, which arose in the context of the dominant Romantic Movement of the time. The Barbizon school was active roughly from 1830 through 1870...

 had come into vogue among American patrons and collectors.

Hudson River School paintings reflect three themes of America in the 19th century: discovery, exploration, and settlement. The paintings also depict the American landscape as a pastoral
Pastoral
The adjective pastoral refers to the lifestyle of pastoralists, such as shepherds herding livestock around open areas of land according to seasons and the changing availability of water and pasturage. It also refers to a genre in literature, art or music that depicts such shepherd life in an...

 setting, where human beings
Human
Humans are the only living species in the Homo genus...

 and nature
Nature
Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general...

 coexist peacefully. Hudson River School landscapes are characterized by their realistic, detailed, and sometimes idealized portrayal of nature, often juxtaposing peaceful agriculture and the remaining wilderness, fast disappearing from the Hudson Valley just as it was coming to be appreciated for its qualities of ruggedness and sublimity. In general, Hudson River School artists believed that nature in the form of the American landscape was an ineffable manifestation of God
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....

, though the artists varied in the depth of their religious conviction. They took as their inspiration such European masters as Claude Lorrain
Claude Lorrain
Claude Lorrain, , traditionally just Claude in English Claude Lorrain, , traditionally just Claude in English (also Claude Gellée, his real name, or in French Claude Gellée, , dit le Lorrain) Claude Lorrain, , traditionally just Claude in English (also Claude Gellée, his real name, or in French...

, John Constable
John Constable
John Constable was an English Romantic painter. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for his landscape paintings of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home—now known as "Constable Country"—which he invested with an intensity of affection...

 and J.M.W. Turner, and shared a reverence for America's natural beauty with contemporary American writers such as Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist...

 and Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century...

. Several protagonists have been members of the Düsseldorf school of painting.

While the elements of the paintings are rendered very realistically, many of the actual scenes are the synthesized compositions of multiple scenes or natural images observed by the artists. In gathering the visual data for their paintings, the artists would travel to rather extraordinary and extreme environments, the likes of which would not permit the act of painting. During these expeditions, sketches and memories would be recorded and the paintings would be rendered later, upon the artists' safe return home.

Thomas Cole

The artist Thomas Cole
Thomas Cole
Thomas Cole was an English-born American artist. He is regarded as the founder of the Hudson River School, an American art movement that flourished in the mid-19th century...

 is generally acknowledged as the founder of the Hudson River School. Cole took a steamship up the Hudson in the autumn of 1825, the same year the Erie Canal
Erie Canal
The Erie Canal is a waterway in New York that runs about from Albany, New York, on the Hudson River to Buffalo, New York, at Lake Erie, completing a navigable water route from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes. The canal contains 36 locks and encompasses a total elevation differential of...

 opened, stopping first at West Point
West Point, New York
West Point is a federal military reservation established by President of the United States Thomas Jefferson in 1802. It is a census-designated place located in Town of Highlands in Orange County, New York, United States. The population was 7,138 at the 2000 census...

, then at Catskill landing where he ventured west high up into the eastern Catskill Mountains
Catskill Mountains
The Catskill Mountains, an area in New York State northwest of New York City and southwest of Albany, are a mature dissected plateau, an uplifted region that was subsequently eroded into sharp relief. They are an eastward continuation, and the highest representation, of the Allegheny Plateau...

 of New York State to paint the first landscapes of the area. The first review of his work appeared in the New York Evening Post on November 22, 1825. At that time, only the English native Cole, born in a landscape where autumnal tints were of browns and yellows, found the brilliant autumn hues of the area inspirational. Cole's close friend, Asher Durand, became a prominent figure in the school as well, particularly when the banknote-engraving business evaporated in the Panic of 1837
Panic of 1837
The Panic of 1837 was a financial crisis or market correction in the United States built on a speculative fever. The end of the Second Bank of the United States had produced a period of runaway inflation, but on May 10, 1837 in New York City, every bank began to accept payment only in specie ,...

.

Second generation

The second generation of Hudson River school artists emerged to prominence after Cole's premature death in 1848; its members included Cole's prize pupil Frederic Edwin Church
Frederic Edwin Church
Frederic Edwin Church was an American landscape painter born in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters...

, John Frederick Kensett
John Frederick Kensett
John Frederick Kensett was an American artist and engraver. He attended school at Cheshire Academy, and studied engraving with his immigrant father, Thomas Kensett, and later with his uncle, Alfred Dagget...

, and Sanford Robinson Gifford
Sanford Robinson Gifford
Sanford Robinson Gifford was an American landscape painter and one of the leading members of the Hudson River School...

. Works by artists of this second generation are often described as examples of Luminism
Luminism (American art style)
Luminism is an American landscape painting style of the 1850s – 1870s, characterized by effects of light in landscapes, through using aerial perspective, and concealing visible brushstrokes...

. In addition to pursuing their art, many of the artists, including Kensett, Gifford and Church, were among the founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...

 in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 (1869).

Most of the finest works of the Hudson River school were painted between 1855 and 1875. During that time, artists like Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt
Albert Bierstadt
Albert Bierstadt was a German-American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. In obtaining the subject matter for these works, Bierstadt joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion...

 were celebrities, influenced by the Düsseldorf school of painting. When Church exhibited paintings like Niagara or Icebergs of the North, thousands of people would line up around the block and pay fifty cents a head to view the solitary work. The epic size of the landscapes in these paintings, unexampled in earlier American painting, reminded Americans of the vast, untamed, but magnificent wilderness areas in their country, and their works helped build upon movements to settle the American West, preserve national parks, and create city parks.

Public collections

One of the largest collections of paintings by artists of the Hudson River School is at the Wadsworth Atheneum
Wadsworth Atheneum
The Wadsworth Atheneum is the oldest public art museum in the United States, with significant holdings of French and American Impressionist paintings, Hudson River School landscapes, modernist masterpieces and contemporary works, as well as extensive holdings in early American furniture and...

 in Hartford, Connecticut
Hartford, Connecticut
Hartford is the capital of the U.S. state of Connecticut. The seat of Hartford County until Connecticut disbanded county government in 1960, it is the second most populous city on New England's largest river, the Connecticut River. As of the 2010 Census, Hartford's population was 124,775, making...

. Some of the most notable works in the Atheneum's collection are 13 landscapes by Thomas Cole, and 11 by Hartford native Frederic Edwin Church, both of whom were personal friends of the museum's founder, Daniel Wadsworth.

Other collections

  • Albany Institute of History & Art
    Albany Institute of History & Art
    The Albany Institute of History & Art is a museum in Albany, New York "dedicated to collecting, preserving, interpreting and promoting interest in the history, art, and culture of Albany and the Upper Hudson Valley region". The museum is located at 125 Washington Avenue in downtown Albany...

     in Albany, New York
  • Brooklyn Museum
    Brooklyn Museum
    The Brooklyn Museum is an encyclopedia art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At 560,000 square feet, the museum holds New York City's second largest art collection with roughly 1.5 million works....

     in [Brooklyn, NY
  • Detroit Institute of Arts
    Detroit Institute of Arts
    The Detroit Institute of Arts is a renowned art museum in the city of Detroit. In 2003, the DIA ranked as the second largest municipally owned museum in the United States, with an art collection valued at more than one billion dollars...

     in Detroit, MI
  • Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center
    Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center
    The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center is a teaching museum, major art repository, and exhibition space on the campus of Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, New York, USA. It was originally founded in 1864 as the Vassar College Art Gallery. It displays works from antiquity to contemporary times...

    , Poughkeepsie, NY
  • Fruitlands Museum
    Fruitlands Museum
    Fruitlands Museum is a cluster of small historic buildings in Harvard, Massachusetts on the former site of the unsuccessful utopian community Fruitlands...

     in Harvard, MA
  • Gilcrease Museum
    Gilcrease Museum
    Gilcrease Museum is a museum located northwest of downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma. The museum now houses the world's largest, most comprehensive collection of art of the American West as well as a growing collection of art and artifacts from Central and South America...

     in Tulsa, OK
  • Metropolitan Museum of Art
    Metropolitan Museum of Art
    The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...

    , Manhattan, NY
  • National Gallery of Art
    National Gallery of Art
    The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden is a national art museum, located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, in Washington, DC...

     in Washington, DC
  • Newark Museum
    Newark Museum
    The Newark Museum is the largest museum in New Jersey, USA. It holds fine collections of American art, decorative arts, contemporary art, and arts of Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the ancient world...

     in Newark, NJ
  • New-York Historical Society
    New-York Historical Society
    The New-York Historical Society is an American history museum and library located in New York City at the corner of 77th Street and Central Park West in Manhattan. Founded in 1804 as New York's first museum, the New-York Historical Society presents exhibitions, public programs and research that...

    , Manhattan, NY
  • Olana State Historic Site
    Olana State Historic Site
    Olana State Historic Site was the home of Frederic Edwin Church , one of the major figures in the Hudson River School of landscape painting. The centerpiece of Olana is an eclectic villa composed of many styles, difficult to categorize, which overlooks parkland and a working farm designed by the...

    , Hudson, NY
  • Westervelt Warner Museum of American Art
    Westervelt Warner Museum of American Art
    The Westervelt Warner is located in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, United States. The Westervelt collection is the result of 40 years of collecting American art by Jack Warner. He founded the museum in 2003 after exhibiting portions of the collection elsewhere...

    , Tuscaloosa, AL

Noteworthy artists of the Hudson River School

  • Albert Bierstadt
    Albert Bierstadt
    Albert Bierstadt was a German-American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. In obtaining the subject matter for these works, Bierstadt joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion...

  • John William Casilear
    John William Casilear
    John William Casilear was an American landscape artist belonging to the Hudson River School.Casilear was born in New York City. His first professional training was under prominent New York engraver Peter Maverick in the 1820s, then with Asher Durand, himself an engraver at the time...

  • Frederic Edwin Church
    Frederic Edwin Church
    Frederic Edwin Church was an American landscape painter born in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters...

  • Thomas Cole
    Thomas Cole
    Thomas Cole was an English-born American artist. He is regarded as the founder of the Hudson River School, an American art movement that flourished in the mid-19th century...

  • Samuel Colman
    Samuel Colman
    Samuel Colman was an American painter, interior designer, and writer, probably best remembered for his paintings of the Hudson River....

  • Jasper Francis Cropsey
    Jasper Francis Cropsey
    Jasper Francis Cropsey was an important American landscape artist of the Hudson River School.-Biography:Cropsey was born on his father Jacob Rezeau Cropsey's farm in Rossville on Staten Island, New York, the oldest of eight children. As a young boy, Cropsey had recurring periods of poor health....

  • Thomas Doughty
    Thomas Doughty (artist)
    Thomas Doughty was an American artist of the Hudson River School.Born in Philadelphia, Thomas Doughty was the first American artist to work exclusively as a landscapist and was successful both for his skill and the fact that Americans were turning their interest to landscape...


  • Robert Duncanson
    Robert Scott Duncanson
    Robert Scott Duncanson was born in Seneca County, New York in 1821. Duncanson’s father was a Canadian of Scottish descent and his mother was an African American, thus making him “a freeborn person of color.” Duncanson, an artist who is relatively unknown today, painted America, both physically...

  • Asher Brown Durand
    Asher Brown Durand
    Asher Brown Durand was an American painter of the Hudson River School.-Early life:Durand was born in and eventually died in Maplewood, New Jersey , the eighth of eleven children; his father was a watchmaker and a silversmith.Durand was apprenticed to an engraver from 1812 to 1817, later entering...

  • Sanford Robinson Gifford
    Sanford Robinson Gifford
    Sanford Robinson Gifford was an American landscape painter and one of the leading members of the Hudson River School...

  • James McDougal Hart
    James McDougal Hart
    James McDougal Hart , was a Scottish-born American landscape and cattle painter of the Hudson River School. His older brother, William Hart, was also a Hudson River School artist, and the two painted similar subjects....

  • William Hart
    William Hart (painter)
    William Hart , was a Scottish-born American landscape and cattle painter, and Hudson River School artist. His younger brother, James McDougal Hart, was also a Hudson River School artist, and the two painted similar subjects...

  • William Stanley Haseltine
    William Stanley Haseltine
    William Stanley Haseltine was an American painter and draftsman who was associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting, the Hudson River School and Luminism.-Early life and education:...

  • Martin Johnson Heade
    Martin Johnson Heade
    Martin Johnson Heade was a prolific American painter known for his salt marsh landscapes, seascapes, portraits of tropical birds, and still lifes...


  • Hermann Ottomar Herzog
    Hermann Ottomar Herzog
    Hermann Ottomar Herzog was a prominent nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European and American artist, primarily known for his landscapes. He was born in Bremen, Germany and entered the Düsseldorf Academy at age seventeen. Herzog achieved early commercial success, allowing him to travel...

  • Thomas Hill
    Thomas Hill (painter)
    Thomas Hill was an American artist of the 19th century. He produced many fine paintings of the California landscape, in particular of the Yosemite Valley, as well as the White Mountains of New Hampshire.-Biography:...

  • David Johnson
    David Johnson (American artist)
    David Johnson was a member of the second generation of Hudson River School painters.He was born in New York City, New York. He studied for two years at the antique school of the National Academy of Design. He also studied briefly with the Hudson River artist Jasper Francis Cropsey...

  • John Frederick Kensett
    John Frederick Kensett
    John Frederick Kensett was an American artist and engraver. He attended school at Cheshire Academy, and studied engraving with his immigrant father, Thomas Kensett, and later with his uncle, Alfred Dagget...

  • Jervis McEntee
    Jervis McEntee
    Jervis McEntee was an American painter of the Hudson River School. He is a somewhat lesser-known figure of the 19th century American art world, but was the close friend and traveling companion of several of the important Hudson River School artists...

  • Thomas Moran
    Thomas Moran
    Thomas Moran from Bolton, England was an American painter and printmaker of the Hudson River School in New York whose work often featured the Rocky Mountains. Moran and his family took residence in New York where he obtained work as an artist...

  • Robert Walter Weir
    Robert Walter Weir
    Robert Walter Weir was an American artist, best known as an educator, and as an historical painter. He was considered an artist of the Hudson River school, was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1829, and an instructor at the United States Military Academy...

  • Worthington Whittredge
    Worthington Whittredge
    Thomas Worthington Whittredge was an American artist of the Hudson River School. Whittredge was a highly regarded artist of his time, and was friends with several leading Hudson River School artists including Albert Bierstadt and Sanford Robinson Gifford...



See also

  • Düsseldorf School
    Düsseldorf School
    The Düsseldorf school of painting refers to a group of painters who taught or studied at the Düsseldorf Academy in the 1830s and 1840s, when the Academy was directed by the painter Wilhelm von Schadow...

  • History of painting
    History of painting
    The history of painting reaches back in time to artifacts from pre-historic humans, and spans all cultures. It represents a continuous, though periodically disrupted tradition from Antiquity. Across cultures, and spanning continents and millennia, the history of painting is an ongoing river of...

  • Landscape art
    Landscape art
    Landscape art is a term that covers the depiction of natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, and especially art where the main subject is a wide view, with its elements arranged into a coherent composition. In other works landscape backgrounds for figures can still...

  • List of Hudson River School artists
  • Macchiaioli
    Macchiaioli
    The Macchiaioli were a group of Italian painters active in Tuscany in the second half of the nineteenth century, who, breaking with the antiquated conventions taught by the Italian academies of art, did much of their painting outdoors in order to capture natural light, shade, and colour...

  • Romanticism
    Romanticism
    Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

  • Western painting
    Western painting
    The history of Western painting represents a continuous, though disrupted, tradition from antiquity. Until the mid-19th century it was primarily concerned with representational and Classical modes of production, after which time more modern, abstract and conceptual forms gained favor.Developments...

  • White Mountain art
    White Mountain art
    White Mountain art is the body of work created during the 19th century by over four hundred artists who painted landscape scenes of the White Mountains of New Hampshire in order to promote the region and, consequently, sell their works of art....

  • Young America Movement
    Young America movement
    The Young America Movement was an American political and cultural attitude in the mid-nineteenth century. Inspired by European reform movements of the 1830s , the American group was formed as a political organization in 1845 by Edwin de Leon and George H. Evans...


Sources

  • Ferber, Linda S., The Hudson River School : nature and the American vision, New-York Historical Society, 2009.
  • Howat, John K. American Paradise, The World of the Hudson River School. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1987.
  • O'Toole, Judith H. Different Views in Hudson River School Painting. Columbia University Press 2005.
  • Wilmerding, John. American Light. The Luminist Movement 1850. Paintings Drawings Photographs. National Gallery of Art Washington 1980.

External links

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