Hudson River School
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The Hudson River school was a mid-19th century American group of landscape painters whose approach was related to romanticism. Their paintings depict the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area, as well as the Catskills, Adirondacks, and White Mountains of New Hampshire. Note that "school" in this usage is a group of people whose thought, work, or style demonstrates a common thread, rather than a learning institution.
Overview
Neither the originator of the term Hudson River school nor its first published use has been fixed with certainty. It is thought to have originated with the New York Tribune art critic Clarence Cook or the landscape painter Homer D. Martin (Howat, pages 3-4). As originally used, the term was meant disparagingly, as the work so labelled had gone out of favor when impressionism came into vogue.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 setting, where human beings and nature coexist peacefully. Hudson River school landscapes are characterized by their realistic and detailed portrayal of nature. In general, Hudson River school artists believed that nature itself was an ineffable manifestation of God, though the artists varied in the depth of their religious conviction. They took as their inspiration such European masters as Claude Lorrain and John Constable, and shared a reverence for the natural world with contemporary American writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
While the elements of the paintings are rendered very realistically, many of the actual scenes are the amalgamated products of multiple different 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.
The artist Thomas Cole is generally acknowledged as the founder of the Hudson River school. Cole journeyed into the Catskill Mountains of New York State in September and October of 1825 to paint the first landscapes of the area. His collaborator and friend, Asher Durand, was a prominent figure in the school as well. The second generation of Hudson River school artists rose to prominence after Cole's early death in 1848 and include John Frederick Kensett and Sanford Robinson Gifford. Works by artists of this second generation are often described as luminism.
Most of the finest works of the Hudson River school were painted between 1855 and 1875.The scenes of these paintings invoked sentiment from Americans towards the notion of "the frontier", and were used to build upon movements to settle the American West, national park movements, and city park movements.
The world's largest collection of paintings by artists of the Hudson River school is at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. Some of the most notable works in Atheneum's collection are thirteen landscapes by Thomas Cole, and eleven by Hartford native Frederick Edwin Church, both of whom were personal friends of the museum's founder, Daniel Wadsworth. Other important collections of Hudson River school art can be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and the Westervelt Warner Museum of American Art in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Artists who painted in the Hudson River school style
- Albert Bierstadt
- Frederic Edwin Church
- Thomas Cole
- Jasper Francis Cropsey
- Thomas Doughty
- Asher Brown Durand
- Sanford Robinson Gifford
- James McDougal Hart
- William Hart
- Martin Johnson Heade
- Hermann Ottomar Herzog
- John Frederick Kensett
- Homer Dodge Martin
- Jervis McEntee
- Thomas Moran
- Worthington Whittredge
See also
References
Howat, John K. American Paradise, The World of the Hudson River School. The Metroplitan Museum of Art, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1987.External links
- [Hudson River School art in museums around the United States]
- [Overview of the Hudson River School]
- [White Mountain Art & Artists]
- [Albany Institute of History and Art]
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