Hudson River School (painting)
The Hudson River School is an American art movement that emerged in the early to mid-nineteenth century, characterized by a group of painters who sought to depict the natural beauty and grandeur of the American landscape, particularly around the Hudson River Valley. This movement reflects a romantic ideology centered on the sublime, capturing the majesty of untamed nature and the spirit of a young nation. Founded by Thomas Cole, the Hudson River School artists, including notable figures such as Frederic Edwin Church and Asher Durand, often painted serene landscapes that evoked themes of harmony between civilization and nature.
The paintings produced by these artists often symbolize the aspirations of the United States, illustrating a vision of progress and triumph over wilderness. While their work celebrated American landscapes, it also glossed over the complexities of colonization and its impact on Native populations. Many artists were inspired by European romantic aesthetics but sought to create a distinctly American art form that resonated with national identity. The movement flourished between 1825 and 1870, and its influence extended beyond the Hudson River, with artists exploring more rugged terrains and even creating works inspired by international landscapes. Overall, the Hudson River School remains a significant chapter in American art history, encapsulating the interplay between nature, nationalism, and the evolving American identity.
Hudson River School (painting)
As the new American republic began to settle into nationhood, artists became interested in exploring and depicting the majestic images of untamed nature they believed were representative of the spirit of the nation. The Hudson River school, formed in the early to mid-nineteenth century, refers to a group of painters who sought to capture these images, initially concentrating in the region around the Hudson River Valley. The artists were guided by a romantic ideology of the sublime and the desire to recreate images of untamed, virgin territories of North America that seemed larger than life. These images became the repository for the dreams of the young nation: the grandeur of its nature, the triumph of civilization over wilderness, enterprise and courage, and so on. These stories glossed over the price exacted from Native Americans and other peoples, but the stories told by the images did become symbolic of the nation both at home and worldwide.
Brief History
Thomas Cole is considered the founder of the Hudson River school. Cole explored and painted the region of the river and its surrounding territories. His work, which became representative of the Hudson River school, presents images of soft lights and virgin forests, a pastoral vision of harmony with nature in which human figures, when shown, are dwarfed by the magnificence around them.
Prior to the rise of Thomas Cole, Louisa Davis Minot had painted a couple of canvases of Niagara Falls in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In these, she represented the majestic force of nature in the same aesthetic later spearheaded by Thomas Cole. Minot’s work, according to scholars, demonstrates her knowledge of the aesthetic theory of the sublime, followed by many of the romantic artists and writers of the period. The theory of the sublime, as articulated by philosopher Edmund Burke in the mid-1700s, explained the astonishment—sometimes even the horror—inspired by the greatness of nature.
Cole inspired other artists to travel and paint outdoors, some of whom explored and depicted increasingly rugged terrain. The second generation of Hudson River school artists continued developing the effects of light on canvas and landscape. The ideal of the sublime continued to be an important element; therefore, critics have argued that the Hudson River school often aggrandized or exaggerated the grandeur, peacefulness and harmony of their landscapes.
Some artists representative of the Hudson River school aesthetic are Frederic Edwin Church, Asher Durand, John Frederick Kensett, and Sanford Robinson Gifford. Church, a student of Thomas Cole, went beyond the representation of North American landscapes, travelling abroad in order to paint landscapes of the Arctic, Asia, and South America, expanding the initial scope of the Hudson River school.
Among the most emblematic paintings of the values represented by the Hudson River school are Thomas Cole’s series The Course of the Empire (1833–1836) and Louisa Davis Minot’s Niagara Falls (1818). These reproduce the utopian ideals and splendorous scenes associated with the bright future expected of the United States.
Overview
Art movements are not born in vacuums. In fact, they must be understood in light of the social and historic events in which they are contextualized. The inception of the Hudson River school is usually set in the beginnings of the nineteenth century, when a group of artists, including William Dunlap, Asher Durand, and John Turnbull discovered the work of Thomas Cole. The first artists associated with the school focused on painting the Catskills and New York, and the general territory around which the Hudson River flows.
Prevalent at the time, especially among artists and poets, was the idea of the sublime, so the school is considered a branch of the romanticism. In time, the Hudson River school came to represent a large group of American painters, spanning the years between 1825 to 1870, although there were some art pieces produced earlier that show elements typical of the school.
Thomas Cole’s travels inspired artists to travel to rugged terrains under harsh conditions and paint outdoors, which made it difficult to create full paintings in depth. Therefore, it was common among artists to render quick sketches of the scenes, in carbon or watercolor, and then develop them as a full oil painting later at home. The ideals behind their work included a celebration of the American landscape, making the Hudson River school an inherently native school of art, set apart from European art movements.
However, the Hudson River school was not isolated from world events. It was also a response to the global expansion of international powers, wars, and exploration, which fostered an aesthetics led by the discoveries of explorers such as Richard Francis Burton, David Livingstone, and Alexander von Humboldt. Explorers published memoirs and illustrations, which showed romanticized scenes, often punctuated with artifacts of ancient civilizations from vanquished peoples who were supposed to have inhabited them before.
While these inspired some Hudson River school painters to travel abroad, others, such as Asher B. Durand, remained in the Hudson River Valley region. Durand painted scenes of New York and the Adirondack regions, such as his famous piece Progress (The Advance of Civilization) (1853), which contrasts scenes of pure nature with the steamboats, telegraph lines, and other markers of industrialization. At the time, modern civilization was correlated to industrialization. Although the scene may be seen as an elegy to nature, it also represents the inevitable advance of civilizing forces.
Besides the growth of industrialization, some critics have found, in paintings such Progress, the representation of the expansion of global markets. For instance, although Durand tended to paint scenes of virgin nature, such as Adirondack Mountains, NY (1870), his paintings are also imbued by the same ideology of nationalism and expansionism that characterized other painters of the Hudson River school.
Bibliography
Ankele, Daniel, Denise Ankele, and Albert Bierstadt. Albert Bierstadt: 325 Hudson River School Paintings. Luminism and Realism. Ankele, 2013. Kindle file.
Avery, Kevin J., Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, John K. Howat, Dorren Bolger Burke, and Catherine Hoover Voorsanger. American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013. Print.
Cooper, James. Knights of the Brush: The Hudson River School and the Moral Landscape. Manchester: Hudson Hills P, 1999. Print.
Ferber, Linda S. The Hudson River School: Nature and the American Vision. New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2009. Print.
Jaeger, C. Stephen. Enchantment: On Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2012. Print.
Manthorne, Katherine. Hudson River. Newington-Cropsey Cultural Studies Center, 2012. Web. 15 May 2015.
O’Toole, Judith, and Arnold Skolnick. Different Views in Hudson River School Painting. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. Print.
Yaeger, Bert. The Hudson River School: American Landscape Artists. New York: Line, 2013. Print.