Hudson River Valley Artists Views
The Hudson River School[1] was a mid-19th century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by romanticism. The paintings for which the movement is named depict the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area, including the Catskill, Adirondack, and the White Mountains; eventually works by the second generation of artists associated with the school expanded to include other locales.
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, John Frederick Kensett, and Sanford Robinson Gifford. Works by artists of this second generation are often described as examples of Luminism. In addition to pursuing their art, many of the artists, including Kensett, Gifford and Church,[4][dead link] were founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (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 were celebrities. When Church exhibited paintings like Niagara[5] or Icebergs of the North,[6] 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.
This painting is sometimes used to illustrate the intrusion of civilization and technology (the train and all it implies) into the natural landscape. Were the Hudson River Valley painters pro-nature or pro-progress? See this assessment: The Serpent in the New Eden: Technology and the Hudson River School.
Hudson River Valley Artists Images
