Truly all is remarkable and a wellspring of amazement and wonder. Man is so fortunate to dwell in this American Garden of Eden.
- Albert Bierstadt
With their sweeping vistas and ethereal luminescence, the works of the Hudson River School are among the most dramatic and inspiring of early American art. Regarded as the country’s first artistic fraternity and founded on the Sublime style of the landscapes by Thomas Cole, artists such as Albert Bierstadt, George Inness, Thomas Worthington Wittridge and Frederic Church captured the adventurous spirit of a young nation discovering its place on the world stage while expanding its boundaries at home.
When Thomas Cole arrived in New York in 1825, he brought with him a fervent desire to become an accomplished landscape painter. He found his inspiration in the Catskills of New York, sketching and painting along the region’s rivers and mountain trails, and quickly gained recognition for his efforts. Audiences and artists alike were moved by his unprecedented depiction of the American landscape as an untamed wilderness and his style quickly garnered a following of New York City-based landscape painters who would come to be known formally as the Hudson River School.
Despite Cole’s recognition as the school’s founder, it was under the leadership of his friend, Asher B. Durand that the Hudson River School developed into a codified group. Many of its artists belonged to the National Academy of Design (founded by Cole and Durand in 1825), occupied space in the country’s first designated artists’ workshop, and eventually built homes along the Hudson Valley. Their craggy mountains, monumental compositions, and emphasis on light falling on terrestrial forms broke away from the widely acclaimed European neoclassical ideal in favor of one that was uniquely American.
Between the years of 1850 and 1900, the Hudson River School flourished, expanding past the New York region to the American West and Southwest where seminal works such as Albert Bierstadt's Domes of Yosemite, 1867 were envisioned. Though the school lost public favor at the turn of the century to the softer romanticism of the European aesthetic, it continues to occupy an important place in American Art and has provided the foundation for subsequent styles including Luminism, a form of which can still be seen today in the works of artists such as April Gornik. With many works found in the expansive collections of the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT and Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, NY, these magnificent scenes glorifying the grandeur of nature and the manifest destiny of the era continue to ignite in audiences a lust for America’s bygone landscapes, full of adventure and waiting to be explored.
