CategoriesStyles and Movements
Hudson River School
American landscape painters of about 1825 to 1875 who pictured the Hudson Valley, the Catskills and later the West as grand, near-sacred wilderness.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Hudson River School are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
The Hudson River School began with Thomas Cole, an English-born painter who travelled up the Hudson in 1825 and painted the wild scenery of the Catskill Mountains. His dramatic landscapes, and allegories such as The Course of Empire (1833–36), treated American nature as a moral and spiritual subject. The name was applied later, somewhat dismissively, once tastes had changed.
Cole's followers sketched outdoors in summer and worked up large, highly finished canvases in New York studios in winter. Asher B. Durand's Kindred Spirits (1849) shows Cole with the poet William Cullen Bryant in a Catskill gorge. Frederic Edwin Church travelled to South America and the Arctic for panoramic scenes like Heart of the Andes (1859), and Albert Bierstadt painted the Rocky Mountains and Yosemite on a vast scale. Robert S. Duncanson worked in the same idiom in Cincinnati. Look for glowing skies, tiny figures and crisp detail.
Related artists
More in Styles and Movements
Hyperrealism and Photorealism
Iconic Works of Art History
Impressionism
Impressionism and Contemporary Impressionist
Japanese Erotic Prints
Japanese Photography
Japonisme
Kanō School
Land Art
Landscape Photography
Light and Space Movement
Luminism
Mannerism
