The Hudson River School

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The Hudson River School
American Romanticism in Art
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• The Hudson River School was a mid-19th century
  American art movement by a group of landscape
  painters influenced by romanticism.
• Thomas Cole (1801-1848) was the founder of this
  movement. The previous slide presents his
  painting The Oxbow (1836).

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• Hudson River School landscapes are characterized
  by their realistic and detailed portrayal of
  nature. In general, Hudson River School artists
  believed that nature in the form of the American
  landscape was a manifestation of God.
• Thomas Coles Genesee Scenery (1847)

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• In the Kaaterskill we have a stream, diminutive
  indeed, but throwing itself headlong over a
  fearful precipice into a deep gorge of the
  densely wooded mountain.
• --Thomas Cole, Essay on American Scenery
• Coles Falls of Kaaterskill (1826)

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Coles close friend, Asher Brown Durand
(1796-1886), was an important early member of the
group.LandscapeScene from Thanatopsis (1850)
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• Durand is noted for his 1849 painting Kindred
  Spirits, which shows Cole and poet William Cullen
  Bryant in a Catskills landscape.
• It was painted as a tribute to Cole upon his
  death.

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• In the mountains of New Hampshire there is a
  union of the picturesque, the sublime, and the
  magnificent there the bare peaks of granite,
  broken and desolate, cradle the clouds. --Cole,
  Essay on American Scenery
• Durands Mount Washington (1855)

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• Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) was one of
  Coles prize pupils and carried out his ideas.
• In 1835, Cole wrote, And Niagara! that wonder of
  the world!where the sublime and beautiful are
  bound together in an indissoluble chain. In
  gazing on it we feel as though a great void had
  been filled in our mindsour conceptions
  expandwe become a part of what we behold!
• In 1857, Church completed Niagara, the artwork
  that guaranteed his position as the most popular
  American painter of his time.

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"Some paintings seem to bear their nationality on
their faces. Church's Twilight in the Wilderness
1860 could only, I feel, be American. Church
specialized in works inspired by the sheer
vastness of the American continent. Wendy
Barrick
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Churchs Niagara (1867)

• Cole also wrote that the Waterfall at once
  presents to the mind the beautiful, but
  apparently incongruous idea, of fixedness and
  motiona single existence in which we perceive
  unceasing change and everlasting duration.

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Kensetts The Old Pine, Darien, Connecticut

• John Frederick Kensett (1816-1872) is associated
  with the so-called "second generation" of the
  Hudson River School.
• Typical of this style, many of his paintings
  depict the American landscape as a pastoral
  setting where human beings and nature coexist
  peacefully, as in the next painting, Mount
  Washington from the Valley of Conway (1851).

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• As others of his gen-eration, Kensett applied a
  style that came to be known as luminism, the use
  of nearly invisible brushstrokes to convey the
  qualities and effects of atmospheric light. It
  shares some of the fea-tures of Impressionism,
  which developed later in the century.
• Mount Lafayette and Franconia Notch from
  Littleton (1859)

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Another member of the second generation of Hudson
River School painters was Albert Bierstadt
(1830-1902).The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak
(1863)
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He is best known for his large, detailed
landscapes of the American West. Looking Up the
Yosemite Valley (c. 1865-67)
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• Again Cole wrote, In the Forest scenery of the
  United States we have that which occupies the
  greatest space, and is not the least remarkable
  being primitive, it differs widely from the
  European. In the American forest we find trees in
  every stage of vegetable life and decaythe
  slender sapling rises in the shadow of the lofty
  tree, and the giant in his prime stands by the
  hoary patriarch of the wood.
• The Great Trees, Mariposa Grove, California (1876)

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• Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California
• (1868, 72 x 120 in)

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• Thomas Moran (1837-1926) also gained artistic
  success by heading West.
• A self-taught artist, he joined a U.S. geological
  expedition into the Yellowstone region of Wyoming
  in 1871.
• His landscapes of that area inspired public
  imagination and helped motivate Congress to
  establish the National Park System.

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• Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (1872)
• Next slide, Mountain of the Holy Cross (1875)

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• The Cross of Snow
• In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
• A gentle facethe face of one long dead
• Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
• The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
• Here in this room she died and soul more white
• Never through martyrdom of fire was led
• To its repose nor can in books be read
• The legend of a life more benedight.
• There is a mountain in the distant West
• That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
• Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
• Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
• These eighteen years, through all the changing
  scenes
• And seasons, changeless since the day she died.
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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• Standing on the bare groundmy head bathed by
  the blithe air and uplifted into infinite
  spaceall mean egotism vanishes. I become a
  transparent eyeball I am nothing I see all the
  currents of the Universal Being circulate through
  me.
• --Emerson Nature
• Morans Solitude (1897)