1. 19th Century American Art
Hudson River School
19th Century American Art
- Thomas Cole The Clove, Catskills

2. Why is art created?

4. Art is. . . . Art is an act of creation,
Artists create their work in response to some thought, emotion, or personal experience.
To find a true understanding about a work of art, one must look further than the artwork itself.

5. How do we see Art? As a casual admirer? As an art critic?
As a historian?
Migration of the Negro by Jacob Lawrence (1940s)

6. Prior to the Hudson River School, portrait paintings by Limners had been popular in the early United States.
Limners were early American artists who, during the cold winter months, painted single or group portraits without the faces. When spring arrived, they would find patrons who wanted their faces filled in.
This form of art was unoriginal and modeled after an older European style of painting.

7. American artists in the Revolutionary and Early Republic periods found success by going to Europe and adhering to classical themes and conventions.
John Trumbulls’
General George Washington at Trenton, oil on canvas, 1792. Yale University Art Gallery

8. This painting made Copley a good deal of money, but it was displayed in London and portrayed a scene from Havana Bay, a place Copley had never seen.
John Singleton Copley’s
Watson and the Shark, 1778

9. When the United States “defeated” Great Britain in the War of 1812, American artists started to move away from "old world" styles of painting.

10. With this growing sense of national pride, it was important for these American painters to develop their own sense of identity.

11. American painters found this unique identity when they developed a style of landscape painting that emphasized nature rather than the human in the scene.
Asher Brown Durand

12. Between the 1820's and 1880's an original and significant movement took place in the art world; landscape art evolved. The Industrial Revolution changed peoples' values; nature had become a backdrop to the works of human beings.

13. The Hudson River School. . .
In order to awaken people's awareness of the importance of nature, a small group of artists took the pleasure of observing the vast beauty of nature and emphasized its importance in their paintings.
This group's emerging style of painting eventually became known as the Hudson River School

14. Many of the original artists lived and worked in the Hudson River Valley, New York.
These artists portrayed the spirituality they felt towards the beautiful American scenery through detailed and majestic landscapes.

15. The wild, untamed beauty of the American scenery differed from European scenery. This scenery struck artists such as Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand as pristine.
The typical Hudson River School scene consists of a portion of virgin landscape, extending into the far-off distance; often, tiny foreground figures are set against it.

16. Thomas Cole, born in 1801 in Lancashire, England, was trained as an engraver of woodblocks used for printing calico, or cloth.
Because he did not have a formal education in art, his aesthetic ideas derived from poetry and literature. Artists such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman strongly influenced his paintings.

17. Cole next moved to New York, where the series of works he produced following a sketching trip up the Hudson River in the summer of 1825 brought him to the attention of the city's most important artists and patrons.

18. “Mr. President and Gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson,An Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837
Concurring with Emerson, who had written in his 1841 essay, THOUGHTS ON ART, that painting should become a vehicle through which the universal mind could reach the mind of mankind, the Hudson River painters believed art to be an agent of moral and spiritual transformation.
As Thomas Cole maintained, if nature were untouched by the hand of man then man could become more easily acquainted with the hand of God.

19. View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts,
after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow) 1836

20. The popularity of the Hudson River School did not last forever.
According to local landscape artist James Cramer, the downfall of the Hudson River School coincides with the rise of Impressionism in the late 19th century.
Although the rise of Impressionism led to the decline of the popularity of the Hudson River School it certainly did not extinguish the ideals that the Hudson River School set forth.

22. Washington Arch, Spring (1890) by Childe Hassam

23. Ice on the River by Ernest Lawson