The Hudson River School

It begins in 1825, when Thomas Cole, an English-born painter of twenty-four, sailed up the Hudson River to the Catskills and came back with three landscapes. Shown in a New York shop window, they were bought by three established artists, John Trumbull, William Dunlap and Asher Durand, and Cole was made. By 1836 he was painting View from Mount Holyoke, after a Thunderstorm, known as The Oxbow, the storm clearing off a river bend in Massachusetts.

Cole died in 1848, and a second generation took the style to its height in the 1850s and 1860s, from the Andes to the Rocky Mountains. After the Civil War, taste turned to French painting, and the name Hudson River School was given to them in the 1870s by a critic who meant it as a put-down. It stuck, as an honor.

Thomas Cole painted allegories as well as views. His five-part The Course of Empire of 1834 to 1836 follows one landscape from wilderness to a marble empire to ruin, and his four-part The Voyage of Life follows a man down the river of time. When he died, Asher Durand painted him in Kindred Spirits, standing with his friend the poet William Cullen Bryant on a ledge above a Catskill gorge.

Frederic Edwin Church, Cole's only student, traveled to South America, the Arctic and the Holy Land. When he showed Heart of the Andes in New York in 1859, alone in a darkened room, thousands paid a quarter to see it, some with opera glasses to study the detail. Albert Bierstadt, trained in Düsseldorf, went west with a government survey in 1859 and painted The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak on a canvas ten feet wide. Thomas Moran's paintings of Yellowstone, from the survey of 1871, helped persuade Congress to make it the first national park in 1872.

Others painted quieter light: John Frederick Kensett, Martin Johnson Heade, Fitz Henry Lane and Sanford Robinson Gifford, later grouped as the Luminists, with their still water and glowing air. Robert S. Duncanson, an African American painter in Cincinnati, painted in the same style and was praised in Canada and Britain in the 1860s.

From the 1870s American painters went to Paris and came home with softer, moodier landscapes. George Inness led Tonalism, painted in veils of evening light, and by the 1890s American Impressionists were painting the Connecticut shore in broken color, as Impressionism had taught them. The great views lived on in the national parks the Hudson River painters had helped to make.