I. Background: Pre-1825 Types of Paintings

• Portraiture
• European influence
• John Singleton Copley (1738-1815), Paul Revere, 1768
• "Naive" style
• Flat design, spare painting (Ammi Phillips and others)
• Edward Hicks, The Peaceable Kingdom
• Landscapes
• Often appear as a detail of portraiture: for example, the property seen through an open window in a portrait suggests the family's wealth.
• Washington Allston's imaginary landscapes

Not merely topographic but interpretive and poetic views of nature

Formal composition and attention to detail

Depictions of harmony in nature

"Home in the Wilderness"

Juncture of civilization and wilderness: "Wilderness on the doorstep"

Incursions of civilization and progress

• Thomas Cole, The Hunter's Return  (1845)
• Thomas Cole, Home in the Woods (1847)
• Thomas Cole, Daniel Boone Sitting at the Door of his Cabin on the Great Osage Lake, Kentucky, 1826
• Thomas Doughty, Home on the Hudson

Juxtaposition of elements

Nature on a grand scale with smaller figures of man and markers of civilization

Use of panoramas to show immensity of nature and insignificance of human beings

Distant or elevated perspective for the viewer

Symbolic use of light and darkness

Contrast of diverse elements to show the unity of nature

• Thomas Cole, Scene from Last of the Mohicans": Cora Kneeling at the Feet of Tamenund (1827)
• E. C. Coates, West Point  (1855)
• Thomas Cole, The Clove, Catskills (1827)

•  Edmund Burke, Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful  (1757-1759)
• Beautiful: feminine qualities
• Harmony
• Sociability
• Pastels
• Sensual curves

Harsh, antisocial, "masculine"

Realm of obscurity and brute force

"Agreeable horror"

Feelings of sublimity from portrayals of threatening objects

Feelings of awe at sublime nature

Thomas Moran, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1872

Albert Bierstadt, A Storm in the Rocky Mountains (1866)

Can be intermediate category (William Gilpin)

Ruggedness and asymmetry

Landscape as a rundown Arcadia

Ruined towers

Mossy banks

Appeal to nostalgia for preindustrial age

• Thomas Cole, Roman Campagna (Ruins of Aqueducts in the Campagna di Roma), 1843

Thomas Cole (1801-1848) (index to paintings)

Asher B. Durand (1796-1886)

Thomas Doughty (1793-1856)

John William Casilear

Thomas Moran

• Discovered in 1825 by

John Trumbull

William Dunlap

Asher B. Durand

• "The subject of art should be pure and lofty . . .a moral, religious, or poetic effect must be produced on the mind."
•     Lake with Dead Trees(1825)

• The Voyage of Life (Childhood) , 1842;(Youth) (Manhood)(Old Age)
• Thomas Cole. A View of the Mountain Pass Called the Notch of the White Mountains (Crawford  Notch), 1839
• Thomas Cole, The Ox-Bow  (1836)

• Began as an engraver; turned to painting
• "Letters on Landscape Painting" (1855) in The Crayon
• "Go first to nature to learn to paint landscape."
• Asher B. Durand, Hudson River Scene (1846)
• Asher B. Durand, Kindred Spirits  (1849)

• Style of Hudson River painters applied to other regions:
• Rocky Mountains, South America
• Jasper Cropsey (1823-1900)
• John Frederick Kensett (1816-1873)
• Frederick E. Church (1826-1900)
• George Inness (1825-1894)
• Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902)

• Imitator of Cole's allegorical works
• Panorama of Pilgrim's Progress: Sixty large scenes unrolled to music and lectures
• Jasper Cropsey, Palisades at Sunset (Spyten Duyvil)
• Jasper Cropsey, Gates of the Hudson
• Jasper Cropsey, Autumn on the Hudson (1860)

• Thomas Cole's major pupil
• Full-length "showpiece" landscapes
• Falls of Niagara (1857)
• Landscape as symbol of divine
• American continent as new Eden
• Painted from nature, not notes and sketches
• The Heart of the Andes (1859)
• Twilight in the Wilderness (1860)

• Landscape meditation on relation of man and nature
• Harmonious integration of man's progress and landscape
• Unlike Cole: "A work of art does not appeal to the moral sense.  Its aim is not to instruct and edify, but to awaken an emotion."
• The Lackawanna Valley, 1855

XIII. Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902)

• One of first major artists to explore the West
• A Storm in the Rocky Mountains (1866)
• Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California (1868)
• The Yosemite Valley (1875)

• Not of the Hudson River school
• Created dreamlike, fanciful interpretations of literary scenes
• Artisan-painter: uses bright, ornamental colors
• The Return of Rip Van Winkle (c.1849)

Albany Institute of History and Art
Sandra Hildreth's project on the Hudson River painters
Desmond Fish Library links to paintings

Thomas Cole's paintings (index at Yale)
Carol Gerten Jackson's site

Boime, Albert. The Magisterial Gaze. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1991. 

Callow, James T. Kindred Spirits: Knickerbocker Writers and American Artists, 1807-1855. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967. 

Deakin, Motley F. Introduction. The Home Book of the Picturesque: or, American Scenery, Art, and Literature. 1852. Gainesville: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1967.