The Hudson River School
The Hudson River school represents the first native genre of distinctly American art. The school began to produce art works in the early 1820s; comprised of a group of loosely organized painters who took as their subject the unique naturalness of the undeveloped American continent, starting with the Hudson River region in New York, but eventually extending through space and time all the way to California and the 1870s. During the period, that the school’s artists were active (c. 1820-1870) the nation was in the process of undergoing momentous political, social, and economic change. The works that the Hudson River School painters comprised reflected the changes that were taking place across the continent as well as the self-conceptualization taking place in an ever developing and ever changing America.
Many consider Thomas Cole to be the father of the Hudson River School because of an exhibition he had organized in New York City. The exhibition, which took place in 1825, displayed many of the paintings he had made during a trip up the Hudson River. Thomas Cole had the clearest vision of what the artists of the School were seeking to accomplish in their painting and how the images that they were creating complimented the American concept of national character. Ironically, Cole was not American by birth. Born in England in 1801, Cole did not immigrate to the United States until he was twenty years old. Cole wrote an essay titled: Essay on American Scenery, which was published in a prominent Colonial magazine. American Monthly published Cole’s essay in January of 1836. In the essay, Cole addressed nature as the characteristic that set America apart from Europe.
Cole and the other artist that were part of the genre thought of the American continent as the Garden of Eden. Subsequently they developed their own individual iconography that was expressive of the vision that America was in fact a garden, which had been provincially set aside by god for his chosen people, the Americans. For instance, lakes represented the “eye of the human countance” a mirror reflecting the undertones of the rest of the landscape, and, most importantly, linking the sky to the earth. Thus, the linking of Sky and Earth was inferring to the feeling of closeness that one got as he looked upon the American Landscape and marveled at how close it ...
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Jules David Prown, Nancy K. Anderson, William Cronon, Brian W. Dippie, Martha A. Sandweiss, Susan P. Schoelwer and Howard R. Lamar, Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the American West, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1992
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Web Resources
Vitaly Komar & Alex Melamid's Most Wanted Paintings on the Web: http://www.diacenter.org/km/
The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC: http://www.nga.gov/
In Part II of A Sand County Almanac, titled "The Quality of Landscape," Leopold takes his reader away from the farm; first into the surrounding Wisconsin countryside and then even farther, on an Illinois bus ride, a visit to the Iowa of his boyhood...
Denevan, William M. "The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492." The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the. Northern Arizona University, Web. 25 Mar. 2014.
Because of westward expansion, America gained a significant amount of fertile land which contributed to the nation 's’ agrarian identity. The wilderness and landscape
There are many ways in which we can view the history of the American West. One view is the popular story of Cowboys and Indians. It is a grand story filled with adventure, excitement and gold. Another perspective is one of the Native Plains Indians and the rich histories that spanned thousands of years before white discovery and settlement. Elliot West’s book, Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers and the Rush to Colorado, offers a view into both of these worlds. West shows how the histories of both nations intertwine, relate and clash all while dealing with complex geological and environmental challenges. West argues that an understanding of the settling of the Great Plains must come from a deeper understanding, a more thorough knowledge of what came before the white settlers; “I came to believe that the dramatic, amusing, appalling, wondrous, despicable and heroic years of the mid-nineteenth century have to be seen to some degree in the context of the 120 centuries before them” .
Quinn, David B. North America From Earliest Discovery to First Settlements. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1977.
Gardner, Helen, and Fred S. Kleiner. Gardner's Art Through the Ages: The Western Perspective. N.p., 2014. Print.
...to Americans: if their prospects in the East were poor, then they could perhaps start over in the West as a farmer, rancher, or even miner. The frontier was also romanticized not only for its various opportunities but also for its greatly diverse landscape, seen in the work of different art schools, like the “Rocky Mountain School” and Hudson River School, and the literature of the Transcendentalists or those celebrating the cowboy. However, for all of this economic possibility and artistic growth, there was political turmoil that arose with the question of slavery in the West as seen with the Compromise of 1850 and Kansas-Nebraska Act. As Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in his paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” to the American Historical Association, “the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”
"Chapter 2 Western Settlement and the Frontier." Major Problems in American History: Documents and Essays. Ed. Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, Edward J. Blum, and Jon Gjerde. 3rd ed. Vol. II: Since 1865. Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2012. 37-68. Print.
Frontier in American History is divided in two major parts each with an introduction. The first part claims that the gradual settlement of the west is what forms American History. In the following four paragraphs the frontier is explained in details. The frontier is viewed as a moving belts
This work shows impeccably drawn beech and basswood trees. It was painted for a New York collector by the name of Abraham M. Cozzens who was then a member of the executive committee of the American Art-Union. The painting shows a new trend in the work of the Hudson River School. It depicts a scene showing a tranquil mood. Durand was influenced by the work of the English landscape painter John Constable, whose vertical formats and truth to nature he absorbed while visiting England in 1840.
With his passion for painting, his admiration of landscapes and influence as a teacher, Thomas Cole was a proficient Romanticism artist. Undoubtedly because of his extensive traveling and studying various landscapes, Cole is one of the most well known landscape artist in America. Cole painted many landscape paintings, one of these being The Oxbow. Established by Cole the Hudson River School of Romantic Landscapes was created to teach students about painting landscapes. As American nature became realized to be beautiful and divine more and more artists commenced painting the eminent nature that God created for them.
Utley, Robert M., The Indian Frontier of the American West 1846-1890. Pub: by University of New mexico Press, 1984
Slotkin, R. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600-1860. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973.
Grant Wood’s American Gothic is one of the most famous paintings in the history of American art. The painting brought Wood almost instant fame after being exhibited for the first time at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1930. It is probably the most reproduced and parodied works of art, and has become a staple within American pop-culture. The portrait of what appears to be a couple, standing solemnly in front of their mid-western home seems to be a simplistic representation of rural America. As simple as it sounds, when looking deeper into this image, it reveals something much more complex.
Kleiner, Fred S. Gardner’s Art through the Ages: The Western Perspective. Vol 2.13th ed. Boston: Wadsworth/ Cengage Learning, 2010.