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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Motley F. Deakin, The Home Books of the Picturesque: or American Scenery, Art, and Literature, Gainseville, Scholar's Facsimiles and Reprints, 1967
Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825-1875, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1993
Perry Miller, Nature's Nation, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1967
Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting 1825-1875, New York, Oxford University Press, 1995
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
John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America: 1508 to 1845, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1982
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...
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.
Because of westward expansion, America gained a significant amount of fertile land which contributed to the nation 's’ agrarian identity. The wilderness and landscape
In the era where Thomas Cole first established the Hudson River School, other artist that is not from the United State such as John Constable, has the same taste in nature and outdoors. John Constable who is from England, created many painting from the surrounding area from his backyard to the countryside. For Cole’s painting, his work of art has been throughout the Hudson River, therefore, his painting consist of vast amount of forest, river, and mountains. He also travels in many locations in America and even done some painting in Europe. Both painter love nature, for this example, landscape will be the primary focus.
...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.”
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
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
Miller makes clear the impact of wilderness on early American life. While the Old World mentality presented wilderness as mysterious and filled with demons, the new American nation viewed it differently. Rather than possessing a sense of fear, their belief in the divine mission to spread democracy and civilization inspired them to journey west. Accordingly, they did so with a sense of excitement and a thirst for discovery. As such, I wholeheartedly agree with Miller’s view that the early romantic images of the American landscape were expressions of a new cultural nationalism. According to Miller, these early countrymen viewed the new nation as “...a place apart, an unpeopled wilderness where history, born in nature rather than in corrupt institutions,
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.
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.
Thomas Hart Benton was born in the familiar, small town of Neosho, Missouri. He was named after his granduncle, the famed and prominent pre-American Civil War senator. First Thomas Hart Benton studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and then lived in beautiful Paris for three years. When he came back he moved to New York City after 1912 he turned away from his usual style, modernism, and gradually developed a rugged naturalism that affirmed traditional rural values. By the 1930’s Benton was riding a tide of popular acclaim along with his fellow regionalist Grant Wood, who was responsible for American Gothic, and John Steuart Curry, who was responsible for The Tragic Prelude. The mural, America Today (1930-1931, The Equitable Life Assurance Society of the U.S., New York City), Thomas Hart Benton’s masterpiece, presented an optimistic portrayal of a vital country filled with earthy, muscular figures.
Kleiner, Fred S. Gardner’s Art through the Ages: The Western Perspective. Vol 2.13th ed. Boston: Wadsworth/ Cengage Learning, 2010.