Hudson River Homecoming

The majestic paintings of the 19th-century Hudson River School enjoy tremendous popularity today because of their Romantic and often highly dramatic depiction of nature. America's first national school of landscape painting, it was essentially founded by the English-born Thomas Cole (1801-1848), who regarded America as "the new Eden" and painted it as such. Cole produced many of his visionary, panoramic landscapes and architectural fantasies as allegories of human experience, often imbuing them with religious overtones in tune with the public spirit of his time.

Thomas Cole, 'Scene From "The Last of the Mohicans"' (1827).

His mantle was worn with increased sophistication by his pupil Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), by the Düsseldorf-trained Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), and by such contemporaries as Asher Durand (1796-1886), Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880) and John Frederick Kensett (1816-72). Moreover, the school's Romantic urge to glorify the serene wonders of nature—with its mountains veiled in mist and scenery often bathed in the glowing light of dawn or sunset—influenced the somewhat younger group of landscape painters known as the Luminists and served as a springboard for a later generation of artists including George Inness, Albert Pinkham Ryder and, of course, Winslow Homer.

 Surprisingly, one of the finest and earliest collections of the Hudson River School is maintained not along the Hudson, but on the banks of the Connecticut River at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. Founded in 1842, and housed partly in its original castellated building designed by Alexander Jackson Davis, the Wadsworth Atheneum is the nation's oldest public art museum. Its riches include important old masters, a magisterial representation of 19th- and 20th-century masterpieces and a vast collection of important decorative arts.


Hudson River school : masterworks from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.

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