America's first great landscape movement got its famous name as an insult
In the autumn of 1825 an English-born painter rode a steamboat up the Hudson, hiked into the Catskills and painted the blazing colours he found. Thomas Cole's trip launched a school of American landscape art whose label, the Hudson River School, was first used in the 1870s as a put-down.
The movement flourished from about 1825 to 1870, centred on New York City, where many of its painters rented space in the Tenth Street Studio Building in Greenwich Village. Contemporaries called it the native or American school. The now-standard name reached print in 1879 and may have been coined by the Tribune critic Clarence Cook or the painter Homer Dodge Martin, at a time when the style was falling from fashion.
A New York Evening Post writer reviewed Cole within weeks, on November 22, 1825. His canvases, and those of friends such as Asher B. Durand, mixed careful realism with idealised calm, often setting tidy farms beside wilderness that was vanishing from the valley. Durand worked outdoors with painstaking detail; one study of his shows moss-covered stones in a ravine in New Jersey's Delaware River Valley. The pictures carried national themes of discovery, exploration and settlement, imagining people and nature at peace.
After Cole died young in 1848, a second generation took over, led by Frederic Edwin Church, his most gifted student, alongside Sanford Robinson Gifford and John Frederick Kensett, whose glowing light earned the label Luminism. Their best work came between 1855 and 1875. Church and Albert Bierstadt, both shaped by the Düsseldorf school, became celebrities, and crowds paid 25 cents a head to see giant canvases such as Niagara. Kensett, Gifford and Church also helped found the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Women painted in the circle too: Susie M. Barstow climbed the peaks she painted, and the Irish-born Eliza Pratt Greatorex was only the second woman the National Academy of Design ever elected.
Interest revived after World War I, faded, and returned from the 1960s. The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford holds 13 landscapes by Cole and 11 by Church, both friends of its founder Daniel Wadsworth.
Source: Hudson River School
