Nature and the American
Vision: Masterpieces of the Hudson River School
touring the United States in 2011
and 2012
Artwork labels
- The American Grand Tour: On America's Favorite River
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- Samuel Colman (1832 - 1920)
- The Narrows and Fort Lafayette, Ships Coming Into
Port, New York, ca. 1868
- Oil on canvas
- The New-York Historical Society, Museum purchase, Watson
Fund, 1976.2
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- A New York artist known for his landscapes and port scenes,
Colman painted this sweeping view of the mouth of New York harbor from
the Long Island shore (now Brooklyn) at Fort Hamilton, looking west across
the Narrows. The massive round walls of Fort Lafayette dominate the center
of the painting. In the far left distance, Fort Wadsworth on the Staten
Island shore can be seen. Originally called Fort Diamond, it was renamed
Fort Lafayette to honor the French hero of the American Revolution. Fort
Lafayette was later demolished to make way for the Brooklyn anchorage of
the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.
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- Francis Augustus Silva (1835 - 1886)
- Off City Island, New York,
1870
- Oil on canvas, 20 1/4 x 40 1/4 in. (51.4 x 102.2 cm)
- The New-York Historical Society, Thomas Jefferson Bryan
Fund, 1975.22
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- Silva typically focused upon more remote stretches of
river and coast, like Off City Island, New York, where he
was able to exploit the great expanse of open sky and the fleeting effects
of weather and the time of day to create poetic waterscapes. In this panoramic
vista, luminous waters reflect becalmed schooners and sailboats. City Island,
then a seaport community of oystermen and shipbuilders, lies in Long Island
Sound off the east coast of the Bronx and on the shipping channel via the
East River from the Sound into New York harbor.
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- Robert Havell (1793 - 1878)
- View of Hudson River from Tarrytown Heights, ca. 1842
- Oil on canvas, 22 x 30 in. (55.9 x 76.2 cm)
- The New-York Historical Society, Gift of Harry Peck Havell,
1946.179
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- The artist, who was the English engraver of John James
Audubon's Birds of America, emigrated to the United States
in 1839, settled in Tarrytown, and turned to landscape painting. His river
vista looks north from the Tarrytown area, with Hook Mountain at the left
and Kingsland and Croton Points jutting from the Westchester County shore
in the center. The Hudson's banks provided magnificent views for cottages
and villas like the charming yellow house seen here. Perhaps the artist
was already aware of Andrew Jackson Downing's recently published Cottage
Residences (1842), a popular volume of house designs and landscapes
plans suitable for an emerging middle class.
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- John Frederick Kensett (1816 - 1872)
- View from Cozzens' Hotel Near West Point, 1863
- Oil on canvas
- The New-York Historical Society, Robert L. Stuart Collection,
Stuart 189
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- One of the second generation of Hudson River School artists,
Kensett expressed his vision through contemplative light-filled landscapes
like this one, which captures the dramatic vista of the Hudson Highlands
from the elevated vantage point of a popular hotel. The view is suffused
in luminous air, painted with the delicately precise calibrations of light
and atmosphere for which the artist was justly famous. While Kensett's
canvas is small, the scale of the image itself is vast and his detail is
exquisite.
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- John Ferguson Weir (1803 - 1889)
- View of the Highlands from West Point, 1862
- Oil on linen, 19 1/2 x 33 in. (49.5 x 83.8 cm)
- The New-York Historical Society, Robert L. Stuart Collection,
S-224
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- The dramatic scenery of the Hudson Highlands recorded
in Weir's deep vista of a long-famous view, one enriched by associations
with the Revolutionary War, was still a strategic military site in 1862.
Weir, who was born and raised at West Point where his father taught drawing,
chose a vantage point near the ruins of historic Fort Putnam. During the
Civil War, the Highlands was the center of the era's military-industrial
complex, with the United States Military Academy on the west bank and the
Cold Spring foundries on the east, then engaged in producing advanced weaponry
for the Union army.
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- Asher Brown Durand (1796 - 1886)
- Beacon Hills on the Hudson River, Opposite Newburgh
- Painted on the Spot, ca. 1852
- Oil on canvas, 46 x 32 in. (116.8 x 81.3 cm)
- The New-York Historical Society, Gift of Lucy Maria Durand
Woodman, 1907.11
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- About 1849, Durand purchased a country house overlooking
the Hudson near Newburgh. This panoramic landscape may be the view from
his property, looking across the river to Fishkill (today Beacon). Overlooking
a heavily wooded embankment, a group of figures (perhaps the artist's family)
enjoy a pastoral interlude beneath framing trees and from a height offering
a splendid view of the busy river and the eastern shore. Like Cole's, Durand's
property would be compromised by the building of a railroad. This ultimately
drove the artist from his country retreat and, in the words of his son,
John, "obliged him to resume his annual search for the picturesque
in the undisturbed wilderness."
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- John William Casilear (1811 - 1893)
- Landscape, 1852
- Oil on canvas, 22 1/2 x 30 in. (57.2 x 76.2 cm)
- The New-York Historical Society, Gift of Lucy Maria Durand
Woodman, 1907.7
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- Influenced by Cole, Kensett, and especially Durand, Casilear
retired from the business of engraving in the 1850s to take up landscape
painting. He sketched each summer with artist friends in the Catskills,
the Adirondacks, the White Mountains, and the Genesee Valley. Casilear
was recognized especially for his serene images of domesticated landscapes,
bathed in a skillfully rendered delicate silvery haze. A contemporary critic
characterized Casilear's distinctive contribution to American landscape
painting: "His skies are luminous, and his distances tender and melting
. . . there is a poetic pastoral charm in all his work." Durand's
influence is especially apparent in the pastoral charm of the scene and
the golden light of the distant horizon.
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- Asher Brown Durand (1796 - 1886)
- The Solitary Oak (The
Old Oak), 1844
- Oil on canvas
- The New-York Historical Society, Gift of the New-York
Gallery of the Fine Arts, 1858.75
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- Durand's tour of European art capitals from 1840-41 resulted
in considerable modifications of his artistic outlook. The low horizon,
luminous atmosphere, and cattle subject of The Solitary Oak demonstrate
Durand's admiration for the landscapes of the Dutch painter Aelbert Cuyp
(1620-1691). The painting commanded significant attention when it was exhibited
at the National Academy of Design in 1844. As one critic wrote, "[I]t
has that glow of sunlight which it is so difficult to express. A veteran
tree, standing alone upon a gentle eminence, stretching forth its great
arms, that have withstood the storms of centuries, is truly a noble subject
for an artist of Mr. Durand's reputation. . . .
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- William Hart (1823 -1894)
- On the Esopus, Meadow Groves,
ca. 1857-58
- Oil on canvas, 25 1/4 x 45 in. (64.1 x 114.3 cm)
- The New-York Historical Society, Robert L. Stuart Collection,
S-81
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- William Hart, who was raised with his brother James,
in Albany portrayed a bucolic interlude along the course of the wandering
Esopus that flows from the Catskills to the Hudson. A limpid pool mirrors
the brilliant noonday sky; two children mind the watering cattle. Meadow
Groves, as the painting was then known, drew admiration at the National
Academy of Design for its alluring evocation of country life. "[T]his
picture," wrote a critic for the art journal, The Crayon, "glows
with light; the water, with the cattle standing at the margin of the stream-its
clear, unruffled surface reflecting its bank and the clouds overhead-is
beautifully rendered."
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- The Catskills and Lake George
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- Thomas Cole (1801 - 1848)
- Catskill Creek, New York,
1845
- Oil on canvas
- The New-York Historical Society, Robert L. Stuart Collection,
Stuart 157
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- In 1836 Cole left New York City to settle at Catskill,
a village on the west side of the Hudson River, on the route to what had
become popular sketching and touring grounds. This painting depicts one
of Cole's favorite local subjects-a view of the distant Catskill range,
some twelve miles to the west, and featuring the distinctive shape of North
Mountain. This landmark vista is from Catskill Creek, whose still waters
mirror an image of the mountain profiles and the sky behind them, suffused
in the glow of an early autumn twilight. Cole was also inspired to celebrate
Catskill Mountain sunsets in verse, composing "Sunset in the Catskills"
in 1838:
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- The valleys rest in the shadow and the hum
- Of gentle sounds and low toned melodies
- Are stilled, and twilight spreads her mighty wings
. . .
- Until the setting sun's last lingering beams
- Wreathe up in many a golden glorious ring
- Around the highest Catskill peak.
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- Asher Brown Durand (1786 - 1886)
- Study from Nature: Rocks and Trees in the Catskills,
New York, ca. 1856
- Oil on canvas
- The New-York Historical Society, Gift of Mrs. Lucy Maria
Durand Woodman, daughter of the artist, 1907.20
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- These vivid little paintings are still celebrated as
a special body of works known as Durand's Studies from Nature. Smaller
in scale and less formal than studio compositions, the studies record the
particulars of a given site close up with the aim of conveying the sensation
of direct experience. These carefully observed details also convey the
belief that contemplation of unspoiled nature offered opportunities for
spiritual meditation and renewal; what Durand called "lessons of high
and holy meaning."
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- Asher Brown Durand (1786 - 1886)
- Shandaken Range, Kingston, New York, ca. 1854
- Oil on canvas
- The New-York Historical Society, Museum purchase, The
Louis Durr Fund, 1887.5
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- Durand left a successful career as an engraver and portrait
painter around 1837 and turned his attention to landscape subjects. This
impressive tree study was made near Kingston with a distant view of the
Shandaken Mountains, in the Catskill range. After Cole's death in 1848,
Durand, who was by then president of the National Academy of Design, assumed
a leadership role among American painters. In his "Letters on Landscape
Painting," published in 1855, Durand declared that North American
scenery offered artists "many other forms of Nature yet spared from
the pollutions of civilization [and] a guarantee for a reputation of originality
that you may elsewhere long seek and find not."
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- Thomas Hiram Hotchkiss (1833 - 1869)
- Catskill Mountains, Shandaken, N.Y., 1856
- Oil on canvas, 10 15/16 x 15 13/16 in. (27.8 x 40.2 cm)
- The New-York Historical Society, Gift of Nora Durand
Woodman, 1932.44
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- The talented and still little-known painter Thomas Hotchkiss
enjoyed a close relationship with Durand. Debuting at the National Academy
of Design in 1856, Hotchkiss was embraced by the community of landscape
painters, undoubtedly due to Durand's support. A precocious talent, he
quickly mastered the conventions of the Hudson River School and produced
a limited but impressive series of American landscapes like this one, with
its precisely painted foreground details and luminous atmosphere. He left
New York late in 1859 to study and live in Italy. There he died ill and
impoverished at an early age, leaving his estate to be overseen by the
Durand family.
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- Thomas Hiram Hotchkiss (1833 - 1869)
- Catskill Winter Landscape,
1858
- Oil on canvas
- The New-York Historical Society, Gift of the Estate of
Nora Durand Woodman, 1942.480
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- Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823 - 1900)
- Sunset, Lake George, New York,
1867
- Oil on canvas
- The New-York Historical Society, Robert L. Stuart Collection,
Stuart 126
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- Lake George was one of the most popular tourist resorts
in the nineteenth century. Rather than focusing on the wilderness aspects
of the lake's setting, Cropsey emphasizes its pastoral nature, including
the presence of a small fishing boat and the herd of cattle gathered on
the shore. The light from the setting sun is orchestrated into dramatic
rays presenting the quiet lake as an earthly paradise. Cole had observed
that autumn was the "season when the American forest surpasses all
the world in gorgeousness"; Cropsey, among the best known of second-generation
Hudson River School artists, was especially famous as a painter of the
American autumn.
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- Asher Brown Durand (1796 - 1886)
- Black Mountain from the Harbor Islands, Lake George,
New York, 1875
- Oil on canvas
- The New-York Historical Society, Gift of Mrs. Lucy Maria
Durand Woodman, daughter of the artist, 1907.17
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- This glacially formed body of water, some thirty-four
miles long, is situated at the eastern edge of the Adirondack Mountains.
This monumental work is said to be Durand's last major painting, completed
when the artist was seventy-nine years old. While attentive to the specific
topography of the setting, Durand suppressed the minute details of nature.
He distilled his image further by enveloping the scene in an atmospheric
haze suffused with light, suggesting a spiritual presence in nature. Although
the lake steamer's smoke rises in the distance and a rowboat progresses
toward a picnic, the prevailing mood is still one of nature's solitude.
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- The White Mountains and New England
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- John Frederick Kensett (1816 - 1872)
- White Mountain Scenery, 1859
- Oil in canvas
- The New-York Historical Society, Robert L. Stuart Collection,
Stuart 194
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- When Kensett returned to New York from Europe late in
1847, the Hudson River School artists were flourishing. Inspired by their
success, Kensett, who was trained as an engraver, began to paint landscapes.
His masterful topographical panoramas of Mount Washington, the highest
peak in the White Mountain range, earned him particular acclaim. In contrast,
White Mountain Scenery is a less literal interpretation of the region.
Working in a vertical rather than panoramic format, Kensett assembled elements
of mountainous terrain generally suggestive of the region, uniting them
in a harmonious light-filled composition.
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- Asher Brown Durand (1796 - 1886)
- White Mountain Scenery, Franconia Notch, New Hampshire, 1857
- Oil on canvas
- The New-York Historical Society, Robert L. Stuart Collection,
Stuart 105
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- Durand was a frequent visitor to the sketching grounds
of New Hampshire. From an elevation high above the Pemigewasset River Valley,
he presents the distant mountain profile with the pass between the two
peaks known as Franconia Notch at the center of his composition. Presiding
over all is a dramatic cloudy sky casting broad bands of light and shadow
over the earth and on the broad channel of river. Durand's success in conveying
such great expanses of space through command of atmospheric perspective
in large studio paintings like this one was gained through his commitment
to painting small outdoor studies.
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- Asher Brown Durand (1796 - 1886)
- Study from Nature, Stratton Notch, Vermont, 1853
- Oil on canvas
- The New-York Historical Society, Gift of Mrs. Lucy Maria
Durand Woodman, daughter of the artist, 1907.21
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- Durand tempered his knowledge of traditional landscape
conventions with the kind of direct observation demonstrated by this foreground
study, made near Stratton Mountain in southern Vermont, in which he examined
a recently fallen tree. While his image is grounded in experience, the
prone trunk would have reminded him of the visual and literary conventions
associated with the storm-blasted tree. Tree bark, leaves, and the splintered
wound where the trunk was snapped are rendered as a precise record of surface
textures, detail, and color. Equally observant is his record of the distant
mountains glimpsed through branches of the fallen tree.
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- One text for both of next two paintings:
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- Thomas Cole (1801 - 1848)
- Autumn Twilight, View of Corway Peak [Mount Chocorua],
New Hampshire, 1834
- Oil on wood
- The New-York Historical Society, Gift of the New-York
Gallery of the Fine Arts, 1858.42
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- Thomas Cole (1801 - 1848)
- Summer Twilight, a Recollection of a Scene in New
England, 1834
- Oil on wood
- The New-York Historical Society, Gift of the New-York
Gallery of the Fine Arts, 1858.46
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- These two paintings of identical dimensions were conceived
as a pair of images in which Cole contrasted the natural disarray of the
wilderness with the order of a cultivated landscape. By depicting the Native
American paddling a canoe in the foreground of Autumn Twilight and
the woodsman carrying an ax in Summer Twilight, the artist set up
a series of oppositions between original Indian life in the region and
the changes wrought by New England's colonists. Cole's viewers would have
been familiar with the legend of Chocorua, whose Indian protagonist placed
a curse on the land before leaping to his death to elude capture by settlers.
Cole used the pair of landscapes to chart the course of civilization, one
wild and embodying concepts of the "sublime" and the other cultivated
and representative of the "picturesque." These landscape devices
parallel (on a much smaller scale) those used for The Savage State
and The Pastoral State in Cole's Course of Empire, on view
nearby.
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- American Artists Afield & Abroad
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- Louisa Davis Minot (1788 - 1858)
- Niagara Falls, 1818
- Oil on linen, 30 x 40 5/8 in. (76.2 x 103.2 cm)
- The New-York Historical Society, Gift of Mrs. Waldron
Phoenix Belknap, Sr., to the Waldron Phoenix Belknap, Jr., Collection,
1956.4
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- Niagara Falls straddles the border between New York State
and Canada.. Tourist travel to the falls expanded after the 1825 completion
of the Erie Canal, but their fame was so great that a number of artists
had made the trek long before, including Louisa Davis Minot who produced
an impressive pair of landscape paintings in 1818. Her composition compressed
a vista of the American and Horseshoe falls under threatening skies, conveying
the disorienting scale of the mammoth cataracts and exploiting a sense
of awe and even fear at the overwhelming power of nature. While Fisher
presents a view of Niagara Falls domesticated by the presence of well-dressed
touring parties, Minott exploits an aesthetic experience known as the sublime,
meant to stimulate a sense of awe and even fear at the overwhelming power
of nature on a grand scale.
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- Alvan Fisher (1792 - 1863)
- Niagara Falls: The American Falls and Goat Island, ca. 1820
- Oil on canvas
- The New-York Historical Society, Gift of Arthur A. Jones,
1948.25
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- The Boston painter Alvan Fisher was among the pioneers
of American landscape and genre painting in the early nineteenth century.
He first visited Niagara Falls in the summer of 1820 and over the course
of his career painted no fewer than ten images of this renowned formation.
In this view, Fisher chose to depict the falls from below and at a distance,
presenting a broad panorama that emphasizes the site's impressive expanse.
This is a Niagara Falls cultivated into a tourist attraction. In the foreground,
an artist and his companions contemplate a subject while visitors explore
the base of the falls and clamber on the rocky promontories that line the
gorge.
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- Marie-François-Régis Gignoux (18141882)
- Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, ca.
1843
- Oil on canvas
- The New-York Historical Society, Gift of an Anonymous
Donor, X.21
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- After training at the French École des Beaux-Arts,
Gignoux immigrated to the United States, where he soon established himself
as a landscape specialist. He was drawn to a vast underground system of
corridors and chambers in Kentucky known as Mammoth Cave. The site portrayed
has been identified as the Rotunda-so named because its grand, uninterrupted
interior space recalls that of the Pantheon in Rome. Gignoux created a
romantic image rooted in fact and emotion. In contrast to the bright daylight
glimpsed through the cavern mouth, the blazing fire impresses a hellish
vision that contemporaneous viewers may have associated with the manufacture
of gunpowder made from the bat guano harvested and rendered in vats in
that very space since the War of 1812.
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- George Henry Boughton (1833 - 1905)
- Winter Twilight near Albany, New York, 1858
- Oil on canvas
- The New-York Historical Society, Robert L. Stuart Collection,
Stuart 234
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- Winter Twilight was the first
of Boughton's paintings to gain widespread critical notice. Shown at the
National Academy of Design in 1858, it was described by one critic as "a
perfect piece of winter." The painting was largely a plein-air
endeavor. As Boughton recalled, "It was the depth of winter and it
struck me that I had never seen a winter landscape painted just as I saw
it. I went into a field and worked until I was so cold that I was on the
point of giving up."
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- George Henry Durrie (1820 - 1863)
- Wood for Winter, 1860
- Oil on canvas
- The New-York Historical Society, Robert L. Stuart Collection,
Stuart 103
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- The rural landscape of Durrie's native Connecticut inspired
the scenes of simple New England farm life for which he was noted. The
largely self-taught painter mastered the effects of atmosphere and the
varying textures of snow and ice. Yet his paintings, which frequently repeat
architectural and figural elements, display an underlying naïveté
in technique and conception. His winter subjects gained additional popularity
through prints published by Currier and Ives beginning in 1861.
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- Jervis McEntee (1828 - 1891)
- Autumn, Mill Stream, 1860
- Oil on canvas
- The New-York Historical Society, Robert L. Stuart Collection,
Stuart 12
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- Many of McEntee's paintings featured the landscape surrounding
his native Rondout, New York, a small town on the Hudson River. Although
he intended his paintings to be faithful representations of specific locales,
McEntee believed in landscape's capacity to construct meaning, saying:
"In landscape you can tell a certain kind of story." Here, the
autumnal view augers the end or metaphorical death of the year. The abandoned
structures (the wooden building whose peaked roof pierces the horizon and
the stone hearth directly below it) also suggest the passing of time by
introducing the motif of the ancient ruin in New World terms.
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- Louis Rémy Mignot (1831 - 1870)
- The Harvest Moon, 1860
- Oil on canvas
- The New-York Historical Society, Robert L. Stuart Collection,
Stuart 160
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- Mignot's aesthetics ranged from the operatic sublime
of the Ecuadorian tropics and Niagara Falls to intimate views of anonymous
American harvest fields, as exemplified here. Harvest themes were frequently
addressed at midcentury, often out of moralizing aims associated with national
politics or the economy. In this case, however, Mignot eschewed obvious
narrative content and gave greater attention to the formal aspects of his
art. As Mignot's contemporary the influential critic Henry T. Tuckerman,
wrote: "He [Mignot] has a remarkable facility of catching the expression,
often the vague, but, therefore, more interesting, expression of a scene.
. . . "
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- George Inness (1825 - 1894)
- Hackensack Meadows, Sunset,
1859
- Oil on canvas
- The New-York Historical Society, Robert L. Stuart Collection,
Stuart 22
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- Inness abandoned the crisply detailed brushwork of his
early manner after two European trips in the 1850s, when he was attracted
to the work of the Barbizon artists. In this quiet view of New Jersey farmland,
Inness has applied the suffused light, rich colors, and softened forms
of the Barbizon School, characteristics that were compatible with his own
growing beliefs, which gave authority to emotional rather than intellectual
responses to the intimate aspects of nature.
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- John Frederick Kensett (1816 - 1872)
- Shrewsbury River, New Jersey,
1859
- Oil on canvas