Hudson River School19th Century American Art

- Thomas Cole The Clove, Catskills

Why is art created?

Art is. . . .

• Art is an act of creation, • Artists create their work in response

to some thought, emotion, or personal experience.

• To find a true understanding about a work of art, one must look further than the artwork itself.

How do we see Art?

• As a casual admirer?

• As an art critic?

• As a historian?

• Prior to the Hudson River School, portrait paintings by Limners had been popular in the early United States.

• Limners were early American artists who, during the cold winter months, painted single or group portraits without the faces. When spring arrived, they would find patrons who wanted their faces filled in.

• This form of art was unoriginal and modeled after an older European style of painting.

• When the United States defeated Great Britain in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, American artists wanted to move away from "old world" styles of painting.

• A deep sense of national pride was developing in the United States so it was very important to these early Americans that they have their own sense of identity.

• American painters found this unique identity when they developed a style of landscape painting that emphasized nature rather than the human in the scene.

The Hudson River School. . .• Between the 1820's and 1880's an original

and significant movement took place in the art world; landscape art evolved.

• The Industrial Revolution changed peoples' values; nature had become a backdrop to the works of human beings.

• In order to awaken people's awareness of the importance of nature, a small group of artists took the pleasure of observing the vast beauty of nature and emphasized its importance in their paintings.

• This group's emerging style of painting eventually became known as the Hudson River School

• Many of the original artists lived and worked in the Hudson River Valley, New York.

• These artists portrayed the spirituality they felt towards the beautiful American scenery through detailed and majestic landscapes.

• The wild, untamed beauty of the American scenery differed from European scenery. This scenery struck artists such as Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand as pristine.

• The typical Hudson River School scene consists of a portion of virgin landscape, extending into the far-off distance; often, tiny foreground figures are set against it.

Thomas Cole• Thomas Cole, born in 1801 in Lancashire,

England, was trained as an engraver of woodblocks used for printing calico, or cloth.

• Because he did not have any formal education in art, his aesthetic ideas derived from poetry and literature, such as which Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman , influences that were strongly to mark his paintings.

Cole next moved to New York,

where the series of works he produced

following a sketching trip

up the Hudson River

in the summer of

1825 brought him to the

attention of the city's

most important

artists and patrons.

• Concurring with Emerson, who had written in his 1841 essay, THOUGHTS ON ART, that painting should become a vehicle through which the universal mind could reach the mind of mankind, the Hudson River painters believed art to be an agent of moral and spiritual transformation.

• As Thomas Cole maintained, if nature were untouched by the hand of man then man could become more easily acquainted with the hand of God.

The works of Thomas Cole

View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow)1836

The Voyage of Life: Childhood1842Oil on canvas

The Voyage of Life: Youth1842Oil on canvas

The Voyage of Life: Adult1842Oil on canvas

The Departure1837

Oil on canvas39 1/2 x 63 in (100.3 x 160 cm)

The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington

• The popularity of the Hudson River School did not last forever.

• According to local landscape artist James Cramer, the downfall of the Hudson River School coincides with the rise of Impressionism in the late 19th century.

• Although the rise of Impressionism led to the decline of the popularity of the Hudson River School it certainly did not extinguish the ideals that the Hudson River School set forth.

Washington Arch, Spring (1890) by Childe Hassam

Ice on the Riverby Ernest Lawson