Introducing: The Hudson River School

The Hudson River School was a style of American landscape painting that flourished between 1825 and 1875, representing the country’s first distinctively national art movement. It originated with Thomas Cole, Thomas Doughty and Asher B. Durand, who were united by their shared love of dramatic scenery along the Hudson River Valley and the Catskill Mountains. Alongside socializing together and working in the same studio on West Tenth Street, they were all members of the National Academy of Design. Seeking to celebrate the rugged, untamed beauty of America’s wilderness, they used an ‘idealised naturalism’ to produce spectacular and romantically patriotic pictures. They were influenced by the epic landscapes of British painters such as John Martin and J.M.W Turner, as well as philosophical ideas about the ‘Sublime’. With Cole’s death in 1848, Durand took over leadership of the movement and guided it towards a less grandiose and more honest observational realism informed by the work of John Constable. In the years during and after the American Civil War, the Hudson River tradition was carried on by a younger generation of painters, including Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt, often referred to as ‘Luminists’.