Hudson River and Its Painters

During the nineteenth century, an interesting development in American art occurred in New York and environs called the Hudson River School. This group had a specific intention of building national pride and a sense of place. Their subject was the Hudson River and its natural surroundings, not choosing to paint New York skylines or cityscapes-on-the-banks, but rather the river itself, unsullied for the most part. While the buildings, houses, mills, and other human constructs cannot help but be pictured in certain scenes (and ships and boats also feature), it is clear from most that it is the river itself that is the principal subject. New England had a strong pantheistic philosophical/theological streak at this time, and an awe and reverence for nature not only as the work of God, but rather as part-and-parcel of God, can be seen in the paintings. The artistic founders of the school could be said to be John Trumbull, William Dunlap and Asher Durand, around 1825. Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper added a literary element to the same. These artists were also joined by Thomas Chambers, Edward Moran, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Sanford Robinson Gifford, William Guy Wall, Frederic Edwin Church, as well as artists bearing names that became established even beyond the Hudson River School, Winslow Homer and Victor Gifford Audubon. The paintings here are varied in their use of light, colour, and perspective, but there is an important spirit that permeates all of these images. The book contains a hundred images on full-colour plates; some paintings are so true to life it is amazing they are not photographs, while others border on Impressionistic, but all treat their subject with a keen eye and gracious development. This artwork is of vital importance now as the Hudson Valley continues to lose natural settings in favour of increasing development - as many as twenty times the number of people who lived in the Hudson Valley during the Hudson River School times lives there now. The authors and compilers of this book agreed that the royalties of the book should go to the Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference, and thus this book helps to preserve the Hudson Valley in many ways.