Description
The Hudson River School — a loose group of American landscape artists — was neither a school nor confined to the Hudson River Valley. Beginning in the early 19th-century, American painters finally paid significant attention to the uniqueness of landscape around them. The Hudson River School drew inspiration from America’s unspoiled landscape, finding aesthetic taste, a feeling of nationalism, and spirituality in the wilderness. At this same time, though, progress in the form of industrialization and Manifest Destiny began to erode the vision of a pristine idealized American “Garden of Eden.” Hudson River School painters include Thomas Cole, Frederic E. Church, Asher B. Durand and others. For a related class on the Hudson River Valley, see class #621.
