Hudson River School

Among the most vivid and dramatic works of the 19th century, the Hudson River School's sweeping canvases captured the rugged sublimity of the American landscape and memorialized the heady era of manifest destiny. As with so many other pioneering historical art movements, the name Hudson River School was first used disparagingly, by voguishly Europhile critics who favored the dignified realism of L'École de Barbizon. Largely neglected by the turn of the 20th century, a series of exhibitions and the revival of the Hudson Valley region in the 1960s and 1970s reignited interest in the School, and today its exuberantly romantic vision of nature and man's peaceable communion with it is highly esteemed by scholars and collectors alike.

The masterpieces of the Hudson River School powerfully convey the natural grandeur of the New World – not just the Hudson River Valley, as the name would imply, but also the Catskills, Adirondacks, White Mountains, the Maritimes, the American West and South America.

The paintings themselves tend toward the monumental; Albert Bierstadt's Domes of Yosemite (1867), for example, measures 15 feet in width. If human figures are included in these compositions, they exist to emphasize the sheer magnitude of their wild surroundings. The Hudson River School artists also eschewed neoclassical symmetry and balance in favor of jagged lines that suggest latent energy and dynamism.

Robert Seldon Duncanson, a second-generation Hudson River School painter descended from freed slaves in Virginia, exiled himself in Canada during the Civil War. While in Montreal, Duncanson made many monumental paintings and developed fruitful connections within the Canadian art scene. He is credited as catalyzing the creation of the first Canadian school of landscape painting, which would be carried forth by artists such as Otto Jacobi, Allan Edson and John Fraser after Duncanson's return to the United States. Duncanson's preeminent Canadian landscape, Owl's Head Mountain (1864) is displayed in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

The Hudson River School directly influenced the style of landscape painting known as luminism, characterized by its contemplative treatment of light, water and atmosphere. Its principal exponents included Fitz Henry Lane and Sanford Robinson Gifford, who were active concurrently with the second generation of the Hudson River School. These artists, in turn, have inspired numerous contemporary painters in the pursuit of rarefied candescence; Stephen DaLuz and April Gornik are among the living artists whose work has been termed “neoluminist.”

The work of the original Hudson River School masters can be seen in numerous public institutions, principally in the northeastern United States. Among the largest collections is at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, the hometown of Frederic Edwin Church. Other collections of note are the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York; the Mabee-Gerrer Museum of Art in Shawnee, Oklahoma, and the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.