The Hudson River School

The "Hudson River School" was the first American Art movement. It was influenced by European Romanticism and Claude Lorraine. The movement lasted about 50 years from 1825-75 and included 3 generations of artists. Although it started in the Catskills or Kaaterskills, it soon included paintings from the Adirondacks and eventually the Sierra Nevada and the rest of the American West as well as South America and the Mediterranean. 

Along with European Romanticism, Transcendentalism and the writings of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson were key to the Hudson River School Painters philosophy. The relationship between God, Man and Nature were a common thread throughout their painting.

The Hudson River School can be attributed to building in America a strong sense of environmentalism and the founding of our National Park system. The paintings often depict man in the environment as a small figure in the vast wilderness that is nature. The two in conflict, man trying to subdue nature and at the same time inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. America set its identity by this vast untamed wilderness but in it saw great promise for expansion and development of its bounty. As a modern day Hudson River School painter/photographer, we have the opportunity to expand and interpret their message in a new era that understands a little more, the consequences of, and responsibilities involved with developing this limited resource.

The painting on the Blog title is "Kindred Spirits" by Asher B. Durand of his friends, fellow painter Thomas Cole and William Cullen Bryant a poet and politician.