Speed Art Museum
© John Nation 1998
Louisville, KY
302-634-2700
Art & Nature: The Hudson River School
The exhibition "Art & Nature: The Hudson River School"
is scheduled to open at The Speed Art Museum on June 27 and extend through
August 27, 2000. "Art & Nature" offers 27 beautiful landscapes
representing all the major artists associated with America's first school
of landscape painting, the Hudson River School. The exhibition was organized
by the Albany Institute of History & Art in Albany, New York, and has
been circulated to seven museums across the United States by Smith Kramer
Fine Art Services of Kansas City, Missouri. (left: Asher B. Durand
(1796-1886), 1845, An Old Man's Reminiscences, oil on canvas)
The Hudson River School is a term applied to a group of American artists working in the mid-nineteenth century whose paintings stemmed from their pride in and their desire to capture the beauty of American landscape. Not a school in the traditional sense of the word, the Hudson River School instead was a loosely organized group of artists who shared a style and an attitude toward landscape painting.
Two
of the earliest and most important among the Hudson River painters were
Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand, who chose as their subjects the landscape
surrounding New York's Hudson River, the Catskill Mountains, and other remote
and untouched wilderness areas. In 1855, Durand, a theorist and leader of
the group, published a series of "letters" to an imaginary student
in which he outlined the aesthetic principles that guided the Hudson River
School painters--the direct study of nature, the use of preparatory studies
made out of doors, and the execution of carefully conceived paintings that
captured the majesty of the American landscape. Today, paintings by members
of the Hudson River School are admired for their dramatic depictions of
nature, with subjects ranging from sublime views of wilderness to pastoral
scenes and allegorical pictures with moral messages. At the height of the
movement, paintings were often intended to celebrate the presence of God
in nature. In keeping with the tenets of Romanticism, these artists saw
the natural American environment as a source of divine expression. This
exhibition focuses on the changing meaning of Hudson River School paintings
over time. (left: Sanford R. Gifford (1823-1880), Mount Merino
and the City of Hudson in Autumn, c. 1851-52, oil on canvas)
In addition to Cole and Durand, the exhibition features works by Frederic Edwin Church , Jasper F. Cropsey, Sanford Robinson Gifford, James McDougal Hart, William M. Hart, John Frederick Kensett, Homer Dodge Martin, David Johnson, John William Casilear and George Inness.
Read more about the Speed Art Museum in Resource Library Magazine
Please click on thumbnail images bordered by a red line to see enlargements.
For further biographical information on selected artists cited above please see America's Distinguished Artists, a national registry of historic artists.
This page was originally published in Resource Library Magazine. Please see Resource Library's Overview section for more information. rev. 3/2/11
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