The growing commercial popularity of the Hudson River painters—auction prices are hovering around $1 million for major works— has something incongruous about it. After all, this kind of realistic landscape painting is about as far as one can get from what is taken seriously in the contemporary art world. If you doubt this, check out the catalogues from the last few Whitney Biennials.
Frederic Church’s “Cotopaxi.”
And yet, judging by collectors’ interest and by the number of museum shows in recent years, there seems to be a growing consensus about the importance of this homegrown school of landscape painting, a 19th Century movement that included Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederic Church, John Kensett, and Albert Bierstadt.
Their accomplishments are well displayed in a superb show at the Metropolitan Museum: “American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School.” The Metropolitan is the perfect place to display these works: Two of the painters, Kensett and Church, were museum founders, the first of the Hudson River School shows were held there, and many of the paintings on display are from the Met’s permanent collection.
The exhibit of 88 paintings is spread over seven galleries, roughly chronological in arrangement. It begins in the 1820’s with the works of Cole and Durand, who painted intimate, painstaking views of unspoiled wilderness.
From there we are introduced to the “second generation” of painters, such as Church and Bierstadt, who sought out more dramatic and exotic locations—Church in the jungles of South America, and the German-born Bierstadt in the Rocky Mountains. Both painted grandiose, almost theatrical canvases with a degree of realism that went beyond the romantic naturalism of Cole and Durand.
The exhibit also treats the development of “Luminism” —a style of simple compositions, profound stillness, and diffused light – as practiced by Kensett, Martin Johnson Heade, and Sanford Gifford.
The twilight years of the Hudson River School, in the 1870’s, are represented by the works of George Inness, an artist who unquestionably owed much to the Hudson River artists, but whose French-inspired paintings freely populated with figures, houses, and other signs of civilization set them apart from the pristine views of nature that characterized the Hudson River School.
The high points of the show include Cole’s “The Oxbow,” a view of a bend in the Connecticut River, with a passing thunderstorm moving across one corner of the painting; Durand’s “Kindred Spirits,” a portrait of Thomas Cole and nature poet William Cullen Bryant standing on a rock overlooking a gorge in the Catskills; Kensett’s “Lake George,” a Luminist tonal poem; Church’s “Cotopaxi,” a South American volcano exploding at twilight; and Bierstadt’s “A Storm in the Rocky Mountains—Mount Rosalie,” a cataclysmic battle of light and dark.
The Hudson River School has had its ups and downs over the past hundred years. Most of the artists enjoyed critical favor and financial success during their lifetimes, but the work fell into disfavor, then obscurity for the first half of the 20th Century. Even the name itself (as is so often the case with artistic schools and movements) was sometimes used derisively by rivals and critics to label the artists as stodgy academics obsessed with the same motifs.
The rediscovery of the Hudson River School, which began in the 1960’s and has really taken off in the past six or seven years, has several causes.
One is the growing awareness of the deep and important role played by these painters in the evolving consciousness of the American nation. Their romantic visions of the American wilderness as a pristine Garden of Eden captured the temper of a young America in the first half of the 19th Century. It was a view that was irrevocably shaken both by the growing industrialization of this country and, even more so, by the Civil War.
The other cause has to do with inherent artistic merit. As history has proved again and again, there is a raised level of artistic quality when artists work within an evolving tradition. The Hudson River artists fed on each other’s ideas, techniques, and energy. The school produced its share of clunkers, of landscapes that were on the same level as travelogue descriptions, but the best of these works are beautiful and transcendent, as far from travelogue as are the nature poems of Wordsworth and Keats.
What makes this a good show is the way it persuades us that this group of painters, who worked over about 50 years, constituted something as cohesive as a “school.” It’s an important accomplishment, because there are strong arguments for breaking up the painters into different groups. They painted in varying styles and for different philosophical reasons and, despite the name, had no strong allegiance to the Hudson River.
Bierstadt, with his operatic compositions and his photographic approach to nature, is miles apart from the Luminists, with their contemplative, highly subjective vision.
At the same time, in the hands of an artist like Heade, Luminism begins to look like Surrealism. Heade’s “The Coming Storm” (1859), with its ink-black water and its eerie, yellow light, has a powerful, ominous quality and has been described as an allegory for the coming the Civil War (the validity of this interpretation is called into question by a similar painting, “Approaching Storm, Beach Near Newport,” which Heade painted after the Civil War).
Then, there are painters like Jasper Cropsey, whose favorite spot for communing with nature was Greenwood Lake. Cropsey’s work has superficial similarities to the other members of the Hudson River School, and yet his approach to landscape seems merely topographical, with neither the romantic poetry of Cole or the transcendent quality of Church’s best work.
In the case of Church, it’s important to understand the philosophical underpinnings of a painting like “Niagara” (1857), Church’s masterful treatment of the Horseshoe Falls. It was a popular belief of the time that awesome, even frightening, spectacles of nature – such as Niagara Falls – could help people to experience God.
Later, Church was influenced by the German explorer-scientist Alexander von Humboldt, whose writings advocated an approach to landscape painting that would unite discovery, science, and art. It was in this spirit that Church traveled to South America and subsequently produced one of the most popular paintings of the 19th Century: “Heart of the Andes” (1859).
This enormous canvas, just short of 10 feet wide, appealed to the public’s appetite for views of strange and exotic places at a time when photography was a primitive form of reproduction. It was the 19th Century’s version of “Nova” and National Geographic.
When it was exhibited in a gallery in New York City, the public paid a fee to stand in front of it. What they saw, illuminated by murky gas lamps and surrounded by drapery and palm trees—props designed to create the illusion of a window on the real thing—was a jungle, a waterfall, and, behind, a series of rising tablelands that end with the ice-clad, gleaming peak of Mount Chimborazo looming in the distance.
Extravaganzas like this, which call to mind P. T. Barnum, seem miles away in spirit and intent from the intimate canvases of George Inness, in which the artist is involved in recording specifics of precise moments: temperature, time of day, weather, and light. Later in his career, in paintings not shown in this exhibit, Inness would evolve away from the Hudson River tradition, toward a painting style that was more ephemeral and ghostlike.
And yet, despite all the differences, this show hangs together. There is a thread, an affinity among the artists that seems uniquely American. What is presented, in the end, is not so much a school, or the kind of European movement that spawned manifestoes —but a lineage, in which American artists, acting for the first time independently of European influences, found their identity rooted in the American soil.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
1987
