Hudson River School

A nineteenth-century American art movement whose painters depicted landscapes, especially the Hudson River Valley and other parts of North America. Its artists often joined close observation of nature with ideas about national identity, spirituality, and wilderness.

Thomas Cole: An English-born American painter whose landscapes helped establish the Hudson River School. His paintings and teaching supplied the movement with an early model.
The Oxbow: Thomas Cole’s 1836 landscape depicting a bend in the Connecticut River after a storm. It contrasts cultivated land with wilderness in one of Cole’s best-known American scenes.
American art: Visual art produced in the United States and its predecessor colonies. The movement helped establish landscape painting as a major form of national art.
Manifest destiny: The nineteenth-century belief that United States expansion across North America was justified and inevitable. Western landscapes could suggest both the promise and the ideological claims of territorial expansion.
Asher B. Durand: An American landscape painter and engraver associated with the Hudson River School. His close study of trees and nature shaped the movement’s approach to landscape.
Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand’s 1849 painting of Thomas Cole and poet William Cullen Bryant in the Catskills. It memorializes Cole and links landscape art to literary celebration of nature.
National Academy of Design: An American art institution founded in New York City in 1825 by artists including Samuel F. B. Morse. Its exhibitions and professional network helped early landscape painters gain recognition.
Westward expansion: The movement of United States settlement and political control westward across North America. Painters’ journeys and images brought distant western scenery into eastern cultural life.
Hudson River: A major river in eastern New York that flows south into New York Harbor. The valley gave the movement its name and an early focus for landscape painting.
The Heart of the Andes: Frederic Edwin Church’s 1859 painting of an imagined panoramic view of the Andes. Its immense, detailed landscape extended the movement’s ambitions beyond the United States.

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