A native movement with ties to European Romanticism, the so-called Hudson River School was America's first and most influential school of landscape painting. Though in a sense founded by Thomas Cole in 1825, the Hudson movement was not strictly speaking a school, but rather a loose confederation of original artists, disciples, and protégés united by a common philosophy and style.

    Cole was the central figure--both the originator of the Hudson style and the model for its later imitation and dissemination. Contrary to Bryant's assumption, the painter was not a native-born American but a transplanted Englishman, an imaginative nature lover who deserted the coal fields of his birthplace and sailed across the Atlantic, lured on by descriptions of an idyllic woodland named Ohio.

    No native-born Yankee or true son of  '76 could have loved his new continent more dearly. Cole responded to the American landscape with the ardor of a newlywed and immediately set to work to capture its essence (which he recognized as a certain glorious and prolific wildness) in oil on canvas. By 1825 he was already assembling the main elements and details of a style that would guide and inspire U.S. landscape painting for the next fifty years.

    Among the many features of that style the following characteristics seem especially noteworthy:
 

• Vastness and Sublimity. Perhaps the first thing that strikes the viewer of a Cole landscape is a sense of Nature's overwhelming magnitude. The engulfing scene diminishes its few tiny inhabitants (figures who, far from being the main subject of the painting, seem to have been inserted into the landscape purely to provide a sense of scale). The overall effect is that of an exalted sublimity (that feeling of aesthetic excitement which, according to Kant, results from the perception of magnitude plus a sense of risk or danger).

• Solitude. The quintessential Cole landscape is a pure wilderness, a natural vista devoid (in Bryant's phrase) of "the trace of men." At times the Hudson painters would trek for miles into a woods or among the mountains looking for the perfect spot--ideally a place that had never been viewed, much less painted, by a person of European descent. The bliss of solitude--the inner joy of isolated communion with nature--as recommended by Rousseau and Wordsworth and later by Bryant, Emerson, and Thoreau finds its full visual expression in the paintings of Cole, Church, Durand, and Bierstadt.

• Jaggedness and Irregularity. The Hudson River artists sought to render a raw, wild, untamed nature, a distinctly non-idealized nature.  No dainty scenes of lawns, gardens, soft breezes, and limpid brooks for them. In place of the orderly spaces, perfectly symmetrical trees, and balanced compositions of neo-classical tradition, they introduced deliberate disharmonies and jagged effects: blasted trees, fallen limbs, and naturally eroded hillsides and riverbanks.

• Hidden Force. A scene by Cole or Church typically conveys a sense of concealed dyamism, of submerged or underlying power. Dark clouds or stormy skies above, uprooted trees and jutting rocks below express the view that, far from being a serene or static environment, nature is instead a living, changing, vitalistic force. (See especially Durand's Interior of a Wood, with its powerful outcroppings, and Church's The Icebergs, with its eerie atmosphere  of beauty and menace.)

• Luminosity and Shadow. Whether condensed and restricted to a few spectral rays or flooding in full, incandescent refulgence, light is everpresent in a Hudson School landscape and represents one of the clear hallmarks of its style. The light is typically soft and radiant--so much so that, instinctively, many viewers interpret it as holy, as if it were the visible sign of a beneficent Deity, the shining signature of nature's own Artist-Creator.

• Pantheism and Cosmic Optimism. Though Hudson River paintings are by no means uniformly buoyant and cheerful, and though they often seem to stress nature's vulnerability (especially to the depradations of industrial society and the march of civilization), nevertheless most viewers find in them a sense of hope and endurance as well as a feeling of peacefulness and affirmation.

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