The Clove, Catskills, ca. 1826. Thomas Cole (1801–1848). Oil on canvas, 25 1/4 x 35 1/8 in. New Britain Museum of American Art, Charles F. Smith Fund, 1945.22.
The Hudson River School was not an actual school but a group of like-minded landscape painters who worked in a similar style from about 1825 to 1865. The growing number of crowded industrial cities in the East gave rise to an appreciation for pictures of the landscape untouched by man. The movement was fueled by the poetry of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and by the conviction that God had given the American people an abundance of natural resources as a source of wealth and prosperity. (more…)
