9781422271803

MASTERS OF ART

PLATE 4 The Heart of the Andes (1859) Frederic Edwin Church Oil on canvas, 66 1 ⁄ 4 x 119 1 ⁄

4 (168 x 302.9 cm)

middle years of the nineteenth century. It is not, as its name appears to suggest, a school or movement of painters in the way that one would describe, for instance, as the Pre-Raphaelites or the Impressionists. These inclusive titles encapsulate different philosophies and intentions and render the names immediately informative and identifying: the Impressionist painters had a similar philosophy and pictorial intention so that their work is generally identifiable through these characteristics, and they either worked together or were in personal contact with one another. The lives of the Hudson River painters, on the other hand, covered a wide span of time; they did not all paint with any direct or exclusive connection with the Hudson River and its environs, and they did not all have precisely the same subject interest, nor were they all known to one another. In addition, there is no general agreement on who should or could be included as members of the “School.” What connects them, however loosely, is a passionate Romantic attachment to the 13

was in that context that the Hudson River School, the first essentially American Pictorial Movement, must be considered. The Hudson River School is an identifying group title given to a number of mainly landscape painters working in the United States of America in the early and