9781422271803

MASTERS OF ART

The Hudson River School was an American art movement that was founded in the mid nineteenth century by a group of talented, landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was focused on the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area, including the Catskills, Adirondacks, and White Mountains. The artists were inspired by European masters such as Claude Lorrain, John Constable, and J.M.W. Turner. Usually their works depicted a landscape as a pastoral setting, where nature was idealized, often combining peaceful agriculture and the remaining wilderness of the Hudson Valley. A second generation of artists continued the movement, expanding it to encompass other areas including New England, the Maritimes, the American West, and South America.

THE ART OF THE HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL

T he early history of the United States is principally concerned with the discovery, exploration, and settlement of the land, first on the Atlantic seaboard and subsequently, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, to the Far West, to the Rocky Mountains, and ultimately to the Western Seaboard. The early settlers, almost exclusively from Europe, were motivated by many different aspirations, some from a necessity to improve their condition of poverty, some from a strong sense of adventure, some from religious zeal, and others from hopes of riches. From the end of the fifteenth century and the voyages of Columbus, the European nations had

quarreled and fought over the New World, first the Spanish and Portuguese, and later the French and British. As a result of the historic voyage of the Mayflower in 1620, a British settlement was established at Plymouth, near Cape Cod in Massachusetts, and the serious colonization of Northeastern North America was begun. As other colonies were established on the Eastern Seaboard, each desiring its own independent self government, it was through their combined success and eventual prosperity that the early United States of America was formed in 1783 of the thirteen colonies on the East Coast, from Maine in the north to Georgia in the south. The result was the gradual adoption of the English language as the lingua franca and the focus of the new Americans on the development of their own independent nation. This effort had been initiated in 1775 by the American Revolution, also known as the

PLATE 1 Kindred Spirits (1849) Asher Brown Durand Oil on canvas, 44 x 36 inches (112 x 91.4 cm)

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