The Making of the Hudson River School

The Making of the Hudson River School

Introduction

This exhibition originated from the frequently asked question “what is the Hudson River School?” We can begin with three basic facts.

First, the Hudson River School refers to American landscape painting created between 1825 and roughly 1875.

Second, the Hudson River School was not an actual school, but a group of artists who mainly lived and painted in the Hudson River valley of New York. They frequently knew one another, went on sketching trips together, and exhibited their paintings side by side at exhibitions and galleries.

Third, the name Hudson River School was not used by the artists themselves. The name came into general use in the 1870s, at a time when their style was losing popularity.

In addition to these three statements, this exhibition reveals that much more went into the making of the Hudson River School, such as the influence of European traditions and cultural movements, as well as America’s natural environment and commercial spirit. The Hudson River School also emerged alongside the new medium of photography, the new science of geology, and new technologies that transformed travel and inaugurated an industrial revolution. The Hudson River School ultimately helped shape an American identity.

Something Truly American

In the autumn of 1825, the British-born artist Thomas Cole displayed five of his paintings in the window of New York City book and print dealer William A. Colman. Cole was unknown at the time, but contemporary accounts acknowledge that artists John Trumbull, William Dunlap, and Asher B. Durand saw Cole’s paintings, admired them for their originality, and purchased three of them. They promoted the young artist’s talents in newspaper articles and public exhibitions, setting him on his course to success and notoriety.

What attracted viewers to Cole’s landscapes were his depictions of wild American scenery—views of the Hudson River Highlands and Catskill Mountains. At the time when Cole’s paintings were discovered, America was searching for its cultural identity, its characteristics and conventions that differentiated it from Europe. Cole, himself, identified the rugged American landscape in his “Essay on American Scenery” (1836) as the nation’s distinguishing feature: “the most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive, characteristic of American scenery is its wilderness.”

Emphasis on the American landscape as a source of national pride and identity gave prominence to landscape painting during the nineteenth century, despite traditional hierarchies that placed landscape painting far beneath history painting and heroic portraiture. Indeed, the Hudson River School brought awareness not only to the art of landscape painting but also to America’s wilderness regions. Writing for the Knickerbocker magazine in 1839, art critic Thomas R. Hofland observed that “the American school of landscape is decidedly and peculiarly original; fresh, bold, brilliant, and grand.” What he and others saw in the Hudson River School was something truly American.

On the Beach

Thomas Doughty (1793-1856) | 1827-1828

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 35 H x 52 W

Provenance: Descended from Olga Gardner Monks (1869-1944) to her son, Rev. George Gardner Monks; to the Albany Institute of History & Art in 1944. (Olga Gardner Monks was the niece of Isabella Stewart Gardner)

Credit: Gift of Rev. George Gardner Monks

Like many artists of his generation, the Philadelphia-born Thomas Doughty was essentially self-taught. Around the age of fifteen or sixteen he began an apprenticeship as a leather worker, and he remembered sketching some of his first pictures during those years. His only art instruction may have been night school, where he learned to draw with India ink. Most of his knowledge of landscape painting came by observing works exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the collection of European paintings owned by Baltimore collector and patron Robert Gilmor, Jr. Gilmor’s collection contained landscapes by the seventeenth-century masters of the genre, including Claude Lorrain, Salvator Rosa, Jacob Ruisdael, Nicholas Poussin, and Albert Cuyp.

By 1820, Doughty had devoted himself entirely to landscape painting. His earlier works were mainly topographical, but by the middle of the decade he moved away from strict representation to paint grander and more ambitious landscape compositions that show the influence of the European masters he studied in Philadelphia and Baltimore. On the Beach, painted 1827–1828, represents the apogee of Doughty’s career. The overall composition of trees, distant mountains, and striking cloud formations, as well as Doughty’s diffused golden light, recall the works of Lorrain and Rosa, but the undomesticated wilderness is purely American. Human beings enter into nature’s domain peacefully and without altering its appearance.

In 1834, the art historian, William Dunlap, wrote in his History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, “Mr. Doughty has long stood in the first rank as a landscape painter—he was at one time the first and best in the country.” His remark testifies to the great admiration shown towards Doughty’s landscapes, but it also indicates that by 1834 Doughty’s popularity was fading. His landscape compositions of the 1830s and 1840s were more contrived and artificial, and they quickly lost favor to the paintings of younger artist Thomas Cole.

Lake Winnepesaukee

Thomas Cole (1801-1848) | 1827 or 1828

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 25 1/2 H x 34 1/4 W

Provenance: The exact line of descent in the Van Rensselaer family is unknown but it is likely that it went from Stephen III's son, William Patterson Van Rensselaer (1805-1872), to his son, Captain Kiliaen Van Rensselaer (1845-1905) to his daughter, Sarah Elizabeth Van Rensselaer (1873-1945), who married Benjamin Walworth Arnold Jr. (1865-1932), and then to his daughter from his first marriage, Dorothy Treat Arnold (Mrs. Ledyard) Cogswell (1892-1984)

Credit: Gift of Dorothy Treat Arnold Cogswell, Jr.

During the summer of 1827, Thomas Cole traveled to the White Mountains of New Hampshire in search of scenery. His patron Daniel Wadsworth of Hartford, Connecticut, suggested the trip and even planned Cole’s itinerary, which took the young artist past Lake Winnipesauke. The following spring, Cole exhibited a work at the fourteenth annual exhibition of the AmericanAcademy of the Fine Arts identified as No. 3. Landscape view on the Winnipisogn Lake (most likely the painting presented here), which Stephen Van Rensselaer III of Albany purchased.

Although the human presence appears in the Cole’s landscape in the form of the two travelers on the rugged dirt road, the sailboat on the lake, and patches of European mullein (an invasive weed unintentionally introduced by early colonists), his painting pays homage to the American wilderness, which dominates the scene, dwarfing its human visitors.

Asher B. Durand engraved Cole’s painting for inclusion in the magazine, The American Landscape (1830), with descriptive text contributed by American poet William Cullen Bryant. Noting the increasing spread of civilization, Bryant assured his readers that “the beauties of the lake can never be lost: they are a feature of nature that civilization may slightly change, but can never destroy.”

View of Catskill Creek (formerly Distant View of Roundtop)

Thomas Cole (1801-1848) | c. 1833

Medium: Oil on composition board

Dimensions: 17 H x 25 W

Credit: Albany Institute of History & Art Purchase, Evelyn Newman Fund

After spending three years in Europe, Thomas Cole returned to New York in the autumn of 1832. According to the New-York Mirror for April 18, 1835, “Mr. Cole, since his return from Europe, has retired every summer to the neighborhood of the Catskill mountains for study, and in the winter opened his atelier in New-York.” View on Catskill Creek probably resulted from his summer’s retreat in1833, at which time he was eager once again to paint the American landscape.

View on Catskill Creek, like many of Cole’s paintings, harmoniously unites mankind and nature. The composition must have been appealing since a duplicate exists at the New-York Historical Society. Cole, in fact, painted slightly different versions of the same view, and in 1838 he completed a larger canvas that exhibits only minor changes (now at Yale University Art Gallery). On the back of the wood panel that supports the Yale painting Cole inscribed an original poem:

     Sunset in the Catskills
 
     The valleys rest in shadow and the hum
     Of gentle sounds and two toned melodies
     Are stilled, and twilight spreads her misty wing
     In broader sadness oer their happy scene
     And creeps along the distant mountain sides
     Until the setting sun’s last lingering beams
     Wreathe up in golden glorious ring
     Around the highest Catskill peak.

Lecture on American Scenery

Thomas Cole (1801–1848)

Printed in The Northern Light

Letterpress on paper, May 1841

Albany Institute of History & Art Library, CV 553

Originally printed as “Essay on American Scenery” in the January 1836 issue of the Atlantic Monthly Magazine, Cole’s essay appeared a second time as “Lecture on American Scenery” in the May 1841 issue of The Northern Light, after he presented it to the Catskill Lyceum on April 1 of that year.

Cole’s “Essay on American Scenery” is his verbal exaltation of the American landscape, akin to his paintings. His intention in writing the essay was to direct his fellow Americans to the grandeur that surrounded them. “It is a subject that to every American ought to be of surpassing interest,” he remarked, since the American landscape “is his own land; its beauty, its magnificence, its sublimity—all are his.”

Landscape with Figure on Road

Jacob Caleb Ward (1809–1891)

Oil on canvas, 1829

Collection of Bill and Kate McLaughlin

Born in Bloomfield, New Jersey, Jacob Caleb Ward engaged in several branches of the arts. In addition to painting, he occasionally worked as an illustrator, supplying Dr. David Hosack of Columbia College with medical illustrations, and between 1845 and 1848, he joined his brother Charles in Chile to run a daguerreotype business.

Ward began exhibiting paintings at the National Academy of Design in 1829, the date inscribed on the back of this early landscape, and he continued to show paintings into the 1850s. During his own day, Ward received favorable criticism in the press. Reporting on the 1833 exhibition at the American Academy of the Fine Arts, the American Monthly Magazine commented about Ward that “we have rarely seen any landscape painter more uniformly natural, than he is, in all his subjects. He is in our opinion decidedly the best artist we possess, and is daily rising higher and higher in his profession.”

Works by Ward have sometimes been attributed to his better-known contemporary, Thomas Cole, as the two did paint many of the same scenes, and they exhibited together at both the National Academy of Design and the American Academy of the Fine Arts in New York City. Ward has too often been overlooked as one of the early painters of the American landscape.

The Adirondacks

James M. Hart (1828-1901) | 1861

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 42 H x 69 W

Credit: Gift by exchange, Governor and Mrs. W. Averell Harriman

When James M. Hart painted The Adirondacks in 1861, the artist was at the height of his popularity, rivaled only by the master Hudson River School artist Frederic Edwin Church. The Cosmopolitan Art Journal declared in 1860, “Church obtains his own price, for he paints only one picture where one hundred are asked. The same thing may be said of no artist in this country, except it be of James M. Hart, whose superb canvasses are daily becoming more difficult to obtain.”

The Adirondacks represents much of Hart’s work in years preceding the American Civil War. It focuses on the country’s wilderness areas, inhabited by wild animals like the frolicking bear cubs and their watchful mother, painted near the center of the canvas. Following the war, Hart more often painted bucolic landscapes with grazing cows than wild scenery. His change of subject resulted from the growing influence of European art, namely the Barbizon School of landscape painting that favored intimate rural scenes with pastures, cultivated fields, and small woodlots.

Storm King on the Hudson

Homer Dodge Martin (1836-1897) | 1862

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 22 H x 38 1/4 W

Credit: Bequest of Mrs. Anna Vandenbergh

Sketch of Lake George

Worthington Whittredge (1820–1910)

Oil on canvas, c. 1864

Collection of Bernard R. Brown

In 1859, the artist Worthington Whittredge returned to the United States after living and painting in Europe for ten years. His time abroad accustomed the Cincinnati native to the European landscape, one tamed and civilized, cultivated and inhabited. His return brought him face to face with a landscape that was very different, a landscape he rediscovered through the work of Asher B. Durand. “When I looked at Durand’s truly American landscape, so delicate and refined, such a faithful if in some parts sombre delineation of our own hills and valleys,” Whittredge wrote, “I confess that tears came to my eyes.” Inspired by Durand’s landscapes, Whittredge took his sketch box and traveled to the Catskill Mountains to paint the American wilderness for himself.

From 1860 to 1866, Whittredge sketched in the Hudson Valley, the Catskills and Shawangunk Mountains, and Lake George. The oil sketch exhibited here demonstrates Whittredge’s reconnection with the American wilderness. Its narrow viewpoint enclosed by tall trees is characteristic of much of his work during the period. In 1866 he traveled to the American West, perhaps encouraged by the success of Albert Bierstadt’s paintings of the Rocky Mountains. The vast, open landscape of Colorado and New Mexico captivated him and influenced his later landscapes. In the 1870s Whittredge became a prominent member of the New York art world, serving as president of the National Academy of Design from 1875 to 1877. He also helped organize the art exhibitions at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia.

Gathering Clouds

James David Smillie (1833–1909)

Oil on board, c. 1860–1870

Collection of Bernard R. Brown

The combination of elevated perspective, dramatic clouds, and the hazy, distant horizon beyond the broad valley gives an air of grandeur to James David Smillie’s painting. Despite its relatively small size, it magnificently captures the expansiveness of America’s wilderness.

Smillie was trained as an engraver by his father James Smillie, and only in 1864, after years of working as a banknote engraver, did he turn to landscape painting as a profession. His decision to do so was not without moments of concern and frustration, resulting from the slow sale of his paintings and the meager income they generated when compared with the annual salary of $6,000 he made as an engraver. “I haven’t a dollar to my name and am out of sorts generally,” Smillie recorded in his diary on May 10, 1865, “I have commissions—but no money.” Yet Smillie did find satisfaction as a painter, and his election as an associate of the National Academy of Design, in 1865, engendered feelings of accomplishment and joy.

Smillie is best known for his Adirondack landscapes and especially his oils and watercolors of the Ausable River and Keene Valley, which he visited on several occasions with his brother George Henry Smillie and fellow artists Roswell Morse Shurtleff and Samuel Colman. Smillie became involved with the American Society of Painters in Water Colors and eventually returned to etching and lithography as his primary means of artistic expression. Much of what we know about Smillie comes from his surviving forty-five diaries, which were donated to the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in 1981.

Lake George Sunset

William Hart (1823–1894)

Oil on canvas, c. 1860

Courtesy of House of Nathaniel Gallery

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The Improved Landscape

Hudson River School landscapes are best recognized for their exaltations of wild and uncultivated nature, aspects of the American continent that differentiated it from Europe where wilderness had almost completely vanished. Yet, nearly all Hudson River School artists captured landscapes of pastoral repose, scenes that signified abundance, prosperity, and refinement.

In eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, landscapes of grazing livestock, grain cultivation, and haying activities characterized the ideal of land improvement, and Americans embraced the same point of view. In his poem Greenfield Hill (1794), Yale College president Timothy Dwight observed a landscape of improvement in his native Connecticut:

Unnumber’d farms salute the cheerful eye;
Contracted there to little gardens; here outspread
Spacious, with pastures, fields, and meadow rich;
Where the young wheat its glowing green displays,
Or the dark soil bespeaks the recent plough,
Or flocks and herds along the lawn disport.

Improvement also meant carefully planned and configured parks and gardens. Beginning in the 1730s, affluent English landowners adopted the fashion for naturalistic parklands composed of open fields interspersed with clumps of trees, winding paths, and smooth bodies of water. “As a people descended from the English stock, we inherit much of the ardent love of rural life and its pursuits” noted American landscape designer Andrew Jackson Downing in his Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening Adapted to North America (1841). Downing further commented: “landscape gardening, which is an artistical combination of the beautiful in nature and art . . . is capable of affording us the highest and most intellectual enjoyment to be found in any cares or pleasures belonging to the soil.” Landscape artists similarly captured the “beautiful in nature and art” and portrayed the cultivated countryside as an important expression of American ideals.

The Seats of the Nobility and Gentry

William Watts (1752–1851)

Published by William Watts, London

Engravings and letterpress on laid paper, 1779–1786

Private Collection

The fashion in England for topographical views of picturesque scenery and gentlemen’s estates generated several publications in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including William Watts' The Seats of the Nobility and Gentry that were issued serially over several years. His engraved views were marketed to a growing middle class interested in architecture and landscape design, a segment of the population who also considered books an important element of personal refinement.

When the last engravings were issued in 1786, the complete set contained eighty-four views of the landscaped grounds and elegant houses of Britain’s affluent landowners. Trained by topographical artists Paul Sandby and Edward Rooker, Watts used his own drawings as well as those from several other artists as sources for the fine copperplate engravings that illustrated his book.

Clermont the Seat of Mrs. Livingston

Alexander Robertson (1772-1841)

Pencil and ink on paper, 1796

Albany Institute of History & Art Purchase, 1945.51

In September 1796, the Scottish immigrant Alexander Robertson ventured north on the Hudson River, traveling from New York City to Albany and then west along the Mohawk River. Throughout his journey Robertson made sketches of the towns and scenery he encountered, including Clermont, the family home of Robert R. Livingston, Jr. (known as Chancellor Livingston). Robertson’s sketch of the manor house and grounds resembles the engraved views of gentlemen’s estates found in William Watts’ publication, The Seats of the Nobility and Gentry, a book that Robertson likely knew.

Alexander Robertson and his brother Archibald were born in Aberdeen, Scotland. Both attended King’s College in Aberdeen and trained at the Royal Academy of Arts in London before settling in New York City, Archibald in 1791, and Alexander a year later in 1792. Together they opened the Columbian Academy, one of the first art schools in the United States, where they taught drawing and watercolor. The artist John Vanderlyn attended the Columbian Academy, as did numerous amateur artists, both male and female. In 1802, the brothers ended their partnership. Archibald continued the Columbian Academy, and Alexander opened his own art school, the Academy of Painting and Drawing.

Elements of the Graphic Arts, Table III

Archibald Robertson (1765–1835)

Published by David Longworth, New York (1802)

Elements of the Graphic Arts (1802) was one of the first art instruction books published in United States. It provides a good idea of the type of instruction Archibald and Alexander Robertson offered their students at the Columbian Academy in New York City. The stylized shapes of leaves and branches resemble those used by Alexander in his sketchbook.

View of Featherstonhaugh Estate near Duanesburg

Thomas Cole (1801–1848)

Oil on canvas, 1826

Private Collection

“I am extremely anxious to get to painting again [&] also to feel the comfort of a good country fire,” Thomas Cole wrote on December 5, 1825, in a letter to the English-born land developer, writer, and geologist George William Featherstonhaugh. In October, Cole had sold five of his earliest landscape paintings in New York City and instantly won praise as a new American genius. Featherstonhaugh, who resided on his country estate in Duanesburg, New York, southwest of Albany, became Cole’s first supporting patron.

As the December 5th letter indicates, Cole had already visited Featherstonhaugh and was accepting his invitation to spend the winter at his home in Duanesburg, where Cole was promised a painting room and accommodations. In return, he would paint several views of the Featherstonhaugh estate, and presumably have time to work on other landscapes. Painting views of gentlemen’s estates had a long history in England, where both Featherstonhaugh and Cole originated, and both would have been familiar with the tradition.

Cole arrived in Duanesburg the third week of December 1825, and stayed until the end of March the following year. View of Featherstonhaugh Estate near Duanesburg was one of four views he painted of the estate, and probably the first or second in the series. In this painting and a nearly identical work titled The Woodchopper, Lake Featherstonhaugh (Fisher Museum of Art, University of Southern California, Los Angeles), Cole shows the house on the left and FeatherstonhaughLake in the middle ground. A dead, twisted tree trunk in the left foreground immediately confronts the viewer and frames the scene.

Although Cole used his stay with Featherstonhaugh to paint and sketch the scenery of the Schoharie Valley, it was the wilder, more rugged landscape of the Catskill Mountains that he preferred. In a letter written on February 24, 1826, to the older artist John Trumbull, Cole states, “The scenery from which I have been painting here is certainly fine, extensive, but not of the character that I delight in.” Cole accepted another commission to paint a gentleman’s estate, that of the Van Rensselaer family in Albany, which he undertook in 1840 and 1841.

Letter from Thomas Cole to George William Featherstonhaugh

December 5, 1825

Pen and ink on paper

Private Collection

New York, December 5, 1825


Dear Sir,


I have concluded to take advantage of your kind offer [&] I expect to be with you in about ten days.
I go to Philad: tomorrow for the purpose of buying colours etc.
I found all the family well [&] they are highly gratified with the account I gave of the kindness I received whilst at your house. I am extremely anxious to get to painting again [&] also to feel the comfort of a good country fire.
Present my respects to Mrs. F____.
It is very late [&] I am going off early to Morrow or I should perhaps trouble you with more.

I am,
Yours respectfully
Thomas Cole

I have disposed of your letters as you wished.

Gardens of the Van Rensselaer Manor House

Thomas Cole (1801-1848) | 1840

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 24 H x 36 W

Credit: Bequest of Miss Katherine E. Turnbull

The Van Rensselaer Manor House

Thomas Cole (1801-1848) | 1841

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 24 H x 35 3/4 W

Credit: Bequest of Miss Katherine E. Turnbull

Between 1765 and 1769, Stephen Van Rensselaer II built the grand manor house that sat on the west bank of the Hudson River, just north of downtown Albany. The Van Rensselaer family held vast tracts of land on both sides of the river, land originally granted in 1630 to Kiliaen van Rensselaer, an Amsterdam diamond merchant and director of the Dutch West India Company.

The manor house and grounds descended to Stephen Van Rensselaer III, who lived there with his first wife Margarita Schuyler, and after her death in 1801, with his second wife Cornelia Paterson. When Stephen III died in 1839, his son William Paterson Van Rensselaer commissioned Thomas Cole to paint views of the house and gardens as mementos for his mother and sister, who planned to move from the house to make way for Stephen Van Rensselaer IV and his wife Harriet. Stephen IV was the eldest son, and thus, the inheritor of the manor house and grounds.

Cole rarely painted strict topographical views, but a commission from the socially prominent Van Rensselaer family was too important to decline. Like his English predecessors who depicted gentlemen’s estates, Cole included narrative devices within his paintings. The empty chair and basket of flowers create intrigue and force the viewer to ask “who was it that just left the scene?”

The Horticulturist

Edited by Andrew Jackson Downing (1815–1852)

Volume 2, October 1847

Albany Institute of History & Art Library, SpC 630.5 HOR v. 2

With the publication of his first book, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening Adapted to North America (1841), the horticulturist and landscape designer Andrew Jackson Downing immediately became an influential force in America. Not only did he design gardens and parks in a new American style, using native plants and trees, he also designed cottages and houses suited to the growing American taste for suburban living that offered proximity to town with the benefits of a rural setting.

In 1846, Downing accepted an offer from the publisher Luther Tucker to serve as editor for a new journal, The Horticulturist. The monthly magazine gave Downing the opportunity to disseminate his ideas and designs to a greater number of Americans than his books alone. Montgomery Place, a house belonging to the Livingston family, exemplified much of what Downing favored—beautiful gardens, scenic views, paths and drives for communion with nature—and what he described as “accessible perfect seclusion.”

Pastoral Scene

DeWitt Clinton Boutelle (1820–1884)

Oil on canvas, 1844

Collection of House of Nathaniel Gallery

The artist DeWitt Clinton Boutelle may have had no other intention in painting this small canvas than to visualize the charms of country life. Indeed, the picture personifies the bucolic ideal—a happy couple enjoying a pleasant summer day while attending their grazing cattle. Poets and writers stretching back to ancient Rome have verbalized scenes similar to this, where the unhurried pace of rural life afforded contentment and peace of mind. In “Ode on Solitude,” the English poet Alexander Pope wrote:

[nbsp] [nbsp] Happy the man, whose wish and care
[nbsp] [nbsp] [nbsp]A few paternal acres bound,
[nbsp] [nbsp] [nbsp]Content to breathe his native air,

Americans, such as landscape designer Andrew Jackson Downing and the print publishers Currier and Ives, promoted and kept alive a nostalgic longing for rural life throughout much of the nineteenth century.

Scene in the Helderbergs near Albany

William Hart (1823-1894) | c. 1848

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 22 H x 29 7/8 W

Credit: Gift of Anna R. Spelman

The towns and villages southwest of Albany have traditionally been rural farming communities. William Hart’s Scene in the Helderbergs near Albany depicts the country lanes and open pastures that once characterized the area. Hart, however, did not paint a topographical landscape, that is, a truthful representation of an actual scene. Instead, he composed his landscape by incorporating a variety of elements most likely viewed during several sketching excursions through the region. The high ridge in the left background resembles the Helderberg escarpment that rises abruptly to a height of 1,000 feet, but the rest of the painting shares no resemblance to any specific location. Even long-standing residents have never identified a specific site.

Hart most likely painted his landscape to evoke an idealization, a glorification of country life that captivated Americans in the 1840s and 1850s. Numerous books and periodicals like The Horticulturist, edited by landscape designer Andrew Jackson Downing, presented Americans with plans for rural residences and advice on laying out attractive grounds and gardens. The tan-colored house, in fact, shown peaking through tall shade trees along the country lane, closely resembles the rural gothic architecture promoted by Downing in his second book, Cottage Residences (1842). It features the steep, peaked roof and scrolling tracery on the gabled end that, as Downing noted, “if well executed it will have a rich effect.”

Valley Scene (Study near the Catskills)

John Frederick Kensett (1816–1872) | c. 1855

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 10 ¼ H x 17 ½ W

Credit: Gift of Estate of Marjorie Doyle Rockwell

View of Amenia, New York from the Amenia Island Cemetery

Carl Albert Peters | 1861

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 18" H X 24" W, Framed 21 3/4" H x 27 3/4" W

Credit: Gift of Elizabeth Bassett Crawford

The Van Allen Homestead

Henry A. Ferguson (1845–1911) | c. 1860–1870

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 9 1/4 H x 14 1/4 W (image); 19 H x 23 5/8 W (frame)

Credit: Gift of Mrs. Anna Van Allen Jenison

Henry Ferguson’s painting illustrates the Van Allen homestead in Bethlehem Township, in Albany County. It is both a house portrait and a veneration of the old family homestead. In the decades following the American Civil War, American families tended to be less stationary than they were in earlier generations. The old family homestead become a symbol of the past, a nostalgic reminder of what Americans were losing due to rising urbanization and industrial expansion.

Henry Ferguson was born and raised in Glens Falls, New York. He eventually joined his brother Hiram in Albany as a wood engraver, producing printing blocks for magazines, books, and newspapers. His aspirations to become a painter led Ferguson to leave family and home, and travel through Mexico, South America, Europe, and Africa in search of landscapes. In 1867, he began exhibiting at the National Academy of Design works derived from his travels abroad as well as from more familiar excursions through the Hudson Valley.

View near Lansingburgh, Looking toward Troy, on the River

attributed to James M. Hart (1828-1901) | c. 1850

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 36 1/4 H x 54 W

Provenance: Possibly owned by Mrs. A.W. MacMurray and exhibited at the Young Men's Association in Troy in 1859. Alfred W. MacMurray is listed in the 1864 Troy directory at 176 Congress Street, Lansingburgh

Credit: Albany Institute of History & Art Purchase

A pastoral landscape spreads across the island-studded section of the Hudson River just north of Lansingburgh and Troy. Sheep and cattle graze on the islands while four fishermen spend a peaceful day in piscatorial pursuit. At one point in its history, the individuals in the foreground were identified as members of the Burden family, but no evidence has been found to support that claim. The painting has had several titles over the years, and attributions to several artists, but a catalogue for an 1859 exhibition at the Troy Young Men’s Association lists a painting by James M. Hart, titled, View near Lansingburgh, Looking toward Troy, on the River, almost certainly the painting exhibited here.

Valley Lands

James M. Hart (1828-1901) | 1867

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 24 H x 48 W

Credit: Albany Institute of History & Art Purchase

Hudson River at Croton Point

Julie Hart Beers (1835-1913)

Oil on canvas, 1869

Collection of Nicholas V. Bulzacchelli

Hudson Valley at Croton Point displays the hand of an accomplished artist, one who mastered landscape composition and perspective. Yet for the artist, Julie Hart Beers, formal training was limited to the lessons she learned from her artist brothers, William and James Hart, as no evidence exists to suggest she attended any formal classes. Despite the lack of formal training, Beers and other women in the nineteenth century became professional artists. On November 12, 1866, The New York Times reported: “The number of ladies in America who have taken up the study of Art as a profession is very much greater than is generally supposed.”

Like the present work, many of Beers’ paintings reflect her travels in the Hudson Valley. They depict bucolic landscapes along the Hudson River or its tributaries, complete with meadows, fences, and occasionally grazing cows.

In 1857, Beers and her two daughters moved from Albany, following the death of her first husband George Washington Beers, to live with her brother William at his studio in Brooklyn. A few years later, Beers took her own studio in the Dodsworth Building in Manhattan, and 1868 she and her daughters moved there. It was an unusual arrangement for a woman in the nineteenth century, but Beers was devoted to her art. Over the years, she exhibited at several venues, including the National Academy of Design, the Brooklyn Art Association, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Boston Athenaeum.

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The Geologic Revolution

The science of geology developed as an influential field of study in the United States during the nineteenth century, affecting everything from government policy to art. Nearly everywhere, Americans were collecting rocks and minerals, attending public lectures on geology, and surveying the earth’s composition.

Within that bustle of activity, the upper Hudson Valley became an important center for geological investigation. Amos Eaton, a lawyer turned scientist, and a founding member of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, conducted two model geology surveys, both commissioned and funded by wealthy landowner Stephan Van Rensselaer III: the first, a geological survey of Rensselaer County, New York (1821); and the second, a survey of the lands bordering the Erie Canal (1824). Years later in 1836, the New York State legislature approved support for a statewide survey that resulted in several indispensable reports. Other states carried out similar surveys with the main purpose of determining their “economical geology,” or their commercially valuable resources including building stones, clays, and metal ores.

The interest in geology, however, reached well beyond official surveys, as suggested by The Knickerbocker magazine in 1834 when contributor Samuel L. Metcalf wrote: “It is, indeed, the fashionable science of the day.” For many, geology offered more than a glimpse at the earth’s strata; it opened a window onto moral and religious truths. In 1836, the North American Review elaborated: “It opens to us the great book of nature, where we may read the eternal truths of creation, those ‘sermons in stones,’ which were written by the finger of the ALMIGHTY.” Landscape artists were considered the interpreters of those truths, who captured with pencil and brush earth’s geological history.

An Index to the Geology of the Northern States

Amos Eaton (1776–1842) | 1820 (2nd edition)

Author: Amos Eaton (1776–1842)

Publisher / Location: Published by W. S. Parker, Troy, NY, and Websters and Skinners, Albany, NY

Medium: Letterpress on paper in leather binding

Credit: Albany Institute of History & Art Library

By attentively studying the present structure of the earth, and by duly considering the millions of organized beings whose remains are almost every where in the more recent strata, we may arrive at some correct views of the history of our planet.

Economical Geology of New York

1830

Surveyor / Draughtsman: Amos Eaton (1776–1842)

Medium: Hand-colored engraving on paper

Dimensions: 14 H x 16 1/4 W

Credit: Albany Institute of History & Art Library

Agriculture of New-York, Vol. 1

Ebenezer Emmons

Bound volume with lithographic plates, 1846

Albany Institute of History & Art Library, SpC 630.9747 EMM AGR 1846 v. 1

View of the Indian Pass

Charles C. Ingham (1796-1863) | 1837-1838

Printer: John Henry Bufford (1810-1870), New York City

Medium: Lithograph on wove paper

Dimensions: 30 1/8 H x 44 1/3 W

Credit: Albany Institute of History & Art

Both this print and the following, Trap Dyke, at Avalanche Lake, illustrated the 1838 “Report of E. Emmons, Geologist of the 2d Geological District of the State of New-York,” also known as New York State Assembly Document no. 200. The report's ten views, drawn by Ebenezor Emmons, Charles Ingham, and others, and printed by the New York lithographic printer John Henry Bufford, are among the earliest printed views of the Adirondack Mountains and record the first use of the name “Adirondack.” These prints were also issued separately, attesting to the great interest in the region and its geological formations.

Trap Dyke, at Avalanche Lake

Charles C. Ingham (1796-1863) | 1837-1838

Printer: John Henry Bufford (1810-1870), New York City

Medium: Lithograph on wove paper

Credit: Albany Institute of History & Art

Cathedral Ledge

Asher B. Durand (1796-1886)

Oil on canvas, 1855

Gift of Miss Jane E. Rosell, 1987.20.4

When donated to the Albany Institute by a descendent, Asher B. Durand’s painting was known as The Shawangunks, a mountain range just south of the Catskills. A rock climber visiting the museum observed that the rock formations in the painting were vertical like those found at Cathedral Ledge in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, rather than horizontal, like rocks found in the Shawangunks. Further research revealed that Durand was working in North Conway, New Hampshire, during the summer of 1855, which led to a new title, Cathedral Ledge. Like other painters of the Hudson River School, Durand paid close attention to the structure and shape of rocks, providing information about a region's geological evolution.

Nature Study

John Frederick Kensett (1816 – 1872)

Oil on canvas, c. 1850

Private Collection

John Frederick Kensett frequently painted rock formations with amazing attention to detail. Here, in this narrow woodland scene, the light-colored boulder in the foreground attracts the viewer’s notice and draws the eye toward the rock’s crevices and moss-covered surface. The boulder is Kensett’s primary subject, the star of his production. He even focused a beam of light directly on the boulder, like a spotlight on a stage performer, and the trees and bushes that surround it form the backdrop.

In the April 27, 1850, issue of Literary World, a reviewer of the National Academy of Design exhibition made note of Kensett’s talent with rocks: “As a painter of rocks we know of no one superior to Kensett.”

New England Coast

William Stanley Haseltine (1835-1900) | c. 1864

Medium: Pencil and wash on paper

Dimensions: 16 H x 22 1/4 W

Credit: Gift of Helen Haseltine Plowden

Watkins Glen

James Hope (1818–1892)

Oil on canvas, c. 1870

Collection of Nicholas V. Bulzacchelli

The eroded limestone walls that form Watkins Glen in the Finger Lakes of central New York are captured in amazing detail in this painting by James Hope. One can easily see in the layers and striations the transformative effects caused by thousands of years of running water. Yet Hope’s painting is not merely about geology and the processes of change; it is a visual embodiment of time itself, a tangible sign that allows its viewers to see something intangible.

Hope spent his early years in Vermont after emigrating from Scotland. Although he worked as a wheelwright, he developed a talent for painting portraits in the late 1830s, while convalescing from a severe ankle injury. Within a few years he met the Albany artist William Hart, and later Frederic Edwin Church, who persuaded Hope to take up landscape painting. Hope painted the scenery of New York and New England and showed his work at many public exhibitions, including the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the National Academy of Design.

On his way to the Rocky Mountains in 1870, Hope stopped in central New York and found the area around Watkins Glen inspiring. He built a house and studio on the edge of the gorge and remained there for the rest of his life, painting the local scenery and exhibiting his work in the Glen Art Gallery, a museum Hope founded in 1872. Most of Hope’s paintings remained in family hands, and in 1935, more than eighty of his canvases were destroyed in a flood. The present painting was one of the rare survivors, suffering only minor damage along the lower edge.

Jacob’s Ladder, Watkins Glen

Photographed by Charles E. M. Taber, Albany, NY | c. 1870

Photographer: Photographed by Charles E. M. Taber, Albany, NY

Medium: Albumen Stereograph on printed card

Credit: Albany Institute of History & Art Library

Photographic stereographs allowed Americans to travel in the comfort of their own homes. They could view the wonders of Rome and London, or the scenic charms of tourist sites such as Watkins Glen. Stereographs were also collected as souvenirs—keepsakes to remind one of attractions visited in person.

Charles E. M. Taber sold his stereographs of Watkins Glen at his Indian Store and Glen Bazaar, the “Wholesale and Retail Emporium of Curiosities.” They sold for 20 to 25 cents for single views, $2.00 and $2.50 per dozen, or $3.00 and $4.00 per set (twenty cards in each set). In addition to stereographs, Taber offered customers other curiosities, including, “Indian, Swiss, French, English, Chinese, Japanese and Mexican Curiosities, Rock and Spar Ornaments, Agate Jewelry, Glen Specimens, Indian Relics, [&]c., [&]c.”

The Vista-Looking Up, Watkins Glen

Photographed by John C. Lytle, Watkins Glen, NY | c. 1870

Photographer: Photographed by John C. Lytle, Watkins Glen, NY

Medium: Albumen Stereographs on printed card

Credit: Albany Institute of History & Art Library

Photographic stereographs allowed Americans to travel in the comfort of their own homes. They could view the wonders of Rome and London, or the scenic charms of tourist sites such as Watkins Glen. Stereographs were also collected as souvenirs—keepsakes to remind one of attractions visited in person.

Charles E. M. Taber sold his stereographs of Watkins Glen at his Indian Store and Glen Bazaar, the “Wholesale and Retail Emporium of Curiosities.” They sold for 20 to 25 cents for single views, $2.00 and $2.50 per dozen, or $3.00 and $4.00 per set (twenty cards in each set). In addition to stereographs, Taber offered customers other curiosities, including, “Indian, Swiss, French, English, Chinese, Japanese and Mexican Curiosities, Rock and Spar Ornaments, Agate Jewelry, Glen Specimens, Indian Relics, [&]c., [&]c.”

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