Christopher Cranch’s caricatures that illustrate Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings became a way for Cranch to visualize the great Transcendentalist’s complex and frequently abstruse ideas. They foreshadow his later landscapes, which he began painting in earnest in the early 1840s with his decision to change profession from Unitarian preacher to artist.

Cranch’s paintings are often contemplative in mood and include figures observing or communing with nature, as in the landscape Peaceful Evening, which pictures a solitary man sketching the scenery. His landscapes reveal the basic tenet of American Transcendentalism, that nature is the embodiment of spiritual truths. “Every picture should be a poem,” Cranch observes in his article “The Painter in the Woods,” published in the January 1852 issue of Sartain’s Union Magazine of Literature and Art, “it should tell some story, or embody some idea, or appeal in some way to the love of the Beautiful. For all Art is but a mosaic pavement for the mind to step upon as it moves onward to its inmost sanctuaries . . . It for ever points on and on, as all symbols should, towards central and interior truths.”

Frederic Edwin Church studied painting with Thomas Cole for the course of a year. On June 4, 1844, Cole recorded Church’s arrival: “Church came to study under me on the 4th June 1844. He is to pay me $300 for the year.” Joseph Church, Frederic’s father, paid Cole a total of $341.36 for tuition and supplies, including pigments and a copy of “Burnet’s work on painting,” most likely John Burnet’s Practical Hints on Composition in Painting, first published in London in 1822.

Rondout, New York, lies on the west bank of the Hudson River, near Kingston, in the shadows of the Catskill Mountains. It was the community Jervis McEntee called home. He once commented, “From my home in the Catskills I can look down a vista of forty miles, a magnificent and commanding sight. But I have never painted it.” Sunset is one of McEntee’s few paintings that captures such an expansive scene; most of his work tended to focus on the narrower landscape.

Sunset, however, is characteristic of McEntee’s work. The artist had a predilection for painting the somber side of nature—autumn scenes, rainy days, cloudy skies, and dusk. “Some people call my landscapes gloomy and disagreeable. They say that I paint the sorrowful side of Nature, that I am attracted by the shadows more than by the sunshine,” he remarked for the writer George Sheldon. “But this is a mistake. I would not reproduce a late November scene if it saddened me or seemed sad to me. In that season of the year Nature is not sad to me, but quiet, pensive, restful.” His small painting of orange and yellow glow of sunset is indeed quiet and pensive. It is the time of day when life’s activities and nature, herself, come to a rest.

The artist Sanford R. Gifford wrote of his friend and fellow artist James A. Suydam: “Although he was not lacking in full appreciation of what is splendid or imposing in nature, his peculiar sympathies led him to prefer the simpler, quieter phases, those phases which win our affection rather than those that compel our admiration and wonder.” Hudson River Sunset exemplifies Suydam’s quiet style, his affinity for contemplative landscapes filled with reflective light.

Suydam was born to an affluent family in New York City. His father, John, owned a successful dry goods business, and upon his death in 1841, left his son the financial means to pursue his interests free from work. Suydam did finish medical studies at the University of the City of New York (now New YorkUniversity) by 1842, but decided the career of a physician did not suit his artistic leanings. Between 1842 and 1845, Suydam and his brother Peter Mesier, traveled through Europe. While in Florence in 1843, they met the American artist Miner K. Kellogg, who showed the two the great art collections and architecture of the city.

Suydam returned to New York in 1845. His artistic pursuits over the next eleven years are uncertain, but in 1856, Suydam debuted his first painting at the National Academy of Design, a painting titled From North Conway. Most of his early landscapes depict scenes in the Hudson River valley, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and other inland locations. In 1859, Suydam made an abrupt change, focusing his attention for the next several years on coastal scenes. He became close friends with the artist John Frederick Kensett, and many similarities exist between the serene coastal views painted by both artists. Suydam died suddenly in 1865 from dysentery while painting in the White Mountains.

Alfred Thompson Bricher probably first visited Grand Manan Island off the coast of Maine in 1874. It became one of his favorite sketching destinations throughout the rest of his life. Writing in 1879 for his book American Painters, George William Sheldon made the following comment about Bricher: “He is fond of depicting the indolent and easy swaying of the summer sea in the Grand Menan region; the rocks and weeds along the coast; the sunlit stretch of waters, flecked with distant white sails.” Bricher’s painting of Grand Manan does indeed portray the lazy, sunlit sea of a peaceful summer day. Calm, serene, it is the kind of day that catches one in an afternoon daydream.

Grand Manan was not the only location along the Maine coast where Bricher painted. In the summer of 1859, a year after quitting his job as a dry goods clerk in Boston in order to pursue painting as a profession, Bricher accompanied the artists Charles Temple Dix and William Stanley Hazeltine to Mount Desert. The sea captivated the artist and he became well known for his marine coastal scenes.

In 1862, Bricher moved into Boston’s StudioBuilding at Tremont and Bromfield Streets. The artist Martin Johnson Heade also resided in the building, and the two must have met not long afterward. There is no documentary evidence to indicate the two developed a close friendship, but similarities in style between Bricher’s and Heade’s works are evident. Both tended to paint tranquil landscapes, smooth waters, and they both effectively communicated in their paintings an inaudible stillness.

There is something haunting in the paintings of Ralph Albert Blakelock, some mysterious articulation arising from the somber shade that darkens the foreground. Blakelock has often been called a visionary, like fellow artists Elihu Vedder and Albert Pinkham Ryder, and his insanity, which imprisoned him within asylums for the last seventeen years of his life, has only fueled the public’s fascination with the quiet and unassuming artist.

Blakelock was born in 1847 on Christopher Street in New York City. He remained there until 1878 or 1879, when he and his wife, Cora Rebecca Bailey, moved to East Orange, New Jersey. Prior to their marriage in 1875,

Blakelock traveled through the American West between 1869 and 1872, sketching the landscape and the Indians he encountered. For years following his return to the East, Blakelock painted landscapes inhabited by Native Americans. The sketches from his western excursion and his imagination composed those striking works. Blakelock later ventured to the Caribbean, and he made his way up and down the Hudson River valley, including Lake George.

During the 1870s and 1880s, Blakelock and his family moved several times. His inability to sell paintings at prices that supported him and his family led to his working for a Newark, New Jersey, furniture manufacturer, doing decorative painting on knickknacks and household items. Blakelock did exhibit at the National Academy of Design and he did have many admirers, but his timid demeanor kept him from actively promoting his art.

On September 12, 1899, Blakelock was taken to the Flatbush Insane Asylum and eventually transferred to the MiddletownStateHomeopathicHospital. It was during the next seventeen years of confinement that Blakelock began to receive the notoriety that he deserved. By the time of his death on August 9, 1919, Blakelock was one of the most famous artists in America. His Moonlight painting sold six years earlier for the amazing sum of $13,900, and three years after that Brook by Moonlight was purchased for $20,000!

Like his brothers Arthur and Henry, Ernest Parton became a landscape painter. He was born in Hudson, New York, and spent his early years sketching regional scenes with Arthur, who encouraged him to pursue his interest in art. Arthur also taught his younger brother to sketch from nature. In 1873, Ernest traveled to England, where he remained and ultimately spent the greatest part of his professional life, returning to New York in 1932.

Storm in the Adirondacks, painted before Ernest’s departure for Europe, recalls Thomas Cole’s early storm-ravaged landscapes, such as A Tornado in the Wilderness (1831), which presents the viewer with dark menacing storm clouds, wind-blown trees, and twisted trunks. The taste for such sinister landscapes was established in the seventeenth-century by the Italian painter Salvator Rosa, whose paintings frequently displayed the power and force of nature. Once in Europe, Ernest fell under the influence of the BarbizonSchool of painting, which favored nature’s calmer side.

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.

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.”

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.