The Hudson River School was a movement within American art that promoted harmony with nature, depicting humans, nature, and pastoral settings coexisting in peace. Starting in the early-mid 19th century, it was, the first true landscape art in the United States. It is important to keep in mind that it was not an actual school, but a movement of artists inspired by each other, nature, and people such as Emerson, Humboldt, and Hawthorne, whose writings inspired them. This movement, though ending around the turn of the 20th century, helped spawn the early conservation movement in America. And, though maligned during its peak, the love of the school today helps promote conservation in the Hudson river area today.

Mount Washington, 1869, by John Frederick Kensett (1816 – 1872). Kensett worked as a bank note engraver as well as a painter. He took his love of 17th century Dutch landscape paintings and brought it to America where he painted extensively from his many travels.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=470764

Thomas Cole is known as the informal leader of The Hudson River School, though it was not known to him at the time. Regardless, his paintings are quite stunning. This eminently well-named painting from 1836 is The Oxbow, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, After a Thunderstorm.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=182973

To demonstrate that not all of the school’s work had to be based in the United States, here is The Heart of the Andes by Frederic Edwin Church, another star of the movement. Church spent two years studying under Cole who wrote that he had “the finest eye for drawing in the world.” Church was heavily influenced by European romanticism as can be seen in this dynamic piece and its grand scale.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3069947

I chose Kindred Spirits (1849) by Asher Brown Durand because it depicts three major influences of the Hudson River School: The beautiful landscape, school founder Thomas Cole, and poet William Cullen Bryant.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2957871