The Hudson River School: Promoting Conservation in America

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.

In the painting above, you see 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. Below is Thomas Cole’s eminently well-named painting from 1836 is The Oxbow, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, After a Thunderstorm. 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.

For the next painting below I chose Kindred Spirits (1849) by Asher Brown Durand. It’s very well painted, but also it depicts three major influences of the Hudson River School: The beautiful landscape, Thomas Cole, and the poet William Cullen Bryant.

Here in the northeast, we think largely of the megalopolis that exists around us, but it is important to remember our roots. Rugged, wild, scenic, and beautiful. It’s all still there, though sometimes we have to squint. If people restore more of their unused yard space to native landscaping, it will come back in force.