The American Landscape

When learning about American history one of the biggest artistic influences you will come across is the Hudson River School. Essentially, the Hudson River school was a collection of American landscape painters that sought to celebrate the American landscape and sever European influence on American art. Some of the most recognizable individuals that constitute this group are:

• Asher B. Durand
• Thomas Cole
• Thomas Doughty
• John Frederick Kensett
• Frederic Edwin Church

These individuals celebrated the American landscape by painting its natural beauty. They painted the Catskill Mountains in New York, Yosemite Valley, the Rocky mountains, Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon and more. The image below, “Kindred Spirits” by Asher Durand, serves two important functions.

The first being that it pays tribute to the founder of the Hudson River School, Thomas Cole, and therefore seeks to evoke both the principles of the group and it’s leader. Cole, one of the figures in the center of the image, stands alongside William Bryant, a renowned American poet. Bryant was known for writing about the beauty of New York and the Hudson River Valley. By depicting both of these important figures, Durand unifies three different men, Cole, Bryant, and himself, by a common ideology; the appreciation for the American landscape.

The second function of this image is it’s rendering of a time in which the American landscape was very different from the one we all know today. The Hudson River School painters all worked within the 19th century and within the context of technological and economic advances such as the Industrial Revolution, the Cyclical Theory of History, and more. They primarily sought to use the American landscape to address issues, horrors, and ideologies of the time with themes like nationalism, the importance of nature, and testing the limits of what was ‘‘property’’.

This image, and the people it represents, are an essential part of not only American history but American identity. America has become so industrialized and technologically structured that nature has often paid the price and conveniently been overlooked or underappreciated. This era of transcendentalism which ran on the principle of one day humans can be at one with the natural world is something that is paramount to our current state. With environmental concerns and disasters happening all over world like industrial agriculture, GMO’s, deforestation, pollution in every sense, extinct species and more, this image serves as a reminder to current American’s to reevaluate the importance of nature before it no longer exists.