Hudson River School

The Hudson River School was the first coherent American school of landscape painting, active from roughly 1825 to 1875, founded by Thomas Cole and carried on by a second generation including Asher Durand, Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt. Centered initially on the Hudson River Valley and the Catskill Mountains, the painters produced grand, often panoramic views that treated the American wilderness as a source of national identity and moral or spiritual meaning, in the Romantic tradition of the sublime, later expanding their subjects westward to the Rocky Mountains and South America as Church and Bierstadt sought ever more awe-inspiring scenery. The school's celebratory vision of unspoiled nature coincided with, and helped popularize, the westward expansion of American settlement it simultaneously mourned as vanishing, and its large exhibition canvases established landscape as a subject worthy of the same scale and seriousness as history painting in American art.