Hudson River School: Artistic Style & Methods

Hudson River School painters worked in two stages. In summer and autumn they traveled - on foot, by steamboat, and, from the 1850s, increasingly by railroad - to the Catskills, the White Mountains, the Adirondacks, Lake George, and the coast, filling sketchbooks with pencil studies and making small oil sketches outdoors. Many such sheets survive in this archive: Sanford Gifford's 1859 sketchbook of the White Mountains and Maine, Jervis McEntee's 1869 pages from Lake Como and Lake Maggiore, Jasper Cropsey's album studies, and Durand's tree and leaf studies. Over the winter they composed large finished canvases in their New York studios, freely combining, rearranging, and heightening what they had recorded. Cole sketched Schroon Mountain in the Adirondacks in early summer, for instance, but painted it ablaze with autumn color; Church painted Twilight in the Wilderness in his studio from Maine sketches made nearly two years before.

The finished pictures share a recognizable grammar. A dark foreground of rock, water, or tree - often a storm-broken trunk, as in Church's Storm in the Mountains - frames a luminous, deep middle distance and a high sky. Detail is precise enough to identify species of tree and formations of rock, a reflection of Durand's insistence in his Letters on Landscape Painting that a painter learn from nature itself before studying other painters. Human figures are small: a shepherd, an artist at an easel, a solitary hunter, cows at a pond. Light carries the emotional weight, from Cole's thunderstorms and Church's blazing sunsets to the calm, even glow of Kensett's lakes.

That glow is the quality later critics called luminism. The term was introduced in 1954 by John I. H. Baur, who singled out Fitz Henry Lane and Martin Johnson Heade; it has since been applied as well to Kensett and Gifford. Luminist pictures tend toward still water, low horizons, smooth, nearly invisible brushwork, and a hushed, airy light - the qualities visible in Lane's Lumber Schooners at Evening on Penobscot Bay and Becalmed off Halfway Rock, Heade's salt marshes, and the 1872 Long Island Sound and Lake George studies Kensett left at his death. The painters themselves never used the word, and scholars still debate how far it describes a distinct movement rather than a tendency within the Hudson River School.

Alongside these specialties, the archive shows how broad the painters' practice was: Durand's early career as an engraver of portraits, book illustrations, and banknote vignettes; Cole's architectural drawing and Italian ruins; Heade's hummingbirds, orchids, and flower pieces; and George Inness's movement, after the 1850s, toward a softer, more atmospheric manner that looked to France rather than to the detailed Hudson River tradition.