Hudson River School

When Hudson River School artist Jervis McEntee’s wife Gertrude died in October 1878 at the age of 44 of an unknown illness, it left a gaping hole in his life. They were married in 1854. Early on, they lived in an idyllic cottage on the McEntee family property overlooking the town of Rondout, New York (now Kingston). From their windows they could see the Catskill Mountains to the north and the Hudson River to the east. While Jervis worked on his art, Gertrude planted rose bushes around the cottage, played the piano, and sang: "I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls," "There you’ll ...

Read Post

For the Hudson River School artists there was no more sacred place than Kaaterskill Clove, the rocky, forested nave into which Thomas Cole and successive aspirants trekked and clambered, paint box and umbrella in hand. The artists rarely came alone. Working in twos or threes outdoors in nature, they probably talked art, shared tips and encouragement, or sometimes just painted together in silence, listening to what William Cullen Bryant referred to as the "still voice" coming from "Earth and her waters, and the depths of air." Today that "still voice" speaks to a new generation of young ...

Read Post

From one owner to another, from exhibition to auction, through years of adulation and years of neglect, a painting can endure a life of its own. Some lives are more exciting than others. Such is the case with Albert Bierstadt’s Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California, a monumental work measuring over five feet by eight feet in the collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art. How it arrived at the Alabama museum is a story involving shady finances, public charity, and a historic escape from destruction. Bierstadt painted Looking Down Yosemite Valley in 1865 toward the end of the Civil War. ...

Read Post

"My dear McEntee…"On August 28, 1863, Sanford Robinson Gifford wrote to Jervis McEntee from a book shop at Saratoga Spa in northern New York State (the original letter is digitized on the Smithsonian Archives of American Art website). Gifford had recently returned from his final tour of duty with the New York Seventh Regiment in the Civil War. He was attempting to gather his friends, including artists Richard William Hubbard and Worthington Whittredge, for a sketching tour of northern New York.  His letter is a revealing glimpse of the affection and humor that characterized the close ...

Read Post

In the 1850s through 1860, John Frederick Kensett painted a series of at least five landscapes of the "Shrewsbury River" (now the Navesink River) along the New Jersey shore. The paintings are striking in their design and yet convey an atmosphere of translucent calm, for which they are justifiably renowned.A splendid example is included in "Painting the American Vision," an exhibition of Hudson River School landscapes from the New York Historical Society, on view at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts starting July 30. The exhibition travels to the Columbia Museum of Art in ...

Read Post

Sometimes a small painting can tell a big story. Such is the case with a six-by-nine-inch landscape by John S. Jameson. The painting is on display at the Olana State Historic Site in Hudson, New York, in the new exhibition, "Rally 'Round the Flag: Frederic Edwin Church and the Civil War.”Born in 1842 in Hartford, John S. Jameson was a rising young star among the New York painters at the time of the Civil War. The patriotic tug of duty, however, changed his course.A prodigy in both art and music, Jameson attracted attention in the 1850s while just barely a teenager. His father was the ...

Read Post

Everyone knows that art world players throw big bucks at Picasso, Warhol, and Monet. Yet within the past couple of months, the typically serene and dignified field of Hudson River School art has been ruffled by the secretive sale of at least two monumental paintings, along with several lesser, but still important works.Upwards of $100 million may have changed hands, most of it for one painting by Asher Durand and one by Thomas Cole, in what may be the highest prices ever paid for nineteenth century American art.The Hudson River School paintings were part of the Westervelt corporate ...

Read Post

There is the moral of all human tales; 'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past. First Freedom and then Glory—when that fails, Wealth, vice, corruption—barbarism at last. --Lord Byron In the summer of 1835, Thomas Cole was in the middle of painting The Course of Empire, his grand five-part cycle of the rise and fall of an imaginary Greco-Roman civilization. He had traveled to Rome in the early 1830s, pondered the ruins, and read the romantic literature. There was more on his mind, however, than Byron and Gibbon. America was experiencing growing pains in the 1830s. By the middle of the decade, ...

Read Post

New York’s Only Annual Hudson River School Exhibition to Run March 10–April 2, 2011. Questroyal Fine Art, LLC  is pleased to announce its eleventh annual Hudson River School exhibition, An Untamed Nation. The show, which opened to the public on March 10, features examples by America’s most beloved landscape artists of the nineteenth-century. Highlights include a sublime landscape by the 19th-century forefather of American art, Thomas Doughty, a marine masterpiece by Luminist painter Francis Augustus Silva, a vibrant Hudson River scene by Jasper Francis Cropsey, and a poetic landscape ...

Read Post

Reclining under a tree, on a hill overlooking his hometown along the Hudson River, Sanford Gifford made a decision that would save his family business. According to the story later told by his artist friend Worthington Whittredge, it would have been in the mid-1840s, perhaps summer. Sanford had taken early leave of Brown University in 1844. He didn’t want a life in business, or letters, or as his mother wished, the church. Sanford had an inclination for art. "It was one of the greatest pleasures of my boyhood to look at and study the miscellaneous collection of engravings which covered the ...

Read Post

"When and how, therefore, did the generations perceive that the Cropseys, generically speaking, wouldn't do? When and how, still more, did they begin to perceive that the Hudson River wouldn't, and doesn't?"So inquired writer Henry James about the events by which, in the nineteenth-century, the Hudson River School—which he personified as "the Cropseys"—became passé.A poignant moment in their decline was captured in the diaries of artist Jervis McEntee, which are online and browsable at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. It is the kind of first-hand historical account that was ...

Read Post

Perhaps we should be grateful that world events occasionally derail us from the deeply grooved course of modern society so that we are forced to consider our own journey. We seek a reference to gauge the nature of our own experience and art has a vital role in this process.  The economic disruption and disillusionment of recent times has increased our awareness of this quality and refocused our attention on the art that is personally meaningful. As a dealer observing the ebb and flow of the American art market, I detect a fundamental change in the way collectors perceive the value ...

Read Post

Twenty works by leading American artists such as Thomas Cole, George Inness, Alfred Maurer, Jane Peterson, Thomas B. Pope and Anthony Thieme, are on loan from the private collection of John and Jean Wilkinson to the Appleton Museum of Art. The exhibit, which runs through July 25, illustrates art movements from the Hudson River School of the 19th century to early 20th century modernism. Also, on view through May 30 is "Florida Journeys: African-American Artists From The Sunshine State" with nearly 40 artworks by some of Florida’s finest African-American artists such as Kenneth Falana, ...

Read Post

A 19th-century Hudson River School painter showcased in a high-tech platform has been named as one of the Honorees in the Arts category in the 14th Annual Webby Awards.  Official Honoree Explore Thomas Cole (http://www.explorethomascole.org/) was among 8,000 entries competing for the distinction. Fewer than 15% of entered websites are recognized with a Webby, the award given for an outstanding caliber of work in website design. Part of the site's appeal is certainly the beauty and functionality present in the comprehensive Virtual Gallery of Cole's work. Filter the gallery by subject, ...

Read Post