My favorite paintings are those from The Hudson River School Painters. At the height of the movement, paintings were meant to celebrate the presence of God in nature. The artists saw the natural American environment as a source for divine expression and inspiration
The Hudson River School represents the first native school of American Art. Dating from the 1820s, it was a loosely organized group of painters who took as their subject the unique naturalness of the American continent, starting with the Hudson River region in New York, but eventually extending in time and space all the way to California and the 1870s. The time period in which the school's artists were active was a time of momentous social, political and economic change in American history, and the work of the Hudson River School artists represents part of the process of national self-conceptualization taking place in those years.
In the course of its fifty year history, the paintings of the Hudson River School spoke in symbolic language to both a great hopefulness and a wistful remnicience of the American experiment, a celebration of the primeival American landscape, the entrance of technology into that landscape, and eventually sorrow at its passing, to both a belief in a Provinically ordained destiny and the crisis of the Civil War. Despite, or perhaps as a result of this fluidity of meaning, these landscape paintings lay claim to an important place in American art history and in the American cultural consciousness. They represent the undeniable place that nature has and continues to occupy in the American imagination.
Asher Brown Durand "Kindred Spirits"
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