Monday Morning Museum: The Hudson River School

The Hudson River School – America from 1835 to 1870

The Hudson River School was a mid-19th century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by romanticism. The paintings for which the movement is named depict the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area, including the Catskill, Adirondack, and the White Mountains; eventually works by the second generation of artists associated with the school expanded to include other locales. – Wikipedia.org

In addition to Alfred Bierstadt (see art example below), others in the Hudson River School include Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church.

Mountain Out of the Mist by Alfred Bierstadt (1830-1902)

Last Monday’s Art – The Harlem Renaissance
Next Monday’s Art – Impressionism

Top of post: “The Hudson River School” graphic created by Adrean Darce Brent
Below: “Monday Morning Museum” logo created by Adrean Darce Brent

Monday Morning Museum: Thomas Cole

Self-Portrait, 1836 by Thomas Cole

Thomas Cole – Sunday 1 February 1801 Bolton, Lancashire, England to Friday 11 February 1848 Catskill, New York

English-born American Hudson River School Painter

The Titan’s Goblet, 1833

"The massive, vegetation encrusted goblet around whose rim are found classical ruins, and on whose glassy surface boats sail, has been linked to Norse legend and Greek mythology. Theophilus Stringfellow, Jr. described it as a self-contained, microcosmic human world in the midst of vast nature, while Falconer linked the monumental stem of the goblet to the trunk of the Norse world-tree; he likened the cup to "the ramifying branches . . . which spread out and hold between them an ocean dotted with sails, surrounded by dense forests and plains." Other theories tie the fantastic forms to J. M. W. Turner's "Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus" (National Gallery, London), to Italian architecture and geological formations, or to the golden goblet of the sun-god Helios. The elevation and remove of the cup, rimmed with classical remnants, suggests the disassociation of the present, embodied in the surrounding landscape, from the pinnacle of creation which nourished its culture. Cole serves as intermediary, a role open only to the artist or poet, transcending the strictues of the immediate world to unite past and present." - Metropolitan Museum of Art

Last Monday’s Artist – Frederick Childe Hassam
Next Monday’s Artist – Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino

“Monday Morning Museum” logo created by Adrean Darce Brent