y lived. The number of artists who show an affinity with the Hudson River School amounted to fifty, with T. Cole, AB Durand, FE Church and A. Bierstadt as leading exponents. The artistic value of their work is very uneven. The tastes in art of the Jacksonian era ear-mark most of the Hudson River School landscapes. With all individual differences they have certain common features. They are large in size and panoramic in scope. The typical Hudson River School scene consists of a portion of virgin landscape, extending into the distant background, often with tiny figures against it. Sometimes, as with Cole, there is also a blasted tree prominent in the foreground, to suggest to the viewer the desolation of the place. The Hudson River School landscapes were romantic but their romanticism was literal: instead of expressing romantic ideas and emotions in artistic terms they literally represented romantic subjects. Many of their compositions were theatrical showpieces calculated to impress the viewer. Their gigantic size is combined with naturalistic literalness of detail. Such landscapes drew the greatest acclaim and commanded the highest prices, even outstripping portraiture in popularity. At the same time credit should be given to the Hudson River School painters for being the first to turn to their native American scene.first definite school of professional landscape painting did not appear until the middle of 1820 s - what came to be called the Hudson River School. The man who can be considered its founder was not native-born. Thomas Cole, English by birth, coming to America at seventeen, spent his youth in what were then the virgin forests of Ohio. Highly romantic, strongly religious, and-with a decided literary bent, Cole on coming to New York in 1825 found a cultural climate favorable to the growth of landscape, what with Washington Irving s tales of the Hudson River Valley, James Fenimore Cooper s novels of the wilderness, and William Cullen Bryant s solemn nature poetry.his celebration of the American wilderness, still unravaged, Cole brought a romantic imagination, a love of solitude, and a realization of spaciousness and grandeur of this new world. He was the first to picture the wilderness with the passion of a poet, and to capture the wild beauty of the continent as it was a century and a half ago.the first Cole introduced a more living concept of landscape: a feeling for the life in nature, for her alterations of storm and peace, of clouds and serene light - the whole spectacle of the wilderness and its changing aspects, presented with a new dramatic sense and technical skill. Sometimes his Byronic fantasy led him from the sublime to the ridiculous. Often a religious element appeared, for Cole was concerned not only with nature for herself but as a setting for moralistic allegories. His series of painting such as The Departure and The Return (a knight gaily leaving his castle in the morning and borne home lifeless in the evening), or The Course of Empire, tracing in five acts the rise, splendour and ruin of an imaginary ancient capital, illustrated his thoughts on the vanity of worldly power and pleasure, and true inevitable destruction that overtakes them. Most of these works were pure Hollywood, but in his finest series, The Voyage of Life, he achieved powerful pictorial drama. An artist capable of deplorable corniness, he also created the most vital landscape painting so far in America.to Cole as a lea...
