e. Old Kentucky Home, at first glance, seems completely at variance with HB Stowe s Uncle Tom s Cabin: well-fed slaves are seen content and relaxed, rather than oppressed and harrassed, and no masters are in sight except for one rather benign onlooker. But the Negroes live in squalour in the shadow of the white man s large and substantial house, partially visible in the upper right-hand portion of the painting.human warmth radiating from the Old Kentucky Home is not evident in many of Johnson s genre paintings of 1870 and later years. His In the Fields shows a group of people engaged in picking cranberries. It is a work that suggests comparison with Old Kentucky Home, for both paintings depict groups of people at leisure. While the Negroes entertain one another by strumming guitars, gossiping, and doing an impromptu dance, the cranberry pickers tend to be absorbed in their own thoughts [8, p. 201-211]. Emergence in 1820s of landscape painting was also linked with the growth of national consciousness after the end of the war with England (1812-1816). It was the first consciously national school of American painting. Later it was termed the Hudson River School because the artists first painted views of the Hudson Valley, and the places near which they 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 fir...
