der of the Hudson River School was Asher B. Durand. With him, Cole s flamboyant imagination was replaced by a sober affection for nature: His painstaking hand recorded every detail - the lichened tree trunks, the vine-covered rocks, the flowers and weeds in the foreground. His engaging Kindred Spirits, showing Cole and Bryant in a mountain landscape, painted the year after Cole s death, was a memorial, like the poet s tribute to their mutual friend. s grandiose romanticism and Durand s literal naturalism were the chief influences on the younger painters of the Hudson River School. These artists formed a consciously native school-the first in American art. Many of them were friends, going on walking and sketching trips together in the Catsldlls, the Adirondacks and the White Mountains. They were tremendously proud of America s national beauties - the grandeur of her mountains, the wildness of her forests, the blazing colors of her autumn foliage. Though most of them visited Europe to paint its picturesque places, sometimes remaining for years, their admiration for their own land remained undimmed.the typical Hudson River landscape the canvas is enormous, the view-point panoramic; yet so meticulous is the handling that one can count every leaf. In the huge paintings of Church, Bierstadt and Moran, with which the school s grandiose tendencies culminated, the technical proficiency is astounding. Their panoramas were even more extensive than Cole s, while every detail, the exact character of every growing thing, every phenomenon of light and atmosphere and. weather, were rendered with more than photographic accuracy.artistic limitations of the school were obvious enough. Though contemporaries of the French romantics and the Barbizon school, they showed no awareness of the new trends that were transforming European art, or else they were definitely opposed; to them even Corot was still a revolutionary. Compared to trends in France, their artistic concepts were anachronistic. Their romanticism took the form of literal representation of romantic subjects, rather than expression of romantic emotion in the language of form and color as with Gericault and Delacroix.their direct contact with nature, their observation, and their skill of eye and hand, are values ??that have endured. In the wideranging works of Bierstadt, for example, especially in his less pretentious or highly finished canvases, one continually meets with fresh, unconventional recording of light, color and weather-the work of an acute visual observer. And Church, in a painting like Twilight in the Wilderness, achieved colour as daring as any optical painter today. If these men had been less committed to literal naturalism, if they had trusted their visual sensations more, their contribution would have been a less baffling combination of art and non-art.their best landscapes the character of the American land, its spaciousness and solitude , the clearness of its air, the brilliance of its light, its high remote skies, were pictured truly and with a romantic emotion that is still alive. Their works had a leisurely completeness, a feeling for nature in her myriad aspects, tragic as well as smiling, and a sense of her solid substance and moving forces, rather than her mere appearances - qualities that were lost in the more intimate, fragmentary landscapes of their successors.to the Hudson River School with their grandiose and stagy landscape arrangements, and their...
