st 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 leader 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 con...
