Collection: Hudson River School

The Hudson River School was the first distinct American landscape movement, running from approximately 1825 to the late 1870s. Thomas Cole (1801–1848) founded it with paintings of the Catskill Mountains and a Romantic allegorical mode that included The Course of Empire and The Voyage of Life. The movement is named for the Hudson River Valley but extended its subject matter across the United States.

The second generation, working after Cole's death in 1848, shifted the emphasis toward observed natural detail and increasingly grand continental subjects. Asher Brown Durand was Cole's close friend and a prominent early figure. Frederic Edwin Church, Cole's prize pupil, extended the project across the Andes, the Arctic, and the Holy Land. Albert Bierstadt brought the manner to the Rocky Mountain West, producing the great panoramas of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada. John Frederick Kensett, Sanford Robinson Gifford, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Martin Johnson Heade, Thomas Moran, Thomas Doughty, Robert Duncanson, and Worthington Whittredge belong to the broader school.