Explore Thomas Cole

A group of mid- to late-nineteenth-century American landscape painters, including artists such as Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederic Edwin Church, Jasper Francis Cropsey, George Inness, Sanford Gifford, Charles Herbert Moore, and others. The term "Hudson River School" was first coined around 1879, possibly by the art critic Clarence Cooke. The name initially referred to the members of the National Academy of Design, who lived and painted in the Hudson River Valley; eventually the "Hudson River School" came to encompass nearly all nineteenth-century American landscape painters who worked in the East.

Hudson River School painters favored a highly illusionistic style of carefully rendered, crisply defined forms. They studied both nature and previous art to achieve precise effects of light and atmosphere, and they excelled at rendering rocks, trees, skies and bodies of water. Unlike European contemporaries such as J.M.W. Turner, they avoided painterly flourishes that called attention to artistic technique. This has led some critics to judge the Hudson River School as less adventurous than other landscape traditions in the nineteenth century, but stylistic differences emerged out of a specifically American social and intellectual context. American artists' reliance on print sources for their models may have given rise to a crisp linearity. A deeper explanation derives from the artists' belief that nature was an arena of revealed divinity. Stylistic innovation and bravura technique violated their sense of appropriate humility before, in Cole's words, nature's "purer love divine."