Frederic Edwin Church was an American landscape painter born in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters, best known for painting large landscapes, often depicting mountains, waterfalls, and sunsets. Church's paintings put an emphasis on realistic detail, dramatic light, and panoramic views. He debuted some of his major works in single-painting exhibitions to a paying and often enthralled audience in New York City. In his prime, he was one of the most famous painters in the United States.
The Hudson River School was a mid-19th century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by Romanticism. The paintings typically depict the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area, including the Catskill, Adirondack, and White Mountains.
Thomas Cole was an English-born American artist and the founder of the Hudson River School art movement. Cole is widely regarded as the first significant American landscape painter. He was known for his romantic landscape and history paintings. Influenced by European painters, but with a strong American sensibility, he was prolific throughout his career and worked primarily with oil on canvas. His paintings are typically allegoric and often depict small figures or structures set against moody and evocative natural landscapes. They are usually escapist, framing the New World as a natural eden contrasting with the smog-filled cityscapes of Industrial Revolution-era Britain, in which he grew up. His works, often seen as conservative, criticize the contemporary trends of industrialism, urbanism, and westward expansion.
John Frederick Kensett was an American landscape painter and engraver born in Cheshire, Connecticut. He was a member of the second generation of the Hudson River School of artists. Kensett's signature works are landscape paintings of New England and New York State, whose clear light and serene surfaces celebrate transcendental qualities of nature, and are associated with Luminism. Kensett's early work owed much to the influence of Thomas Cole, but was from the outset distinguished by a preference for cooler colors and an interest in less dramatic topography, favoring restraint in both palette and composition. The work of Kensett's maturity features tranquil scenery depicted with a spare geometry, culminating in series of paintings in which coastal promontories are balanced against glass-smooth water. He was a founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Jervis McEntee was an American painter of the Hudson River School. He is a lesser-known figure of the 19th-century American art world, but was a close friend and traveling companion of several of the important Hudson River School artists. Aside from his paintings, McEntee's unpublished journals, written from 1872 to 1890, are an enduring legacy, documenting the life of a New York painter during and after the Gilded Age.
Fitz Henry Lane was an American painter and printmaker of a style that would later be called Luminism, for its use of pervasive light.
Sanford Robinson Gifford was an American landscape painter and a leading member of the second generation of Hudson River School artists. A highly-regarded practitioner of Luminism, his work was noted for its emphasis on light and soft atmospheric effects.
Luminism is an American landscape painting style of the 1850s to 1870s, characterized by effects of light in landscape, through the use of aerial perspective and the concealment of visible brushstrokes. Luminist landscapes emphasize tranquility, and often depict calm, reflective water and a soft, hazy sky. Artists who were most central to the development of the luminist style include Fitz Hugh Lane, Martin Johnson Heade, Sanford Gifford, and John F. Kensett. Painters with a less clear affiliation include Frederic Edwin Church, Jasper Cropsey, Albert Bierstadt, Worthington Whittredge, Raymond Dabb Yelland, Alfred Thompson Bricher, James Augustus Suydam, and David Johnson. Some precursor artists are George Harvey and Robert Salmon.
Olana State Historic Site is a historic house museum and landscape in Greenport, New York, near the city of Hudson. The estate was home to Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), one of the major figures in the Hudson River School of landscape painting. The centerpiece of Olana is an eclectic villa which overlooks parkland and a working farm designed by the artist. The residence has a wide view of the Hudson River Valley, the Catskill Mountains and the Taconic Range. Church and his wife Isabel (1836–1899) named their estate after a fortress-treasure house in ancient Greater Persia, which also overlooked a river valley.
David Johnson was an American painter, a member of the second generation of Hudson River School painters.
The Thomas Cole National Historic Site, also known as Cedar Grove, is a National Historic Landmark that includes the home and the studio of painter Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School of American painting. It is located at 218 Spring Street, Catskill, NY, United States. The site provided Thomas Cole with a residence and studio from 1833 through his death in 1848.
The Heart of the Andes is a large oil-on-canvas landscape painting by the American artist Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900).
William Stanley Haseltine was an American painter and draftsman who was associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting, the Hudson River School and Luminism.
Edmund Darch Lewis was an American landscape painter known for his prolific style and marine oils and watercolors. Lewis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in a well-to-do family. He started training at age 15 with German-born Paul Weber (1823–1916) of the Hudson River School. At age 19 he exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and was elected an Associate of the Academy at age 24.
The Icebergs is an 1861 oil painting by the American landscape artist Frederic Edwin Church. It was inspired by his 1859 voyage to the North Atlantic around Newfoundland and Labrador. Considered one of Church's "Great Pictures"—measuring 1.64 by 2.85 metres —the painting depicts one or more icebergs in the afternoon light of the Arctic. It was first displayed in New York City in 1861, where visitors paid 25 cents' admittance to the one-painting show. Similar exhibitions in Boston and London followed. The unconventional landscape of ice, water, and sky generally drew praise, but the American Civil War, which began the same year, lessened critical and popular interest in New York City's cultural events.
The Arch of Titus is an 1871 oil painting on canvas. It was a collaboration between three American painters: George Peter Alexander Healy, Frederic E. Church, and Jervis McEntee. It depicts the Arch of Titus in Rome, with the Colosseum in the background, and includes portraits of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his daughter Edith, and the three artists. The painting is currently on display in the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey.
Charles Herbert Moore was an American university professor, painter, and architectural historian, known as the first director of Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum. He was one of many followers of the works of John Ruskin, and was known as an American Pre-Raphaelite. In 1871, Moore left painting to begin teaching at Harvard, where he led its new art department. There, Moore was among the first art historians at an academic institution in the United States. After retirement, Moore moved to Hampshire, England where he wrote many books on medieval and Renaissance architecture. He died in Hampshire in 1930.
Niagara is an oil painting by Frederic Edwin Church. Niagara was his most important work to date, and confirmed his reputation as the premier American landscape painter of the time. In his history of Niagara Falls, Pierre Berton writes, "Of the hundreds of paintings made of Niagara, before Church and after him, this is by common consent the greatest."
The Andes of Ecuador is an 1855 oil painting by Frederic Edwin Church, the premier American landscape painter of the time. It is the most significant result of his 1853 trip to South America, where he would travel again in 1857. It is Church's first major painting, his largest work to date, and "an early masterpiece of Luminism", according to the Reynolda House Museum of American Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which holds the painting.
