Hudson River school

The Hudson River School was an American art movement of the mid-nineteenth century whose members were landscape painters depicting picturesque scenes of natural beauty, including the Hudson River valley, the Catskill, Adirondack and White Mountains of the north-eastern United States. The movement was not a formal organisation but rather a generation of like-minded artists, whose founder is considered to be Thomas Cole and whose leading figures included Asher Durand, Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, John Kensett and Sanford Gifford. The painters of the school celebrated the grandeur and pristine quality of American nature, regarding it as a manifestation of divine presence and a symbol of the young country's national identity. Their canvases are distinguished by meticulous detail, dramatic lighting and a Romantic, sometimes exalted and religious mood; many works carry allegorical or moral-philosophical undertones, such as Cole's cycle The Course of Empire. Later painters of the school, notably Church and Bierstadt, expanded its geography to depict the Andes, the Rocky Mountains and the American West. The Hudson River School was the first major national movement in American painting and had a lasting influence on the development of landscape art in the country.