Transcript Hudson River School Painters and Writers

The Hudson River School
Look at the paintings on the next three slides.
Identify traits which they all have in common.
 A Storm In The Rocky Mountains, Albert Bierstadt
Kindred Spirits 1849
Asher Brown Durand
 mid-19th century American art movement embodied
by landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was
influenced by romanticism.
 the first coherent school of American art
- active from 1825 to 1870; painted wilderness
landscapes of the Hudson River valley and
surrounding New England
 Landscape In The Adirondacks, Frederic Edwin
Church
 A Storm In The Rocky Mountains, Albert Bierstadt
 The Hudson River School style involved carefully
detailed paintings with romantic, almost glowing
lighting, sometimes called luminism.
 The paintings for which the movement is named
depict the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding
area, including the Catskill, Adirondack, and the
White Mountains; eventually works by the second
generation of artists associated with the school
expanded to include other locales.
 Hudson River School paintings reflect three themes of
America in the 19th century: discovery, exploration,
and settlement.
 The HRS combines elements of Romanticism and
Nationalism. The first Europeans who came to the
New World tended to view nature either as an evil,
forbidding wasteland or as a storehouse of
economically valuable resources. In either case,
wilderness was something to be quickly civilized,
brought under human control in the name of
progress…
 The HRS paintings depict the American landscape as
a pastoral setting, where human beings and nature
coexist peacefully.
 This period saw masterpieces like:
 Nathanial Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and The
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House of the Seven Gables.
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick
Henry David Thoreau’s Walden
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle and The
Headless Horseman
Edgar Allan Poe, suspenseful short stories like The
Raven
James Fenimore Cooper, Last of the Mohicans
 Wrote of the American West and peoples
experiences and reactions with nature.
Developed ideal of individuals with a
natural inner goodness.
 His most popular work, Last of the
Mohicans, defined the stereotypical work of
white frontiersman and Native Americans.
 Wrote Moby Dick,
 Themes include man versus man, man
versus nature and man versus society.
 Revolves around the obsession of a sea
captain with a giant whale
 Considered one of the most important
novels in American Literature.
 American transcendentalist who was against slavery
and stressed self-reliance, optimism, selfimprovement, self-confidence, and freedom. He was a
prime example of a transcendentalist and helped
further the movement.
 Henry David Thoreau
 Protégé of Emerson
 United States writer and social critic (1817-1862)
Transcendentalist and wrote on civil disobedience
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was America's
most beloved nineteenth century poet. He
created myths and classic epics from
American historical events and materials —
Native American oral history ("The Song of
Hiawatha"), and the first battle of the
Revolutionary War ("Paul Revere's Ride").
He reminded Americans of their roots and
in the process became an American icon
himself.
 Civil Disobedience: On the Duty of Civil
Disobedience," 1849
 Henry David Thoreau wrote this essay where he
expressed opposition to the Mexican War. He
argued that individuals have a moral responsibility
to oppose unjust laws & unjust actions by gov'ts.
This essay influenced Dr. King's philosophy of
nonviolent resistance.
Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass
Celebrated democracy, the liberation of
individual spirit
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter
About the price individuals pay for cutting
themselves off from society. Set in Puritan
New England