Browse: Paintings by Hudson River School Artists

Beginning in the rolling hills, green valleys, and towering forests of upstate New York, the Hudson River school painters captured the distinct American landscape. The first major artistic fraternity in the United States, the Hudson River school became one of the most influential movements in American art. In the early 19th century, American Transcendentalist writers inspired a new appreciation for the beauty of wild, untamed land. In 1825, painter Thomas Cole produced a series of images of the Catskill Mountains, celebrating the dramatic scenery of upstate New York and starting a new approach to American landscape painting. By the mid-19th century, the Hudson River school painters expanded their search for new subject matter to South America, the Arctic, and the American West, celebrating the grandeur and vastness of the American landscape.

By Laura F. Fry, Senior Curator and Curator of Art, Gilcrease Museum with research assistance by Zachary Qualls, Graduate Student, Museum Science and Management Program, The University of Tulsa, 2016

22 Items

Untitled [landscape]

“Thomas Moran the etcher, and Mary Nimmo, his wife, work side by side down in their studio on Twenty-second Street. Big tables near the light, on which are laid the plates while the artists are at work, are an important feature of their furnishings; but there are easels too, for before either of them was an etcher they were painters.”¹ —Elizabeth Bisland, The Cosmopolitan, 1889

Sierra Nevada Mountains

Indian Encampment

Sierra Nevada Mountains in California

Niagara Falls

Mount Hood

Sierra Nevada Morning

Florida River Scene

Approaching Storm

Sacramento River Looking East to Mt Shasta on the Left, Lesser Peak on the Right

Point Lobos, California

Wagon Train

The Glory of the Canyon

The Davidson Glacier

Niagara Falls (Horseshoe Falls)

Harbor Scene

View on Lake George

Specters from the North

In April 1890, Thomas Moran sailed aboard a White Star liner from New York City to Europe accompanied by his wife, Mary Nimmo Moran (1842–1899). When the ship was several days out at sea, reports circulated among the passengers that an iceberg was adrift nearby.¹ Moran spent hours on deck in freezing temperatures sketching the glacial behemoth, complete with notations on longitude and latitude.² These quickly executed drawings impart Moran’s excitement as he encountered an iceberg firsthand. Later, the artist would channel the thrill of that moment into this oil painting, Specters from the North.³ Even though it was more than two decades before the RMS Titanic would sink after hitting an iceberg, Moran clearly appreciated the danger the bergs presented, as evidenced by the wreckage he portrayed in the painting’s foreground. This bit of battered wood was also a reference to Frederic Edwin Church’s The Icebergs (1861, Dallas Museum of Art, 1979.28) and although not obvious, the title of Moran’s work creates an additional connection to Church’s painting.

Geyser in the Yellowstone

Lake George

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