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

14 Items

The Grand Canyon

By the early twentieth century Thomas Moran spent most winters sketching at Arizona’s Grand Canyon. Upon his return to the East Coast, he worked up paintings from his sketches, such as this oil on canvas from 1913.¹ Art critic Forbes Watson (1879–1960), who occupied rooms next to Moran’s New York City studio, related that when the artist was well into his seventies, he “continued to practice his art with astonishing regularity.” Watson noted that Moran first blocked off his canvas, and then, “using small brushes, he would finish one square of the canvas inch by inch before moving over to another square, and the peaks of sunlit mountains would appear finished on one part of the canvas before the other parts of it had been touched.”²