An art history question that’s been bugging me for years, admittedly a selfish, self-centered one, is why the Hudson River School painters — heavy hitters such as Asher Durand, John Frederick Kensett, Sanford Gifford and Thomas Cole, the school’s founder — were fixated on the Catskills to the virtual exclusion of the rest of the Hudson Valley.
After all, the river, after which the school is named, doesn’t run through the Catskills.
I’ve got nothing against those mountains. They’re perfectly fine, though pretty eroded by geological time compared to the Rockies, the Tetons, the Alps and, of course, the Himalayas.
As I said, my feeling of injury is somewhat selfish. Over a lifetime of looking at paintings I’ve discovered that there are certain qualities that captivate the viewer. Beauty, obviously. Genius. Virtuosity. But coming in a close second are scenes with which you’re intimately acquainted. I’ve known more than one artist who’s earned a respectable living painting the places where his patrons go — Maine, the Hamptons, the Caribbean.
Thus, it was with some interest that I visited Rolling Hills and Gracious Fields, a new show at the Columbia County Historical Society in Kinderhook, New York. Devoted to the county’s Hudson River School artists, their subject matter was the views outside their windows, or at least within easy hiking distance.
What surprised me was the high quality of the art. These weren’t amateurs; they actually knew what they were doing.
“They all had perfectly reasonable careers,” Taryn Zarrillo, the show’s curator, told me as we walked through the gallery. “They were all successful in their own right, but they weren’t Frederic Church or Thomas Cole. They are a little further down the ladder.”
My favorite painting is an 1860 work called "The Range." It’s by John Bunyan Bristol, an artist from Hillsdale, New York, whose atmospheric paintings drew on his travels around New York State and New England. "The Range" comes from the Columbia County Historical Society’s collection. It depicts a painter — a canvas by his side — contemplating the bucolic Hudson Valley with the Catskills rising in the distance. It’s impossible to pinpoint exactly where he’s located. But I like to think it’s not far from my home.
The only famous Hudson River School paintings that portray my neck of the woods — I’m happy to stipulate that my knowledge of the school is far from encyclopedic — do so as atmospheric smudges in the distance, an afterthought, window dressing from some aerie high in the Catskills. This show goes some distance, no pun intended, to rectify that oversight.
Why the Hudson River Valley held less interest to 19th-century painters than the mountains isn’t hard to understand. Artists who travelled upstate from New York City were searching for unspoiled nature, for the sublime. By the early 1800s, and certainly with the arrival of the railroad, industrialism had taken root along the banks of the Hudson River. Thomas Cole was bereft by what he saw as the destruction of nature by the forces of commerce and progress.
But I like to think there’s also another reason why our area was underappreciated. What draws people to the area these days — whether it’s full-timers, weekenders, or increasingly wedding parties — is the subtlety of the landscape. There are no smoking volcanoes, no crushing cataracts such as Niagara Falls that Frederic Church famously depicted. Yet somehow, whether it’s the Hudson Valley or the Taghkanics and the Berkshires beyond, the landscape is instantly recognizable to those who understand it. The low hills and valleys evoke reverence, if a sort that requires slightly more effort than Cole’s or Sanford Gifford and Asher Durand’s edenic Catskills.
I was about to say glibly, "If Cole could see it now!," regarding how nature has been despoiled in the 21st Century. But that’s not the case. Several of the works in the show depict the landscape of the 1800s as virtually denuded. Where today hillsides are blanketed with mature trees, in the late 1880s, Hillsdale resident Cuyler Williams’ paintings — works such as 1870’s "Looking Towards Hillsdale" and 1884’s "Taghkanic Mountains" — show clear-cut hillsides as far as the eye can see.
You can observe the artists in the show, particularly Henry Ary — he was a follower of Thomas Cole’s and an accomplished landscape painter in his own right whose work focused on Mount Merino near the city of Hudson, New York — wrestle with industrialization and whether to include or erase it. In one work, he may depict homesteads or the railroad intruding upon the landscape, and in the next — of virtually the identical Mount Merino scene — ignore it completely.
Some of the paintings draw comparison to great European landscape painters — Claude Lorrain, Poussin, and Barbizon School painters such as Corot. That’s not by accident.
Despite their Hudson Valley addresses, Columbia County’s artists weren’t hicks. They weren't influenced by Cole, Church and Kensett alone.
“You are still living in a world that is, to an extent, interconnected,” Zarrillo said. “They are seeing pictures from elsewhere. A lot of these artists did actually travel to Europe and that absolutely did influence the direction their work went in.”
The show at the Columbia County Historical Society runs through early January.
