Hudson River School

Group of US landscape painters working between 1825 and 1870; it was the first US school of landscape painting. Depicting the dramatic, uncultivated regions of the Hudson River Valley and the Catskill Mountains in New York State, their work is characterized by attention to detail and a deep regard for the natural world. Their style, inspired by the New World, was influenced by the Romantic landscapes of J M W Turner and John Martin. Leading members of the school, which was divided into two periods, were Thomas Cole, who set up a studio at Catskill in 1826, and Albert Bierstadt, from the 1850s.

The original Hudson Valley School, led by Cole, worked primarily in the Hudson River Valley region, and included Asher Brown Durand and Thomas Doughty, among others. A fine example of their work is Doughty's In the Catskills (1836; Reynolda House, Winston-Salem, North Carolina). The second generation, led by Albert Bierstadt, moved westwards into more seemingly foreign terrain. Both groups, sometimes called ‘Romantic realists’, were linked together by a style marked by painstaking detail and a love of America's untouched beauty.