Hudson River School unites three collections

Marcella Veneziale Spread Editor

The Hudson River School Trilogy, the current exhibit at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, culls an impressive range of 19th-century Hudson Valley-inspired drawings and paintings divided into three parts—Focused Collectors: Maryann and Alvin Friedman; Permanent Collection; and Drawings from Dia.

The paintings in Focused Collectors also had a run at Cornell University this past April through August, where Friedman graduated in 1952. His wife is a member of Vassar’s Class of 1955.

“[The Hudson River School] was an important component of the landscape genre,” said Curator James Mundy. Artists of this school were frequently members of the National Academy of Design in New York and followers of the painter Thomas Cole. They differed in significant ways from painters in other genres, such as portraiture and history painting, because their work was not funded by patrons.

Man’s presence in nature is subtly evident in most of the works. The artists were “not focusing on man’s intrusion in nature, but collaboration,” Mundy said. He also noted that during this period of time, telegraph wires and railroad tracks made modernization well visible in the Hudson Valley. Yet the artists never depicted such signs, and chose instead to focus on man’s harmony with nature.

The exhibit opens with works from the Friedmans’ collection and shows off the artists’ range in oil painting in the Hudson River Valley. While Sanford Robinson Gifford’s “A Foggy Autumn Morning in the Catskill Mountains” features a hazy fall forest, Alfred Thompson Bricher paints a bright, summery beach scene in the 1870s “Sailing off the New England Coast.” The calm water occupies most of the canvas, while a crescent beach defines the ocean’s edge.

Two works by Jasper Francis Cropsey also comprise the Focused Collector’s section: the 1880 painting “On the Susquehanna River” and “Fall Landscape” of 1891. The latter is notable for the vertical, cold beam of sunlight that organizes the canvas, and the hint of civilization’s presence in the form of a man’s livestock. However, in “Susquehanna River,” man’s receives a greater presence in the form of a boy fishing on the shore.

The exhibit’s second part, the Permanent Collection, opens with “Apartment of the Art Gallery, Vassar College” by an unknown artist. A studious girl represents the ideal, well-rounded 19th-century Vassar student. She is neat and well-dressed, reading a book on a couch in the College’s art gallery and flanked by a stained glass cross and paint palette.

Other landscape artists, such as Frederick Edwin Church, John Frederick Kensett, and Charles Herbert Moore, chose locales outside the Hudson Valley. Church’s “Autumn in North America” of circa 1856 could represent a number of places in the northeast during fall. Kensett chose a spot in Rhode Island in “Berkeley Rock, Newport” for his depiction of the choppy Atlantic and a figure perched on the jutting cliffs.

Drawings from the Dia collection complete the trilogy. These works are on extended loan from Dia, as the 19th-century sketches “don’t fit in their [Beacon contemporary] collection,” noted Mundy. The sketchbooks of Sanford Robinson Gifford and Jervis McEntee record the nuances of the Hudson Valley and lend greater understanding to these artists’ paintings, especially Gifford’s, which are included in the exhibit.

Several drawings and paintings throughout the exhibit depict exotic locales in the Hudson Valley. William Stanley Haseltine’s painting “Sunset Glow, Roman Campagna” depicts the Italian marshes near Ostia, Rome’s port city, and Jasper Cropsey’s “Evening at Paestum” was inspired by his visits to the ancient ruins in this Italian city.

The Grand Tour in Europe was at its height of popularity, and picturesque tourist sites, such as Rome and Paestum, were common subjects. Most Hudson River School artists traveled extensively through South America, the Middle East and the Arctic. Mundy commented on the age’s adventurous spirit, “The 1850s and forward was a period for artists to see the world.”