Seeing the Landscape in Landscape Art

In 1825, a young British immigrant, cap-tivated by the wild scenery of the Hud-son River and nearby Catskill mountains, endeavored to promote America’s natural won-ders as a distinctive national identity. That year Thomas Cole began painting the undeveloped landscapes of the Northeast with romantic gran-deur and literal exactitude, inspiring a cadre of followers that produced America’s first painting movement. The Hudson River School (HRS), as the movement was later named, thrived for the next half century before being replaced by the misty, ethereal landscapes of the tonalists made famous by George Inness in the 1880s and 1890s. In an ironic twist, a painting fraternity (the HRS) founded to celebrate America’s wil-derness became synchronous with a brief period in the northeastern United States in which the landscape was altered to a greater extent than at any time since the last ice age. Because pho-tography was in its infancy during this period and because intensive observation and faithful depiction of nature as well as the study of natu-ral science were integral to the HRS’s ethos, nineteenth century American landscape paint-ing affords a window into the dramatic ecologi