Exhibitions

The Hudson River to Niagara Falls: 19th-Century American Landscape Paintings from the New-York Historical Society will include forty-five 19th-century American landscape paintings, with emphasis on works by artists of the Hudson River School. Rising to eminence in New York during the mid-nineteenth century, this group of artists sought to forge a self-consciously "American" landscape vision. Both were grounded in the exploration of the natural world as a resource for spiritual renewal and as an expression of cultural and national identity. Important landscape paintings by Hudson River School painters such as Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, John W. Casilear, Jasper Cropsey, Albert Bierstadt, and George Inness are among highlights of the exhibition.

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These works will be organized geographically, as an American Grand Tour, beginning at the mouth of the Hudson in New York's harbor and following the River's course north and west along the Erie Canal, enabling visitors to explore themes and imagery that illuminate these unique sites that drew both artists and travelers. Executed between 1818 and 1892, the paintings generally depict identifiable landscapes, historic sites, natural wonders, and waterways of New York state from the mouth of the Hudson River north to the Adirondacks and then to the western boundary of the state-Niagara Falls.

Thomas Chambers, Lake George and the Village of Caldwell, ca. 1850, oil on canvas, Thomas Jefferson Bryan Fund, 1977.13

The exhibition and related interpretive activities will contribute to community-wide programming developed to commemorate the Hudson-Fulton-Champlain Quadricentennial, marking the 400th anniversary of Hudson and Champlain's voyages along the river and lake that bear their names, and the 200th anniversary of Robert Fulton's steamboat voyage on the Hudson, which initiated steam commerce on the river. The project is organized by the New-York Historical Society and The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art (SDMA) at the State University of New York at New Paltz.