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Hudson River School Paintings

HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL STYLE

Considered the first major American painting movement, the Hudson River School emerged in the first half of the 19th century with landscape paintings that celebrated the young country’s natural beauty. Most of its leading painters were based in New York City where they exchanged ideas and traveled to the nearby Hudson River Valley and Catskills Mountains to re-create their vistas. At a time when the city was increasingly dense, the Hudson River School artists extolled the vast and pristine qualities of the American landscape, a sentiment that would inform the conservation movement.

American art was dominated by portraiture and historical scenes before Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School, began painting the Catskill Mountains in 1825. While the Hudson River School was informed by European art aesthetics, particularly the British focus on the sublime in nature, it was a style imbued with nationalism. The landscape painters who followed and studied under Cole would expand their focus from the Northeastern United States to places across the country, their work shared through prints and portfolios promoting an appreciation for the American wilderness — Niagara Falls, the mountain ranges that dot the American West and more — as the style blossomed during the mid-19th century.

Cole’s student Frederic Edwin Church as well as painters such as Albert Bierstadt, John Frederick Kensett, Asher Brown Durand and others became prominent proponents of the Hudson River School. The American art movement also had close ties to the literary world, including to authors like William Cullen Bryant, Henry David Thoreau and James Fenimore Cooper who wrote on similar themes. Although by the early 1900s the style had waned, and modernism would soon guide the following decades of art in the United States, the Hudson River School received renewed interest in the late 20th century for the dramatic way its artists portrayed the world.

Find a collection of authentic Hudson River School paintings, drawings and watercolors and more art on 1stDibs.

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Size: Medium
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Style: Hudson River School
High Peaks in the Adriondacks
Located in Saratoga Springs, NY
Charles Henry Chapin - American (1830 - 1889) “High Peaks of the Adirondacks” Note: Peaks include Mount Marcy, Haystack Mountain, Basin Mountain, as viewed from the Ausable Lake Area...
Category

Late 19th Century Hudson River School Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Road-Side View (View in Wisconsin)
Located in New York, NY
Label on stretcher bar: No. 175. / AMERICAN ART-UNION. /Road-Side View / Painted by / Seth Eastman / Distributed December 20, 1850.
Category

19th Century Hudson River School Paintings

Materials

Oil

Mid Century Monument Valley Desert Landscape -- Navajo Hogan and Rug Loom
Located in Soquel, CA
Substantial and period mid-century landscape of Monument Valley, Arizona of Navajo Hogan and rug weaving loom by Ralph Holmes (American, 1876-1963). c.194...
Category

1940s Hudson River School Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Oil Sunset titled "Virginia Sunset"
Located in Fredericksburg, VA
William H. Langworthy (1836–1900) was an American painter known for his contributions to landscape and genre painting during the late 19th century. Little is known about Langworthy's...
Category

Mid-19th Century Hudson River School Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

The Cove at Dusk
Located in Saratoga Springs, NY
Signed and dated 1877. Mortimer Smith, a lesser-known yet skilled artist of the Hudson River School, captured the untamed beauty of the American landscape with remarkable depth. This painting presents a seacoast scene with a solitary fisherman, with his boat during the tide. The rugged cliffs frame the composition, their weathered surfaces telling the story of time and nature’s relentless forces. Sunlight filters through the mist, casting a halo glow in the sky, while waves crash against the shore in rhythmic motion. Smith’s brushwork conveys both the serenity and power of the natural world, inviting the viewer to step into the scene under nature's power and beauty. Although born in Jamestown, New York, Mortimer Smith would become well-known as a Detroit architect and artist by the end of the nineteenth century. Little is known of Smith's earlier years; however, scholars speculate that he studied in Oberlin and Sandusky, Ohio before moving to Detroit in 1855. There, the artist flourished and became famous for his crisp landscapes of local scenery, including his beloved winter scenes. In addition to his artistic career, Smith founded a successful architectural firm by the name of Smith, Hynchman and Grylls; Smith's reputation in the visual arts was often overshadowed by his draftsmanship as an architect. Nevertheless, he was a vital force in Detroit's arts community exhibiting his works in venues including the Detroit Art...
Category

1870s Hudson River School Paintings

Materials

Oil, Canvas

Antique American Hudson River School Colosseum Italian Oil Painting Landscape
Located in Buffalo, NY
Antique American Hudson River School artist working in Italy. Oil on canvas. Framed nicely. No signature found.
Category

1860s Hudson River School Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Picnic in the Vineyard Spring Contemporary French Impressionist Style Landscape
By Alexandr Rapoport
Located in Soquel, CA
Spring Picnic in the Vineyard, Contemporary Impressionist Landscape Beautiful oil painting of a variety of fruits with cups in a field of grass by Alexander Rapoport (Russian-Ameri...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Hudson River School Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil, Illustration Board

"Building the Allegheny Railroad, Pennsylvania" Alfred Wall, Scalp Level School
Located in New York, NY
Alfred S. Wall (American, 1825-1896) Untitled (Building the Railroad), 1859 Oil on canvas 14 1/2 x 18 1/2 inches Signed and dated lower left For Christmas, 2008, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette featured Alfred Wall's painting, Old Saw Mill from the collection of the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, PA. It was painted in 1851 in the town of Lilly, Pennsylvania in the Allegheny Mountains. The newspaper description stated that "though the saw mill is long gone, it still conveys all the warmth and coziness of this time of year. The article, written by Patricia Lowry, continued: At first glance, Alfred S. Wall's painting of a saw mill in snowy woods triggers nostalgia for the coziness of a log cabin, the smell of a wood-burning fire and the warming of chilled hands and feet beside it. But as sentimental as it seems on the surface, Mr. Wall's painting has a deeper and unexpected context. This is more than a painting about sled-riding children and early industry planted in the middle of virgin forest. Intended or not, this is a painting about conquering the great divide of the Allegheny Mountains. For the third consecutive year, the Post-Gazette features a winter-scene painting on the cover of the Christmas Day newspaper. This year's painting, Old Saw Mill, was selected by co-publisher and editor-in-chief John Robinson Block and executive editor David Shribman during a visit to the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg. Mr. Wall, listed as a portrait painter in the 1850 census, was about 26 when he painted Old Saw Mill in 1851. The self-taught artist was born in Mount Pleasant, Westmoreland County, to William and Lucy Wall, who'd emigrated from England around 1820. An artistic sensibility ran in the family: William was a sculptor who carved ornate tombstones here; Alfred's children, A. Bryan and Bessie, were landscape painters, as was Alfred's older brother, William Coventry Wall. For more than a century the Walls formed a prominent art dynasty in Pittsburgh, and Alfred, eventually a partner in the city's most prestigious art gallery, was well known as a painter, dealer and restorer. In Old Saw Mill, two wood cutters, each holding an axe, meet outside the mill; one points in the direction of the forest. On the other side of the stream, one child pulls another down the hillside on a sled. Just behind the hill's slope, the roof of a building appears, perhaps the home of the sawyer. The luminous, late afternoon light comes from the northwest, casting lengthening shadows on the snow under a darkening sky. The saw mill in "Old Saw Mill" likely would have been impossible to track down had Mr. Wall, presumably, not written on the back of the painting: "old saw mill near Jct. 4, Portage RR, Pa." "There was no Junction 4," said Mike Garcia, park ranger at the Allegheny Portage Railroad National Historic Site, about 90 miles east of Pittsburgh near Gallitzen, Cambria County. "But there was an Inclined Plane No. 4 at Lilly, and there was a saw mill there." In fact, there were at least six saw mills at Lilly over the years, said longtime resident Jim Salony, president of the Lilly-Washington Historical Society. But when he saw an image of the painting, Mr. Salony had no trouble coming up with a location. While there are no known photographs of the saw mill, he believes it stood near the intersection of Portage and Washington streets, next to Bear Rock Run. Mr. Salony, retired academic dean at Mount Aloysius College, didn't know exactly when the mill was torn down, but it's been gone since at least the late 1800s. He was pleased to learn of the painting, even though that knowledge came too late for inclusion in a new book about Lilly, The Spirit of a Community, for which he served as primary author and editor. It runs to more than 700 pages. For a little town -- population 869 last year -- Lilly has a lot of history. Nestled in a bowl on the western slope of the Allegheny Mountains about 3 miles south of Cresson, Lilly was first settled in 1806 by Joseph Meyer and his family, who named their 332-acre land patent Dundee. Although the Meyers had left by 1811, other settlers followed, but the community didn't flourish until the 1830s, when the Allegheny Portage Railroad began its 23-year-run through the town. For 200 years the Alleghenies had stood as an impediment to trade and travel between Pittsburgh and the east. A canal from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh would change that and compete with New York's Erie Canal. But a portage railroad would have to be built, on which teams of horses would lead the canal boats over the mountains. Engineer Sylvester Welch began his surveying from the small settlement at Lilly. The railroad would require 10 inclined planes, some quite steep, between Hollidaysburg and Johnstown. To build it, trees had to be cut along a 120-foot-wide right-of-way for 36 miles, along which track and engine houses had to be built. William Brown, who owned the saw mill on Bear Rock Run, built at least one of the engine houses at Inclined Plane No. 4; an 1834 contract also included fencing the dwelling lots at the head and foot of the plane. Lilly is located at what was the foot of Inclined Plane No. 4., giving the community one of its early informal names, Foot of Four. Named in 1883 for Richard Lilly, who'd completed the grist mill there, Lilly had another early name: Hemlock, so dubbed by a Portage Railroad traveler who smelled the bark stripped from the trees at the saw mill. Because there isn't another Allegheny Portage Railroad location like it, where a cut in the mountains opens into a bowl, Mr. Salony thinks it was Lilly that Charles Dickens wrote about following his trip from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh on the Pennsylvania Canal in late March 1842, describing what he saw after emerging from "the bottom of the cut": "It was very pretty while traveling, to look down into a valley full of light and softness, catching glimpses through the tree-tops of scattered cabins; children running to the doors; dogs bursting out to bark, who we could see without hearing; terrified pigs scampering homeward; families sitting out in their rude gardens; cows gazing upward with a stupid indifference; men in their shirt-sleeves looking on at their unfinished houses, planning out to-morrow's work; and we riding onward, high above them, like a whirlwind." To get to Lilly, Mr. Wall may have taken the Pennsylvania Canal from his home in Allegheny City, now the North Side. He'd married young, at 21, to Sarah Carr in 1846, the same year he began his career as an artist. By 1880 they were living in a brick townhouse at 104 (later 814) Arch St., now demolished. Across the river in Pittsburgh he shared a studio at 67 Fourth Ave. with his brother William; they later moved to Burke's Building, today the city's oldest office building at 209-211 Fourth. But often they worked outdoors, sometimes as part of the colony of artists that grew up around painter George Hetzel beginning in the late 1860s at Scalp Level...
Category

1850s Hudson River School Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

"Couple in the Field, " James Brade Sword, Hunter on Farm Landscape
By James Brade Sword
Located in New York, NY
James Brade Sword (1839 - 1915) Couple in the Field Oil on canvas 16 x 20 inches Signed lower left After a childhood in Macao, China, James Brade Sword started out in life, after hi...
Category

Late 19th Century Hudson River School Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

"A Quiet Afternoon" Enoch Wood Perry, Genre Scene Mother and Child Interior
By Enoch Wood Perry Jr.
Located in New York, NY
Enoch Wood Perry, Jr. (1831 - 1915) A Quiet Afternoon, 1876 Oil on canvas 15 1/4 x 21 inches Signed and dated lower right Born in 1831 in Boston, Enoch Wood Perry, Jr, is internati...
Category

1870s Hudson River School Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Picnic On The Mohawk
Located in Milford, NH
A wonderful landscape by American artist Thomas Mickell Burnham (1818-1866). Burnham was born in Boston, MA and received informal art training early on, traveling abroad before relo...
Category

Mid-19th Century Hudson River School Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Mount Washington, New Hampshire
Located in Saratoga Springs, NY
Edmund Darch Lewis (1835-1910) Mount Washington, New Hampshire 50 x 58 inches, signed & dated 1859 Description The area near Mount Washington in New Hampshire was visited by many ...
Category

1850s Hudson River School Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

A Day in June, Scene Eastchest, New York
Located in Missouri, MO
A Day in June, Scene Eastchest, New York Edward Gay (Irish, American, 1837-1928) Oil on Canvas Complimented by original frame in great condition Signed and Dated Lower Right Titled a...
Category

1890s Hudson River School Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

The Columbian Exhibition, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair
Located in Saratoga Springs, NY
Thaddeus Welch (American 1844-1919) The Columbian Exhibition, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair 70 x 35”, oil on board signed Request Price The C...
Category

Late 19th Century Hudson River School Paintings

Materials

Oil, Board

Hudson River School paintings for sale on 1stDibs.

Find a wide variety of authentic Hudson River School paintings available for sale on 1stDibs. Works in this style were very popular during the 21st Century and Contemporary, but contemporary artists have continued to produce works inspired by this movement. If you’re looking to add paintings created in this style to introduce contrast in an otherwise neutral space in your home, the works available on 1stDibs include elements of blue, orange, purple and other colors. Many Pop art paintings were created by popular artists on 1stDibs, including Ralph Albert Blakelock, Jane Bloodgood-Abrams, Jasper Francis Cropsey, and John Frederick Kensett. Frequently made by artists working with Paint, and Oil Paint and other materials, all of these pieces for sale are unique and have attracted attention over the years. Not every interior allows for large Hudson River School paintings, so small editions measuring 4 inches across are also available. Prices for paintings made by famous or emerging artists can differ depending on medium, time period and other attributes. On 1stDibs, the price for these items starts at $400 and tops out at $875,000, while the average work sells for $14,933.

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