Take a look on this painting: there are two men at the top of the rocks, contemplating a fantastic fluvial valley, studded with rocks, shrubs and water jumps. In first plane, a majestic tree embraces the scene, like giving shelter to both men who dominate the landscape. To the bottom, two clearly symbolic elements - the cascade and the eagle- emphasize an imaginary vertical that divides and organizes the composition. Everything is peacefully; everything is perfect within the grandiloquence of the Nature. The painting that we described is, of course, Asher Brown Durand's "Kindred spirits", an emblematic work and paradigm of the Hudson River School .

Within that boisterous artistic period that was the American 19 th century, no tendency or movement is more interesting and suggestive than the Hudson River School . The painters of this school gave a radical turn to the landscape painting, making of the landscape no longer a bottom of the composition, but turning it the authentic reason and protagonist in the picture. But there is more, much more of which to speak. In this small essay we are going to try to discover some less evident aspects of this sensational artistic period.

The influences of this school are varied and not always evident. Much has been said about the continuous presence of winks to the great landscape painters of the late Baroque - Meindert Hobbema, Claude Lorrain- in works of Cole or Durand. More complex, but even more important, it is the influence of the greatest American writers of that time, like Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau, with his writings destined to proclaim the cultural independence of the United States with respect to Europe. We will study this complex influence in later chapters. Also, it is necessary to mention pioneers of the American landscape Art, like George Catlin or Thomas Doughty.

About the influence that this movement had in the immediately later American Art -symbolism, luminism and American impressionism- there is a lot to say. It has been said quite often - and it is difficult not to fall in the temptation of saying it again- that the influence that the painters of the Hudson River School had on the American impressionism is similar to that the Barbizon School had on the French impressionism. This is not so simple, at least in my opinion. First of all, the American impressionism is a much more heterodox movement - and generally worse studied- than its French homonymous: Whereas many American artists simply copy the intentions and techniques of the European, some - as Winslow Homer- even approaches the impressionism before Monet, Renoir and company does it. In addition, the American landscape painting entails political and even very complex spiritual connotations that difference it from the French one. In any case, the hudsonian influence in works of Albert Pinkham Ryder, Ralph Blakelock or Winslow Homer is undeniable.

THE PROTAGONISTS

THOMAS COLE (1801-1858) is known as the founder of the Hudson River School . Born in Britain , his family emigrates to America when he was only 17 years old, so we can consider him a totally American painter. Cole discovers the beauty of the Hudson River in 1825, when emigrating to New York , and begins to create his first outdoors sketches. Here he paints some of his more famous works, like "The falls of Kaaterskill". Its love for the American landscape is demonstrated when, after travelling to Europe - especially to Italy- he finds the landscape of the Old Continent cold and desolated. At the end of his life he settles down in the Catskills, where he paints the series of "The Voyage of the life".

ASHER BROWN DURAND (1796-1886), although older than Cole, introduces himself in the landscape after knowing the works of the previous master. More romantic and less faithful to the reality that Cole, their works are despite more beautiful and poetic, with clear influences of masters like Meindert Hobbema or Claude Lorrain. He is the author of works as "Kindred Spirits" or "The beeches".

ALBERT BIERSTADT (1830-1902) emigrated from Europe to Massachusetts with his family being only a boy. He is one of the first painters who represented the grandeur of the American West, as we can see in his views of Yosemite Valley, the Kern River Valley or the White Mountains . He is the most prolific and possibly the most grandiloquent of all the American painters of his time.

FREDERICK EDWIN CHURCH (1826-1900) is admirer and disciple of Thomas Cole, to whom dedicates many of his works. Church represents the culmination of the Hudson River School : he possesses the love for the landscape of Cole, the romantic lyricism of Durand, and the grandiloquence of Bierstadt, but being braver and technically more gifted than anyone with them. Church is without any doubt one of the best landscape painters of all time, perhaps only surpassed by Turner and some impressionists and postimpressionists like Monet or Cézanne. At his maturity, the American landscape remains short to Church, and he paints exotic masterpieces like "Cotopaxi", "Chimborazo" or the oneiric "Above the clouds at sunrise.

In a second line we can locate SANFORD ROBINSON GIFFORD (1823-1880), perhaps the most gifted painter of the second generation (after Bierstadt and Church, of course), JOHN FREDERICK KENSETT (1816-1872), great seascape painter and depicter of Mount Washington, WILLIAM TROST RICHARDS (1833-1905), WORTHINGTON WHITTREDGE (1820-1910), of German origins like Bierstadt, JASPER FRANCIS CROPSEY (1823-1900) or MARTIN JOHNSON HEADE (1819-1904), attracted, like Church, by the exotic landscapes.

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: SOCIETY AND VALUES IN THE AMERICA OF THE 19 TH CENTURY

We have already said that we are going to focus this test towards the pictorial Hudson River School . Therefore the limits of our temporal context would include from the decade of 1830 to the change of century. Being more concrete, and excluding the childhood and decline of the school, we can speak of a period of 1840-1880. We were, then, in the heart of the American 19 th Century. The United States is still a young nation; in the heat of its development (part of the States that today forms the American West had not been annexed). In addition, it suffers between 1861 and 1865 a cruel Civil War that puts in danger its unity and even the bases of its existence. It's for that reason that, after the end of the War, the painters of the victorious North wished -conscious or unconsciously- to find in the monumental natural scenes the ideal representation of the united Nation and the durable Peace of the aftermaths of the Civil War.

A main point to obtain this national unity was to create a society, a culture completely independent of the European. Writers like Emerson, Thoreau or Whitman made special emphasis in the idea of that the North American culture needed to became independent of the European one, which translated to the School of the Hudson River means the American own landscape, goal and objective of all the Hudson River landscape painters. But, paradoxically, all these thinkers who pleaded for the own culture felt a great attraction to the European culture, to which they made constant reference. Something similar happens in the painting: although several of their protagonists - in special the master Thomas Cole- repeated over again the vulgarity and emptiness of the European landscape if compared to the American, the reality is that very few painters - perhaps only Bierstadt and Church, both in their maturity- were able to free themselves of any reminiscence of the European landscape to reach the goal of the essential American landscape.

It would be also irresponsible to avoid the subtle but vital importance that the religion had in the American society and Art of the 19 th Century (and in the 20 th and the early 21 st ). I say subtle because the religion did not dictate - at least in the Art, in social subjects the things were quite different- norms that forced the artists to tie themselves to a rigid iconography; but also vital because of the deep importance of it in the pictorial activity. We are going to explain something more of this complex subject in the following chapter.

LANDSCAPE AS DIVINE WORK / LANDSCAPE AS HUMAN WORK

"The true province of landscape art is the work of God in the visible creation, independent of man"

Asher Brown Durand

"There are, properly, but two styles of landscape-gardening, the natural and the artificial. One seeks to recall the original beauty of the country (.) But you will understand that I reject the idea of 'recalling the original beauty of the country.' The original beauty is never so great as that which may be introduced"

Edgar Allan Poe - The Dominion of Arnheim (the garden-landscape), 1847

The already commented importance of the religion was not alien to the great landscape painters of the American 19 th Century, who saw in the grandeur of the nature the unmistakable hand of the divinity. However, the religious implications of the painters of the Hudson River School are more complex and less evident than those that many critics try to make us to believe. As Alfred Kazan has pointed in its essay God and the American writer, the religiousness of the American writer - or the painter- is deeply personal and heterodox, in whom the natural elements acquire practically a category of divinity. In this sense, it is not preposterous to suggest that this pictorial transcendentalism approached more the primitive beliefs of the Native Americans than to the rigid Christian orthodoxy.

In front of this defence of the divine and wild nature, not altered by the man, Edgar Allan Poe writes in 1847 The Domain of Arnheim, known in his first version as The landscape Garden, in which he defended the modification of the landscape by the human hand. The Nature, for Poe, was not perfect, but that it had defects that could - and had- to be modified by the artist. But not even this idea is free of the divine hand, rather it is " a Nature which is not God, nor an emanation of God, but which still is Nature, in the sense that it is the handiwork of the angels that hover between man and God " (The Landscape Garden )

THE PRIMITIVE MAGNETISM OF THE WILDERNESS

"Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him."

Henry David Thoreau, Walking, 1862

"The bleak splendours of these remote and lonely forests rather overwhelmed him with the sense of his own littleness. That stern quality of the tangled backwoods which can only be described as merciless and terrible."

Algernon Blackwood, The Wendigo

The resource of representing the wild nature, savage and wild nature, as a recurrent element in the landscape painting is not a creation by Hudson River School or the rest of American landscape painters. If we want to look for an origin, we must find it in the early European romanticism, where painters as Caspar David Friedrich used the disturbing contrast between the immensity of the nature and the insignificance of the single human being (The monk in front of the sea, The cuirasier in the forest.). But in the American case a simultaneously attractive and disquieting element is included: to the grandeur of the nature was added the fact of that the greatest part of that natural area was still unexplored. In fact, almost the totality of which today is Canada was covered with million and million square meters of coniferous forests from which the white man have not more information than the terrible Indians legend about the spirits who inhabited these vast earth, as suggestively Algernon Balckwood narrates in "the Wendigo"

"He remembered suddenly how his uncle had told him that men were sometimes stricken with a strange fever of the wilderness, when the seduction of the uninhabited wastes caught them so fiercely that they went forth, half fascinated, half deluded, to their death."

The original inhabitant of these "wild lands" was - of course- the American Indian. In words of Thoreau, "The Indian...stands free and unconstrained in Nature, is her inhabitant and not her guest, and wears her easily and gracefully. But the civilized man has the habits of the house. His house is a prison". Therefore, the way of life of the American Indian, living in harmony with the natural surroundings, will become a recurrent subject for the American landscape painters, especially Albert Bierstadt or Ralph Albert Blakelock. But even in paintings of this thematic, the human being, the American Indian, does not seem the main protagonist of the composition, but like an element more within the grandiloquence of the surrounding nature.

REAL LANDSCAPE / FANTASY LANDSCAPE

The gorgeous fluvial valley of the Hudson River was not the only natural landscape protagonist in the paintings of the School. Numerous natural monuments of the Northeast take also part in this particular natural iconography, such as the Mount Washington or the Adirondacks . In addition, it is necessary to mention that numerous painters of the second generation successfully dedicated themselves to the seascapes, skilfully portraying the coasts of Connecticut or New Hampshire . We must name such important seascape painters as Fitz Hugh Lane or John Frederick Kensett.

But the true Mecca of this landscape Art, there where the American landscape was exhibited in its maximum splendour was the American West. The expansion of the settlers towards the West had showed the magnificence of these virgin lands. So the Western lands were the main motif to painters like Herman Herzog, Thomas Hill, and, over all of them, Albert Bierstadt.

It is necessary to emphasize, in addition, two painters whose ambition was not satisfied only with the American landscape, not even with the magnificent West, and travelled until the exotic South America in search of exuberant landscapes. We are talking about the already mentioned Frederick Edwin Church and Martin Johnson Heade. The first of them is the author of works that combines an absolute technical perfection with a colossal and heroic vision of the magnificence of the tropical landscape, as we can see in the spectacular Cotopaxi . Its fantastic " Heart of the Andes " was sold to the Metropolitan Museum of New York shortly after being finalized by 10.000 dollars, then the highest price ever paid for a work of a living American artist. Contrasting with these exotic paintings, Church also represented the frozen beauty of the Arctic , painting The Icebergs , one of his masterpieces. On the other hand, Heade felt deeply attracted by the tropical landscape, or the one of South America or the one of Florida, as he shows in his spectacular paintings of orchids in flowering.

But in front of these natural landscapes, being American or foreign, and perhaps related to the already commented idea of "to improve" the natural landscape, many painters of the School resorted with assiduity to the imagined landscape, as a way to give the nature a grandiloquence that was beyond the reality. Thomas Cole resorts to this in his fantastic Expulsion of the Garden of the Eden , in which he combines clearly moralizing elements with a visual fantasy comparable to the one of Edgar Allan Poe, who writes the sensational end of The Domain of Arnheim : " Meantime the whole Paradise of Arnheim bursts upon the view. There is a gush of entrancing melody; there is an oppressive sense of strange sweet odor,-there is a dream-like intermingling to the eye of tall slender Eastern trees-bosky shrubberies-flocks of golden and crimson birds-lily-fringed lakes- meadows of violets, tulips, poppies, hyacinths, and tuberoses-long intertangled lines of silver streamlets-and, upspringing confusedly from amid all, a mass of semi-Gothic, semi-Saracenic architecture sustaining itself by miracle in mid-air, glittering in the red sunlight with a hundred oriels, minarets, and pinnacles; and seeming the phantom handiwork, conjointly, of the Sylphs, of the Fairies, of the Genii and of the Gnomes."

EPILOGUE - THE INHERITANCE OF THE HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL

Logically, a movement so particularly American as the Hudson River School was barely had repercussion in Europe, where the tradition of a landscape representation - and not only at pictorial level- drank of such old and consolidated sources as the romanticism or the realism of the Barbizon School . Nevertheless, in the United States its influence was tremendous, and not only in the already commented artistic aspect. Here the School had a fundamental influence not only in the pictorial representation of the American Nature, but also in the way in which the North Americans were related to it. A brief walk in Central Park , a park created following the spirit of the School, is enough to realize of which we are talking about.