Book Description
Hudson River School paintings are among America's most admired and well-loved artworks. Such artists as Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and Albert Bierstadt left a powerful legacy to American art, embodying in their epic works the reverence for nature and the national idealism that prevailed during the middle of the nineteenth century. This book features fifty-seven major Hudson River School paintings from the collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, recognized as the most extensive and finest in the world. Gorgeously and amply illustrated, the book includes paintings by all the major figures of the Hudson River School. Each work is beautifully reproduced in full color and is accompanied by a concise description of its significance and historical background. The book also includes artists' biographies and a brief introduction to American nineteenth-century landscape painting and the Wadsworth Atheneum's unique role in collecting Hudson River pictures.
From the Publisher
This book accompanies an exhibition that travels to the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University (October 8, 2003 to January 18, 2004); the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (February 21 to May 9, 2004); the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh (June 6 to August 29, 2004); the Dayton Art Institute, Ohio (September 2004 to January 2005); and the Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma (February 6 to April 24, 2005). Published in association with the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
The Hudson River School: Masterworks from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art FROM THE PUBLISHER
Hudson River School paintings are among America's most admired and well-loved artworks. Such artists as Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, and Martin Johnson Heade left a powerful legacy to American art, embodying in their epic works the reverence for nature and the national idealism that prevailed during the middle of the nineteenth century. This book features fifty-seven major Hudson River School paintings from the collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, recognized as the finest and most extensive in the world.
Amply illustrated, the book includes paintings by all of the major figures of the Hudson River School. Each work is beautifully reproduced in full color and is accompanied by a concise description of its significant and historical background. The book also includes artists' biographies and a brief introduction to American nineteenth-century landscape painting and the Wadsworth Atheneum's unique role in collecting Hudson River pictures.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
American landscape painting in the mid-19th century came to embody the desires and hopes of a young and growing nation. In particular, the so-called Hudson River School of Painters became recognized as practitioners of the first truly national style of painting. Two new exhibition catalogs explore aspects of 19th-century American landscape painting from distinctly different viewpoints. George Inness and the Visionary Landscape accompanies an exhibition organized by the National Academy of Design Museum and is skillfully written by the show's guest curator. A Ph.D. candidate in art history at Columbia University, Bell concentrates on Inness's (1825-94) aspiration to "resolve" theology into the "scientific form" of landscape painting. Bell examines Inness's highly intellectual ideas of landscape painting and distills them down, examining several major influences: the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, Luminism, consciousness and stream-of-thought theories, and the science of geometric shapes and patterns. Bell's essay and catalog entries are fresh and illuminating, and the exhibition's 40 paintings from Inness's mid- to late career are beautifully reproduced. Both the book and the show are not to be missed. Hudson River School is an exhibition catalog that accompanies the Wadsworth Atheneum's collection as it travels across the country throughout 2004-06. The book contains an introductory essay, short artist biographies, and catalog entries ably written by Kornhauser (deputy director & chief curator, Wadsworth Atheneum), as well as full-color reproductions of each of the 57 paintings in the show. While the Wadsworth Atheneum's collection of Hudson River School paintings is certainly impressive and includes over 25 paintings by Bierstadt, Church, and Cole, this work adds little to the two-volume American Paintings Before 1945 in the Wadsworth Atheneum, penned by Kornhauser in 1996. Best suited to public libraries that do not own the earlier collection catalog.-Kraig A. Binkowski, Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
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