New York’s greatest river has long been romanticized, perhaps most strikingly by the Hudson River School, a New York-based movement of landscape painters that promoted growing nationalism, and ultimately Manifest Destiny, by portraying America’s wilderness as utopian. The towns and villages along its idyllic shores now serve as weekend getaways for busy New Yorkers, but by the mid-19th century artists such as Thomas Cole And Frederic Edwin Church idealized his naturalism. A sale at Shannon’s auction house in Connecticut, which is set to begin April 27, features works by many lesser-known artists from the Hudson River School, highlighting the past lives of the Hudson River.
The works depict the pastoral history of New York State, sometimes offering reminders of all that has changed, but often showing all that has remained the same.
Landscape painter Henry Boese centered New York State imagery throughout the second half of the 1800s. He rendered a rolling landscape around the Hudson in a painting he titled “Stroll- you along the river” (1853). The scene looks fantastical, but it’s dotted with 19th-century relics – sailing ships, a man and woman dressed in yesteryear’s clothing, and a farmhouse.
The rolling hills were cultivated for farmland: in the 1880s, less than a quarter of New York was forested. (Now about 63% of the state is covered in trees.) Boese, however, does not represent farm workers, crops, or animals. Instead, it depicts two people seemingly walking around. The choice alludes to a larger theme of the Hudson River School, which became popular alongside America growing tourism industry. The painting is not from the point of view of the people who live and work in the riverside surroundings, but rather from the melancholy point of view of a vacationer.
An impressionist painting by little-known artist Bayard Taylor depicts a less organized scene. The artist depicts the palisades, the sheer cliffs that drop the shore of New Jersey into the Hudson River. It looks like a photograph taken around 1910, but another photo taken a hundred years later reveals an almost identical scene.
Other works offer more overtly romantic depictions of the Hudson. In an 1867 work entitled “Storm King”, the Scottish-born artist James Fairman makes the titular mountain in Cornwall, New York (just a 10 minute drive from the more famous Storm King Art Center). It’s impossible to decipher the details of Fairman’s landscape, but a recent photograph of the 1,300-foot Storm King Mountain shows a scene nearly untouched by development.
One of the works up for auction presents the most shocking commentary on the rapid expansion of American cities and the sacrifice of design and pedestrian utility. Richard Hayley Lever’s circa 1913 painting of the High Bridge in the Bronx shows a scene that appears to be taken directly from a poem by Robert Frost, rather than New York. Snow covers the slopes of the river and small painted buildings line the waterfront. In the background, a group of developments sits on a small hill.
A contemporary photo of this exact location reveals a river expansion project that doubled the length of the bridge, highlighted by a billboard and a tangle of highways. The shore now seems impossible to access on foot.
However, about a dozen miles from town, modern photographs reveal scenes that still mimic romanticized 19th and 20th century paintings. The coastline is nearly untouched except for the train tracks that run along the Hudson from New York to Albany, creating one of the most beautiful train rides in the country.
