10 Hudson River School Artists You Need to Know
Discover 10 hidden gems of the Hudson River School, including Heade, Moran & Susie M. Barstow. Your next favorite landscape painter is here.
In the 1820s, a group of American painters looked at the wilderness around them and decided it was sacred.
They painted mountains, rivers and forests with the kind of reverence Europeans reserved for cathedrals. This was the Hudson River School, America’s first major art movement.
You probably know Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church.
Here are ten others who deserve the same attention.
1 | Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823–1900)
His autumn colors were so vivid that when he exhibited in London, critics refused to believe American trees actually looked like that.
So he had real leaves shipped from New York to prove it.
Cropsey painted fall like no one else. Entire valleys burning orange and crimson, rivers reflecting skies on fire, sunlight caught in the canopy like stained glass.
Queen Victoria was a fan. The American public worshipped him. Then Impressionism arrived, his style went out of fashion, and he died nearly forgotten, selling his estate to pay debts.
The leaves, though. Nobody has ever painted leaves like that.
2 | Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904)
While every other Hudson River School painter was going big — mountains, waterfalls, canyons — Heade went small. And horizontal. And quiet.
His salt marshes are the opposite of grandiose. Flat light. Tiny haystacks. A sky that takes up three quarters of the canvas. It shouldn’t work. It’s mesmerizing.
Then there’s the other Heade. Three trips to South America to paint orchids and hummingbirds in the jungle. Over forty tiny canvases of iridescent birds hovering in tropical heat.
He planned a book called The Gems of Brazil. It never got published. The paintings survived. They’re the most original still lifes in American art.
3 | William Louis Sonntag (1822–1900)
Here’s the irony: he’s considered a central figure of the Hudson River School, but he never painted the Hudson River valley.
His thing was the Ohio River Valley where he grew up, and idealized Italian ruins he painted after living in Florence. Grand, sweeping, deeply romantic. Thomas Cole without ever having studied under Cole.
He also co-created a massive panorama of Milton’s Paradise Lost. A painting you literally walked through.
Died in 1900 as one of America’s most respected landscape painters. Today, almost nobody knows his name.