Description
Drawn primarily from the rich collections of The New York Historical, Transcendent: Landscapes of the Hudson River School explores nationally beloved paintings through the lens of Transcendentalism, a 19th-century movement that emphasized the spiritual connection between humans and the natural world. Emerging in the 1850s and reaching its apogee in the 1870s, the Hudson River School marked a high point in American landscape painting. The show examines the belief of period artists, writers, and theologians who viewed nature to be the primary locus of the divine. Though they do not overtly illustrate religious scenes or texts, Hudson River School paintings were created by deeply religious artists who understood their works to reflect their faith. Supplemented with key loans from public and private collections, Transcendent will introduce visitors to the tradition of landscape painting that flourished in the United States in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.