`Hudson painters captured naive, unspoiled America`

By Joe Pinchot
Herald Staff Writer

The painters included in the Hudson River School are sometimes called the first environmentalists. It’s a tag that proves to be deceptive, ironic or at least naive, as seen through modern eyes.

Their forest scenes, mountain vistas, and farmscapes showed a harmony between man and nature that has turned out not to be true, and trumpeted Manifest Destiny, the belief that it was God’s will that the United States should rule all of North America.

Spirituality had a lot to do with the philosophies of the artists, who established landscape as an important genre in American art, and flourished from 1820-80.

In the catalog for a show at Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, John Driscoll writes that the artists "believed that nature had religious, therapeutic, and/or didactic values - nature was equated with moral authority."

But Manifest Destiny gave rise to the destruction of vast tracts of forest and plains, something that probably has the painters rolling over in their graves. By placing brush on canvas they might as well have taken ax to tree.

The Butler show makes you long for the America they depicted: blazing autumn reds in "Up The Hudson" by Alfred Thompson Bricher, pink light infusing John Herman Carmiencke’s "Catskill Cove," and the yellow rays blessing Jasper Francis Cropsey’s "On the Hudson Near West Point."

The sense of human corruption is subtle in these paintings. There are no mills, subdivisions or strip malls, but there are farms, canoes and people hunting or resting. In William C.A. Frerich’s "Ice Skating," you see people as far off as you see the frozen lake.

Once the first human has reached a spot, you know others will follow, and people rarely leave things alone.

The show goes a long way to make a case for women, with some of the most impressive works painted by Laura Woodward and Julie H. Beers.

In Ms. Woodward’s "By the Stream," the viewer is placed in a shaded stream, looking upon a hillside lit by a glorious sun, with two deer at the edge of the shadow, giving a sense of quiet and serenity.

The movement was never about strong emotions. There is no anger, sorrow, joy or violence, except for the implications of a hunter’s gun.

C.H. Chapin’s "Storm in the Adirondacks" carries the foreboding of the approaching storm, while capturing the last bright rays of a setting sun shining on rocks and trees in the foreground and turning clouds to orange and yellow.

But even though Manifest Destiny led to the destruction to much of what the artists held dear there still are scenes like the ones they depicted out there, and modern-day artists are still painting them.

"All That is Glorious Around Us: Selections From the Hudson River School" probably will run into September. Information: (330) 743-1107.

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Updated July 14, 1998
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