American History Hit - Hudson River: America's First Art Movement

Episode Date: April 6, 2023

English-born artist Thomas Cole emigrated to the United States in 1818. Six years later he began what is now known as the Hudson River School, which became the first art movement of the United States.. Betsy Jacks, director of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, tells Don how these artists captured the country's awe-inspiring natural beauty, at a time when the US was rapidly industrialising. Framing an image of America that would illustrate the spirit of the continent and the nation that sought to conquer it.Produced and mixed by Benjie Guy. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long. For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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The unveiling of Niagara, a magnificent new panorama of the American frontier, painted by the rising celebrity artist Frederick Edwin Church. Shrouted in dark cloth, the massive canvas measures. over seven feet in length and stands in a monumentally sized wooden frame, artfully lit by gas lanterns. More than a mere art show, this reveal is intended to be a dramatic visual experience. And sure enough, as the shroud is lifted, it does not disappoint. The painting is astonishing. In breathtaking detail, Church has perfectly rendered the unbridled glory of the Niagara River,

its roiling waters plummeting precipitously over Horseshoe Falls. The painting will be viewed by thousands before it tours the nation and the world. For all his bold genius in commercial showmanship, Frederick Edwin Church was part of something greater, an entire art movement known eventually as the Hudson River School of Painting. Church owed much of his training to an artist who had come to be known as the founder of this movement, Thomas Cole. These artists, master and pupil, who could not

have been more different in style and intent, would go far together in framing an image of North America that would illustrate both the spirit of the continent and the nation which sought to conquer it. Everyone, I'm Don Wilde, and welcome to American History Hit. Along the eastern seaboard, early 19th century America was a land on the precipice of massive industrial change and social upheaval that would be coming in a short several decades. In New York's Hudson Valley, which extends 150 miles north of the city,

to Albany, these changes would land especially hard, as hundreds of factories would be constructed along the river, shipping, crowding its waters, and intensive forestry clear-cutting the dense growth along its banks. But in 1825, that was still in the cards, and it was at this pivotal time that a promising British-born artist named Thomas Cole stepped onto a steamship in New York City and took a trip upriver that would change his life forever and helped to establish a powerful new vision of the American landscape, one that sought to convey the majesty and promise of a startling new world. Thomas Cole is known as the founder of the Hudson River School of Painting, famously America's first art movement. Of course, most founders of movements are

anointed long after they're gone. So here to tell us of what Cole intended to express about the American wilderness while he was still alive, a message carried on by dozens of renowned artists after him is Betsy Jacks. executive director of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, New York. Welcome, Betsy, to American History, It. Thank you. Delighted. Betsy, we're going to be telling a story today that is a history bookended by the lives and works of two painters, starting with Thomas Cole, who lived from 1801 to 1848, and then his student, Frederick Edwin Church,

born 1826, died 1900. This is a master and pupil story, if ever there was. that ends remarkably with both men's houses and studios kind of staring at each other from the opposite sides of the Hudson River where they remain today. It couldn't be a more dramatic embodiment of their relationship and the movement they would spawn. So let's begin with Thomas Cole and Emma Gray from England. What brings this guy to the Hudson Valley? Well, he was an economic migrant. His family really lost their ability to work when the Industrial Revolution arrived. and he was growing up in Lancashire, which was ground zero for the big changes and the massive smokestacks and coal dust.

So it was an environment that his parents just couldn't adjust to, as it often happens with big economic and social changes. So he came to the United States as an immigrant, as a 17-year-old, and he from then on had to make his way in America. They live in Steubenville, Ohio. They move to Philadelphia. I guess he moves to Philadelphia. And then he finds himself in New York, as I say, around the 1820s. New York is starting to boom. I mean, we're just at the beginning of the Erie Canal and all of that that's going to change everything forever.

He takes a steamship ride up the Catskill, which is now a famous story. Was this purely as a tourist? What was his intent? He was very ambitious as a young artist. And he really lucked out to. be in New York at this pivotal time. It was absolutely about to explode. And as you say, the Erie Canal connected the Hudson River to the entire center of the country through the Great Lakes. They just had to connect those waterways, the Great Lakes to the Hudson River. And then all of a sudden,

goods and trade could flood into New York Harbor. So he lucked out in that he had this talent and this ambition and this desire to go up to the legendary Hudson Valley, which was already becoming famous for its wild and incredibly dramatic beauty. And that's what he wanted to paint because he wanted to capture this new country that people had really never seen. To the people in New York City, to the Europeans who had arrived, it was a brand new country. Exactly. I mean, this is a time when, you know, I'm going to mention this later, I'm sure. We're pre-media here. It's not easy to convey through imagery at this point the grandeur that is North America. It's mainly settled, most densely, along the eastern seaboard. Of course, the Midwest is starting,

and all of that is happening out in Chicago and so forth. But there's this land here, this expanse, that Europeans are very curious about, have always been very curious about for hundreds of years at this point. But it is this imagery that is becoming very popular and a subject unto itself. So Cole, as you say, he spends a great deal of his youth in England and witnesses there the results, the consequences of industrialization. And he would know that this is heading to America. I mean, this is a trepidation for him that is central to his vision. Fair to say? When Cole did arrive in the Hudson Valley, he married into a family and established this beautiful home overlooking the Catskills there.

And lo and behold, the Industrial Revolution unfolded right in front of him. right in that view. So one of the very earliest trains in America came plowing right through his favorite grove where he went walking by the creek and sketching and painting. You could see it from the windows of the house where he was living.

So it came to him. He and his family had run from the Industrial Revolution, but it followed them. And so there in America, he saw this, what he felt was the downfall, the destruction of this natural beauty, And for him, the beauty wasn't just a simple pleasure or a luxury. It was the work of God.

It was something divine. It was this gift, this incredibly pristine and rare opportunity to see all of God's creation not yet messed up by human beings. That's the way he saw it, of course. There were human beings living there for thousands of years before he arrived. As we know, the Native Americans, the indigenous populations were there. But for Thomas Cole coming from England, he saw no one has screwed it up. There weren't coal stacks and coal smoke and ruined landscapes with all the things that had come with the Industrial Revolution back home.

He's really drawn to nature as a spiritual symbol. This is a paradise lost canvas in front of him. And he's drawn to explain this through the image. imagery of the Hudson Valley as an idealized landscape. Talk to me about his style of painting. Where do the influences come from? What was he seeking to capture at the earlier part of his career? The thought leaders in New York City, I guess today we would call them influencers, were looking for something to celebrate as uniquely American, uniquely from this new country. And they wanted some imagery. And Thomas Cole just landed right at that very moment with exactly what they were looking

for, these beautiful landscapes that embodied something unique to this country, which was wild, untamed, undeveloped nature. And they said, this is it. This is what our new country is all about. And it evolved into what we know now is America the Beautiful. It became celebrated as something that is not to be found in the old country, but something that's brand new, and they seized upon Thomas Cole as this embodiment of what our new country was going to be all about. And yet in Europe, especially in Germany, what becomes known as the Dusseldorf School of Painting, right? These guys were also doing this with the Alps. There was a lot of big time painting being done. They were playing with new ways of manipulating paint. And basically, art is

coming out of a time of portraiture. But this new idea of seeing the world in and of itself as a painting subject was a brand new idea over in Europe. That comes over with him, and he sees the potential for doing this on a whole other scale. But he also has this spiritual quality, this romantic quality, which had crept into English art at the time as well, the pushback against all the age of enlightenment ideas, but also the impact of the industrialized age, this idea of sort of creating this idealized vision through light and composition, right? Yes, and it's no coincidence. It happened when the Industrial Revolution was changing those landscapes because that triggered the nostalgia for the way it used to be. You know, you don't

really appreciate what you've got till it's gone. And so when the landscape started to be filled with factories and the trees started to be clear cut, then people started wanting imagery of the way it used to be. The other thing is that Thomas Cole did bring these European ways of looking at a landscape, for example, from Claude Lorraine, and transferred those onto an American landscape. So he was the conduit between the continents. He was the one that was going back and forth. And so he brought that European style of framing a picture, but put it on America and said, what is unique about America's landscapes are its wildness, that in Europe it's been cultivated and there have been wars and there have been people carving it up.

So the landscapes in Europe had been changed over and over, but he felt that in America, nobody had touched it. And so it was just as God had created and therefore it was this incredible opportunity to see all of God's creation. It really fits right in to the idea of America itself at the time, the beginnings of manifest destiny, that this expanse before us, despite its previous settlement by many, many people, Native American civilizations, this expanse before us waits to be discovered. and he's wetting the appetite for this world that is beyond. As I say, he arrives in New York in 1825. He lives a relatively short life. He dies in 1848.

In this time period, he inspires a lot of people. I mean, he's selling a lot of paintings. Let's not forget that this is also his way of living. And he's a very, very popular painter. He begins to cede the marketplace, right? Yes, I think I would say Thomas Cole is quite different than all of the artists that came after him. largely because he, well, for many reasons, but he was from England. He was decades ahead of when landscape painting really took off in America.

And he felt that this expansion across the continent was a terrible idea. And he felt that what other people called progress was really a potentially destructive, it could possibly be the end of our new republic. And it was, you know, remember, it was, in the lead up to the Civil War here as well, that all of this was taking place. And so he was starting to see signs of the country coming apart already. And he conflated the industrial revolution and the greed that he saw in that, that people were just trying to extract all the resources with the greed that was leaking into politics as well. And he felt that this is going to be the end of this

miraculous new experiment in a new land. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. We're about to witness the first coronation at Westminster Abbey in 70 years. And gone medieval from history hit is your perfect companion for the event. From the earliest English coronation records. To what the royal regalia used in the ceremony means. From the surprising origins of the recognition part of the service. To the lavish banquets that took place are.

afterwards. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Kat Jarman, and on Gone Medieval in April, we'll be exploring the medieval origins of this feast of pageantry. We'll try to pick out the key moments for you to watch and trace their origins back into the mists of time. We've got some great guests and fascinating topics to lift the lid on a moment when, let's face it, people all around the world will have gone medieval. Subscribe and follow Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. He creates a seminal work around 1833 to 36. So about 10 years after he's taken that steamship ride, he's interpreting this on a global scale now.

He creates this epic seminal work, as I say, a five-piece set of paintings that visually describe the rise of empire from man imposing himself on nature all the way to the destruction. He does another one called Vorge of Life. This is a very popular way of doing these paintings. but it shows his belief, his central belief, that the human civilization is going to do no good to the world. Yes, the course of empire is one of his most popular series to this day, because in the destruction painting, people see what's happening now. People feel very strongly about the destruction painting. It starts with this idealized, beautiful landscape. It goes through this rise, which he sees in parallel to kind of like the Roman Empire. You see the columns. You see the,

the emperor, you see this grandeur, and then very quickly it gives way to war and destruction and violence, and then mankind seems to be extinct in the final picture. And all that's left are these ruined columns. So I think that he was quite pessimistic, actually, about the outlook of humanity. People now know him as the first environmentalist, but also he's kind of the first to sound the alarm, you know, that this is not going well. Yeah, right, exactly. In 1844, as it happens towards the end of Cole's life, a man named Daniel Wadsworth from Hartford, Connecticut, sends Cole a promising young student named Frederick Edwin Church. Who was Church, and where did he come from? Well, Frederick Church was from Hartford, Connecticut, and he was from a very wealthy family, a very well-established

family, whereas Thomas Cole, they were migrants, economic migrants, and his family was penniless. So it was a very different relationship in terms of where they came from. But Thomas Cole at that time was in his early 40s, and Frederick Church was just a teenager. So Thomas Cole was known as the foremost landscape painter in America, a very celebrated artist, and that's who Frederick Church wanted to study with. Yeah. I mean, it's important to realize that at this point we have. this rising America, this gilded age America is coming into the fore.

This is going to straddle the antebellum and then Civil War and then Reconstruction period. All of that is Frederick Church's lifespan, really. But during this time, an enormous amount of art is bought and collected and put into museums and into big mansions in Newport, you know, Rhode Island and so forth. This is a whole new way of looking at art because it's now symbolic, but it's also decorative, you It has a big role in America that it didn't have before. And Church walks right into this marketplace with an extraordinary palette of skills. He was particularly good at the grand painting, wasn't he?

Yes, I would say Frederick Church was like the rock star of his era because there were no movies. There wasn't any other way of disseminating imagery other than little prints, right? So these paintings were gobsmacking, just mind-boggling. People couldn't believe what they saw. And Frederick Church had an extraordinary talent for detail. And he would set up his paintings with curtains, like they would draw back in a dramatic fashion. And he would give people opera glasses so that they could, from a distance, see all the little details in his paintings. And every little leaf on a fern was detailed in his works.

And the vistas, he would take what was a grand landscape. and make it into an over-the-top crazy grand landscape. I mean, it would have volcanoes at the same time as earthquakes and eruptions, and it was just, you know, a complete fantasy based on this extraordinary landscape in a country people had never seen. So people would line up and pay admission, and it was quite a spectacle. Exactly, the word for it. At a time when America is discovering the power of spectacle, I mean, the circuses are happening,

all this sort of reimagining the world through the bigger than life, almost surreal qualities that are being brought to bear now on art by the likes of Edwin Church. I don't want to rush past this because it's important to realize that in the 1850s, when Church is setting up these spectacles, what is yet to come is the idea of lining up to go see a movie to understand the world through images. Even periodicals, which are certainly out there, haven't yet printed pictures like this yet. You know, it's not a normal thing to see a visual image that absolutely stuns you, which to this day, if you walk into the National Gallery in D.C., you will see the Niagara picture that one of the pictures we're talking about. It blows your socks off to see this picture today.

And we are so saturated with media. We've seen everything at this point. You know, nothing's going to impress us. It impresses you today. You can only imagine what that was like in the 1850s before people just didn't. have that in their normal life. So they lined up and paid a quarter piece, and I'm talking thousands of people, to see this extraordinary thing. But it wasn't just set up like, here's a painting in a museum. It was also done in a sort of three-day way. It was against a

black backdrop. It was intent. It was lit or at least arranged so that lighting would hit it in a certain way at a certain time of the day. It was very manipulative. And it was intended to be a show that would absolutely shock people and make them tell their friends. and come. It was just like a movie. Yeah, it's really hard to imagine a world in which you're not bombarded by imagery, trying to shock you, trying to get your eyeballs. But this was a new phenomenon, and Frederick Church really pioneered it. It was like nothing anyone had ever seen. His painting of Niagara Falls, well, people had been used to seeing Niagara Falls, perhaps in little sketches and very small renderings from a distance. But Frederick Church positioned you on the water, about to go over the falls.

gave people, you know, this kind of fear of height sensation because you feel the water moving under you and you confront the vast depths of the fall right in front of your eyes. Yes. These guys are prolific. I mean, he goes on to do the in the heart of the Andes. He and his wife tour the world and they bring back these sort of global versions of all of that, which we're talking about. It's a good moment to point out the difference, again, between coal and church, a world of difference in terms of their artistic vision and priorities. And in the end, church kind of trumps Cole in terms of American history and the way that the vision that Americans embrace. Eventually, it all plays out differently, of course. But at that time, it really slotted perfectly

in with the American vision of what was to come in the 19th century, the Gilded Age. Yes, ultimately, Thomas Cole was a dreamer and a poet and a Luddite, you know, in the original term, He did not like the new technology. So he felt that progress was not a good thing and that he said that the changes in the landscape and the destruction are what other people call improvement, you know, improvement upon the land. And he felt this was deeply ironic and saw his country about to implode and will lead up to the American Civil War, whereas Church felt an optimism about the country and that the land was just waiting for all of them to explore this empty, you know, what he depicted as an empty wilderness. And as you mentioned, the term

manifest destiny that we apply to that, that it was manifest, it is our destiny to go racing across the continent. And how, of course, deeply erasing that was of all the people that had lived there for thousands of years. They were just conveniently erased from all of those images. Yeah, so it was a very big difference between Cole, who was decades ahead of Church, Durand, and all of the other artists that followed, who embraced progress. So it was a different vision, but in the early days, people were just so drawn to Thomas Cole's depiction of the beauty of the land, that that was the magic of it, the majesty of the mountains, the grace of the rivers, and the rocky cliffs and the deep gorges.

It was just so glorious. They couldn't believe it was all out there, just easily accessible from New York City. How aware were these guys? And we're talking about, just to be clear, the Hudson River movement is dozens and dozens of painters. I mean, we're discussing the two primary ones, but they inspire and influence

and, you know, many, many other people who go out into the land and beyond into the world. And this becomes, you know, a hundred years of painting, basically. in trying to capture and convey the majesty of this land. It's a remarkable movement to study. Yeah, if we think about today how quickly trends and fads and movements and styles come and go, this is a movement that lasted over 50 years encompassing over 100 artists. It's hard to imagine something being dominant in a culture for 50 years. Exactly, especially the art culture in America, right?

It's true. remarkably. I mean, it really, the story can't end more perfectly than this. On the left bank, if you're going up from New York City, the west bank of the Hudson River in Catskill, New York is the Thomas Cole National Historic Site and Studio. That sits there to this day where Cole lived and worked for his, almost his entire career. It sits opposite Hudson, which is across the, on the other side, south of which is Olana, which is a, a, historic site in its own right, a beautiful mansion that Frederick Edwin Church and his wife built on the land above the farm that he had purchased. I mean, he did very well in life. He was

already a privileged person before he started painting, but he did very, very well. And he builds this incredible mansion, this sort of Persian-influenced structure that has the most amazing view of the Hudson River you will ever see in your lifetime. It can't be more perfect in terms of the comparison of these lives and really their pursuit of the art they made. Yes, it's really chapter one and chapter two of American culture. And it's right, the two homes are just two miles apart separated by a bridge. And there's a walkway over that bridge as well so that you can walk between the two sites even and have this experience of being over the Hudson River.

So Thomas Cole's home on one side of the river faces the Catskills. And the view there is exactly like his paintings. So you can stand there and compare that mountain profile to his paintings, and it's all there. So that's incredibly exciting to people, that that view has not been destroyed. And then when you cross the river and go to Olana, I would call it a castle. It has pinnacles and towers and turrets. So it's really not what you normally see in the Hudson Valley. And it's on top of a hill where Thomas Cole brought Frederick Church to go sketching together.

And so later in life, Church came back and built this magnificent home on that pinnacle. It's something that I always tell people they must do if they come to the New York area, but really if they're coming to America. I mean, this is a way in to the whole experience of the history of America, certainly in the 19th century, and to really understand where the myth begins, because they had a very conscious and subconscious role in creating that America, which we live with today. Betsy Jacks is the director of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site.

It is located in Catskill, New York. What is that? About two hours north of the city, Betsy? It is exactly two hours by train. You can get the train in New York City and head right up there. It's a remarkable place. You recently renovated the studio of Thomas Cole there. It's a beautiful place to visit.

And like we were saying, cross the bridge and you go see Chapter 2, which is at Olana. It's an amazing experience. It's worth a whole weekend, in my opinion. Thank you so much. Betsy for this conversation. I really appreciate it. Thank you. My pleasure. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.