Can the Hudson River landscapes made famous by America's first school of painting survive a new wave of development?

BY WILL YANDIK

In 1825, a lanky 24-year-old painter named Thomas Cole packed some sketch paper, brushes, and an umbrella onto a steamboat in New York City and journeyed 100 miles north on the Hudson River. He docked at the village of Catskill and hiked several miles inland to Pine Orchard, a wild mountain notch with expansive views of the river. Hoping to earn a few dollars by painting landscapes, Cole camped in the valley for several days sketching the scenery.

Later, back in Manhattan, he completed three paintings from his travel sketches and placed them for sale in the window of a bookstore named Coleman's Literary Emporium, where they soon captured the attention of John Trumbull, president of New York's trendsetting Academy of Fine Arts. The older painter bought one canvas, encouraged his friends to buy the others, and arranged for journalists to praise the new artist. America's first native painting movement, which would later be called the Hudson River School, had begun.

Cole captured nature in oil on canvas for a new class of Americans grown rich by exploiting the very resources that he romanticized. These men of the railroad, the telegraph, and the steamboat hungered for natural subjects—a retreat from the industrial cities they helped to create. Views of the Hudson grew in popularity, civilizing the parlors of countless robber barons. Generations of Romantic painters followed Cole into the Hudson Valley in search of the wild and the sublime, as did several important American writers—Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe. Artist colonies sprang up around the small river towns like cattails.

Today another movement is sweeping across the Hudson River Valley—one of development and industry. A newspaper recycling facility, a cement plant, and eight power plants seek to build on the landscapes made famous by the Hudson River School. Though the Hudson has a long tradition of industry, some argue that this new wave of development will destroy the natural scenery and end a new, and growing, source of income—tourism.

The 125-mile stretch of river between New York and Albany shelters 46 National Historic Landmarks, making the region the largest National Historic Landmark District in the country. Visitors to these sites—many of them the studios and homes of the Hudson River School painters—infuse more than $100 million annually into upstate New York's weak economy.

For more of this story, see our November/December 2001 issue.