The Catskill Mountains, America's First Landscape

Before Yosemite was known to the American public. Before anyone thought to paint the Rocky Mountains. Before wilderness had any political friends at all, a group of painters hiked into the Catskill Mountains of New York in the eighteen twenties and decided that their rugged, forested escarpments were worth taking seriously as beauty.

They were right, and their paintings changed what Americans thought nature was for. The Hudson River School, the name came later; at the time they were just artists, began with Thomas Cole, a British-born painter who emigrated to America in eighteen eighteen and discovered the Hudson Valley in the middle of the next decade. Cole hiked the Catskills, sketched the Kaaterskill Falls and the high ledges, and painted landscapes in which nature was not backdrop but protagonist.

His canvases hung in the galleries of New York and caused a sensation. Young painters followed in his footsteps: Frederic Church, who would push the scale of landscape painting to operatic dimensions; Asher Durand; John Kensett; others who formed a coherent movement centered on the idea that the American landscape was morally significant, that to look at a mountain was to look at something true about God and the republic. The Catskills themselves rewarded this attention.

They are not the highest mountains in New York, the Adirondacks hold that claim, but they are among the most painted. The escarpment above the Hudson Valley drops off sharply on the east side, giving views across the river to New England that on clear days cover fifty miles. The Mountain House hotel, perched on that ledge above the valley, was for decades one of the most famous destinations in America, the place writers and presidents and foreign visitors came to stand in the fog and feel the romance of the new world.

The Hudson River School was not just painting. It was an argument for preservation before the word existed. Cole's landscapes included stumps and clear-cut slopes alongside the sublime vistas, a record of what was being lost.

The movement created the aesthetic vocabulary that made Yellowstone, Yosemite, and eventually the whole national park system politically possible. It started in the Catskills.