The Hudson River School: How Painters Invented Conservation

Thomas Cole arrived in the Hudson Valley in eighteen twenty-five and painted what he saw with an intention that was new in American art: landscape not as backdrop but as the subject itself, as moral argument, as evidence that the natural world had a value that was not primarily economic.

Cole had grown up in England and emigrated to Ohio, and his training was conventional. What was not conventional was what he did with his eyes when he got to the Catskills. He saw the light on the mountains, the particular quality of autumn atmosphere that the Hudson Valley produces, the rivers and rocky outcrops and forest edges, and he understood that he was looking at something that was simultaneously specific, beautiful, and in the process of being destroyed. The Erie Canal had just opened. The forests were coming down. The mills were going in. Cole began painting with the urgency of someone who understood the material was finite.

The tradition he founded, retrospectively called the Hudson River School, produced Frederic Edwin Church, whose paintings of the Andes and the Arctic brought wilderness from across the hemisphere into galleries in New York and London, where audiences who had never seen such landscapes paid admission to stand in front of them. It produced Albert Bierstadt, whose enormous canvases of the American West were propaganda for westward expansion even as they mourned, in their scale and grandeur, the vastness that expansion was consuming. It produced Sanford Gifford, John Kensett, and dozens of others who spent the middle decades of the nineteenth century making the argument, in oil paint, that wilderness had spiritual and moral value, not just economic utility.

Frederic Church's studio, Olana, sits on a Columbia County hilltop above the Hudson. Church designed the building and the landscape around it as a single artwork, managing the views, the plantings, and the approach roads to produce the experience of a painting entered from outside. From certain windows, you are looking at a composition Church arranged as carefully as he arranged a canvas. He is making the argument to the last: this is what we are losing, and it matters.

The environmental movement that emerged in the eighteen sixties and seventies, the movement that produced Yosemite and Yellowstone and the idea of the national park, drew its philosophical fuel from this tradition. Cole and Church did not invent conservation. They convinced people it was necessary.