Wadsworth and the Hudson River School

A Hartford local art patron Daniel Wadsworth founded the Wadsworth to share his love and the wonders of art with the public. The Wadsworth features many works collected by Wadsworth and other Hartford notables such as Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt and J. Pierpont Morgan. Leading the way in art the Wadsworth embraced new art movements. It was the first American museum to purchase works by Caravaggio, Frederic Church, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, Balthus, and Joseph Cornell. The Wadsworth‘s famed Hudson River School collection can be found in the architecturally majestic Huntington Gallery near the front entrance.

The Hudson River School is the first national school of landscape art in the United States. It was between 1825 and 1875 that the discovery and exploration of the land were important to American landscape painters. The wonders of nature clearly were the subject the artist’s used to express the nation’s hopes and aspirations. This is where during my visit I found my own personal part of heaven. I loved viewing paintings with scenes from Connecticut to places like Niagara Falls and seascapes of Maine where I have visited.

In this collection you find many paintings by Frederic Church. Church, (May 4, 1826 – April 7, 1900), came from a wealthy Hartford family and was a student of Thomas Cole at the Hudson River School. Cole and Church were introduced by Daniel Wadsworth, a family neighbor and founder of the Wadsworth. During the 1850's and 60's he was a famous American landscape artist and one of America's most famous painters at the time. His paintings are of dramatic landscapes representing and harnessing the power, energy, space and light of extraordinary moments of nature with no traces of man. He was adventurous and traveled throughout his career. He took trips through Colombia and Ecuador. His South American pictures showed well in 1855 and for the next decade a great part of his attention focused on this subject producing a series of paintings that brought international fame and attention. Curiosity kept him looking for other subjects to paint from visiting places like Nova Scotia, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and several trips to sketch Niagara Falls. Material for future paintings came from another trip to Ecuador, a voyage to Newfoundland and Labrador. In 1857, however, Church leapt to even international prominence with his seven-foot-wide picture Niagara and ten-foot canvas Heart of the Andes in 1859 that garnered him recognition as America's most famous painter. The exhibition of The Heart of the Andes in New York was the beginning of Church's courtship and marriage to Isabel Carnes. They couple were married in 1860 and lived on a hillside farm overlooking the Hudson River at Hudson, New York.

I especially loved one of his finest seascapes, Coast Scene Mount Desert, Maine. “There is no such picture of wild, reckless abandonment to its own impulses, as the fierce, frolicsome march of a gigantic wave,” Church wrote after observing the sea off Mt. Desert Island, Maine. This quote captured the same feeling of power, energy and light that I had when I was in Maine looking at a similar coastline as represented in his painting. Church’s style of painting remained true to his belief that an artist should capture the realities of nature and focus on the relationship between light and form. His painting technique was more precise and focused on specific effects of nature by the weather and atmosphere. You can see this relationship between the ocean and the clouds as represented in Coast Scene, Mount Desert.

In 1876 Church was stricken with rheumatoid arthritis. This made it difficult to paint. He still managed to paint by using his left hand but at a much slower pace he continued to sketch at his home at his estate on the Hudson River, Olana he died on April 7, 1900. Today, Olana is a New York State Historic Site, a National Historic Landmark, and one of the most popular tourist destinations in the Hudson Valley and upstate New York. Called by Church "the Center of the World," Olana is next on my list of the top 10 places to visit this summer.

By Kim Zarra
Picture link:
http://www1.snapfish.com/snapfish/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=4186758015/a=141417625_141417625/otsc=SHR/otsi=SALBlink/COBRAND_NAME=snapfish/

References:
http://www.wadsworthatheneum.org/index.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Edwin_Church
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/C/church.html
http://www.olana.org/learn_frederic_church_olana.php
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/intro/atr/atr.htm
http://faculty.pittstate.edu/~knichols/arttours.html#hudson