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Schools of American Landscape Painting

Top 5 Places Landscape Painting Grew in America

brandon · Jun 19th, 2017

Plein Air Painting

Landscape painting and natural history go hand-in-hand. It even helped establish America’s first national park. There have been five places across the United States where this marriage of art and nature especially flourished.

Knowledge in art is the power behind the hand-work… I must know the geology. I must know the rocks and the trees and the atmosphere and the mountain torrents and the birds that fly in the blue ether above me.

— Thomas Moran (April 1903 edition of Brush and Pencil)

Hudson River School

Location: Hudson River, Catskill Mountains, Adirondack Mountains

Notable Artists: Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, Asher B Durand, Thomas Moran

Date Founded: 1825

Relevant Museums: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Wadsworth Atheneum, Department of the Interior Museum (for Moran’s Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone Painting)

The Hudson River School was one of America’s first and most important schools of landscape painting. Before its inception in 1825 by Thomas Cole, portraiture was the dominant form of art, but through the artists’ idealized and romanticized depictions of nature it helped landscape painting be a permanent force in American art.

The Hudson River Valley and the surrounding mountains (Catskills and Adirondacks) was where the movement was born, but artists like Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt took the ideas and techniques of the Hudson River School in their expeditions westward. Moran painted the first color images of the Yellowstone area as a part of the government’s first survey of the area in 1871.

His works, especially his masterwork of the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, fascinated people in the east who still had a hard time believing these places existed and helped give Yellowstone the nickname "Wonderland". In 1872, influenced by the images of Moran and photographer William Henry Jackson, congress made Yellowstone the world’s first national park.

Cos Cob Art Colony

Location: Cos Cob, CT

Notable Artists: John Henry Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, Childe Hassam, Theodore Robinson

Date Founded: 1890

Relevant Museums: Bruce Museum

John Henry Twachtman started one of the first art colonies devoted to impressionism in America shortly after he moved to Cos Cob, CT and began teaching classes in 1889. Artists gathered to teach, share ideas, and experiment and stayed at the Bush-Holley House (which is now a historic site you can visit).

After training in Europe and absorbing French Impressionism, the artists at Cos Cob embraced their American surroundings, painting in a revolutionary style that transformed American art.

— Emily Ballew Neff (Curator of American Painting And Sculpture at Museum of Fine Arts Houston)

Old Lyme Art Colony

Location: Old Lyme, CT

Notable Artists: Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf

Relevant Museums: Florence Griswold Museum

Date Founded: 1899

The Griswold House in Old Lyme was the largest and best known art colony devoted to American Impressionism. Although it was founded in 1899 by Henry Ward Ranger, it wasn’t until Childe Hassam arrived in 1903 that American Impressionism and the observation of nature became the main theme (source). In addition to painting, Willard Metcalf, another of the most important impressionists at Old Lyme, was known to be an avid naturalist collecting birds nests, eggs, moths, and butterflies (source).

Laguna Beach Art Association

Location: Laguna Beach, CA

Notable Artists: Edgar Payne, William Wendt

Relevant Museums: The Irvine Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Laguna Art Museum

Date Founded: 1918

In the early 1900’s California artists developed their own regional style of impressionism known as California Impressionism. This movement happened throughout the state, but one of the most important centers of California Impressionism was the Laguna Beach Art Association founded by one of California’s most famous landscape painters, Edgar Payne.

The coast and mountains of the state, the Sierras in particular, were popular subjects and artists such as Payne went great distances to take their easels outside.

Now we find him painting away for dear life and for months at a time in the cold and remote recesses of the high Sierras; now he is in the hottest pockets of the desert; now he is perched on the rocks of the Pacific. Seldom, indeed, is he "at home," the business of painting is too engrossing for that.

— Antony Anderson writing about Edgar Payne in February 1922

Also motivating Payne was the sense of urgency that he felt in recording the pristine beauty of the Sierra. The "feeling of communion with nature" that he readily experienced in California, for instance, had been mitigated in the Swiss Alps by development. "Even on the peaks, one finds there shelter huts," Payne reported. "The slopes are cultivated to the snow line. The hotels follow you everywhere." He feared the same thing happening at home.

— Scott A. Shields, PhD in p. 73 of Edgar Payne: The Scenic Journey

Taos Art Colony

Location: Taos, NM

Notable Artists: Ernest L. Blumenschein, Bert Geer Phillips, Ernest Martin Hennings, William Herbert "Buck" Dunton, Joseph Henry Sharp, Eanger Irving Couse, Walter Ufer, Nicolai Fechin, Oscar Berninghaus

Relevant Museums: Gilcrease Museum, Taos Art Museum at the Fechin House, Harwood Museum

Date Founded: 1898 (Blumenschein arrives), 1915 (Taos Society of Artists)

In 1898, a wagon wheel breaking near Taos, NM helped lead to the founding of the Taos Art Colony. Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Geer Phillips were traveling to Mexico when a wheel on their wagon broke, and the nearest settlement with repairs was Taos Pueblo. After flipping a coin, Blumenschein rode into Taos and fell in love with the landscape and Native American culture (source).

In 1915, Blumenschein founded the Taos Society of Artists and numerous artists with a diverse range of styles moved to the area. Now, it is estimated that there are more artists per capita than anywhere else in the world (source).

No artist had ever recorded the New Mexico I was now seeing. No writer had ever written down the smell of this air or the feel of that morning’s sky. I was receiving…the first great unforgettable inspiration of my life.

— Ernest L. Blumenschein