Hudson River Paintings
I am captivated by the artists of the Hudson River School. This attachment results from a lot of time spent in Upstate New York. Niagara Falls, the Adirondacks and the Catskills rate among the beautiful regions in America.
In 1816, Governor DeWitt Clinton, the driving force behind the Erie Canal, the New York Historical Society and the American Academy of Fine Arts, got it right:
“Here Nature has conducted her operations on a magnificent scale: extensive and elevated mountains – lakes of oceanic size – rivers of prodigious magnitude – cataracts unequaled for volume of water – and boundless forests filled with wild beasts and savage men, and covered with the towering oak and the aspiring pine.”
Wild beasts and savage men, indeed! The magnificence of the region was documented by the great American painters of the Hudson River School.
I have collected a few Hudson River School paintings. Among those to which I am most attached are three paintings by Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847-1919), a resident of Greenwich Village and perhaps the most tragic figure in history of American art.
As a youth and art student, Blakelock’s produced images demonstrating the impoverished shanties in what is now west midtown around 57 Street. He began his landscapes in the Hudson River style. From 1869-1872, he travelled to the American West and painted Indian encampments in a new style uniquely his own. The trip west also moved Blakelock to produce many moody scenes of canoes in watery landscapes lit by moonlight.
My the three Blakelock paintings cover the range of his work – a Hudson River-style landscape painting, an Indian encampment and a moonlight.
I would save the Blakelock paintings.
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