ABSTRACT
The Hudson River School is remembered for nationally significant sites, naturalistically depicted on outsize canvases. This essay tracks currents in mid-nineteenth century American landscape painting that contrasted with, sometimes opposing, the school’s “mainstream” (Cole, Church, Bierstadt, and Moran). Rather than an offshoot, these “aestheticizing tendencies” originated within the school and can be attributed to the contradictory needs and expectations of artists, patrons, and publics. Gilded Age American painting was bound up with New York City’s upper class or bourgeois. The shifts tracked here are a result of the elite class’s consolidation, reflecting its institutionalization and control over the definition of art.
