Exhibition Details
To browse works in the exhibition scroll down.
Visits are available by appointment, both in-person and via video. Contact us to find out more.
The largest Hudson River School exhibition and sale of the year, American Innovation opens for both in person and virtual viewing on March 11, 2021. Featuring more than 125 paintings by our nation’s master nineteenth-century artists. Works starting at $5,000.
Treasured in three centuries, these works mark the inception of a uniquely American art. Including works by Bierstadt, Bricher, Church, Cole, Colman, Cropsey, Doughty, Gifford, Hart, Herzog, Johnson, Kensett, Moran, Richards, Silva, Sonntag, Whittredge, Wyant, and many others.
In the early part of the nineteenth century, American artistic mavericks ventured into the new world’s pristine wilderness and faced a creative dilemma. In awe of the sublime beauty before them, they were inspired to express their emotional and intellectual discoveries while remaining truthful to nature. The paintings they created became known as the Hudson River School. It was a school that never actually existed, the title was coined to express a European critic’s derogatory opinion of the work. But time has proven to be the best judge as these paintings have been celebrated in worldwide exhibitions and today the Hudson River School is pridefully acknowledged as an inspiring American innovation.
These paintings are visual expressions aligned with the contemporaneous writings of the likes of Melville, Whitman, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau, none of whom will appear on today’s best-seller lists, but we are not foolish enough to value their work in accord with popularity. Yet that is precisely how the art market presently values our historic paintings. I urge you to contemplate this genuine art and seize the opportunity at hand, recognizing that the Hudson River School resonates in the third century after its creation because it is not calibrated to the whims of a time but to the measure of all that is timeless.