Hudson River Art

Location: Thomas Cole House (Catskill), Olana (Hudson), Woodstock Day School (Woodstock)
Contact Hours: 15
Cost: $175 (includes two lunches and one dinner)
Cutoff Date: April 2, 2009
Click here for registration form

Celebrate the Quadricentennial with an immersion into the art which helped define a nation in the Jacksonian and Antebellum periods. Participants will experience the art, ecology, geology, and history of the sublime Hudson River Valley by standing where the artists stood [and having the opportunity to paint as they did.] The art forms live on in Woodstock which became and icon for a decade in American history over a century later and nearly half a century ago. Experience the wonder.

In What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, the awarding winning book by Daniel Walker Howe, there is no mention of Hudson River Art. In response to an on-line critique about the book, Howe wrote: “Were I myself to criticize What Hath God Wrought, it would be for the neglect of art history…what fun it would have been to have included the Hudson River School of artists and link them to the Transcendentalist writers.” By contrast in Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson, David Reynolds does include Hudson River. The role of geology as a foundation for the art still tends to suffer in omission. If the only painting shown in class is American Progress, then the narrative paintings that helped define America of the Jacksonian Age, Panic of 1837, and manifest destiny are being excluded. Here is a chance to put the pieces together.

Saturday (9:00-7:30)

Olana
9:00 Welcome and Program overview
9:30 Olana: grounds walk, house tour and curriculum review
12:00 Lunch and painting
Thomas Cole House
1:00 Hudson River Art, John Howat, Metropolitan Museum
2:00 Hudson River Art Exhibition
2:45 Thomas Cole Cemetery Walk
3:30 Bus tour including painting at Catskill Mountain House and Mountain Top Historical Society
7:30 Return to Thomas Cole House

Sunday (9:00-4:00)

Woodstock Day School, Woodstock
9:00 The Torch Has Been Passed to a New Generation: The Birth of Hudson River Art, Peter Feinman
10:00 The Hudson River School: The Painting and Drawing Methods: James McElhinney
12:15 lunch
Woodstock
1:30 Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild Tour
2:45 Woodstock School of Art
4:00 End

For further information contact IHARE at 914-939-9071 or email us at: contact@ihare.org