The Hudson River began to figure prominently in the artistic consciousness of the nineteenth century when painter Thomas Cole journeyed up its waters in the summer of 1825. The canvases inspired by that trip made his reputation. He settled at Catskill on the Hudson and became the model for other American landscape painters, thus launching the Hudson River School and its romantic, idealized vision of the American landscape.

The river elicited some of these painters' greatest works, and became an iconic emblem for artists and their public alike.

In this volume, lavishly illustrated with more than seventy-five color plates, Driscoll surveys the ideas, events, and figures of the Hudson River School movement and explores the diversity of nineteenth-century Romantic American landscape painting. Highlighted in these pages are works by sixty artists, including such well-known figures as Thomas Cole, John F. Kensett, Sanford Gifford, Frederic Church, William Trost Richards, and Worthington Whittredge.

The work of many lesser-known artists is also brought to light, including that of women such as Eliza Greatorex, Mrs. A.T. Oakes, and Laura Woodward; forgotten masters John H. Carmiencke and Regis Gignoux; and the most illustrious African-American artist associated with the school, Robert Duncanson.