Hudson River School Trilogy: A Focused Collection

This exhibition presented three views of this critical period in the history of American art, first through the eyes of collectors Alvin and Maryann Friedman, Vassar class of 1955, who have devoted themselves to collecting American art of this period since they experienced the seminal Vassar exhibition on the subject All Seasons and Every Light in 1983. Since then, they have assembled an exceptional, very focused group of paintings by the Hudson River School’s key practitioners including Frederic Edwin Church, Sanford Gifford, and Jasper Francis Cropsey, eleven of which comprise the first portion of the exhibition. Adding context to the Friedman’s collection were selections from the original Vassar collection assembled by the Reverend Elias Lyman Magoon in the mid-nineteenth century that served as the substance for All Seasons and Every Light, and a third gallery of selected Hudson River School drawings by masters such as John Frederick Kensett and Aaron Draper Shattuck in addition to Gifford, Church, and Cropsey. A catalogue, fully illustrated in color, accompanied the Friedman Collection portion of the exhibition.

The exhibition was jointly organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, and the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. There are works that appeared in this exhibition that were loans to the Loeb and therefore do not appear on this website.