Founding Collection: Hudson Valley Landscape Ptgs

The Loeb's founding collection of nineteenth-century American landscape paintings is a nationally significant resource for understanding the artistic movement colloquially known as the Hudson River School. What is problematic moniker gets right is the roots of this phenomenon in the Loeb's own geographic surroundings, New York's Hudson Valley. From approximately 1825 to 1875, the young United States saw a surge in the production and consumption of realist representations of the natural world. This "landscape boom" was built upon a particular confluence of ambitious painters and dramatic scenic potential in the the region, with ready access to the professional outlets of New York City, including the National Academy of Design and the Tenth Street Studio Building. A representative selection of key objects from the Loeb's collection reveals characteristic practices and preoccupations of dominant figures in this diffuse artistic movement that has had a lasting impact. These works also offer one of the strongest platforms in American academic museums in which to raise up unheralded creative stories from this fertile period.