`American Splendor' celebrates the natural look

HARTFORD -- Returning from one of his invigorating rambles through the Catskills, the artist Thomas Cole declared: ``The painter of American scenery has, indeed, privileges superior to any other. All nature here is new to art."

The first European colonists found North America's dark woods haunted by ``savages" and witches, but for Cole and his 19th-century artist pals, who would become known as the Hudson River School, the wilderness offered, as Cole wrote, ``prospects mighty and sublime." And that, too, is a good way to describe ``American Splendor: Hudson River School Masterworks From the Wadsworth Atheneum Collection," at the Hartford museum through Dec. 31.

Colonial American art had been dominated by portraits of bigwigs, but the Hudson River painters, fueled by cultural nationalism, created the nation's first significant school of landscape painting. The school got its name from the Hudson River Valley in upstate New York, where they often spent their summers prospecting for sights to transform into ravishing canvases in Manhattan studios each winter. But they ranged through New England as well, and as far south as the Caribbean and Latin America. Others tagged along with government expeditions surveying the West. They were the sort of mutton-chopped romantics who found nothing more enchanting than being caught in a downpour.

In Cole's 1827 ``View in the White Mountains," sun spotlights a pioneer with an ax over his shoulder walking up a dirt road puddled by the previous night's rain. In the distance, a river snakes through a valley below shadowy peaks and snow-capped Mount Washington. Here Cole is pioneering the Hudson River look: precisely observed vast wildernesses, often amalgamations of various landscapes, carved out by deft use of light.

A favorite subject was Niagara Falls. Though populated by tourist hotels by 1820, it epitomized the group's reverence for the wonders of untamed nature. In Thomas Chambers's ``Niagara Falls" (c. 1835), a winning but uncharacteristically folksy Hudson River painting, a frontiersman perches on a boulder amid the cotton-ball mist at the foot of the torrent. Chambers simplifies the scene, reducing it to its distinctive elements, like a memory of the place.

Curator Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser highlights the group's affiliations with Atheneum founder Daniel Wadsworth and Hartford collector Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt. Wadsworth set up Hartford native Frederic Edwin Church as Cole's apprentice. And according to Cole, ``Church has the finest eye for drawing in the world."

Church's 4-foot-by-7-foot panorama ``Vale of St. Thomas, Jamaica" (1867), a commission from Colt, exemplifies the spectacles Hudson River painters created at the movement's zenith. You look down an overgrown mountainside to a wide river meandering through a lush valley. Rain pours down at the left, obscuring the sun. A church on a hill in the distance seems the only sign of humanity. You can just look and look at the endless details, up and down the peaks, along the river, as if you're hovering on the updrafts with the birds.

Some artists, inspired by Transcendentalism and chastened by the Civil War, adopted a more meditative tone. Sanford Robinson Gifford's 1866 ``A Passing Storm in the Adirondacks" shows cattle drinking from a lazy river in pastures at the foot of mountain peaks reaching toward clearing skies. He derived the calm composition from sketches he penciled during an 1863 trip, but the clearly focused center and blurry edges suggest the influence of photography, the new invention threatening to supplant the group's realistic brand of painting.

Albert Bierstadt continued to produce stunning landscapes that rivaled Church's work. A trio of California scenes depicts wide slow rivers, sheer misty cliffs, snowy peaks, and tumbling waterfalls. ``We are now here in the garden of Eden," he proclaimed of an 1863 trip to Yosemite. It's a sentiment that runs back to the Puritans and remains engrained in American responses to nature today. Ultimately the Hudson River School was an art of nostalgia, warning of the pure New World being lost in an increasingly urban and industrial nation.

Interest in the style waned as the 19th century wound down. American artists and patrons, released from the Civil War and still feeling culturally insecure, turned their attention to the Old World. In France, Edouard Manet and the Impressionists were leading an artistic revolution that celebrated busy city streets and bustling cafes, steaming trains and landscapes embroidered with bridges. It was the art of the future.