American Impressionism: The Hudson River School

America, as a relatively young country, has had to create its own art scene from the already booming French Romantic style. Regarded as “at best a brave but crude beginning and only an experiment in the evolution of realistic painting” , American Impressionism was a short-lived flash on the art scene, lasting from about 1880 up until the rising Jazz phenomena in the early 1920s. Characterized by rough brush strokes and soft pastel colors and emphasizing light and en plein air techniques, the term was first coined in 1874, when art critic Louis Leroy, mockingly called Claude Monet’s 1973 work Impression, Soleil Levant , “Impressionistic”. Going the opposite way of the Hudson River School, which focused on the idea of sublimity and power to provoke
There was some deviance after the establishment of the Hudson River School, such as the Luminists and tonalists, which helped edge American art away from idealism to realism and modernism. The Hudson River School was an art movement of landscape painters exploring the American east. Luminism was major landscape painting style of the 1850s to 1870s, but collectors, rather than the artists themselves, mostly use the term ‘luminism’. It had an intense focus on light, using sunlight to give a sense of sublimity to
The problem with the documentation of the Western Expansion can be summarized in the phrase “artistic license.” Like in Thomas Moran’s Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, Bierstadt takes some artistic license when creating a large-scale work. The size of the falls is heightened, the cliff side becomes far more jagged, and the overall scene becomes more dangerous and breathtaking. The senses become overwhelmed as the water must be loud and crashing, the valley walls trapping the roar of water and wind. In order to convey how something so far away must be producing such sounds means the falls must be larger. On the other side, you have Twachtman’s minimalistic view. Still rushing water, but everything is softer, muted, and not as grandiose. However, with the few details given, an accurate albeit bare, rendering of the