SAINT LOUIS, MO.- The Saint Louis Art Museum presents Nature and the Nation - Hudson River School Landscape Painting from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, on view through September 11, 2005. From the late 18th century through the Civil War years, the land and its cultivation dominated American artistic and literary expression. America’s nature poets, such as William Cullen Bryant and Henry David Thoreau, used the nation’s greatest resource, its terrain, as an emblem for American freedom and democracy. Similarly, painters found the bounty of nature a subject capable of expressing the nation’s hopes and aspirations for progress.

Nature and the Nation: Hudson River School Landscape Painting from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art showcases the work of America’s first school of landscape painters. These powerful visions of the American landscape and other scenes from around the globe are a visual celebration of the nation and its potential for greatness. The exhibition was organized by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, which houses one of the world’s finest collections of Hudson River School paintings. It includes more than 50 works by 25 individual artists such as Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and Asher B. Durand.

By the 1850s, landscape painting dominated the annual exhibitions held in New York and other metropolitan centers, receiving the lion’s share of critical attention, and the seasonal travels of artists were faithfully reported in the daily newspapers. Over the course of a decade, the work of landscape painters developed into a national school centered in the Hudson River Valley. Thomas Cole, considered the founder of the Hudson River School, inspired a generation of painters with his bucolic scenes of sweeping valleys seen from mountaintops, imagined historical subjects in dramatic mountain settings, and grand visions of the pastoral countryside.

Cole and the Hudson River School painters helped to make the Catskill Mountains in New York, the White Mountains in New Hampshire, and much of New England into not only what many accepted as representative of the national landscape, but also popular tourist destinations. As urban life became increasingly frenzied, excursions into nature became a welcomed respite from the pressures of modern living. For those able to afford them, landscape paintings hung in dining rooms and parlors and became daily reminders of nature’s restorative power.

The painting of nature was certainly about national purpose, but it was also about place. By the 1860s, the boundaries of America and American interests extended far beyond the Northeast. Attracted by the distinctive terrain of the land’s many regions, artists ventured out to paint the South and the West. Bierstadt traveled on surveying trips to the Western frontier and the far reaches of the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains. Scientific exploration combined with an exploding passion for travel led some artists such as Church and Samuel Colman to explore the exotic, even primitive landscape in South America and Mexico. As the nation attempted to reassert its unity after the fierce upheaval of the Civil War, landscape painting moved beyond its earlier provincialism, embracing many lands on many continents.

Nature and the Nation: Hudson River School Landscape Painting from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art was curated by Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, Krieble curator of American painting, sculpture, and works on paper at the Wadsworth Atheneum. At the Saint Louis Art Museum, the exhibition is curated by Andrew Walker, assistant director for curatorial affairs and curator of American art, with the assistance of Emmeline Erikson, curatorial assistant in the Department of Modern Art.