Across the sea, the Hudson River School painters understood that their job was to show the sublime terrain of America to her new immigrants in order to evoke a response. And so they did, often with panoramas so large the viewer felt like they were actually standing in the paintings.

He was, at the time, “the greatest figure of the Romantic painting movement and his exploration of light, atmosphere, and color is recognized as having been an essential influence in the development of Impressionism later on.”

The Hudson River School painters were heavily influenced by and borrowed liberally from the English Romantic painter Joseph Mallord William Turner’s imagery of foreboding seas, ominous clouds, and vast landscapes. It is hard to overstate the impact Turner had on the art world in the mid- to late 1800s.

Many of these artists came to be known as the Hudson River School—“an identifying group title given to a number of mainly landscape painters working in the United States of America in the early and middle years of the nineteenth century.”6 The Hudson River School—which included Asher Brown Durand, Thomas Cole, Frederick Edwin Church, Thomas Moran,

His notes were thought triggers more than fleshed-out ideas.

Turner happened to be the tip of the spear for this revolution in British art.

by the time Turner died, “landscape painting had replaced aristocratic portraiture as the archetypal British art-form.”59

Though his later work became more disorganized, fragmented, and impressionistic, he won over many of his critics as they not only warmed to his new style but also began to admit that his work marked a shift in English painting.57 What he had initiated was undeniable, and it proved to be nothing less than the break between the classical age and mode

the “varnishing days.”