Knights of the Brush: The Hudson River School and the Moral Landscape

NGW-Stud Hist Art, 1999. Hardcover. New/New. New oversized hardcover with forest green cloth on boards and gilt lettering to spine and front cover. New dust jacket. 4to. ( 9.98 x 0.68 x 10.2 inches) Clean text free of marks or underlining. Gorgeous color photos and illustrations on glossy heavy paper. Includes notes, selected bibliography, index and a list of photo credits. 109 pp.

Fast shipping in a secure book box mailer with tracking. This extraordinary work of cultural criticism analyzes the masterpieces of the Hudson River School, America's golden age of landscape painting that flourished from almost 1825 to 1860. Iconic works by Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Cole, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Asher Brown Durand, and others are examined in relation to the religious, moral, and aesthetic sensibility that underlies their work. For these painters there was a moral purpose in being an artist; art was a sacred obligation. Perhaps not since the Middle Ages had a school of art infused such religious certitude into works of art. William Cullen Bryant wrote, "The paintings of Cole are of that nature that it hardly transcends the proper use of language to call them acts of religion."

The paintings of the Hudson River School- idealized, transcendent, and poetic interpretations of nature- are an extraordinary fusion of Christianity, Greek, and roman culture, and American democracy. They are filled with light, the most obvious manifestation of God's presence, expressing man's harmony with nature, seen as a second chance for mankind in the new Eden of the American wilderness.

Individual chapters on Seeing, Virtue, Chivalry, Spirituality, Beauty, Nature Eden, Civilization, Architecture, Standards, America, History, Western Civilization, Order, and Renewal relate these themes to the cultural crisis confronted by America today and to the cultural renewal called for by the author was we enter the twenty-first century.