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# If one is to recall how American painting began and what it portended, one must name the country's first major artistic movement, the Hudson River School
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/esli-vspominat-s-chego-nachalas-amerikanskaia-zhivopis-i-chto-ona-predveshchala-nado-nazvat-pervoe-krupnoe-khudozhestvennoe-dvizhenie-strany-shkolu-reki-gudzon/
- Published: 2026-07-03T09:23:27.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:25:43.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Art, Observations, New York, Nature

If one is to recall how American painting began and what it portended, one must name the country's first major artistic movement, the Hudson River School. Its voice is usually presented as a hymn to untouched nature. But can you really not sense the anxiety in these majestic landscapes? Anxiety about the coming industrialisation, the tread of empire and the inevitable ruin of the land.

The school began with a waterfall, painted in 1826 by the twenty-five-year-old engraver Thomas Cole, from Lancashire in England. It was Kaaterskill Falls, a cascade in the Catskill Mountains, in the northern Appalachians, in the south-eastern part of New York State, which unexpectedly embodied a kind of declaration of independence from the academies of London and Paris. Staid colonial painting, with its classical subjects and European portraiture, simply shrivelled before a canvas of wild nature. Having neither European cathedrals nor ruins, the young republic presented a landscape that is older than humankind by millions of years.

As early as 1757, in his treatise on the sublime, Edmund Burke wrote that the truly sublime inspires not tenderness but astonishment bordering on terror. And the American landscape, in which one can sense smoke on the horizon and the woodcutter's axe, literally embodied this idea.