The Hudson River School matured during years when European romanticism had significant influence on American arts and culture. Romanticism was an approach to understanding the world and humankind’s place in it. Unlike the Enlightenment that searched for order and knowledge through empirical observations, romanticism emphasized the self, one’s feelings and emotions, and it attempted to discover an essential spirituality in nature.
The American writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson called for the self-discovery of spiritual truths in his essay Nature (1836), which became one of the seminal works of American Transcendentalism, an offshoot of European romanticism. In a well-known passage, Emerson likened himself to a transparent eyeball, observing and becoming part of the world around him. Many Hudson River School artists captured the contemplative mood that Emerson expressed in his metaphor. Calm, quiet landscapes of still lakes, reflective sunlight, and lone figures observing nature attempt to transcend the physical structure of nature to uncover the eternal and divine.
Romanticism likewise valued emotions of fear and dread, an aesthetic known as the sublime. Nature in its most violent moments—storms, volcanic eruptions, threatening waves—forced observers to sense their own insignificance, their own mortality, and discover higher truths. The Scottish philosopher Archibald Alison maintained that human beings experienced different moods in nature through associations. In his Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790), a work widely read in America, Alison made the following observation of an autumn scene: “The leaves begin then to drop from the trees; the flowers and shrubs, with which the fields were adorned in the summer months, decay; the woods and groves are silent . . . Who is there, who, at this season, does not feel his mind impressed with a sentiment of melancholy?”
Spiritual truths and transcendence to a higher state of being could be witnessed and experienced through all that nature placed before the American people. Hudson River School paintings captured the emotional and contemplative forces found in the American landscape.