Most of the finest works of the Hudson River school were painted between 1855 and 1875, after the death of its founder, Thomas Cole. During this time, artists like Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt were celebrities. When Church exhibited paintings such as Niagara or Icebergs of the North, thousands of people lined up and paid fifty cents a head to view the solitary works. The epic size of the landscapes in these paintings, unexampled in earlier American painting, reminded Americans of the vast, untamed, and magnificent wilderness of North America.
Grand Manan Island Bay of Fundy, 1852
Cross in the Wilderness, 1857
Chimborazo, 1864
View of Cotopaxi, 1857
The Andes of Ecuador, 1855
New England Scenery
Landscape with Mountain
Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, 1870
Home by the Lake, 1852