Drawn exclusively from the Albany Institute of History & Art's collections, Inspired Landscapes: Women of the Hudson River School features works by Susie M. Barstow (1836–1923), Julie Hart Beers (1835–1913), and Eliza Greatorex (1819–1897).
For almost two centuries, Thomas Cole—the founder of the first American school of painting, as he is often labeled—has come to personify the Hudson River School. However, we know that by the mid-decades of the nineteenth century, increasing numbers of women achieved personal and financial success as professional artists. Among them were Susie M. Barstow, Julie Hart Beers, and Eliza Greatorex. Their visions of the New York landscape showcased picturesque qualities, a romantic sensibility, and well-balanced compositions earning them fame and prominence in their day. Painting in the style of the Hudson River School, these women artists routinely sketched, hiked, and traveled to immerse themselves in American scenery; they wrote poetically of their adventures, and captured on canvas and paper the beauty and awe they encountered, inspired by the land just as were Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, and Frederic E. Church—the male canon of the Hudson River School. Working out of doors or from the comfort of their studios, these nineteenth-century women artists exhibited and sold their paintings competitively in the most prestigious academies and galleries. Barstow, Beers, and Greatorex are among the many women whose lives, careers, and creative practices necessitate a redefinition of who and what the Hudson River School was and is.
Inspired Landscapes: Women of the Hudson River School is guest curated by Dr. Nancy Siegel.
