The Hudson River School of Art

by Kathleen L. Maher

Anyone who knows me, knows I love my home state of New York. I love to explore its history and often-untold stories, and share my love for all things New York. In addition to being a lover of history, I am also an erstwhile artist, and for me, to have all of these elements come together is a rare and special treat. I hope you enjoy this peek into a special time and place in American history.

Thomas Cole

In the early to mid 1800's, there arose a group of artists that loved to paint in the Hudson River valley, the Catskill Mountains, and the Adirondacks, to capture its grand landscapes and unspoiled beauty. Thomas Cole is considered to be the father of this realistic style marked by European romanticism and luminism, an emphasis on lighting effects.  It is a celebration of the wild, rugged, and picturesque, and an attempt to capture on canvas the grand scale of sweeping scenery.

The Hudson River school wasn't an actual place of study in the literal sense of a school, but rather an association of like-minded artists in one region at one place in time. The second generation of artists influenced by this school took their canvas and bushes to other places, such as the American West.

Albert Bierstadt

Albert Bierstadt is one such artist who employed the aesthetics of this movement at the perfect point in time to capture the American West and translate it to those back east in a way that approximated its larger than life majesty. Bierstadt traveled with surveyors and advance parties during the Westward Expansion of our country, in the 1850's at the dawn of rail travel and before photography had its full capacity. 

His art was so captivating it helped persuade the American people of the value of acquiring and settling these lands.His detailed paintings inhabited canvases often twelve or more feet across and six to eight feet tall, inviting the viewer to step into a scene that they could almost touch and taste and feel. How does one translate the size of a redwood tree to one who has never seen its spectacle? Or the peaks of the Sierra Nevadas, the panorama of the Great Plains? Bierstadt reproduces in almost photo realism the tiniest detail such as trout in a translucent pool, the individual leaves on a tree, and the shimmer of sunlight on water, all the while immersing the spectator in a scope that overwhelms the senses. 

Outlet at :Lake Tahoe by Albert Bierstadt

Another of the important Hudson River School artists includes Frederic Edwin Church. Church was born into privilege as the son of a jeweler and banker. His father's largess convinced the acclaimed aforementioned Hudson School founder Thomas Cole to take Frederic into his tutelage, and soon the student proved himself an artist of international merit. Church painted not only the New York and New England landscapes, but went on to accompany naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt to South America. He is known for the scope and exactitude of his landscapes. Later, he would travel to Greenland to paint great icebergs in the North Atlantic, and later still, the Holy Land and the ancient world.

Niagara Falls by Frederic Edwin Church 

I can almost feel the mist rising off the falls, smell the fresh air gusting up from the plunge, hear the roar of the tons of water pounding the river below. The play of light in the hazy sky and through the translucent water, the artist's depiction of sun refracting in the water droplets suspended in the atmosphere almost defies human capacity. It would be many years before a camera could approximate the same affects. 

The Catskills by Asher B Durand

The last artist in my spotlight is Asher Brown Durand. In addition to being an engraver and portrait artist, Durand earned a stellar reputation as a naturalist landscape artist, depicting "masterpieces of organic verisimilitude." Taking great influence from the European masters, Durand also received enlightenment from the plein air experience, leaving the controlled production of the studio to capture landscape art as it really was, painting in nature. His dark to light dynamic creates a drama that draws the eye to focal points and shimmering points of interest in his compositions. Up close, you can see the moss growing on old roots and lichen clinging to tree trunks. No detail is lost. 

In my new novella releasing October 1 with Barbour Books' collection Lessons on Love, a Hudson River town is my setting during this approximate time period when these artists roamed the foothills and valleys and mountains of undeveloped New York State. "Something Old, Something New" tells the story of Gilda Jacobs, a young Jewish schoolmistress who must partner with Joshua Blake, a protege of New York revivalist Charles Grandison Finney, to meet the Christian curriculum requirements of the largely Dutch population of the town. It was a joy to imagine the lush natural beauty of Gilda and Joshua's world through the lens of these New York State artists. 

Kathleen L. Maher’s first crush was Peter Rabbit, and she’s loved conflicted heroes ever since. She has two novellas in BARBOUR BOOKS' collections: Victorian Christmas Brides and Lessons on Love. Winner 2012 ACFW Genesis Award. Author of Sons of the Shenandoah Series: The Abolitionist's Daughter and The Chaplain's Daughter.
Kathleen and her husband live in an old farmhouse in upstate NY with their children and a small menagerie.

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Pro-life and Pro-Woman--the Early Feminists

by Kathleen L. Maher

March is Women's History Month, and Heroes, Heroines and History honors the pioneers of Women's Rights. 

https://goo.gl/images/w7XJfS

In a previous post I wrote about Rachel Gleason, a pioneering female doctor who championed women's health. (see post here) Dr. Gleason was only the fourth woman in the US to earn her MD, and she was arguably the very first to devote her practice to women's unique health issues. Her contemporaries, many of them personal friends and acquaintances, were suffragettes, some who stayed at her health resort and were active in New York State for women's causes. They all shared a common view of an issue that has been gaining headlines regarding women's health, a view that has been lost or forgotten over the generations as fundamental to women's rights. They all felt a moral reprehension toward abortion.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton began activism as an abolitionist, married to an abolitionist. But women had a limited voice to champion this worthy cause in her day, which frustrated her enough to begin what would become the birth of the women's movement in Seneca Falls. Stanton was steadfastly against abortion. "Let woman assert herself in all her native purity, dignity, and strength and end this wholesale suffering and murder of helpless children. With centuries of degradation, we have so little of true womanhood, that the world has but the faintest glimmering of what a woman is or should be.” In another instance, she wrote, "The social system is too corrupt, it would certainly seem, long to survive. Infanticide is on the increase to an extent inconceivable. "

Stanton and Anthony

Stanton, along with Susan B. Anthony, published a magazine called The Revolution, the official voice of National Women Suffrage Association whose motto read: “The True Republic–Men, their rights and nothing more; Women, their rights and nothing less.” In more than one instance, The Revolution stated Stanton and Anthony's stance on abortion. This passage from The Revolution indicates not just another early female doctor's disdain for the practice, but the editor's views on it as well.

Dr. Charlotte Lozier of 323 W. 34th St., of this city [New York], was applied to last week by man pretending to be from South Carolina, by the name, Moran, as he also pretended, to procure an abortion on a very pretty young girl apparently about 18 years old. The doctor assured him that he’d come to the wrong place for any such a shameful, revolting, unnatural and unlawful purpose. She proffered to the young woman any assistance in her power to render, at the proper time, and cautioned and counseled her against the fearful act which she and her attendant (whom she called her cousin) proposed.

Another article in The Revolution entitled “Child Murder” has been attributed by some scholars to Susan B. Anthony. It reads:

Guilty? Yes no matter what the motive, love of ease, or desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death; but oh! Thrice guilty is he who, for selfish gratification, heedless of her prayers, indifferent to her fate, drove her to the desperation which impels her to the crime.
Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female physician, held a deep respect for life in the womb, of which she said "we can only regard with reverent admiration."  She also held repulsion for the abortionist's trade, and renounced a woman named Madame Restell performing illegal abortions in New York.

"The gross perversion and destruction of motherhood by the abortionist filled me with indignation, and awakened active antagonism. That the honorable term ‘female physician’ should be exclusively applied to those women who carried on this shocking trade seemed to me a horror. It was an utter degradation of what might and should become a noble position for women."

These are but a few direct quotes spoken or written by the heroines and champions of suffrage and women's rights. Other indications of their stance against abortion can be felt through their refusal to accept revenue through abortifacient/pessary advertisement dollars, and their definition of "voluntary motherhood" to mean a married woman's right to abstinence rather than termination of a pregnancy. These women understood that motherhood was a beautiful and honorable role, to be cherished and protected rather than regarded as an inconvenience or grudging obligation. In fact, to these early activists, to sacrifice the sacredness of the maternal role for career and ambition was to lose the identity of femininity itself. 

Louisa May Alcott, famous for her Civil War era novel Little Women, wrote the following to the editor of The Boston Daily Journal: 

The assertion that suffragists do not care for children and prefer notoriety to the joys of maternity is so fully contradicted by the lives of the women who are trying to make the world a safer place for both sons and daughters, that no defense is needed. Having spent my own life from fifteen to fifty, loving and laboring for children, as teacher, nurse, storyteller and guardian, I know whereof I speak.

These historic voices continue in the true cause of women's freedoms over 100 years later, and the diligent scholar will take in the full counsel of their wisdom. No freedom is won at the sacrifice of another, even the dependent child of one's womb. As we celebrate Women's History Month, let us embrace their message of equal rights for every woman, born and unborn.

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Kathleen L. Maher has had an infatuation with books and fictional heroes ever since her preschool crush, Peter Rabbit. Barbour’s best-selling 2018 Victorian Christmas Brides collection includes her novella “Love Brick by Brick”, featuring her hometown of Elmira, New York. Her debut historical, Bachelor Buttons 2013 blends her Irish heritage and love of the American Civil War. She won the 2012 ACFW Genesis contest for her Civil War story, The Abolitionist’s Daughter: Book 1 in Sons of the Shenandoah Series released summer 2018. Book 2 The Chaplain’s Daughter will be available spring 2019. Her novella “Something Old, Something New” releases Oct 2019 with Barbour’s school teacher romance collection Lessons on Love. Kathleen shares an old farmhouse in upstate New York with her husband, children, and a small zoo of beloved pets.

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