News
April 20, 2018Rethinking the Hudson River School
Art Historian Timothy Barringer will discuss American landscape painting and explore the history of the term Hudson River School in a special lecture on April 29, 2018
Landscape with Deer, James M. Hart (1828-1901), 1856, oil on canvas, gift of Ledyard Cogswell Jr., 1948.32.2
On Sunday, April 29 at 2pm, Timothy Barringer will be at the Albany Institute of History & Art to present a special lecture called “American Landscape Painting and ‘the Newly Invented Stigma’: Rethinking the Hudson River School”. Dr. Barringer is a Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. He is contributing an essay to the Albany Institute of History & Art’s upcoming book on its American landscape painting collection (to be published in 2018). The lecture is open to the public and included with museum admission. Space is limited. Seats are available on a first-come, first-served basis. Attendees will receive a wristband at the admission desk the day of the lecture.
The “Hudson River School” has come to suggest a much-loved and respected group of American artists; but the history of the term offers some surprises. Art Historian Timothy Barringer will explore the strange history of the term “Hudson River School,” which was used to criticize art that was considered old fashioned and provincial. So why do we still use it? This lecture considers the possibility of describing American landscape painting in other ways that might do justice to the panoramic richness and ambition, as represented in the collections of the Albany Institute.
More about Timothy Barringer: Barringer specializes in eighteenth – twentieth century art of Britain and the British Empire, in addition to nineteenth century American and German art, and museum studies. He received his B.A. from the University of Cambridge and his M.A. from New York University, before going on to receive his Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Sussex. His recent scholarship includes the 2018 exhibitions Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (January 30-May 13, 2018) and Picturesque and Sublime: Thomas Cole’s Trans-Atlantic Inheritance at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site (May 1-November 4, 2018).
