The Hudson River School has long been 'at home' in the New-York Historical Society. New-York Historical's first membership diploma was engraved around 1821 by Asher B. Durand. The 1858 deposit of Luman Reed’s pioneering collection of American art brought iconic landscapes by Thomas Cole and Durand to the New-York Historical Society’s Museum. Gifts by Durand’s family in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century assembled a collection of more than 375 works by the artist, making New-York Historical the primary Durand repository. Robert L. Stuart’s collection further enriched the collections with works by these artists and with stellar landscapes by Jasper Cropsey and John F. Kensett.
Works selected from these holdings, as well as landscapes by Jervis McEntee, Francis A Silva, and portraits of Hudson River School "Founders," Cole and Durand, will enrich Hudson River School Highlights, twenty-five paintings on view in the Luman Reed Galleries. Of particular interest are over half a dozen of Durand’s famous Studies from Nature and two of his extraordinary full scale sepia landscape cartoons.