#FineArtFriday: Indian Summer on the Hudson River by Albert Bierstadt 1861

Artist: Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902)

Title: “Indian Summer on the Hudson River”

Genre: landscape painting

Date: 1861

Medium: oil on canvas

Dimensions: height: 60.9 cm (24 in); width: 104.1 cm (41 in)

What I love about this painting:

This is the quintessential autumn afternoon in New England on the Hudson River one-hundred and sixty-three years ago. The woods along the banks were old, ancient in some places. Deciduous trees like sugar maples, hornbeams, and sycamores grew along the riverbank.

In this scene, cattle are being watered while a pair of fishers pull their boat ashore, hopefully with a good catch in that basket.

One can almost hear soft splash of the occasional fish snatching waterbugs from the surface of the waters. The evening songs of the woodland birds as they settle down for the night drift across the waters. Tomorrow, the birds will take flight, heading south, while winter birds from further north will arrive and take their place.

About the artist, via Wikipedia:

Albert Bierstadt (January 7, 1830 – February 18, 1902) was a German American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. He joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion to paint the scenes. He was not the first artist to record the sites, but he was the foremost painter of them for the remainder of the 19th century.

Bierstadt was born in Prussia, but his family moved to the United States when he was one year old. He returned to study painting for several years in Düsseldorf. He became part of the second generation of the Hudson River School in New York, an informal group of like-minded painters who started painting along the Hudson River. Their style was based on carefully detailed paintings with romantic, almost glowing lighting, sometimes called luminism. Bierstadt was an important interpreter of the western landscape, and he is also grouped with the Rocky Mountain School. [1]

Credits and Attributions:

Image: Wikimedia Commons contributors, “File:Bierstadt Albert Indian Summer Hudson River.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Bierstadt_Albert_Indian_Summer_Hudson_River.jpg&oldid=837006005 (accessed October 11, 2024).

[1] Wikipedia contributors, “Albert Bierstadt,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Albert_Bierstadt&oldid=1137881139 (accessed October 10, 2024).