“If ever I should wish for a retreat, whither I might steal from the world and its distractions, and dream quietly away the remnant of a troubled life, I know of none more promising than this little valley.” —Washington Irving, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
“Autumn on the Hudson River” by Jasper Francis Cropsey
The traveler who takes the Hudson Line commuter train out of Manhattan will soon see the city vanish and the scene shift to the bucolic beauty of the Hudson River. It’s an enchanted stretch of land dotted with scenic towns with poetic names: Marble Hill, Riverdale, Dobbs Ferry, Hastings-on-Hudson, Yonkers, Irvington—named for Washington Irving, the early American writer who lived in and loved this region. We visit certain parts of the United States for their significance in our political or civil history, but I suppose no other region of the country (excepting New England, perhaps) has a comparable claim to being the cradle of our artistic and cultural heritage. It was in the rural counties surrounding New York City that one of our greatest contributions to visual art, the Hudson River School of painting, was born. And a number of authors of note, including Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and James Fenimore Cooper, lived in this region and to varying degrees incorporated its scenes and magic into their writings.
The Hudson River painters—there were well over a dozen of them, all taking their lead from the English-born Thomas Cole—fostered a distinctly American spiritual imagination. To quote the art historian James F. Cooper, “the spiritual imagination—which sees the sacred in ordinary life—was part of the American experience from the beginning.” The Hudson River painters depicted the local landscape in a way that suggested the majesty of God dwelling just beyond the visible universe. They did this in their handling of receding space, suggesting the infinite and transcendent, and the dramatic interplay of darkness and light. The result was a distinctly American interpretation to the Romantic sublime and America’s first real artistic movement. At a time when intellectual Europeans scoffed at the very possibility of America producing art or beauty, the Hudson School created an outpouring of beauty worthy of any country. It was an aesthetic uniquely American, based on hope in a bountiful land blessed by Providence but also aware that our world below is dark without the inspiring light of Heaven.
One of the many scenic spots along the river, the village of Hastings-on-Hudson, became the home of one of the Hudson School’s leading lights, Jasper Francis Cropsey. Cropsey’s gorgeous and spiritually charged depictions of the surrounding landscape—such as Autumn on the Hudson River—are among the Hudson School’s finest works. Not satisfied with landscape alone, Cropsey branched out into pictures of allegorical and moral import such as The Spirit of War and The Spirit of Peace. So did Thomas Cole, the founder of the group, who lived much further up the river at Catskill; his famous allegorical cycle of paintings The Voyage of Life has immense visionary power. Both Cole and Cropsey showed that landscape and the beauty of nature could be more than a “pretty picture” but could also express symbolic and moral meaning—could teach and instruct. The same went for Asher B. Durand, Frederic Church, and the other painterly inhabitants of the Valley: skeptical of material progress and the industrial revolution, they celebrated the purity of unspoiled nature.
A few miles up the river from Cropsey’s home in Hastings-on-Hudson lived Washington Irving, America’s first professional man of letters, in a cottage near Tarrytown. The Moorish-cum-Dutch-style home, Sunnyside, receives hundreds of visitors every year to this day. Irving acted as a bridge from Europe to America and from the Age of Reason to the Age of Romanticism. His stories (he is often considered the “father of the short story”) have a solid moral core, a gentle humor, delicious prose, and often an innate conservatism. According to the professor Gene Edward Veith, Rip Van Winkle’s long sleep suggests that “twenty years of change is not necessarily for the better,” while another critic comments that Irving withdrew from the realities of the world of his time into the traditions and legends of the past. (Irving’s stint of public service, as ambassador to Spain, was uneventful and mainly served as a chance to soak up the old country’s folktales.) New York Staters in those days viewed their neighbors to the north, the New Englanders, as obsessed with business and progress and always on the move, in contrast with their own more settled and conservative traditions. In “The Devil and Tom Walker,” a story set not in the Hudson Valley but in Boston, Irving warned his fellow Americans to beware the trap of easy money and success—not to compromise moral values in the pursuit of utilitarian ends.
Such stories as “Rip,” “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and “Tom Walker” taught Americans in the young republic that they already had a history and a folklore—a usable past. Irving recorded and preserved the folkways of the original Dutch inhabitants of the Hudson Valley, nostalgically preserving an obsolescent way of life. Irving’s literary imagination was formative for several generations of Americans and influenced such later writers as Hawthorne and Twain. With his tales blending the supernatural with everyday life, Irving helped create a distinctive American form of Romanticism in literature, just as the Hudson artists did in painting. It’s for good reason that about thirty years ago, Tarrytown’s sister village North Tarrytown renamed itself Sleepy Hollow in honor of Irving’s most evocative tale.
Today, in a world widely denuded of beauty, the work of the Hudson artists and writers speaks to us with particular force. Frederick Turner has commented of the Hudson School painters that they “saw in nature an inner truth, a beauty that was a warrant of its goodness.”
Traveling in the Hudson Valley—which I try to do twice a year, amid the flaming foliage of autumn and the sparse blossoms of early spring—the workaday world seems to disappear and history and art come to life. One leaves city squalor behind and finds a purer and calmer world. It wouldn’t be out of place, it seems to me, to call it our Tuscany, a place where a wonderful cultural energy was released and an earthly landscape gives us a portal to the sublime. One can relive the Hudson Valley culture and spirit on the page or in the museum, but that can’t compare with being there where everything—nature and art—came together. Here the Hudson School paintings come to life before your eyes, and as darkness falls you recollect Ichabod Crane’s fateful ride.
Marvelous as it may seem today, there was once in America a creative fraternity based on a shared spiritual and cultural vision; yet it happened, in the Hudson Valley, and both its works and the land that inspired it can be experienced anew.
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The featured image is “Autumn On the Hudson River” (1860) by Jasper Francis Cropsey. This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the National Gallery of Art and is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.