Using what you have learned about Frederick Law Olmsted from the readings and the videos, discuss the similarities and differences that the view of nature that underlies his design of the park has with that of the artists of the Hudson River School, or Washington Irving, or transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, or Walt Whitman.
Author: David Hoffman
Hudson River School
In the middle of the nineteenth century painters such as Asher Brown Durand (1796-1886), Thomas Cole (1801-1848) and Fredric Edwin Church (1826-1900) popularized landscapes that emphasized the romantic, sublime, and fantastic aspects of New York’s Hudson River Valley and other areas of wilderness. Many of the same aesthetics are played out in the stories of Washington Irving and embody a view of nature that is harmonious with that of transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Below are a couple a Cole’s paintings. For further reading follow this link to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s online exhibit of Hudson River School Artists in its collection.
Thomas Cole, “The Titian’s Goblet” (1833)
Thomas Cole, “The Oxbow View” (1836)
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Self Introduction
Write a paragraph or two to introduce yourself. You can talk about where you live; films, novels or music that you like; your family, friends, and pets; your dream job; or similar topics of your own choosing.
Order and Disorder
Write about a surprising or interesting thing that you learned from the segment of the New York documentary that you just watched that has not been mentioned in a previous response. Why did you find it striking?