Time & Place

For 19th-century Americans it seemed everywhere one looked, from the tropics to the Arctic, from the Far East to the far west, to the heavens overhead, the perspective of the earth and the Universe was widening.In the plethora of names from many countries, one heroic leftover from the age of the Enlightenment loomed largest: Baron Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), the German naturalist, explorer, encyclopedist, thinker, and beatific presence in t

The Hudson River School was an landscape that dominated American art in the mid-19th century. Not an institution of artistic training, the Hudson River School was a group of like-minded landscape painters in New York City and New England. Though their styles varied, the Hudson River School painters all sought to capture the grandeur of nature in America.