Traveling the Hudson River Valley With Art as a Guide - The New York Times

Skip to contentSkip to site indexTravel|What Did the Hudson River School Painters See?https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/25/travel/hudson-valley-painting-thomas-cole-frederic-church.htmlShare full article225What Did the Hudson River School Painters See?Artists like Thomas Cole and Frederic Church left us evidence of what America’s landscape was like 200 years ago. Using science, and art history, a writer follows their trail through the Hudson River Valley to better understand how our world has changed.An aerial view of Olana, Frederic Church’s home in the Hudson Valley. The estate inspired the preservation of nearly 3,000 acres of land within its viewshed.What Did the Hudson River School Painters See?Artists like Thomas Cole and Frederic Church left us evidence of what America’s landscape was like 200 years ago. Using science, and art history, a writer follows their trail through the Hudson River Valley to better understand how our world has changed.An aerial view of Olana, Frederic Church’s home in the Hudson Valley. The estate inspired the preservation of nearly 3,000 acres of land within its viewshed.Credit...Supported bySKIP ADVERTISEMENTShare full article225By Kim BeilVisuals by Tony CenicolaPublished May 25, 2026Updated May 26, 2026The American art scene changed indelibly when Thomas Cole took a sketching trip to the Hudson Valley in 1825. Cole’s finished paintings were unusual. His subjects weren’t the saw-toothed Alps, nor the Italian countryside decorated with ancient ruins. Suddenly, the Catskills’ stair-step skyline, its emerald forests, its silver-mirror creeks, its waterfalls and awesome clouds were art. This, finally, was American landscape art.Frederic Church, who was born one year later — 200 years ago this month — and would later become Cole’s student, made his own name as a painter of dramatic, distant landscapes, but he always returned to the Catskills. When his monumental 10-foot-wide painting, “Heart of the Andes,” sold in 1859 for the record-breaking sum of $10,000, Church used the proceeds to purchase a farm in Hudson, N.Y. The grounds included a spot called Red Hill, where he had gone sketching as a young man. Eventually, he acquired a total 250 acres in the area and built an estate called Olana, all of which is now preserved as a historic site.VideoAn oil sketch by Frederic Church of Olana as seen from the southeast, and a current photograph of the property, which is now a historic landmark.CreditCredit...The New York Historical SocietyAs someone who grew up in upstate New York, and then became an art historian, I knew these stories, but perhaps too well. I rushed past the period during graduate school to get to the shocks of the new — to modernism and photography.The thing that finally called me back to this landscape, and the artists who came to be known as the Hudson River School, was an unusual paper published recently in an ecology journal. The authors proposed using 150-year-old paintings to study environmental change. Historical ecology examines the interaction of nature and human beings over time, and the paper showed that some paintings could provide trustworthy information about shifts in biodiversity and forest complexity.But the authors, who came from the worlds of science and art history, weren’t just flattening art into data; understanding what the artists were doing, and why, was essential to the analysis.It was energizing to feel as if the arts had collided with environmental science — and that the paintings themselves could contribute.Searching for a Painted PastWith the help of the Hudson River School Art Trail, I mapped out an afternoon’s drive through the landscape made famous by paintings. I started along Catskill Creek, where Church had drawn Cole’s son against a background of lush summer growth. In early March, I found myself in the gray gravelly parking lot of an auto detailing shop, straining to see the water under a bridge.ImageNorth-South Lake was painted by the Hudson River painter Thomas Cole and is now a popular spot for camping.I’d dreamed I could step directly into the past, like Rip Van Winkle in reverse. Washington Irving’s short story was published in 1819, its Catskills’ magic an intoxicating lure for visitors. But as Church and Cole knew, you didn’t have to fall asleep for 20 years to notice changes in the region. Subtle shifts, whether meteorological or geographical, often inspire painters to revisit the same views. Change is also the reason that Hudson River School paintings may be useful to ecologists today.The engine of my rental car strained when I turned into the mountains, following Kaaterskill Creek toward the site of the former Catskill Mountain House. I parked at North-South Lake, which in another century had been a popular painting spot. Now, at least in summer, it’s a popular campground. As I walked the quiet, wooded trail, icicles melted, and a white-tailed deer shaded silently into a background of trees.VideoCatskill Mountain House, seen in a photograph from 1875, was perched on an escarpment above the Hudson River Valley and was a favorite spot of painters. It burned down in the 1960s.CreditCredit...The New York Historical SocietyThe colonnaded Greek Revival hotel no longer stands, but in period illustrations it appears to hover perilously on a cliff overlooking the broad valley. Despite the stupendous view, I was transfixed by the graffiti at my feet: 200 years of names and dates chiseled into the red rock, looking uncannily like a giant gravestone. I searched for Church and Cole until I realized that their names were already everywhere else in this landscape.Nearby trails lead to other painting sites, Artist’s Rock, Sunset Rock, and the shocking 260-foot drop of Kaaterskill Falls, the highest two-tiered waterfall in the state. Far below, there’s the Hudson Valley with its farms and orchards, but also its auto detailing shops and parking lots. I kept wondering: What part of this is art? What part is nature?Surveying the UnderstoryDana Warren, the lead author of the ecology paper and a professor at Oregon State University, is an irrepressible presence, even on a Zoom screen. When we spoke before my trip, his strawberry blonde hair faintly glowed in his sunny office.VideoThomas Cole’s 1826 painting of Kaaterskill Falls and the falls today.CreditCredit...The New York Historical SocietyDr. Warren told me he’d been dreaming of a project like this ever since graduate school at Cornell University, in Ithaca, N.Y., 20 years ago. There, he was studying the effect of woody debris on forest streams. But, he said, because there is little old-growth forest left in the Northeast, he struggled to identify a “reference condition,” or historical benchmark, against which he could compare his contemporary data.When Dr. Warren saw the work of the Hudson River School painters, he was “jazzed,” because they had painted some of the more distant reaches of the Adirondacks and the Catskills before those forests were logged. But when he proposed using art in his study, a senior faculty member dismissed the idea, telling him, “You can’t trust any of it.”Typically, even art historians resist the idea of using paintings as objective documents. Instead, we prefer to emphasize the artist’s personal vision, their unique way of filtering the objective world through subjective experience. If the artist simply copies the landscape, where’s the art?ImageCatskill Creek, where Church drew Thomas Cole’s grandson against a background of summer growth. It was Eleanor Jones Harvey, a senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, who ultimately affirmed Dr. Warren’s hunch — and, later, convinced me — that there might be a middle ground between these hardened ways of thinking. It’s true that this group of painters sometimes set invented scenes in familiar places or brought distant features close together in composite views. But, she told me, the sketches some of them made from nature were “grounded in accurate observation.”Dr. Warren’s enthusiasm doubled when I asked if he could talk me through the artwork used in the study. His slides filled my screen. It could have been an art history lecture, except his annotations highlighted areas of forest complexity and canopy variability instead of vanishing points and compositional strategies.The benefit of using artwork for historical studies, Dr. Warren explained, is that they can show what’s happening in the forest as a total system. Other historical forest-ecology research tends to rely on “witness trees,” large canopy trees that were recorded by surveyors as property boundaries in the colonial era. Dr. Warren said, “There’s a lot more to a forest than dominant canopy trees.”VideoThomas Cole’s 1845 painting of Catskill Creek, and the same view today.CreditCredit...The New York Historical SocietyFrom one of the paintings, on the other hand, he said, “you get a much better sense of the full forest structure,” including dead wood on the forest floor and in streams, the presence of lichens, mosses and understory vegetation.It’s easy, Dr. Warren told me, for a casual observer to look at a forest and think that it looks “old and big,” so therefore it must be healthy. But recovery from disturbances, whether centuries of logging, farming or major storms, takes a long time. “It’s a multicentury process,” Dr. Warren explained. “We need the capacity to look over these longer time scales.”Being able to see the past helps scientists, as well as the general public, escape what’s known in ecology as “shifting baseline syndrome” — the tendency of each new generation to accept the current state of the environment as normal.Meandering Through a MasterpieceOn a warm early-spring morning I was met at the foot of Red Hill by two representatives of the Olana Partnership, which oversees the historical buildings and 250 acres jointly with the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation: Sean Sawyer, the president, and Mark Prezorski, a senior vice president and landscape curator.ImageChurch laid out a series of carriage roads through his property, which many consider to be his most expansive work of art. A recently opened visitor center at Red Hill evokes Church’s own first experience of this site and provides a fitting place to start a tour.Although Olana has long been known for the eclectic home that Church built here, the Olana Partnership has been working steadily to restore the grounds, which many consider to be Church’s last and most expansive work of art. When I visited, the pleasant weather had coaxed spring peepers out of Olana’s wetlands and pairs of walkers onto the property’s five miles of carriage trails, which are open every day, from 8 a.m. until sunset.When Church acquired the property, he set out to restore some of the cleared hillsides by planting native trees. As Mr. Prezorski drove us through Church’s forest in one of the Park’s open-sided electric vehicles, he said, “We sometimes refer to this as an experiential work of art. Moving through it is how you understand it.”Dr. Sawyer chimed in from the back seat: “You’re basically looking over Church’s shoulder.”It was the legacy of Church’s artwork that ultimately helped protect this landscape — and much more. But the hero of the conservation story isn’t one of the massive paintings for which the artist was famous. It’s a small oil sketch of the view in winter, sleeping under snow and blue shadows, and still on view at Olana today.ImageThe Rip Van Winkle Bridge crosses the Hudson not far from Olana. In 1973, the Power Authority of the State of New York revealed plans to construct a nuclear power plant across the river from Olana. Residents and Olana supporters vigorously opposed it. One of the pieces of evidence entered into their case was Church’s snowy landscape, supporting the argument that the nuclear plant would disrupt the historic “view shed,” or the area that can be seen from a particular vantage point. Eventually, the nuclear project was scrapped. Since then, nearly 3,000 acres visible from Olana have been protected, largely thanks to conservation easements in support of viewshed protection.As Dr. Warren, the forest ecologist, told me, you have to be able to see the past in order to understand where you stand today. At the end of my visit, a storm pressed over the skyline, blending the mountains with a blue-gray wash. Comparing this view with Church’s many painted perspectives of it, I could feel the artist feverishly updating his own “baseline,” as still greater changes gathered on the horizon. We may live in that changed world now, but it’s the paintings that help us know its history.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2026.Tony Cenicola is a Times photographer.Read 225 commentsShare full article225Related ContentAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTSite IndexSite Information Navigation© 2026 The New York Times CompanyNYTCoContact UsAccessibilityWork with usAdvertiseT Brand StudioPrivacy PolicyCookie PolicyTerms of ServiceTerms of SaleSite MapCanadaInternationalHelpSubscriptionsManage Privacy Preferences

Artists such as Thomas Cole and Frederic Church left behind significant evidence of the American landscape as it appeared approximately two hundred years prior, prompting an exploration into the Hudson River Valley using art history and scientific principles to understand subsequent environmental shifts. Cole's work initiated a shift in American landscape art by focusing on local features like the Catskills, featuring elements such as stair-step skylines, emerald forests, and waterfalls, thereby establishing a visual lexicon for American scenery. Frederic Church, a student of Cole, further documented the Catskills and acquired the property of Olana in Hudson, New York, through a significant sale, creating an estate that now serves as a historic landmark.

This convergence of art and environment was later explored through the lens of historical ecology, where some researchers proposed utilizing these paintings to study environmental change over time, suggesting they could offer trustworthy information regarding shifts in biodiversity and forest complexity. The motivation behind this approach required understanding the artists' intent, balancing objective data with subjective experience. While art historians traditionally resist using paintings as purely objective documentation, some scholars, like Eleanor Jones Harvey, argued that the sketches made by the Hudson River School painters were grounded in accurate observation. The artwork demonstrated a capacity to reveal the total structure of the forest, including understory vegetation, dead wood, and the influence of long-term disturbances, which is crucial for understanding ecological recovery, a process that spans centuries.

The physical tracing of these artistic views, facilitated by routes like the Hudson River School Art Trail, connected the painted past with the present landscape. Observing locations painted by Cole and Church, such as North-South Lake or sites like Catskill Mountain House, allowed for a direct experiential connection between the historical representation and the current physical reality. This process implicitly addresses the ecological concept of "shifting baseline syndrome" by providing a historical perspective that helps observers situate current environmental states within a broader temporal context.

Frederic Church’s legacy extended beyond painting; his artwork played a role in conservation. His representation of the view shed at Olana provided evidence against a proposed nuclear power plant, supporting arguments for protecting historic vistas. Furthermore, the physical experience of the landscape itself, as articulated by the artists, can be viewed as an experiential work of art. By moving through lands like Church’s property, one gains a deeper understanding of the environment, suggesting that the historical artwork offers a multidimensional view of the forest ecosystem that goes beyond merely dominant canopy trees. Ultimately, the paintings function not just as aesthetic records but as critical historical documents that help scientists and the public appreciate the deep history of environmental change and inform contemporary ecological understanding.