View of the Hudson Looking Across the Tappan Zee Towards Hook Mountain 1866

Albert Bierstadt made this large canvas of the Hudson River, using oil paints, sometime in the late nineteenth century. This was the era of the Hudson River School of painting, which developed as the eastern United States industrialized. Bierstadt and others took to the landscape, not so much with a documentary eye, but with a romanticizing spirit. You can see how the application of the paint gives a subtle texture, a kind of shimmer across the whole composition. The effect isn’t exactly realistic, but it does impart a sense of lived experience. Think about what it must have been like to spend hours on end at an easel, carefully layering colors to get this atmospheric effect. But it's not just the labor of painting, it's also the labor of seeing that's at stake here. Bierstadt’s paintings helped to create a sense of American identity tied to the land, and to fuel the project of westward expansion. The meticulousness of the painting hides the wider social dynamics, the cultural work being done.