In 1836, during President Andrew Jackson's second term, novelist James Fenimore Cooper wrote his friend, sculptor Horatio Greenough: "You are in a country in which every man swaggers and talks, knowledge or no knowledge; brains or no brains; taste or no taste. They are all ex nato connoisseurs, politicians, religionists, and every man's equal and all men's betters." Jackson was elected in 1828 as the champion of the common man -- the frontier farmer, backwoodsman, laborer, and mechanic. (Cherokee Indians of the time, however, would doubtless have disagreed.) Political opponents called his administration "mobocracy," but Jackson's policies fostered national expansion, development of public education, growth of printing and publishing, equal social and business opportunity, and more widely distributed wealth. Wendell D. Garrett, art historian and editor of Antiques magazine, effectively summarizes the broader implications of the seventh president's democratization program:

The whole period of the "great experiment" in Jackson's America was one of change. The steamboats and canals, the new railroads, the revolutionary factories, the growing cities were at once causes and symptoms of the upheaval through which the old order was passing. New influences, partly emanating from Europe and partly indigenous, were at work. The very intellectual underpinnings of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment were being knocked out. The ideals of the previous age -- urbanity, precision, reason -- were under attack from the Romantic cult of the natural, the simple, and the ordinary.

The new influences of which Garrett speaks, those causes for upheaval that gave impetus to the movement cultural historians catalogue loosely beneath the umbrella term "romanticism," spring from events of extensive consequence. In Europe, the failure of reason demonstrated by the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution and the breakdown in the original utopian ideals of the cause, the long turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars, the negative ramifications of the Industrial Revolution -- urban ugliness, slums, and poverty -- all contributed to widespread disillusionment. In America, too, growing revulsion against burgeoning industrialization (hastened by improvements in steam-engine technology and the inventions of the reaper and cotton gin), the rude shock of the War of 1812, the economic Panic of 1837, the Mexican War of 1846-48, and the social and political problems leading to the secession of Southern states and tragic Civil War -- all combined to generate, in Charles Coleman Sellers' view, "a sense of sinister powers beyond human control."

Unconvinced of mankind's supereminence and skeptical of materialism, proponents of what Kenneth Clark calls the "romantic rebellion" tended to trust emotion and subjectivism over intellect and objectivism. Developing more contemplative frames of mind, they queried the mysteries of life, the universe, and God. In America the movement found a philosophical base through the eloquent writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other transcendentalist thinkers. William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe expressed a comparable spirit in literature and poetry. So-called "Gothic" novels were written to impart adventure, intrigue, and trepidation. Gothic and Romanesque Revival architecture, picturesque in its evocation of the Middle Ages, displaced Classical Revival styles (except for many government buildings, where strong precedent dictated, affecting public statuary as well).

Though portraiture continued to serve as a major function of painting and sculpture for expanding middle and upper classes throughout the nineteenth century, the American public opened its tastes in the 1820s and '30s to subjects that in the previous era would have been seen as vulgar and inappropriate for the serious artist. Genre, scenes of everyday experience, emerged as an altogether fitting, vernacular, romantic expression of democratic society. "Paint not for the few but the many," genre artist William Sidney Mount admonished his peers. John Quidor, David Gilmore Blyth, George Caleb Bingham (link), Eastman Johnson, John George Brown, and the Currier and Ives company are among the best known who addressed American popular taste.

At the same time, landscape evolved from subordinate backgrounds in history painting and some portraiture to an autonomous statement. "Widespread acceptance of a romantic view of nature was significant," Garrett explains, "for it was believed that nature revealed its truth and beauty not to a limited few but to the mass of men." Nature in its own terms would come to symbolize, on the one hand, the vast geophysical asset, the challenge and adventure of exploration, the present and the future of the nation (particularly appropriate for a country deficient in long historical traditions). On the other hand, to the anti-urban, anti-industrial naturalist, landscape was the glorious demonstration of God's handiwork and benevolence. "Nature is God's art," extolled painter, critic, and collector James Jackson Jarves -- in so doing, characterizing landscape as of the highest worthiness for the artist's consideration. Not surprisingly, in much writing of the period, the word nature is reverentially capitalized, as though proceeding from Deity just as certainly as the Son and Holy Spirit of the Trinity. Thus landscape was potentially more than mere topographical recording; it could be overlaid with moral and theological significance.

"America's first homegrown, coherent, and sizable group of landscape artists," the Metropolitan Museum of Art's John K. Howat explains, "began in the 1820s . . . It grew rapidly, developed its own theorists, and occupied the center of the national art stage until it faded in the 1870s and 1880s." Though many of its members traveled widely and painted deep into frontier and uncharted territory, the movement has been called the Hudson River School * because a majority of the artists, as well as their patrons and promoters, lived in or near New York City, and found much of their inspiration up the waterway to the relatively nearby Catskill and Adirondack Mountains of New York State, Green Mountains of Vermont, and White Mountains of New Hampshire. Interpretation of the natural wonders took remarkably diverse forms: the subdued pastoral views of Alvan Fisher, Thomas Doughty (link), and Jasper Cropsey; Thomas Cole's (link) epic scenes, laden with philosophical meaning; the light-bathed (indeed "luminist") treatments of Sanford Robinson Gifford, Fitz Henry Lane (link), and Martin Johnson Heade (link); the grandiose and often outsized vistas of Frederic E. Church, Albert Bierstadt (link), and Thomas Moran. Though varying in pictorial and emotional intensity, each version was, and is still, a pantheistic celebration.

* According to Thomas Worthington Whittredge (link), a leading member of the Hudson River School, the designation was first coined by an unnamed critic for the New York Herald, who intended it as a barb on what was seen as the group's provincialism. Other accounts hold that the term originated with Clarence Cook, a nineteenth-century critic for the New York Tribune.