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February - March 2018
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boatingonthehudson.com
“HOMERIC”.
1972, 11” x 16”. Watercolor. . Docked on the west side of lower Manhattan.
Artist Michael Mendel, a European born American artist,
is a reporter of the 20th century Hudson. The Exhibition of
Mendel’s Hudson River watercolor paintings on the pages of
this issue of Boating on The Hudson and Beyond, delivers
today’s movement and images of boats and water traffic and
tranquility, all of which The artist still finds and records on The
River. Different from the Original School of Artists, Mendel’s
views, his different lights, different passion, a different artist’s
eye, tells his story of The Hudson River today.
In 1825, Thomas Cole went to the Catskill Mountains to paint
their rugged cliffs and streams. It was the birth of the Hudson
River School of painting, which flourished until the turn of the
20th century and which has now come back into vogue.
Nineteen years later, Cole’s most famous student, Frederick
Edwin Church, came to study with him in Catskill. Church was
16 years old; he would later build his own home across the
Hudson River, south of the city of Hudson. After him came
Asher B. Durand, George Inness, John Kensett, Samuel F. B.
Morse, Jasper Cropsey, Albert Bierstadt and scores of other
artists.
It was the magnificent scenery of the river and the mountains
to the west that lured the artists north from New York City, first
as summer painters and then as permanent residents.
The artists left a permanent legacy, one that can be seen not
only in their art but also in their homes, some of which have
been preserved as museums open to the public. And now,
at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson and at Vassar
College in Poughkeepsie, an exhibition called ‘’Charmed
Places: Hudson River Artists and Their Houses, Studios
and Vistas’’ shows in paintings, drawings and photographs
the places in which many of those artists lived and worked.
At Bard, the exhibition includes paintings by some of
the artists of their homes, studios and gardens as well as
architectural drawings and old photographs. At Vassar, 20
new color photographs of some of the artists’ homes as
they exist today, taken by Len Jenshel, a New York City
photographer, are on display.
The joint show, which will end on Aug. 12, was put together
by Dr. Sandra S. Phillips, a former curator of the Vassar
College Art Gallery and now curator of the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art. It is the first exhibition to document
and explore the environment of the Hudson River artists,
according to Linda Weintraub, the director of the Edith C.
Blum Art Institute at Bard. It also traces the relationship
between the artists and such Hudson Valley architects as
Andrew Jackson Downing, Alexander Jackson Davis and
Calvert Vaux.