The Hudson River School is a collective name for two generations of painters working in the areas in and around the Hudson River Valley in New York who transformed American Art, and landscape painting in general, in the early part of the 19th Century.

Painting the American Vision is the title of a new exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA that showcases these artists with 45 of their works drawn from the collection of the New York Historical Society.

The show includes works by Thomas Cole, Albert Biersadt, Frederic Edwin Church, Asher B. Durand and others, both familiar and less well known.

The museum’s page for the exhibition includes a slideshow of 12 paintings from the show, and there is a press release that goes into more detail about some of the artists and paintings.

You can also see a slideshow and description of the exhibit on the website of the Carter Museum of Art in Texas, where it was on display last year.

You can also visit the site of the New York Historical Society and view their extensive collection of Hudson River School paintings.

Painting the American Vision is on display at the Peabody Essex Museum until November 6, 2011.

(Images above: William hart, Asher B. Durand, Louis Rémy Mignot, Thomas Cole, George Peter Alexander Healy, Asher B. Durand)

LeConte Stewart was an American painter active in the 20th Century who spent most of his life portraying the landscape of his native state of Utah.

Stewart studied art at the University of Utah, but also traveled to the East Coast to study with established artists there, notably John Fabian Carlson.

I also see other influences in his work, of the California landscape painters like Hanson Puthuff and other American Impressionists, as well as Edward Hopper and John Sloan. Mostly, however, Stewart’s vision was his own and, a dedicated plein air painter, he spent countless hours painting in the fields, farms, deserts and small towns of his beloved Utah.

In addition to painting in oil, Stewart worked in pastel and watercolor, sketched in pencil and ink and was an accomplished etcher. Stewart joined the faculty of the Art Department of the University of Utah, and served as chair for over 20 years.

Some of his early work documents the trials of the nation and of individuals through the Great Depression, which is the theme of one of two new exhibitions on the painter.

The Utah Museum of Fine Arts and the LDS Church History Museum are presenting joint exhibitions, LeConte Stewart: Depression Era Art at the UMFA and LeConte Stewart: The Soul of Rural Utah at the Church History Museum. The exhibitions are on display until January 15, 2012; together they include over 200 works by the artist.

The UMFA has created an online resource for Stewart. The museum’s own holdings of Stewart’s work are extensive and the online section of their permanent collection is the best resource I’ve found. Note the arrows at bottom to subsequent pages of thumbnails, of which there are several. Most images are zoomable (the zoom controls take some getting used to, the icons don’t produce actions themselves, but change the action of your cursor).

There is a video of LeConte Stewart by Claudia Sisemore that includes a brief introduction to Stewart and his work and features footage of him working on location and audio of him discussing his approach.