About the Trail
Wear comfortable shoes, open your eyes and prepare to be inspired.
The Hudson River School Art Trail is a project to map the painting sites of the artists Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School, Frederic Church, one of the most accomplished painters of the movement, and their contemporaries including Asher B. Durand, Sanford Gifford and Jasper Cropsey. This website includes everything you need to plan your visit to one or more of these remarkable sites where one can still see the views that appear in 19th-century landscape paintings.
The Hudson River School Art Trail is divided into several large geographic areas. From this website's homepage, choose which area you wish to explore. The Hudson River Valley area has the largest number of stops while the others are currently less developed.
A new guidebook with complete information including maps and directions is now available for purchase from our online shop, as well as from the visitor centers of either the Thomas Cole National Historic Site or the Olana State Historic Site during regular hours of operation. With over 50 full-color illustrations and an introduction by Kevin Avery, Associate Curator of American Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, this guidebook takes you to the magnificent places that inspired America's first great landscape painters. Included are beautiful reproductions of many well-known paintings of the Hudson River School, alongside photographs of the same views today, enabling side-by-side comparisons. The guidebook can be purchased in advance of your trip to both inspire and assist you with planning your visit.
Throughout the year, the Thomas Cole Historic Site hosts events related to the Trail including guest speakers and guided walks. To see a schedule of current events, click here. If you would like advance notification about these events, please join our mailing list.
About the Project
The Hudson River School Art Trail is a project of the Thomas Cole Historic Site, presented in partnership with Olana New York State Historic Site, The Olana Partnership, the Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area, the National Park Service Rivers & Trails program, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and New York State Parks, and the Greene County Tourism & Planning Department.
The Trail project is funded in part by a grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Arts & Business Council of New York, and the New York State Council on the Arts.
The 2012 website and mobile app are supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Home page images: Cole, View near the Village of Catskill, 1827; Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, 1936; Hill, Franconia Notch, White Mts, 1887; Moran, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1873-74.
The Hudson River School Art Trail takes you to the sites that inspired America's first great landscape painters, enabling you to walk in the footsteps of Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Asher B. Durand, Jasper Cropsey, Sanford Gifford and other pioneering American artists, and to see the landscapes that launched the Hudson River School of art.
The Making of the Hudson River School Art Trail
On the first Sunday in June 2005, coinciding with National Trails Day, the Thomas Cole National Historic Site officially unveiled the first phase of the Hudson River School Art Trail project, which maps the painting sites of 19th-century artist Thomas Cole and his contemporaries including Frederic Church, Jasper Cropsey, Sanford Gifford, and Asher B. Durand. Forming the core of the art movement now known as the Hudson River School, these artists hiked, sketched and painted in the region surrounding Thomas Cole's home in Catskill and Frederic Church's home near Hudson. Many of these views are spectacularly preserved and accessible to the public. The Hudson River School Art Trail project maps the locations from which these painted views can be seen, and enables the public to find and compare the painted and actual views today.
The Hudson River School is America's first major art movement, having dominated American visual arts for over 50 years with over 100 artists between 1825 and 1875. The scenes on the Hudson River School painters' canvases, now hanging in major museums all over the world, are the views that surround us here in the Hudson Valley. Many of the views remain remarkably unchanged since the 19th-century, and are instantly recognizable as the scenes depicted in the paintings. The Trail enables the public to find these sites using a mobile website, a printed guidebook, and outdoor educational panels.
The Trail project takes advantage of the region's unique cultural and natural resources, including the following highlights: 1) the home of the founder of the Hudson River School, Thomas Cole, 2) the home of one of the movement's most accomplished artists, Frederic Church, and 3) the magnificent landscapes that they painted including miles of well-maintained trails in the Catskill Forrest Preserve with waterfalls and spectacular views.
In addition, at both Olana and the Thomas Cole site, visitors can see the artists' actual workspaces. The process of creating a work of art, which began with sketching trips into the local landscape, was completed in the artists' studios which are now open to the public, furnished with the artists' original easels and art-making equipment. Hanging on the walls of Olana is one of the most important collections of Frederic Church's artwork, and the Thomas Cole site each year presents a new special exhibition on the paintings of an influential member of the Hudson River School. Both Olana and the Thomas Cole site offer gift shops with a great variety of books, jewelry, posters and other items that relate to the story of the Hudson River School. Bringing another element into the Trail is Tatiana's Restaurant in Catskill, which has a large terrace and outdoor lounge that overlooks one of the Trail's famous views. The North-South Lake Campground, a New York State Park, contains several of the trail sites and offers amenities such as marked trails, restrooms, picnic benches, swimming, boating, and camping. These resources provide the visitor with a full spectrum of activities including visiting historic homes, seeing art exhibitions, taking hikes in the Catskill Forrest Preserve, visiting one of the highest waterfalls in New York State, shopping at the historic site gift shops, and eating at a restaurant overlooking a historic view.
The Trail is the product of many years of planning, and the concept was included in the original plan for the Thomas Cole National Historic Site written by the National Park Service in 1991. Much of the initial research was done by the late Barry Hopkins, an art teacher in the Catskill Middle School and a knowledgeable naturalist and outdoorsman.
Future Development of the Trail
Phase one of the development of the Trail was completed in 2005 and it included choosing the first eight Trail sites and creating a brochure with maps, driving directions and printed representations of the painted views to use as a comparison with today's actual views. The next phase, completed between 2006 and 2012, included expanding the number of trail sites from 8 to 22 and construction of a mobile-optimized website. In addition, many sites were outfitted with trail markers and outdoor wayside interpretive exhibits. The outdoor exhibits include reproductions of paintings depicting each site as well as background information on the painting, the artist, and relevant historical facts and anecdotes about the site. These wayside interpretive signs serve as "captions on the landscape," enhancing the visitor's understanding about the Hudson River Valley landscape and the art that it inspired. In coming years, the Trail will be further expanded with more sites and the mobile website will be enhanced with more content.