View across the Hudson from Blithewood, Bard College, Annondale-on-Hudson, 2023 and 2000.
Staying with my brother on a recent holiday in New York State I spent a lovely morning drawing the view across the river from the lawns of Bard College (above left). We had visited the house of the father of the Hudson River School, Thomas Cole, and I was using the style I’d picked up from looking at his paintings, with paintbrush blobs for distant trees and picturesque details in the foreground. When I got home I looked through sketchbooks from previous visits (shown below) and was astonished to find a drawing I did 23 years ago from pretty much the same spot (above right).
My USA sketchbooks, clockwise from top right: 1996, 2000, 2012, 2023.
Looking through the sketchbook from my first visit there in 1996 I found more versions of the view, usually framed by the summer houses of historic houses that line the riverbank but behind the railway that seems to run through the water. The old drawings practically line up with the new (below left) as if my hand remembers the drawings I always do when I’m there.
Left: More views across the river, 1996 and 2023. Right: House in Annandale-on-Hudson 2000.
Left: Thomas Cole, River in the Catskills, 1843. Right: Frederick Church, Catskill Mountains from the Home of the Artist, 1871.
In 1996 we had visited Olana, the house of Thomas Cole’s pupil, Frederick Church, that he had built in a spot with fantastic views. Some of my work from the following years was consciously influenced by Church’s use of landscape motifs - mountains, waterfalls, sunsets - and the solitary foreground tree that cuts across the horizontal layers of the landscape as shown in my sketchbooks below.
View across the River Hudson to the Catskills, 1996 & 2000.
If I’m not drawing the river, or the view across the street from the porch, I draw the view through the window, recording the different houses we have stayed in on each visit. Again I was surprised by the repetition in what I’ve chosen to draw, with pine trees making another, looser grid right up against the windows of each house.
Windows, Rhinebeck 1996, Haggerty Hill Road 2012 & Bard College 2023.