ARTISTS ON THE RIVER

Some of the earliest views of a town or settlement show landing and levee first, with a ramshackle village sleeping in the distance. Latrobes easel-painting contemporaries established a consortium of landscape painting that art historians-fairly, this time-have labeled the Hudson River School. For the first time in our history, artists went into the field; there they found great yawning gorges, rock-ribbed palisades, pyrotechnical sunsets that made "terrible beauty" visible. Among the most unforgettable "Hudson River" views are of New York harbor, whose vaporous sunsets must have been something to watch from now-extinct vantage points only Armageddon, or an ice age, could restore. [...]while they were perhaps unaware of it, theirs was a rescue mission; they saved the Hudson Valley in a way that is different from the artists and photographers of this age, who swarm industrial sites or rhapsodize about old railroad depots.