Mount Washington

Discussion

FROM THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO’S CATALOG

The White Mountains of New Hampshire were celebrated by artists, travel writers, and naturalists for their majestic wilderness. In the mid-19th century, Hudson River School painters reveled in the untamed scenery, but by the time Winslow Homer arrived on assignment from Harper's Weekly in 1868, the region was dominated by tourists and the comforts they demanded: grand hotels, railroads, and well-groomed trails for walking and riding. Homer depicted the eastern landscape as a stage for human activity, rather than as a sublime paradise fraught with Christian and nationalistic associations, which was a new approach to landscape painting in the years after the Civil War.

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