About the Paintings on this Website:

		Hudson Highland Artist Materials is located in Kingston, NY, in the beautiful Hudson Valley region of New York State. Kingston sits at the foot of the Catskill Mountains,
on the banks of the Hudson River. The region gave inspiration, birth, name, and home to the first great American art movement, "The Hudson River School".

In accord with this heritage, we have adorned our website with art by some of our favorite artists from the movement: J.F. Kensett, Asher B. Durand and Thomas Cole (especially their sight specific landscapes), Sanford Gifford, Jasper Francis Cropsey, and others. To us, their work represents the "classic" period of the Hudson River School.

They showed us the "sublime" in the landscape by painting its down-to-earth specifics. They captured our region, America's first "frontier", in a near pristine form, even as developement of it was under way. They left us with a record of the pre-columbian landscape, a nostalgia for it, and a new way of looking at and appreciating the landscape that persists more than 150 years later.

Looking out from Kingston today, over the Catskill Mountains and the Hudson River, it is impossible not to see it in part as they did - before the bridges and buildings, roads, and railways.

Most of these paintings are not panel paintings. Rather, they are here because these artists inspire us, much like our mountains and rivers did for them 150 years ago. We hope that you'll enjoy them.

I remember that my grandparents had a reproduction of Durand's "Thanatopsis" in their living room when I was very young. It was the first painting that I fell in love with; I studied it endlessly. Decades later, I realized that all of the many sandcastles which I've built over the years (and still build) inevitably come out looking like the mountains and ruins in this painting!

Our customers make art in every conceivable style, so picking images for our site was tricky. These paintings evoke the great, majestic beauty of our region; we hope that you'll like them. Hover your pointer over a painting for the name of the artist. (Most of the images are details from larger paintings.)

By the way, "The Hudson Highlands" is the name of a specific group of mountains, on the other side of the river and a little south of Kingston. The name is sometimes used to refer to the area near them, from approximately Cold Spring north to Beacon. We use the name in a less specific sense, to refer to the mountainous regions of the mid-Hudson valley.

- Paul Solomon