Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

Following in the footsteps of older Hudson River School painters such as Thomas Cole and Jasper F. Cropsey, the twenty-year-old Charles Herbert Moore painted this dramatic scene of the Catskill Mountains in 1860. The largest known work by Moore, it is likely the one painting he exhibited that year at the National Academy of Design in New York under the title In the Catskills.

Moore is best known as a follower of the English critic John Ruskin, who called for artists to observe nature carefully and depict it realistically. Moore’s mountain scene, however, is a composite of different views rather than a faithful depiction of a particular place. Moreover, the painting’s moody atmosphere links it to Romanticism, an early nineteenth-century movement more concerned with expressing personal and intuitive experiences of the world than exact depictions of nature.