Hudson River at Bear Mountain,

ca. 1835

Most of Doughty’s languidly poetic compositions of American scenery along the Eastern Seaboard share a preoccupation with the pictorial conventions of the picturesque—images carefully structured to guide the viewer’s gaze through a series of landscape elements that project inward from left and right, successively overlapping within the composition. This strategy allowed Doughty to render the natural world—much of it still a threatening wilderness from the perspective of Euro-American settlers—as appealingly rational and controlled. View toward the Hudson River presents scenery that artists of the Hudson River School were already beginning to portray as sublimely grand. Doughty’s painting remains, distinctly, more contained, focusing not on the great river but on a modest tributary, domesticated by three diminutive figures and, on the distant Hudson itself, a handful of placid sailboats.