View toward the Hudson River,

ca. 1839

Most of Thomas 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 visual access to the depicted scene 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 in America — as appealingly rational and controlled. <em>View toward the Hudson River </em>presents scenery that artists of the subsequent Hudson River School were already beginning to portray as sublimely grand. Doughty’s manner remains distinctly more contained, focusing not on the great river but on a modest tributary, further domesticated by three diminutive figures and, on the distant Hudson itself, a handful of placid sailboats.