American Landscape

Aaron Draper Shattuck balances signs of human presence—bridges, fences, church steeples, and rustic roads—with the lush landscape that surrounds them. While the previous generation of Hudson River School painters often sought dramatic views in wild landscapes, Shattuck and his contemporaries explored the transcendent beauty of everyday life. Rarely venturing beyond the Hudson Valley, he captured its rural charm with finely observed details and panoramic scope, made possible by the wider proportioned canvases that were becoming popular in the second half of the nineteenth century.