page_title: Kaaterskill Falls
section_title: Hudson River School
hierarchical_section_title: Kaaterskill Falls / History / Human history / Hudson River School
caption_attribution_description: Kindred Spirits was commissioned by the merchant-collector Jonathan Sturges as a gift for William Cullen Bryant in gratitude for the nature poet's eulogy to Thomas Cole, who had died suddenly during early 1848. It shows Cole, who had been Jonathan Sturges mentor, standing in a gorge in Catskills in the company of mutual friend William Cullen Bryant.
context_page_description: Kaaterskill Falls is a two-stage waterfall on Spruce Creek in the eastern Catskill Mountains of New York, between the hamlets of Haines Falls and Palenville in Greene County. The two cascades total 260 feet in height, making Kaaterskill Falls one of the highest waterfalls in New York, and one of the Eastern United States' tallest waterfalls.
  The waterfalls are one of America's oldest tourist attractions, being depicted or described by many books, essays, poems and paintings of the early 19th century. Long before Alexis de Tocqueville's famous essay on America, Kaaterskill Falls was lauded as a place where a traveler could see a wilder image, a sort of primeval Eden. Beginning with Thomas Cole's first visit during 1825, they became a subject for painters of the Hudson River School, setting the wilderness ideal for American landscape painting. The Falls also inspired "Catterskill Falls", a poem by William Cullen Bryant.
context_section_description: The waterfalls' fame in America really began when Washington Irving mentioned them in his story published during 1819, "Rip Van Winkle". Prior to that time Americans tended to regard the mountains and valleys of upstate New York as an unsafe region populated by savage natives. The famous painting, "The Murder of Jane McRea"   by Kingston, New York, native John Vanderlyn, best illustrates this local attitude. It wasn't until after the War of 1812 when the frontier shifted far to the west, that attitudes changed and people began to regard the lofty heights around the Hudson River valley as something scenic rather than ominous or fearsome. About the same time the profitability of local farming began to decrease due to cheap grain shipped east by an Erie Canal, usable in stages while under construction. Irving's story invited Cole and others to discover the valley when Irving introduced the Falls of the Kaaterskill in "Rip Van Winkle". Irving wrote the following passage about Rip reawakening after a slumber of 20 years and walking home:
  At length he reached to where the ravine had opened through the cliffs to the amphitheatre; but no traces of such an opening remained. The rocks presented a high impenetrable wall, over which the torrent came tumbling in a sheet of feathery foam, and fell into a deep broad basin, black from the shadows of the surrounding forest.
  Pioneering Hudson River School artist Thomas Cole was interested in the story, and took a steamboat ride up the River Hudson, stopping at West Point then going north to Catskill, NY where he ventured into Kaaterskill Clove during October 1825 . 
  The resulting paintings were reproduced on the front page of the New York Evening Post and during an era of Erie Canal wealth made the Hudson River valley, and scenic locations like Kaaterskill Falls, some of the foremost and famous tourist destinations in the rapidly expanding United States. Cole's influential paintings from that visit inspired the first real generation of truly American artists for whom a journey to the Clove, Kaaterskill Falls and Charles Beach's Catskill Mountain House became something of a pilgrimage. The earliest known painting of the front of the Falls by Thomas Cole is dated 1826 is in the Westervelt Warner Museum in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Nearby Palenville, New York is considered to be the first art colony in the United States as a result (noted by Dr. Roland Van Zandt, author of The Catskill Mountain House, pages 175-178). Other artists who painted images of the falls included Frederic Edwin Church, Sanford Gifford, Winslow Homer, Max Eglau, Richard William Hubbard and John Frederick Kensett. Their work attracted affluent visitors to the Catskill Mountain House and the other hotels established near it later.
  One of the best-known depictions of the falls  is Asher Durand's Kindred Spirits (1849), a stylized rendition. It eulogized the recently deceased Thomas Cole by depicting him and William Cullen Bryant standing on Fawn's Leap  looking out over a landscape that synthesized the falls and parts of the surrounding clove, including Haines Falls, into a landscape that, while visually striking, is really an imagined view of the falls. Prior to the painting's execution, during 1836, Bryant had complemented Cole's visualizations with versification when he wrote "Catterskill Falls", which described a wintertime encounter:
  Midst greens and shades the Catterskill leaps,
  From cliffs where the wood-flower clings;
  All summer he moistens his verdant steeps,
  With the sweet light spray of the mountain-springs,
  And he shakes the woods on the mountain-side,
  When they drip with the rains of autumn-tide.
  But when, in the forest bare and old,
  The blast of December calls,
  He builds, in the starlight clear and cold,
  A palace of ice where his torrent falls,
  With turret, and arch, and fretwork fair,
  And pillars blue as the summer air.
  The phenomenon he described — the formation of an ice column by the falls during particularly cold stretches of winter — was well known to frequent visitors.
  At some time during the 19th century
caption: Durand's Kindred Spirits, with the falls in the background.
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "5039", "Image ImageLength": "6256", "Image BitsPerSample": "[16, 16, 16]", "Image Compression": "Uncompressed", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image ImageDescription": "Asher B. Durand (1796-1886)\nKindred Spirits\n1849\nOil on canvas", "Image Make": "Hasselblad", "Image Model": "Hasselblad CF528-39 - Hasselblad H Series", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image PlanarConfiguration": "1", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS5 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2010:12:20 10:28:25", "Image Artist": "The Metropolitan Museum of Art", "Image ExifOffset": "448", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "810", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6051", "EXIF ExposureTime": "4294967/536870912", "EXIF FNumber": "18", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Manual", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "50", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0210", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2008:06:26 16:57:21", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2008:06:26 16:57:21", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "233732935/33554432", "EXIF ApertureValue": "559677859/67108864", "EXIF MeteringMode": "CenterWeightedAverage", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire", "EXIF FocalLength": "120", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1464", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1800"}