BOOK TALK | The American Pre-Raphaelites and the Hudson River School

The Albany Institute of History & Art presents a book talk with Author and Curator Sophie Lynford on her book Painting Dissent: Art, Ethics, and the American Pre-Raphaelites. Her talk will follow how the American Pre-Raphaelites founded a uniquely interdisciplinary movement composed of politically radical abolitionist artists and like-minded architects, critics, and scientists. Active during the Civil War, this dynamic collective united in a spirit of protest, seeking sweeping reforms of national art and culture. This lecture explores how the American Pre-Raphaelites publicly rejected their prominent contemporaries, the artists known as the Hudson River School. Embracing models of landscape theory and artistic practice drawn from their British counterparts across the Atlantic, the American Pre-Raphaelites established themselves as eloquent critics of slavery and antebellum American society.