Thread by @hcndashwood

Something very high up my wish list list when this is all over is to trek from the mouth to the source of the Hudson.

Annoyingly I don't have photos but you kind of get the impression from Google Earth of just how amazing the river is as it sweeps past Manhattan

The New York Historical Society had an exhibition in 2019 called Hudson Rising which included these stunning paintings of the River from over the years. Here's Robert Havell's view from near Sing Sing, next to the same spot (now the prison).

Here's another Havell, this time from Tarrytown

What I find fascinating about New York State is how, once you get north of White Plains, suburbia gives way to this never ending forest. There are still lots of houses in Westchester County but a squirrel could move across this map without touching the ground.

Moving up river we get to West Point. Here is John Ferguson Weir's view of the Highlands from there

This is Asher Brown Durand's view of the Beacon Hills opposite Newburgh. It's just amazing to me how over that horizon is this vast uninterrupted area of forest. No houses, no farms. And we aren't even halfway to Albany yet.

You can still see the marks from the days when they used to build stuff in New York City.

There are these jagged lines where they have cut down trees around Fishkill but I can't work out why. Anyway here is a view from near there by William Guy Wall

I came across Hudson Rising by accident because I had gone to the NYHS to see Thomas Cole's Course of Empire. But of course as the founder of the Hudson River school it was appropriate that they should have held the exhibition next door.

But the painting I remember most clearly was by his sister, Sarah Cole of the Catskill Mountain House Hotel. It burnt down in the 60s and apparently can't be rebuilt because the land is retroactively "forever wild" or some nonsense. It even had its own funicular!

When I visited DC the National Gallery had an exhibition celebrating John Ruskin's 200th anniversary. It was called The American Pre-Raphaelites: Radical Realists and included this painting by Charles Herbert Moore, also near Catskill

You can see how that style differs from the grander romanticism of the Hudson River school.

Another Pre-Raphaelite was John William Hill who made this lithograph of Albany in 1853. A good pub quiz question is to ask who Albany is named after. The buildings have got bigger which is good (spot the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception) but Albany also got US road disease

Beyond Albany there is actually quite a lot of farmland. It's still very woody but if I took the labels away and told you this was in Britain you might believe me

But keep going and you hit the Adirondacks, and now it just becomes incredible how big this forest is. Here's Asher Brown Durand again. It's at Mount Marcy in the top right corner where we find the source of the Hudson.

Specifically it is this lake in the foreground, Lake Tear of the Clouds, that is considered the source

You can see why having grown up in Lancashire, the Cole siblings were so awestruck by the valley carved out by the river. I also found this NYT piece from from 1977 which says

Anyway I will try to make the journey up the river at some point, and try not to get eaten by bears