Avery Kevin J., Roque Oswaldo Rodriguez, Howat John K., Burke Doreen Bolger, Voorsanger Catherine Hoover. American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987. — 367 p.The Metropolitan Museum of Art's commitment to American art goes back to its origins when one of the main reasons for creating the Museum was to provide the city and the nation with an institution that would attract and instruct American artists, as well as acquire their works. Leaders in the New York art world of the 1860s and 1870s were principally landscape painters, many of whom were instrumental in founding the Metropolitan. Among them were John F. Kensett and Frederic E. Church, both prominently represented in this exhibition and publication, and both on the roster of the Museum's first Board of Trustees, elected on 31 January 1870. Kensett served on the influential Executive Committee until his death three years later; the memorial display in 1874 of thirty-eight of his paintings — referred to as the Last Summer's Work — along with three pictures by Thomas Cole, was the first special exhibition mounted at the Metropolitan. Worthington Whittredge and Sanford Gifford, who is also represented in the exhibition and catalog, were among those deeply involved in the early life of this institution. In 1881, when the Museum organized its first monographic retrospective, it was of Gifford's work. Issued concurrently was A Memorial Catalogue of the Paintings of Sanford Robinson Gifford, N. A., the first of a long line of scholarly books and catalogs published by the Metropolitan.