Esopus Creek and Meadow

The perfect stillness of Suydam’s water sets the mood in this quiet scene. The artist highlighted the beauty and peaceful qualities of a Catskill Mountain valley, rather than the fearsome sublimity seen in many earlier Hudson River School paintings.  Suydam’s crisp treatment of color and light instead aligns him with a group of artists who in the mid twentieth century were distinguished by scholars as the Luminists.