On Sunday, Dr. Linda Ferber, of the New-York Historical Society, presented a lecture based on her new-ish book “The Hudson River School: Nature and the American Vision.” Cedar Grove, the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in the Catskills, hosted this third of four Sunday Salon lectures.

Ferber's talk, illustrated with examples by Hudson River School artists, centered on the “idea of geography of the ideal” as presented by the author Henry James who “carried the 18th-century aesthetic conventions right into the 20th century, the sublime, the beautiful and the picturesque...".

For example, James wrote about the Hudson River as “veiled, for the most part, in a mist of premature spring heat, an atmosphere draping it indeed in luminous mystery, hanging it about with sun-shot silver...”