The Thomas Cole National Historic Site, located in Catskill, New York has recently launched the latest phase of The Hudson River School Art Trail. Web-based guide that allows the user to locate 17 trails up and down the Hudson Valley (as well as several in Connecticut and New Hampshire), which can lead them to the actual spots that are depicted in famous (and not so famous) paintings and sketches by Thomas Cole, Jacob Cropsey, Sanford Gifford and Fredric Church.
Falls of the Kaaterskill by Thomas Cole 1826
Kaaterskill Falls today In addition to being able to view the paintings and sketches on the site, it is interesting to see which environments have radically changed from when they were painted, while others seem untouched by time. In addition to information on the artists and work they created each location featured on the website gives some other interesting information, such as poems and excerpts from journals and letters, written by the artists and their contemporaries, but also geological and historical information. 
Vintage view of the Catskill Mountain House, which no longer stands With autumn around the corner, it is a fun tool to help one explore the Hudson Valley, and learn a little bit about the art and artists that helped make the region famous! You can click here to visit the site.
To follow is an excerpt from a recent New York Times article on the Art Trail
“The landscape painters of America’s first homegrown art movement, the Hudson River School, hauled easels, sketchbooks and pigment-filled pig bladders as they picked their way along cliffs vulnerable to avalanches and across mucky shores… The magnificent views — many still much as they were in the mid-1800s — are worth any number of treks. Certainly that was part of the thinking of the creators of the Hudson River School Art Trail, the brainchild of museums including the homes of Frederic Edwin Church and Thomas Cole, nonprofit environmental and heritage advocacy groups and government agencies. It is less a single trail than almost two dozen, spread across four states, each leading to a spot painted by one of the movement’s artists. The trail project, introduced in 2005 as a Web site with maps, directions and information about the associated artists and paintings, has nearly tripled the number of its sites this year, expanding on those in the Hudson River Valley of New York to include the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts and the White Mountains of New Hampshire.”
The New York Times, August 30, 2012
Click here for the full article