SOURCE: "Landscape: Similar Techniques and Mutual Publications," in Kindred Spirits: Knickerbocker Writers and American Artists, 1807-1855, The University of North Carolina Press, 1967, pp. 144-72.

In this excerpt, Callow demonstrates how the Knickerbocker writers and the American painters of the Hudson River School, as a result of their philosophical and aesthetic affinities, used similar methods in their work to portray (especially American) landscapes—even to the point of collaboration on certain picture books.

The Knickerbocker writers and the American painters used analogous methods to develop their landscapes. To some extent this overlapping of techniques arose from the social contact afforded by The Bread and Cheese Club and its successor, The Sketch Club. Members were usually artists who at some time in their lives painted landscapes, or authors who, like Bryant and Cooper, wrote about landscapes. What at first was merely fraternization soon became a broad spiritual affinity between large...