One can enjoy an exhibition while rejecting its central premise, as one must when the art on the walls does not support that premise. “From the Schuylkill to the Hudson: Landscapes of the Early American Republic,” at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, postulates a Philadelphia-centered “Schuylkill River School” that “gave birth to the better-known Hudson River School.”1 The exhibition strives mightily to show the continuity between the two, in the process revealing a fundamental discontinuity. As it happens, that discontinuity is itself fascinating.

The Hudson River School is the wildly popular school of landscape painting that flourished in antebellum America and found its subject matter in the picturesque scenery of the Catskill Mountains. But its savage gorges and lofty, slender waterfalls were only its nominal subject; its real theme was the tragic fragility of nature. In 1825, the year Thomas Cole, the school’s founding figure, made his first sketching tour of the Catskills, the Erie Canal opened. Even as he trudged north along the Hudson in search of unspoiled wilderness, steamboats were already thundering south along the same river, carrying the wealth and produce of a continent to New York City.

Cole turned his back on the distressing spectacle; he seems never to have painted a steamboat. He preferred to depict nature in its primal state, declaring that “the most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive, aspect of American scenery is its wildness.” The human presence in Hudson River School paintings is generally restricted