PASSAGE 4
The term Hudson River school was applied to the foremost representatives ofnineteenth-century North American landscape painting. Apparently unknown during the goldendays of the American landscape movement, which began around 1850 and lasted until the late1860's, the Hudson River school seems to have emerged in the 1870's as a direct result of thestruggle between the old and the new generations of artists, each to assert its own style as therepresentative American art. The older painters, most of whom were born before 1835, practicedin a mode often self-taught and monopolized by landscape subject matter and were securelyestablished in and fostered by the reigning American art organization, the National Academy ofDesign. The younger painters returning home from training in Europe worked more with figuralsubject matter and in a bold and impressionistic technique; their prospects for patronage in theirown country were uncertain, and they sought to attract it by attaining academic recognition inNew York. One of the results of the conflict between the two factions was that what in previousyears had been referred to as the American, native, or, occasionally, New York school — the mostrepresentative school of American art in any genre — had by 1890 become firmly established inthe minds of critics and public alike as the Hudson River school.
The sobriquet was first applied around 1879. While it was not intended as flattering, it washardly inappropriate. The Academicians at whom it was aimed had worked and socialized in NewYork, the Hudson's port city, and had painted the river and its shores with varying frequency.Most important, perhaps, was that they had all maintained with a certain fidelity a manner oftechnique and composition consistent with those of America's first popular landscape artist,Thomas Cole, who built a career painting the Catskill Mountain scenery bordering the HudsonRiver. A possible implication in the term applied to the group of landscapists was that many ofthem had, like Cole, lived on or near the banks of the Hudson. Further, the river had long servedas the principal route to other sketching grounds favored by the Academicians, particularly theAdirondacks and the mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire.
1. What does the passage mainly discuss?
(A) The National Academy of Design
(B) Paintings that featured the Hudson River
(C) North American landscape paintings
(D) The training of American artists in European academies
(A) Figural painting
(B) Landscape painting
(C) Impressionistic painting
(D) Historical painting
3. The word struggle in line 5 is closest in meaning to
(A) connection
(B) distance
(C) communication
(D) competition
4. The word monopolized in line 7 is closest in meaning to