9905 托福阅读真题.docVIP

1999.5 国内考试真题 Section Three: Reading Comprehension Questions 1-9 The term Hudson River school was applied to the foremost representatives of nineteenth-century North American landscape painting. Apparently unknown during the golden days of the American landscape movement, which began around 1850 and lasted until the late 1860s, the Hudson River school seems to have emerged in the (5) 1870s as a direct result of the struggle between the old and the new generations of artists, each to assert its own style as the representative American art. The older painters, most of whom were born before 1835, practiced in a mode often self-taught and monopolized by landscape subject matter and were securely established in and fostered by the reigning American art organization, the National Academy of Design. (10) The younger painters returning home from training in Europe worked more with figural subject matter and in a bold and impressionistic technique; their prospects for patronage in their own country were uncertain, and they sought to attract it by attaining academic recognition in New York. One of the results of the conflict between the two factions was that what in previous years had been referred to as the American, (15) native, or, occasionally, New York school-the most representative school of American art in any genre-had by 1890 become firmly established in the 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 was hardly inappropriate. The Academicians at whom it was aimed had worked and (20) socialized in New York, the Hudsons 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 of technique and composition consistent with those of Americas first popular landscape artist, Thomas Cole, who built a career painting the Catskill Mountain scenery