The imposing presence of the Catskills beside the Hudson River inspired America’s first creative expressions in writing and painting. In 1825, Thomas Cole first painted and sketched the romantic and sublime mountains, cloves, and creeks of the Catskill Mountains, and Asher B. Durand was among many artists who followed him there. Their paintings, imbued with a spiritual sense of wonder celebrating nature, became recognized as the Hudson River School of painting, active through the 1800s. Henry David Thoreau wrote of a house atop Kaaterskill Clove that it seemed “high placed, airy, and perfumed, fit to entertain a traveling god,” in the very light and atmosphere in which works of Grecian art were composed. Drawn by the beauty of the Catskills, artists formed colonies at Palenville in the 1830s, at Cragsmoor near Ellenville, Pakataken in Arkville, Onteora Park and Twilight Park near Haines Falls in the 1880s, Byrdcliffe in Woodstock in 1903, and the Maverick in West Hurley in 1904. Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead’s Byrdcliffe opened in 1903 with the Byrdcliffe School of Art, the first art school in the Hudson Valley. The celebration of nature also shaped the writings of John Burroughs, born in Roxbury in Delaware County, helping inspire him to become one of America’s great naturalists and a leader in the conservation movement, and he visited all the Catskill art colonies. In 1902, Bolton Brown brought Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead and Hervey White to Woodstock, and in 1904 Hervey White left Byrdcliffe to establish the Maverick Art Colony in nearby West Hurley, where fund-raising festivals beginning in 1916 presaged the spirit of the Woodstock Festival. With Byrdcliffe and the Art Students League summer school opening in 1906, the more modern twentieth-century Woodstock School of landscape painting became influential. In music, Camp Woodland brought city children to Phoenicia from 1939 to 1962 and stressed folkways and folk music, with Pete Seeger teaching, performing, and leading songs, while Norman Studer compiled Folk Songs of the Catskills and Catskill Mountain Songbook. In the late 1960s, young musicians flocked to the Woodstock area, and in 1969 the Woodstock Music and Art Fair at Max Yasgur’s farm at White Lake took inspiration from Woodstock’s cultural energy. Artists, musicians, writers, and actors continue to live and work in the Catskills, supported by enduring schools, museums, galleries, and arts organizations across the region.