From the Schuylkill to the Hudson: Landscapes of the Early American Republic comes with a provocative and fascinating thesis: that there was indeed a Schuylkill River School, centered in Philadelphia, exploring themes and ideas that would be taken up by far more famous figures, including Thomas Cole in the 1830s and Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church a generation later. But the exhibition also focuses on rivers in general, and their essential importance to American life, first as sources of water and means of transportation, later as political boundaries and dividing lines, and throughout our history, and up until our current moment, as symbols of man’s dominion over nature and his tendency to ruin it.