It’s unlikely I will be the only reviewer to note the irony that “Nature and the American Vision,” the New-York Historical Society’s exhibition of its extensive holdings of Hudson River School paintings and watercolors, should coincide – as no one could have predicted it would – with the New York Public Library’s divestiture of Asher Durand’s “Kindred Spirits,” one of the greatest masterpieces of the Hudson River School and of American painting in general. I felt a deep poignancy at the New-York Historical Society as I gazed upon the many Durand canvases on display, as well as the works of Durand’s master, Thomas Cole, whom “Kindred Spirits” portrays.

Yet tears welled up in my eyes when I looked at one of the exhibition’s unexpected paintings, which was John Trumbull’s portrait, from 1826, of a 30-year-old, enormously pleasant-looking Asher Durand. For the library’s sale of “Kindred Spirits” is, quite frankly, New York’s most egregious act of self-desecration since the demolition of Pennsylvania Station.

The Trumbull portrait shows the strength of this show, which is a multilayered contextualization of the Hudson River artists. The show endeavors, with great success, to present the paintings in geographical context, as well as historical context.

The visitor may be disappointed if he expects a large gathering of showstoppers like Frederic Church’s “Heart of the Andes” (at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) or Albert Bierstadt’s “Mount Rosalie” (at the Brooklyn Museum). Not that there aren’t some showstoppers here. Cole’s “Course of Empire” (1833-36) is among the greatest masterpieces of American painting, and to my knowledge there are no plans to send it to Bentonville, Ark. There’s a large and glorious Bierstadt, the 1873 “Donner Lake from the Summit,” painted as only he could, and a fine Church, the 1858 “Cayambe,” with all the exoticism our greatest landscape painter ever mustered.

The show contains no fewer than 18 pictures by Durand, including some marvels. Among these is “White Mountain Scenery, Franconia Notch, New Hampshire,” from 1857, Churchean in its movement from the minutest detail of vegetation in the foreground, to glassy water and sylvan meadow, to an infinite sky that fills the whole upper half of the canvas. I think it is one of Durand’s best pictures. Also of great note is his last major work, “Black Mountain From the Harbor Islands, Lake George” (1875). Here a misty haze shrouds a subdued but enormously evocative detail of water, trees, mountains, and clouds that cannot help making the viewer think of impressionism.

Here, too, are some 13 Coles, including the five “Course of Empire” pictures, which only the most jaded viewer won’t gaze lastingly upon. I wonder at the fact that the later of these painters failed to take Central Park as a subject. Perhaps to do so would have been too like making a Hudson River School picture the subject of a Hudson River School picture. But a beguiling canvas by Cole, “Landscape (Moonlight)” (c. 1833-34) shows the Gothic element that never was far from the Hudson River School mentality.

We see it in Central Park, where Calvert Vaux designed structures with pointed arches and Gothic foils as well as a whole turreted castle. In the Cole painting, we see lovers in brooding darkness beside a Gothic tower glowing with an internal flame. Here Cole borrowed his theme from Byron’s “Parasina,” on the melancholy fate of adulterers. We also see the romantic cult of ruins in Cole’s “Italian Scene” (1833), a Roman view again imbued with the spirit of Byron. Aside from the “Course of Empire,” the Cole that most struck this viewer was “Catskill Creek” (1845), an amazing composition of trees in autumn rust and of copper clouds, with distant mountains sketchily limned in the background.

One other picture I was delighted to see was Marie-Francois-Regis Gignoux’s complexly lighted “Mammoth Cave, Kentucky” (c. 1843). Here’s a painter I’d love a full retrospective of. Another is Robert Havell Jr., who appeared in the recent New-York Historical Society Audubon show; Havell, in addition to being a gifted oil painter, served as Audubon’s master engraver. The Audubon show included one of Havell’s canvases. Here there are two, the one from the Audubon show (“View of the Hudson River From Near Sing Sing” (c. 1850) and “View of the Hudson River From Tarrytown Heights” (c. 1842).

Two masterpieces deserve mention: John Frederick Kensett’s “Shrewsbury River, New Jersey” (1859) shows us as luminous an aqueous surface as exists in all of painting. And, straying from the panoramic nature of many of the pictures on display, the brilliant Martin Johnson Heade’s “Study of an Orchid” (1872) is truly an awesome picture. But it’s the unexpected delights that beckon the visitor as much as the expected masterpieces.

There’s that Trumbull portrait of Durand, for starters. We think of Trumbull as belonging to an earlier phase of New York painting. Yet the portrait reminds us of a remarkable continuity from which grew our greatest indigenous school of landscape painting, a “school” that at its best produced works the equal of any produced elsewhere in the 19th century. (So, at least, thought John Ruskin.)

Among the things that pleased me most was the Samuel Colman view of New York Harbor, “The Narrows and Fort Lafayette” (c. 1868). If I have a beef with these painters, it is their scant attention to the harbor in its days of glory; none created the masterful painterly evocation it deserves. Colman, incidentally, was a student of Durand and the teacher of Louis Comfort Tiffany. This show helps us trace the continuity from Trumbull to Tiffany. Colman, too, was a magnificent painter, and deserves his own retrospective.

Most of what is on display is oil on canvas. My own weakness for watercolor drew me to dawdle in the gallery devoted entirely to William Guy Wall. The society owns Wall’s eight known extant watercolors. These served as the source for the engraver John Hill’s “Hudson River Portfolio,” published between 1821 and 1825, which features 20 topographical views of scenes along 212 of the Hudson’s 315 miles. Displayed side by side with the prints, the Wall watercolors reveal how much is lost in the translation to aquatint.

The “Portfolio” is great, but the watercolors are gorgeous in their vivid silvery blues and blue-greens of water beneath slashing clouds in whites, rusts, silvers, and blues. Note that though “Nature and the American Vision” is on view until February the delicate condition of the “Hudson River Portfolio” display will require its dismantling after four months.

Another pleasing surprise is the room devoted to these painters’ principal patrons, Luman Reed, Thomas Jefferson Bryan, and Robert Leighton Stuart. The three were the principal benefactors of the society’s holdings in Hudson River School and related art. Here we find not only Trumbull’s portrait of Durand but Durand’s portrait of Reed (1835), and Thomas Cole’s self-portrait (c. 1836).Yet another room displays genre paintings by some of these masters of landscape. Look for Durand’s “The Pedler” (1835-36) and “Peter Stuyvesant and the Trumpeter” (1835), as well as a handful of Eastman Johnsons.

Our thanks must go to co-curators Linda S. Ferber and Lee A. Vedder, as well as to Roberta J.M. Olson, responsible for the “Hudson River Portfolio” room, and Margaret K. Hofer, responsible for the associated exhibition of landscape-themed ceramics that deserve an essay unto themselves. The society’s holdings here displayed remind us of something New Yorkers, always sadly in pursuit of the latest and greatest, forget: The New-York Historical Society, New York’s oldest museum, is also one of the world’s great museums. That knowledge may console us somewhat as we bid farewell to “Kindred Spirits.”

Until February 5, 2006 (170 Central Park West, 212-873-3400).