“Luminism” is a term first used by the art historian John Baur in the 1950’s to describe some of the second generation of Hudson River School landscape painters, such as John Frederick Kensett and Fitz Hugh Lane, who had a distinctive style which created, so art critics say, a serene view of nautical and seashore life by emphasizing distinctive colors, hiding their brush strokes, and highlighting the light-- “the illumination”-- of their paintings. They are supposedly influenced by Transcendentalist thought about the immanence of religion. I want to provide another category for the description of their paintings that I think better captures their essence and explains the other facets of their work and better places this modest sub species of landscape painting in the context of overall art history. That is the fact that they were dedicated to sweeping geometrical shapes and used hard edges on both human and natural objects. That made the Luminists quite different from the artists that preceded them where the power of the painting came from the richness of its darker hues and the thickness of paint that assumed an almost velvet like sheen, and where colors blended or even seemed to leech over to one another so as to create shadows and thickness and perspective. To the contrary, Luminism created a painting very much in focus and so seems remarkably realistic, almost photographic, even if its colors were fanciful or, what is the same thing, more true to life in a funny kind of way.