Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the following question.
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 1860's, the Hudson River school seems to have emerged in the 1870's 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. 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", "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 socialized in New York, the Hudson's 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 America's first popular landscape artist, Thomas Cole, who built a career painting the Catskill Mountain scenery bordering the Hudson River. A possible implication in the term applied to the group of landscapists was that many of them had, like Cole, lived on or near the banks of the Hudson. Further, the river had long served as the principal route to other sketching grounds favored by the Academicians, particularly the Adirondacks and the mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire.
According to the passage, what was the function of the National Academy of Design for the painters born before 1835?
A. It determined which subjects were appropriate
B. It supported their growth and development
C. It supervised the incorporation of new artistic techniques
D. It mediated conflicts between artists
