Nature and Culture

Oxford University Press wishes to thank

the Henry Luce Foundation for generously
assisting the publication of the trilogy
American Painting of the Nineteenth Century,
Nature and Culture, and Voyages of the Self.
Nature and Culture
American Landscape and Painting 1825–1875

THIRD EDITION
WITH A NEW PREFACE

Barbara Novak

2007
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The Library of Congress has catalogued the previous edition as follows:

Novak, Barbara.
Nature and culture : American landscape and painting,
1825–1875 / Barbara Novak. — Rev. ed., with a new preface.
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 0-19-510352-1
ISBN: 0-19-510188-x (pbk.)
1. Landscape painting, American.
2. Landscape painting—19th century—United States.
3. Landscape painters—United States—Psychology.
I. Title.
ND1351.5.N68 1995 758'.173'09034—dc20 95-25180

987654321
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Brian O’Doherty
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

Preface to the New Edition ix

Preface to the Previous Edition xi
Preface to the Original Edition xxv
Acknowledgments xxvii

Part One
CHAPTER 1 Introduction:
The Nationalist Garden and the Holy Book 3
CHAPTER 2 Grand Opera and the Still Small Voice 15
CHAPTER 3 Sound and Silence:
Changing Concepts of the Sublime 29

Part Two
CHAPTER 4 The Geological Timetable:
Rocks 41
CHAPTER 5 The Meteorological Vision:
Clouds 71
CHAPTER 6 The Organic Foreground:
Plants 89

vii
viii Contents

Part Three
CHAPTER 7 The Primal Vision:
Expeditions 119
CHAPTER 8 Man’s Traces:
Axe, Train, Figure 135

Part Four
CHAPTER 9 Arcady Revisited:
Americans in Italy 173
CHAPTER 10 America and Europe:
Influence and Affinity 195

Notes 233
Selected Bibliography 265
Illustration Credits 275
Index 281
Preface to the New Edition

The scholarship following upon the earlier editions of Nature and Culture
has gratifyingly picked up on some major ideas offered—among them, the
importance of science, especially geology, in relation to landscape art, the
Italian idyll as an expatriate American dream, the growth of industry and
technology, and their impact on nature, the Darwinian watershed and the
national crisis of faith that endures even today in attitudes to Creation, in-
telligent design, and evolution. The scholarship on key landscape figures
and on Western art, photography, and landscape painting at large has also
expanded, along with museum exhibitions that have carried our knowledge
still further. The interdisciplinary character of Nature and Culture has been
reinforced eleven years after the 1995 edition by curriculum changes in many
colleges that now seek to expand the discourse beyond the boundaries of
individual fields.
The ideas adumbrated in the Introduction have begun to seem prescient
in the light of the year 2006. I would hope they offer an understanding of
constancies in America’s cultural, religious, and political climate that I would
not have dreamed to be so useful when I first pointed them out in 1978. To
read the present through the past seems especially instructive at this mo-
ment in the nation’s history. The nineteenth century offers many clues for
Americans and for citizens of other cultures as to political, spiritual, and
philosophical attitudes that are still part of the fabric of American culture.
That fabric today, of course, is as varied as the nation’s citizenry, but the
geography of this large continent also plays its part, and the agricultural
ix
x Preface to the New Edition

roots of the nation run deep, sometimes in sharp contrast to urban devel-
opments. Portions of the citizenry have moved forward into the twenty-
first century. Others remain more closely linked through preference and
tradition to the premodern era. That era made a significant contribution to
landscape art in the western world and should be included in consider-
ations of the great landscape painting of the nineteenth century, along with
that of England, Germany, and France. It also held strongly to ideas of faith
and spirit and to investing the land with a sacrality that had not yet been so
fully violated.
The diverse character of America, its successes, and its failures can all be
read in the cultural signs left to us by the art and artists of the nineteenth
century. The essentially homogeneous character of the culture prior to the
Civil War and the advent of Darwinian ideas established a template that
many are still reluctant to adjust. In the last century, adjustments had to be
made as America became an international power, as the development of
technology began to accelerate and dominate, and as multiculturalism cre-
ated new racial and religious profiles of “average Americans.” Some of the
earlier ideas and beliefs have survived, and they represent the bedrock of
American culture as it was formed from the beginning. Others have been
maintained only as egregious distortions of their original meaning.
What is most edifying, at this writing, is the way in which the tissue of
American culture is offered up to us by a reading of the art and the cultural
context that produced it. Such readings can assist our understanding of
America’s past and can also act as guides to the present and future as we
assess the ways in which constancies in American traditions are useful, or
require adjustment in the twenty-first century.
B. N., 2006
Preface to the Previous Edition

When writing about American landscape painting of the nineteenth cen-

tury, I was concerned to move the borders of a narrowly defined art history
outward to include a broad array of contextual matters—philosophical, re-
ligious, literary, scientific, social—as they were borne toward the great thun-
derclap of 1859, when the Origin of Species appeared.
In my first book, published in 1969,1 I hoped to place the discipline of
American art history on an equal footing with other areas of art history.
The prejudices against the study of American art as a serious pursuit appear
somewhat archaic now, as the field has matured. I employed a double strat-
egy: rigorous formalism was applied to an art previously somewhat inno-
cent of such examination, and cultural and contextual avenues were opened,
to be explored by Nature and Culture in the succeeding decade.
I was conscious then—as indeed I am now—that we live our brief pro-
fessional lives in a continuum. And that modes of inquiry that declare,
like the French Revolution, the Thermidor that sweeps away the past, are
always provisional. The courtesies, as well as the controversies, of inquiry
require that we acknowledge those who have contributed to our under-
standing. While theoretical speculation was not profuse in American art
history when I entered the field in the late 1950s, the monographs of Good-
rich, the luminist essay of Baur, and the European parallels of Richardson
were all of value. Also, the intellectual vigor of such historians as Leo Marx,
R. W. B. Lewis, and Perry Miller was a welcome tributary to the art his-
torical inquiry.
xi
xii Preface to the Previous Edition

These historians have been grouped under the rubric of “American

Mind,”2 and that designation has been mistakenly applied to my work. As
pioneers of American intellectual thought, they were accused of holistic
thinking and then holistically grouped for the purpose of dismissal. Such a
grouping seems to me an episode in a long struggle in American Studies
between intellectual history and social history, presently rehearsed. The closer
one approaches the works of these historians, the more their complexities
escape dismissive epithets. I honor their contributions and credit them with
isolating certain myths and ideas which continue, despite all subsequent
revision, to be useful in problematizing aspects of American culture. How-
ever, my own practice of cultural art history did not issue from the received
ideas of American Studies’ secondary sources. Its source was the artworks
themselves, as they mediated, and were mediated by, their cultural context.
Art history is now an immensely more sophisticated instrument than it
previously was. The frisson of methodologies developed over the past twenty
years has invigorated an art historical discipline that was, in my view, in
need of it. Instructed by Marxist social history, race/gender studies,
deconstruction, semiotics, psychological and anthropological tools, and lit-
erary history, its modes of inquiry are legion, the field of study open, the
limits on the imagination removed. It has been revitalized by ideological
argument; antagonistic fantasies of the nature, role, and function of art-
works; and conflicting modes of thinking about and representing the past.
It is no secret that a frequently impolite war on virtually every academic
campus has been conducted across the fault line between previous and newer
methods of inquiry. Giles Gunn’s summary of the “old” and the “new” his-
torians’ perspectives is magisterial. He writes:
Where the old historicism seeks, finally, out of admiration, or at least out of
hope, to salvage and recuperate the past, the new historicism seeks out of
something closer to suspicion and disillusionment to demystify the past. These
are not mere differences of emphasis; they take in and reflect an entire re-
alignment of sensibility, a major alteration in the structure of intellectual
desire. . . . The object is to resituate the text in the sociopolitical and eco-
nomic sites of its production and thus to unmask the ideological factors that
have concealed its true purpose.3

A key question here is, of course, directed to the testifying historian: Who
is this witness and where does he or she stand? It is part of the confidence of
those who possess the present to assume a superior knowledge, insight, and
penetration with regard to the motives of the past. Does this presume a teleo-
 Preface to the Previous Edition xiii

logical progress in knowledge that paradoxically validates the opinions of those

who are antiteleological? But the historian, examiner, prosecutor, witness oc-
cupies a perishable quota of academic time and registers, consciously and
unconsciously, its assumptions. As Gunn puts it succinctly, this

raises all over again the question as to whether the critic can ever escape the
ideological contamination of his or her own processes of reflection. If he or
she can, then the practices of ideological criticism confute its own premises.
If he or she cannot, then the moral aim of cultural criticism (to the degree
that moral discrimination remains a meaningful critical activity to begin with)
is reduced to little more than the unmasking of the mendacious.4

Despite this, to me, accurate evaluation, some new historicist modes have
been immensely useful in demystifying the past, or perhaps in remystifying
it in terms acceptable to a present suspicious of all forms of synthesis and
idealism. The past is a book open to infinite readings, and reading skills
vary. Every advance, however, casts its own reciprocal shadow ahead of it,
and there is a question whether endemic suspicion of the past skirts a cyni-
cism that may extend to the actual creative process itself.
Quite apart from the most common corruption of this heady enterprise—
unlicensed imaginative excursions on the available data—the devaluation of
the artwork is a matter that requires some comment. If a successful (however
defined) painting or poem is a working synthesis of several factors convinc-
ingly deployed, requiring exceedingly fine discriminations and judgments, the
new historicism frequently withdraws from it the very factors that have insured
its survival as a work of art. From a semiological perspective, Hayden White has
observed, the difference between a classic text and a comic strip is not qualita-
tive but quantitative, “a difference of degree of complexity in the meaning-
production process.” The classic text, he notes, intrigues us “because it gives
insight into a process that is universal and definitive of human species-being
in general, the process of meaning-production.”5 I would suggest that a large
part of the pleasure of the classic text, or in this instance the artwork, is the
revelation of human meaning-production. Yet the many valencies of pleasure—
its exhilarations and satisfactions—sometimes, I feel, now tend to fall into the
penumbra of a scholastic puritanism convinced of its uselessness.
The loss of pleasure is not a sidebar to the often grim interrogations of
artworks’ hidden agendas. What does it mean when such words as “plea-
sure” and its synonyms are denied entry into the discourse, indeed pro-
scribed? Even Barthes, in The Pleasure of the Text, distinguishes between the
xiv Preface to the Previous Edition

text of pleasure that “contents, fills, grants euphoria . . . comes from culture
and does not break with it” and the text of bliss that more readily attracts
the postmodern sensibility, that “imposes a state of loss . . . discomforts . . .
unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the
consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation
with language.”6
In present art historical practice, pleasure is subsumed into the precincts
of the “esthetic” which, in its current transformation of usage, denotes
connoisseurship—and, even worse, the pejorative “decorative”—an irre-
sponsible, if satisfying, disregard of the artwork’s latencies. The denial of
pleasure, however, is itself a suppression of an intrinsic component of the
work’s perception. To marginalize it runs the risk of conducting a more or
less obtuse examination. The uses of pleasure must be returned to the dis-
course, not as a connoisseur’s indulgence but as a matter that distinguishes
the artwork from other examples of material culture. That is the artwork’s
peculiar status: to offer pleasure in its role as stylistic emblem, object of
delight, of philosophical meditation, social document, personal artifact, com-
mentary, iconograph—borne through succeeding historical contexts, which
donate and withdraw from it serialized meanings.

The application of a Panofskian concept of iconology, as I interpret it, to

American art and culture was a methodological aim of this book. Like any
scholarly work, Nature and Culture has had its supporters and detractors.
And like any author, I will claim that several of its premises have been mis-
understood. It endeavors to illuminate the belief systems that donated to
the landscape artists of the mid-nineteenth century the context of ideas
within which they produced their works. This despite the contention that
the past cannot be recovered, only fictions of it answering to various modes
of historical desire. Still, some fictions seem more “fictive” than others. When
virtually any reading or interpretation is assigned an equal validity, it is
difficult to refer it to a criterion of plausibility.
What is important are the terms of historical recovery, the assembling of
the evidence, the degree to which it can be tested, the monitoring of the
historian’s projective and interpretive habits, the patterns, the syntheses
(anathema to much recent thought) that offer themselves, chimera-like, from
the data and in turn seek revision and replacement.
 Preface to the Previous Edition xv

Panofsky’s recreative practice, lessening the distance between the scholar

and his or her subject in past time, seems useful here:

He knows that his cultural equipment, such as it is, would not be in harmony
with that of people in another land and of a different period. He tries, there-
fore, to make adjustments by learning as much as he possibly can of the cir-
cumstances under which the objects of his studies were created.

Panofsky was well aware of his “otherness” with respect to the past. But he
did not allow this insight to absolve him of the need to immerse himself, as
deeply as possible, in every aspect of the culture he was studying, to correct
“his own subjective feeling for content.”7
That Panofsky’s iconological vision (for in its all-encompassing desire it
was a vision) continues to be relevant is indicated by the recent reexamina-
tions of his approach in the light of current methodology. This has stimu-
lated its own debate, even to the point of his being characterized as the
Saussure of art history.8 Michael Holly points out that “semiotics and
iconology share an interest in uncovering the deep structure of cultural
products” and even suggests that Panofsky anticipates Foucault’s “archaeol-
ogy.”9 Foucault observes that a painting “is shot through—and independently
of scientific knowledge (connaissance) and philosophical themes—with the
positivity of a knowledge (savoir).”10 Though there are vast differences be-
tween them, at its most profound, Panofsky’s iconology, it seems to me,
approaches Foucault’s intent here.
If Foucault’s use of the term “archaeology” goes far beyond the simple
idea of geological excavation, designating, as he puts it, “the general theme
of a description that questions the already-said at the level of its existence,”11
Panofsky’s plunge into intrinsic meaning, as laid out in levels on the synoptical
table in his famous essay “Iconography and Iconology,” literally calls up the
idea of digging deeper and deeper.12 Presently, those who stop “digging” at
Panofsky’s intermediary level of iconography often seem to approximate
the readings appropriated from literary methodologies, privileging narrativity,
subject, and even title (however gratuitous its origin) over form.
This verbal textualization of the visual, frequently ushering into exile
any kind of formalist methodology, has aided the dephysicalization of the
art object. Art historians have always confronted the difficulty of fashion-
ing words to deal with wordless objects. But this has been further prob-
lematized by those readings of the object that lend themselves to extended
xvi Preface to the Previous Edition

exegeses of a literary nature. This is one of the most serious issues confront-
ing the art historian.
Panofsky’s own attitude to form has also entered the recent discourse.13
Argan has noted that “Panofsky was perhaps too modest when he said that
iconology is concerned with the subject and not with the forms of works of
art.”14 But I have never felt that Panofsky’s concept of iconology overlooked
form. He alludes at the outset to “The world of pure forms . . . recognized as
carriers of primary or natural meanings (which) may be called the world of
artistic motifs.”15
He also locates the “expressional” at the most elemental level of his
synoptical table, using as a corrective the history of style.16 Clearly, form
must be preestablished to serve as the vehicle of iconological meaning. The
alphabet of form does not fragment and dissolve because a deeper level of
iconological penetration has been achieved. When Panofsky reminds us that
intrinsic meaning is “essential” and “determines even the form in which the
visible event takes shape,”17 he is conceiving holistically of the work of art,
of the form as carrier of the most profound cultural meaning. “We must
bear in mind,” he writes, “that the neatly differentiated categories, which in
this synoptical table seem to indicate three independent spheres of mean-
ing, refer in reality to aspects of one phenomenon, namely, the work of art
as a whole.”18 My own work—insofar as it has applied an iconological model—
is firmly grounded in the belief that cultural meaning can be read from the
artwork’s undeniable objecthood.

Each culture generates its rhetoric, finding it consistent, convincing, and, of

course, useful. This rhetorical screen is particularly durable in those cul-
tures with an imperial bent since it justifies practices that without it would
reveal their self-interest. Such rhetoric has a synthetic and unifying role in
cultural life. It removes the need to examine disturbing issues, giving each
subscriber a sense of comforting identity and firm destiny. It defines the
common good and will not tolerate its redefinition. It maintains itself
through both its own energy and the rewards it offers. Even those who sus-
pect its premises are borne against their will on the historical tide. Outright
dissent usually serves to confirm and reinforce its mandate. The rhetoric
maintains itself until the social and political context revises its assumptions
and replaces it with another.
 Preface to the Previous Edition xvii

In the mid-nineteenth century, the rhetoric subscribed to by landscape

artists, their patrons, and the public they served was remarkably consistent.
It fitted fairly smoothly into the larger aims of the culture. The taking of the
continent was powered by an undisputed Christian consensus, a mission-
ary zeal, a largely benign interpretation of progress. The themes are contra-
dictory: the growth of a comfortable middle class and an on-going Indian
genocide; the idealization of nature concurrent with industrialization; con-
fidence in an inevitable future and a selective memory of the past. All this
accompanied by the establishment of a series of powerful myths which pur-
chased the future at the expense of the present, among them the apotheosis
of the individual, whose resourcefulness, pragmatism, new approach to old
problems, and constant reinvention of self, occasionally transcended, sig-
nalled a new man or woman in a new culture.
The mythic figure so described has been a cogent social force in America
and has constructed a different model of the limits of individual freedom
and its social containment. Out of fictions, generated by the uncontested
desires of a culture, come harsh realities. They in turn authenticate the myths,
and stabilize them for examination. If we substitute usefulness for truth
(and utility in America is an empirical criterion of truth), the myths require
close examination since it is they, however they present themselves as fanta-
sies of power, that have helped to form the cultural reality, in the matrix of
which the art we examine is (literally) formed.
There is a moment when a collection of current ideas establishes closure
and circulates through a system that serves useful social desires and resists
change. By revealing and defining this system of ideas—religious, national-
istic, scientific, philosophical—in the period examined in this book, I sought
to demonstrate its role as a powerful screen behind which the deep ambigu-
ities of the age lingered. If one accepts W. J. T. Mitchell’s association of land-
scape with imperialism (and he makes a convincing case), his conclusion is
difficult to refute:
Landscape might be seen more profitably as something like the “dreamwork”
of imperialism, unfolding its own movement in time and space from a cen-
tral point of origin and folding back on itself to disclose both utopian fanta-
sies of the perfected imperial prospect and fractured images of unresolved
ambivalence and unsuppressed resistance.19

The task, as I saw it twenty years ago, was to demonstrate how a governing
idea of nature was assembled from constituent ideas in several disciplines,
xviii Preface to the Previous Edition

also indicating fault lines over which smooth continuities sought to con-
firm themselves, without losing, in the process, the reality of the art at issue,
however transfixed by vectors from other disciplines. The data seemed al-
most eager to dispose themselves into a convincing figure, for the period
advanced its own rhetoric at every turn. What is strange about it is its eerie
afterlife in contemporary culture. Nor does it take much ingenuity to find
its translation into recent political science. The mid-nineteenth century’s
tendency not to recognize evil when confronted with it, its presumptions of
national goodness and morality, and its concept of the nation’s role as “the
foster parents of billions” are intrinsic to a benign imperial assumption that
eventually was turned outward from its national duties to construe all the
world as America. However etiolated, this belief still coexists with those
found in the darker shadows that such optimism and confidence cast.
That darkness, however, locates itself outside the landscape art of the
mid-nineteenth century, which seems largely impervious to it. This has not
restrained attempts to find it, and a literature is now in place which is satis-
fied that it has. The art has been read from the context inward, and great
events and small now return a variety of echoes—some convincing, some
less so—from the documents (paintings) in the case. In reading the art, I
was careful not to impress upon it, without more powerful evidence, point
for point alliances with specific dates of topical events or to find in it a
skepticism that more readily defines our age.

. . . to return to the current state of minds in America. . . . It is evident that

there still remains here a larger foundation for Christian religion than in any
other country in the world, to my knowledge, and I do not doubt that this
disposition of minds still has influence on the political regime.20
—Alex de Tocqueville, 1831

I believe that as a general rule political liberty animates more than it extin-
guishes religious passions. . . . Free institutions are often the natural and some-
times indispensable instruments of religious passions.21
—Alex de Tocqueville, 1847

The American landscapists, unlike some of the writers, were the avatars of
faith, belief; by virtue of their exercise of creative powers and privileged
 Preface to the Previous Edition xix

readings of nature, they could be recognized as faux-clergymen of a sort.

The relative absence of personal scandal, irony, and scepticism further lo-
cates their practice somewhere between the secular and the divine. While
the magisterial doubts and ambiguities of Thomas Cole’s work leave an open
field for examination, most of the artists who succeeded him are remark-
able for a providential certainty and lack of doubt that the postmodern
mind does not find beguiling. A visual high art that believes its own opti-
mistic readings of nature as confirming the regnant culture can legitimize,
depending on one’s point of view, a magnificent episode in the history of
landscape painting and/or indicate a degree of social obtuseness. The rhe-
torical consensus within which they worked was, like most systems of be-
lief, self-reflective and resistant to change.
Indeed, reading the artists’ comments and studying their work, an ideal
conception of the landscape artist seems to hover over their practice. The
image of the mid-century artist that assembles itself from this complex of
religious, philosophical, and scientific data addresses issues distinct from
his contemporaries in other countries. He (rarely she, for such women land-
scapists as Durand’s student Caroline Ransom have left few traces) recog-
nizes in nature a connection with Creation, and directly or indirectly, with
God. He sees his activity as a moral trust and subscribes to an ethic/esthetic
which must represent without distortion and presumes a spectator of like
mind. As his contemporaries in the sciences adjust their discoveries to their
religious faith, he is reconfirmed in his view of nature as a religious palimp-
sest. He is unacquainted with irony, which could be seen as the preface to a
cynicism that breaches the sacred.
The ingenuousness of this phantom figure makes a large target. As Terry
Eagleton points out in an interesting comment on some current practice:

postmodernism has betrayed a certain chronic tendency to caricature the

notions of truth adhered to by its opponents, setting up straw targets of tran-
scendentally disinterested knowledge in order to reap the self-righteous de-
lights of ritually bowling them over.22

Ideologies and beliefs are enabling structures, and it is possible, I suppose,

to look upon the landscape paintings of the period as residual artifacts,
made possible by group illusions, returning, in the circularity of such rea-
soning, to their sources to offer and gather energy. The issue is what gives
xx Preface to the Previous Edition

such illusions their durability and power; what leads to their formation and
ultimate discharge; and what forces maintain them.

Emerging at a moment when whole epistemological systems were under

modification, this book found itself thoroughly at home in a more permissive
interdisciplinary area of discourse. Though at the time such a departure from
normal art historical practice seemed to warrant an apology, it soon became
clear that the restraints of the various disciplines were being considerably
loosened. As Fox and Lears have described the most recent situation:

We are in the midst of a dramatic shift in sensibility, and “cultural” history is

the rubric under which a massive doubting and refiguring of our most cher-
ished historical assumptions is being conducted.23

Some of the book’s ideas have assumed wider currency, among them the
significance of the ubiquitous Claudian “stamp”; the distinction between
an old and a new sublime; the ecological concerns elaborated in the chapter
on the axe, train, and figure; the emphasis on the importance of the spiri-
tual and nationalist context in which landscape paintings were executed and
received; and the implications of the identification of God with Nature.
Several subsequent American landscape studies have taken their lead from
scholars of European landscape, using methodologies devised for the
problematics of European landscape (which do not dovetail perfectly with
the American circumstance). Still missing, however, is an extension of the
attempt, made in my last chapter, to situate nineteenth-century American
landscape painting in the larger context of the art of the Western world.
Surely, such comparative studies are long overdue and would further assist
the field of nineteenth-century American art to achieve parity with Euro-
pean art. Is there a peculiar parochialism in American art scholarship that
encourages its marginalization?
One other crucial area investigated here remains largely unexamined.
Political and economic investigations have taken precedence in current stud-
ies, and often rewardingly so. Delivering such information to the mute sur-
faces of the landscape paintings has returned to us a variety of discourses.
But the critical importance of how contemporary science constructed the
landscape that the painters studied and affected their representation of it
begs further study.
 Preface to the Previous Edition xxi

The apogee of the landscape “faith” in American painting corresponds

almost exactly with the struggle of providential ideas to maintain them-
selves against the mounting scientific evidence to the contrary, ending of
course in the post-Darwinian crisis of faith. Yet recent scholarship has largely
ignored the implications of that struggle. The importance of a science/reli-
gion conflict that threatened almost two thousand years of belief has been
neglected.24 When science has entered in, post-Darwinian anxieties have
sometimes been read too early (through current hindsight) into the paint-
ings, against the resistance of the landscape painters and their public to any
disruption of providential belief. Science did ultimately change the percep-
tion of space, time, and light, and the signatures of that change can be read
in the landscape paintings of the post-Darwinian generation—in Homer,
for example.
But the difficulties of reading out from the paintings and reading in from
the social context have arranged themselves into two somewhat antagonis-
tic parties. Both see the artwork in very different conceptual perspectives.
This conflict implicates the issues of picture and text, and of the painting as
art and as documentary artifact. In this hot interpretive zone, art historians,
cultural historians, art theorists, and social historians generate a rich ma-
trix of ideas through which the artwork does not pass unchanged.

We must never think of forms, in their different states, as simply suspended

in some remote, abstract zone, above the earth and above man. They mingle
with life, whence they come; they translate into space certain movements of
the mind. But a definite style is not merely a state in the life of forms, nor is it
that life itself: it is a homogeneous, coherently formed environment, in the
midst of which man acts and breathes.25
—Henri Focillon

Perhaps it can be agreed that painting a landscape requires sets of decisions,

conscious and unconscious, pursued to the point where particulars are as-
sembled into a provisional synthesis which suffices for this painting, to be
rehearsed in the next under a new set of conditions which retest the method
in a reciprocal exchange between empirical discovery and a priori knowl-
edge. Anyone who has witnessed the process can testify to the hesitations,
the runs of certainty, the invasions of doubt, the generation of solutions to
test serialized problems, the tactical discretions, the cycles of observation,
and the disposition of information in several codes.
xxii Preface to the Previous Edition

We can see how what emerges refers to the artist’s past and to the larger
universe of paintings with which he or she is acquainted. Perhaps, going
further, we can situate the artist before nature, which he or she sees with
eyes conditioned by conventions and contingencies that articulate the cul-
tural context in which (to adapt Wölfflin) he or she only sees what he or she
looks for and only looks for what he or she can see.26 However the present-
day spectator sees the work—as a station for the reception of cultural sig-
nals or as a transmitter of feelings, intimations, and individual aperçus, like
poetry—that spectator would, I feel sure, agree that he or she had witnessed
a highly complex human activity, calling for sophisticated perceptions, ex-
ecutive skills, and expert knowledge of a variety of depictive signs and strate-
gies. The results articulate again cultural parameters and may confirm, test,
question, or reinterpret their limits. As a mode of representation, all classes
assign to the result of this process a privileged status.
I have essayed this description for one reason, to ask an often unallow-
able question: What is the working artist “thinking”? This is answered with
no great difficulty. He or she is thinking about painting a picture, about the
decisions and difficulties implicit in his or her trade. The circle of conscious
attention within which the work is formed is directed to one end: to make
the “best” picture he or she can make, for few artists, surely (except for a few
current practitioners for whom it is an esthetic), set out to paint a “bad”
one. The successful work maintains a curious posture that makes it vulner-
able, a kind of inclusive “neutrality” that avoids closure. How then can this
picture be read?
Can we conclude from this exercise that the painting has a privileged
status as an artwork and that readings which negate that status to some
certain degree diminish themselves? I am not alone in recognizing an ur-
gent need for a method which better reconciles the formal with contextual
readings. The range of disciplines brought to bear on the artwork tend to
reify and disintegrate it. Held in so many intersecting searchlights, the plea-
sures of the image become increasingly transparent, bodiless, and evanes-
cent. But who is the recipient of this pleasure? By what modalities of
experience does he or she recognize and respond? What, in short, is the
context in which the work is perceived—whether that context is one that
shares the assumptions implicit in the work or deciphers the codes that
produce it?
 Preface to the Previous Edition xxiii

These codes include the ways in which a culture formulates its notions of
the medium through and in which its daily and artistic transactions occur—
space—and the relationship of these notions to the notion of time. These, I
believe, are encoded in the paintings of each era, though the reading of
them is difficult. Each is bound up with social agreements so consistent and
unconscious as to be largely invisible. Perception as a social agreement—
involving mind-set, instrumentalities of vision, concepts of domestic and
social space, etc.—is now a profitable area of study. There are hazards here
as everywhere else. The question can be posed thus: To what degree can
spatial inconsistencies, hierarchies of position, and ratios (in landscape)
between elements be read as reflecting accurately the social context? De-
ductive readings from the social context effectively find formal (syntactic)
hooks on which to hang a variety of issues and content. The screen of the
artwork is easily permeable to ideas projected upon it, and often convinc-
ingly so. But there is a criterion by which some of that content, eager to
annotate the artwork, can be judged.
Thus, the description that opened this section. For the internal decisions
through which the artwork defines itself have their own self-reflexive logic.
Larger matters that the artwork is forced, by deductive practice, to “confess”
are often no more than the solution of an “artistic” problem, made neces-
sary in the carpentry of the trade. Of course, the modes of exercising such
solutions to problems within the work may be said to have a social echo and
launch the analyst once more on a circular track. But it is possible, I think,
to establish a distinction between internal necessity and external projection
upon it of large social duties. A wrinkle in a painting’s space does not always
signify a shudder in the social context.

It seems abundantly clear that we must continue to reach for a methodol-

ogy that allows the artwork to maintain its physical presence as art, as visual
object, and as artifact under the larger rubric of a cultural art history (with
all of the attendant problems of artmaking and visuality entering in).
Hasenmueller has suggested that Panofsky’s “synthetic intuition” is “not
so much a method as a human capacity: it is not an investigative process but
a dimension of mind.”27 Panofsky’s invocation of “synthetic intuition,” his
“equipment” on the third level for arriving at an iconological interpreta-
tion,28 implies for me the full use of a scholar’s faculties, intuitive as well as
reasoned. They are summoned to deal with an entire world of experience,
xxiv Preface to the Previous Edition

which is by definition both conscious and unconscious, and with works of

art which often also derive as much from the artist’s spontaneous intuition
as from training and programs.
If I have been directed toward Panofsky’s idea of iconology, it was more
as a model than as a system, since the kind of knowledge he expects from
the scholar, as articulated in “The History of Art as a Humanistic Disci-
pline,” requires no less than the scholar’s fullest possible immersion in the
art, life, and thought of his or her period, as well as a knowledge of his or
her own contemporary biases. In recent years, the art historian as inter-
preter has overshadowed the art, and systems have overshadowed the far-
ranging flexibility of the individual scholar. A scholar using as many tools
at his or her disposal as possible, considering as many images, artifacts, and
texts as he or she can in a lifetime, and learning from as many methodolo-
gies as are fruitful might with such ecumenicism begin to solve the prob-
lems of meaning that confront us. To substitute the singular “dimension of
mind” for system strikes me as salutary.
B. N., 1995
Preface to the Original Edition

This book’s main intention is to place American landscape painting of the

great era from 1825 to 1875 in its own cultural context—and to examine that
context—philosophical, spiritual, and scientific—as fully as the art itself.
This is a kind of figure-ground problem. The art, seen against the context,
will, I hope, take on more definition and meaning. The cultural ground,
with the art placed against it, should reveal what formed and gave suste-
nance to the art—which in turn contributed to that context.
In American Painting of the Nineteenth Century I emphasized the formal
values of the art which had, I felt, been overlooked in much earlier writing.
Here, I stress ideas, and attempt to show how the history of ideas flows
freely through the membranes that compartmentalize the various disciplines
comprising a culture. In the nineteenth century these compartments were
less restrictive than they are now.
In using this methodology I have abandoned more familiar practices in
order to approach the problems that interest me. The book is not arranged
chronologically, nor does it attempt to give a “history” in the traditional
sense of naming all the landscape painters and summarizing their biogra-
phies and artistic contributions. Rather it aspires through certain thematic
identifications toward a form of cultural art history that probes for what, in
Panofsky’s terms, might be called iconological roots.
This interdisciplinary focus is more horizontal than vertical. While many
of the artists presented here live on into the 1870’s and beyond, much of the
key activity may be said to center around the mid-century—the decade from
xxv
xxvi Preface to the Original Edition

1850 to 1860 when everything came to a climax—that both epitomized the

age and nourished the seeds of its conclusion. This activity is revealed as
much by contemporary letters, journals, periodicals, and criticism as by the
art itself. I place great stress on those texts that elucidate the concerns of the
paintings.
As an art historian I am, however, very aware that the art comes first. The
paintings, drawings, and photographs demand the primary reading. One
goes from the art to the culture hoping to find there what the art has already
told us. To reverse the procedure would be to risk imposing on the art a
priori conclusions unsupported by the artistic evidence—however convinc-
ing such cultural ideas may be.
In “reading” the art, we will of course learn a great deal about the culture
that produced it, and about its response to that culture. I feel that this enter-
prise may also cast some light on the cultural context in which we find
ourselves today, more than a hundred years later. Some American attitudes,
it seems to me, are remarkably durable.
In making this multidisciplinary approach, I am presuming in advance
on the generosity of my colleagues. I am entering into other fields, all of
which have their specialists, as does mine. I do so in the hope that my col-
leagues in related disciplines will approve of my intent, though they may
not always agree with my performance. My belief in the need for a more
“ecumenical” art history has overcome a natural scholarly reserve.
The main theme of this book is conveyed by its title, Nature and Culture:
the conversion of the landscape into art, the evolution of an American cul-
ture and its relation to Western art and culture at large. Emerson, ever oblig-
ing, may have finished my title when he quoted Plato, as was his habit: “He
said, Culture; he said, Nature; and he failed to add, ‘There is also the divine.’”
B. N., October 1978
Barnard College,
Columbia University
Acknowledgments

The gathering of materials for this book depended on the generosity and
cooperation of many individuals, institutions, and publications. Among
these, I would like to acknowledge and thank especially:
Elizabeth Baker of Art in America, Professor Eleanor Tilton of Barnard
College, Richard Slavin, Alan Dages of Olana, Butler Coleman, William
McNaught and William Woolfenden of the Archives of American Art, Linda
Ferber of the Brooklyn Museum, Joan Washburn of the Washburn Gallery,
New York, John Walsh of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Elaine Dee of
the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design, Charles Eldredge of the University
of Kansas Museum of Art, Ellen Sharp and Dr. Frederick Cummings of the
Detroit Institute of Arts, John Wilmerding of the National Gallery of Art,
Professor David Huntington of the University of Michigan, Jane Van Turano
of the American Art Journal, Alfred Hunt and the staff of the Hunt Institute
for Botanical Documentation. Ms. Bea Ellsworth generously made Cropsey’s
work, papers, and library available to me.
“The Nationalist Garden and Holy Book” first appeared in Art in America
in January–February 1972. “Grand Opera and the Still Small Voice” ap-
peared in Art in America in March–April 1971. “Americans in Italy: Arcady
Revisited” formed the catalogue essay for The Arcadian Landscape, an exhi-
bition at the University of Kansas Museum of Art in November–December
1972, and was printed in Art in America in January–February 1973. “Chang-
ing Concepts of the Sublime” first appeared in the American Art Journal
in Spring 1972. Some of the ideas that comprise the chapter “America and
xxvii
xxviii Acknowledgments

Europe, Influence and Affinity” were first presented at the Nineteenth-

Century American Art Symposium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
1970, and were subsequently printed in The Shaping of Art and Architecture
in Nineteenth Century America (Metropolitan Museum, 1972). The chapter
“The Meteorological Vision: Clouds” was first presented as a lecture at the
Nineteenth-Century American Art Symposium at the University of Dela-
ware in 1973. The section on the axe first appeared as “The Double-Edged
Axe” in Art in America, January–February 1976.
The research for this volume was substantially aided by my receipt of a
Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974, by the willing adjustment of Barnard Col-
lege and the Department of Art History and Archaeology of Columbia Uni-
versity to the suspension of my teaching duties for that year.
My debts to my students are only partly indicated by the occasional foot-
notes that recognize their specific contributions. The cooperative “workshop”
atmosphere that has characterized my seminars in American Art in the Gradu-
ate Faculty of Columbia University over nearly a decade while this book was
in preparation has been filled with insights and enthusiasm, all of which fed
my thoughts, as they enriched my life. In this context, I am grateful to Eliza-
beth Garrity, Mary Ann Lublin, Annette Blaugrund, Fred Adelson, Katherine
Manthorne, Jean O’Leary, Kenneth Maddox, and Ella Foshay.
Linda Minarik and Joellyn Ausanka typed the manuscript with scrupu-
lous attention to detail. I am especially indebted to the staff of Oxford Uni-
versity Press. James Raimes showed rare editorial understanding of my ideas,
intentions, and aims. Stephanie Golden’s unique alertness and unfailing
intelligence aided the book immeasurably, as did Deborah Bowen’s perse-
verance and ingenuity in tracking down difficult photograph sources.
Frederick Schneider undertook the problems of design with special sensi-
tivity. All these people generously contributed vast resources of time, en-
ergy and ability, and I thank them.
I would also like to thank my family for their patience over this long
period, particularly my late parents, Sadie and Joseph Novak, who are re-
sponsible for all my scholarly endeavors. There is no adequate way to thank
my husband, Brian O’Doherty, for his inspiration and support.
B. N., October 1978
 Acknowledgments xxix

I much appreciate Cybele Tom’s ingenuity and persistence in pursuing all

the photographic sources for the trilogy, and I am deeply appreciative of
Lelia Mander’s meticulous and caring stewardship of this edition of Nature
and Culture.
B. N., 2006
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Part One


This page intentionally left blank
CHAPTER 1

Introduction:
The Nationalist Garden and
the Holy Book

In the beginning all the world was America.

—John Locke1

In the early nineteenth century in America, nature couldn’t do without God,

and God apparently couldn’t do without nature. By the time Emerson wrote
Nature in 1836, the terms “God” and “nature” were often the same thing,
and could be used interchangeably. The transcendentalists accepted God’s
immanence. More orthodox religions, which had always insisted on a sepa-
ration of God and nature, also capitulated to their union. A “Christianized
naturalism,” to use Perry Miller’s phrase, transcended theological bound-
aries, so that one could find “sermons in stones, and good in every thing.”
“Nature,” wrote Miller, “somehow, by a legerdemain that even so highly lit-
erate Christians as the editors of The New York Review could not quite ad-
mit to themselves, had effectually taken the place of the Bible. . . .”2
That legerdemain was facilitated by the pervasive nature worship not
only of Emerson, but of Wordsworth, Rousseau, and Schelling. With this
added international force it is not surprising that most religious orthodox-
ies in American obligingly expanded to accommodate a kind of Christianized
pantheism. Ideas of God’s nature and of God in nature became hopelessly
entangled, and only the most scrupulous theologians even tried to separate
them. If nature was God’s Holy Book, it was God.
The implications of this for morality, religion, and nationalism make the
concept of nature before the Civil War indispensable to an understanding
3
4 part one

of American culture. Like every age, the early nineteenth century enter-
tained contradictions it did not attempt, or perhaps dare, to resolve. By
asking the apparently simple question “How did Americans see and inter-
pret nature?” we are quickly brought into the heart of these contradictions.
In recent years a number of brilliant historians have tried to isolate and
define the ideas the nineteenth century projected on nature, ideas that strove
to reconcile America, nature, and God. In Errand into the Wilderness, Perry
Miller suggests that “Nature—not to be too tedious—in America means the
wilderness.”3 In Virgin Land, Henry Nash Smith speaks of the American
agrarian dream as the Garden of the World.4 In The American Adam, R. W. B.
Lewis suggests the idea of Adamic innocence before the Fall.5 To these three
(nature as Primordial Wilderness, as the Garden of the World, as the origi-
nal Paradise) we can add a fourth—America awaiting the regained Paradise
attending the millennium. These myths of nature in America change ac-
cording to the religious or philosophical lenses through which they are ex-
amined. Accepting this lability, Leo Marx found it convenient to discriminate
between two concepts of the Garden, the primitive and the pastoral6—a
distinction that fortuitously resolves an important antinomy between ideas
of wilderness (God’s original creation, untamed, untouched, savage) and
the agrarian Garden of man’s cultivation. The mutability of these myths
assisted the powerful hold nature had on the nineteenth-century imagina-
tion. As with any shared overriding concept whose terms are not strictly
defined, each man could interpret it according to his needs. Nature’s text,
like the Bible, could be interpreted with Protestant independence.
The new significance of nature and the development of landscape paint-
ing coincided paradoxically with the relentless destruction of the wilder-
ness in the early nineteenth century. The ravages of man on nature were a
repeated concern in artists’ writing, and the symbol of this attack was usu-
ally “the axe,” cutting into nature’s pristine—and thus godly—state. In his
“Essay on American Scenery” (1835), an essay that articulates the spirit that
was to dominate much American landscape painting for thirty years, Thomas
Cole found America’s wilderness its most distinctive feature,
because in civilized Europe the primitive features of scenery have long since
been destroyed or modified. . . . And to this cultivated state our western world
is fast approaching; but nature is still predominant, and there are those who
regret that with the improvements of cultivation the sublimity of the wilder-
ness should pass away; for those scenes of solitude from which the hand of
 Introduction: The Nationalist Garden and the Holy Book 5

nature has never been lifted, affect the mind with a more deep toned emo-
tion than aught which the hand of man has touched. Amid them the conse-
quent associations are of God the creator—they are his undefiled works, and
the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things.7 (plate 1)

In his funeral oration for Cole, William Cullen Bryant extolled the early
landscapes and noted “delight . . . at the opportunity of contemplating pic-
tures which carried the eye over scenes of wild grandeur peculiar to our
country, over our ariel mountain-tops with their mighty growth of forest
never touched by the axe, along the banks of streams never deformed by
culture. . . .”8 This consciousness of destruction is never far from contempo-
rary criticism. Reviewing two landscapes by Cole’s Hudson River colleague,
J. F. Cropsey, in 1847, The Literary World pointed out the artist’s role in pre-
serving the last evidences of the golden age of wilderness: “The axe of civi-
lization is busy with our old forests, and artisan ingenuity is fast sweeping
away the relics of our national infancy. . . . What were once the wild and
picturesque haunts of the Red Man, and where the wild deer roamed in free-
dom, are becoming the abodes of commerce and the seats of manufactures.
. . . Yankee enterprise has little sympathy with the picturesque, and it be-
hooves our artists to rescue from its grasp the little that is left, before it is
too late.”9 Such intense reverence for nature came only with the realization
that nature could be lost. Given the indissoluble union of God and nature
at this moment, the fate of both God and nature is obvious. A future mourn-
ing the loss of faith and consumed with ecological nostalgia was not far
away. But though the nineteenth century acknowledged its fears to some
extent, it worked hard to reconcile the various myths, to retain God and
nature in any combination that seemed workable. Thus, if Wilderness be-
came cultivated (“deformed by culture,” in Bryant’s phrase), it could still be
a Garden. If the Garden was not Paradise, it could offer the possibility of a
Paradise to be regained. To this idea of Paradise, original or regained, much
energy was devoted.
Though the idea of primal innocence received its main exposition from
Whitman rather late in the pre–Civil War period we are discussing, the rec-
onciliation to its loss was premised on the idea of Adam’s “fortunate Fall.”
The elder Henry James felt that Adam’s original estate had all the happy blind-
ness of the state of nature, undisturbed by the rigors of self-consciousness.
Adam’s state was
6 part one
purely genetic and premoral . . . a state of blissful infantile delight unperturbed
as yet by those fierce storms of the intellect which are soon to envelope and
sweep it away, but also unvisited by a single glimpse of that Divine and halcyon
calm of the heart in which these hideous storms will finally rock themselves to
sleep. Nothing can indeed be more remote (except in pure imagery) from dis-
tinctively human attributes, or from the spontaneous life of man, than this
sleek and comely Adamic condition, provided it should turn out an abiding
one: because man in that case would prove a mere dimpled nursling of the
skies, without ever rising into the slightest Divine communion or fellowship,
without ever realizing a truly Divine manhood and dignity.10

So after detailing the drawbacks of Paradise on the basis that perfect happi-
ness is hardly worth having unless one knows one has it, the stage was set for the
fortunate Fall, putting an optimistic complexion on Original Sin (plate 2). The
notion of the fortunate Fall, R. W. B. Lewis points out, can be traced back al-
most to the fourth century in Christian theology, and allows for “the necessary
transforming shocks and sufferings, the experiments and errors, in short, the
experience—through which maturity and identity may be arrived at.”11
For those who did not subscribe to the concept of Adamic innocence, or
to the fortunate aspect of the Fall, the recovery of Paradise, the coming of
the millennium prophesied in the Book of Revelation, might also be dis-
cerned in American nature, which now took on the aspect of the New Jerusa-
lem. The series of awakenings, of evangelical revivals, that spread through
many American towns from upstate New York to the newer territories in
the West, were a powerful force in the national psyche. Apocalyptic shud-
ders of remorse carried with them an ardent belief that the believers were
chosen, that America itself was the chosen land, and that the millennium
was at hand.
Each view of nature, then, carried with it not only an esthetic view, but a
powerful self-image, a moral and social energy that could be translated into
action. Many of these projections on nature augmented the American’s sense
of his own unique nature, his unique opportunity, and could indeed foster
a sense of destiny which, when it served to rationalize questionable acts
with elevated thoughts, could have a darker side. And the apparently inno-
cent nationalism, so mingled with moral and religious ideas, could survive
into another century as an imperial iconography.

. . . The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God. It is

the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual, and
strives to lead back the individual to it.
—Emerson, Nature
 Introduction: The Nationalist Garden and the Holy Book 7

We can never see Christianity from the catechism—from the pastures, from
a boat in the pond, from amidst the songs of wood-birds, we possibly may.
—Emerson, “Circles”12

Since the landscape was a holy text which revealed truth and also offered it
for interpretation, artists who painted the landscape had a choice of what to
transcribe and interpret. They could paint what Lewis calls “Yankee Gen-
esis,” or they could paint Revelation, with or without evangelical overtones.
Creation and revelation were in fact key words in nineteenth-century phi-
losophy, theology, and esthetics—though, again, their meanings varied enor-
mously according to context.
“We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifestations of its
own nature, by the term Revelation,” wrote Emerson. “These are always at-
tended by the emotion of the sublime.”13 “Sublimity” is also an important
word in nineteenth-century nature terminology. By the time Emerson was
writing, the sublime had been largely transformed from an esthetic to a
Christianized mark of the Deity resident in nature. Indeed the gradual fu-
sion of esthetic and religious terms is an index of the appropriation of the
landscape for religious and ultimately, as we shall see, nationalist purposes.
Science, so prominent in the nineteenth-century consciousness, could hardly
be left out either. Landscape, according to the mid-century critic James Jack-
son Jarves, was “the creation of the one God—his sensuous image and rev-
elation, through the investigation of which by science or its representation
by art men’s hearts are lifted toward him”14 (plate 3). Science and art are both
cited here as routes to God; and this continued attempt to Christianize sci-
ence was made urgent by the growing stress it was placing on the traditional
interpretations of God’s nature. It was hoped that art’s interpretive capacities
would reconcile the contradictions science was forcing on the nineteenth-
century mind.
Revelation and creation, the sublime as a religious idea, science as a mode
of knowledge to be urgently enlisted on God’s side—with these the artist,
approaching a nature in which his society had located powerful vested in-
terests, was already in a difficult position. In painting landscape, the artist
was tampering with some of his society’s most touchy ideas, ideas involved
in many of its pursuits. Any irresponsibility on his part might result in a
kind of excommunication. The nineteenth century rings with exhortations
to the artist on the high moral duties of his exceptional calling—entirely
8 part one

proper for the landscape painters, those priests of the natural church. There
is no question, in early-nineteenth-century America, of the intimate rela-
tion between art and society, a fact that has to be emphasized after a century
of modernism.
Since artists were created by God and generously endowed by him with
special gifts, the powers of revelation and creation extended to them too.
How to exercise these divine rights was the subject of much discussion.
Asher B. Durand cautioned the young artists “not to transcribe whole pages
(of nature) indiscriminately ‘verbatim ad literature’; but such texts as most
clearly and simply declare her great truths, and then he cannot transcribe
with too much care and faithfulness.”15 He suggested starting with a humble
naturalism, for “the humblest scenes of your successful labors will become
hallowed ground to which, in memory at least, you will make many a joy-
ous pilgrimage, and, like Rousseau, in the fullness of your emotions, kiss
the very earth that bore the print of your oft-repeated footsteps.”16 As is
clear from this passage, Durand’s famous “Letters on Landscape Painting”
(1855) frequently adopt the tone of a religious manual instructing a novice.
And as a spiritual instructor sometimes does, Durand tried to make the
burden of humble labors less heavy by pointing to their goal. Landscape
painting, he wrote, “will be great in proportion as it declares the glory of
God, by representation of his works, and not of the works of man . . . every
truthful study of near and simple objects will qualify you for the more diffi-
cult and complex; it is only thus you can learn to read the great book of
Nature, to comprehend it, and eventually transcribe from its page, and at-
tach to the transcript your own commentaries.” But he immediately cau-
tions on the priorities involved and warns the acolyte not to overvalue
hard-won technical facility: “there is the letter and the spirit of the true
Scripture of Art, the former being tributary to the latter, but never overrul-
ing it. All the technicalities above named are but the language and the rhetoric
which expresses and enforces the doctrine. . . .”17
Thomas Cole, though no less reverent, was more assertive in emphasizing
the creative role of the artist than was Durand, who always remained the
devout naturalist: “Art is in fact man’s lowly imitation of the creative power of
the Almighty.”18 Cole also said, “We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out
of the garden is our ignorance and folly.”19 This reinforces a matter often in-
dispensable to the whole machinery of nature worship—morality. Cole im-
 Introduction: The Nationalist Garden and the Holy Book 9

plies that, seen with the guiltless eye, nature would be perceived as perfection,
as Eden. The flaws are not in nature, but in ourselves.
From this point of view Cole’s own development is instructive. The first
two paintings in the Course of Empire series, the savage and arcadian states,
move from the Wilderness to the Garden, two powerful mythic conceits in
America, as we have seen (fig. 1.1). Then, consummation of empire, lush,
sensual, and hedonistic, is followed by destruction and desolation. The moral
of Cole’s parable was mused over in the contemporary reviews. “Will it al-
ways be so?” wrote one reviewer. “Philosophy and religion forbid.” For when
“the lust to destroy shall cease and the arts, the sciences, and the ambition to
excell in all good shall characterize man, instead of the pride of the triumph,
or the desire of conquests, then will the empire of love be permanent.”20 The
expression of such pious sentiments penetrated to the furthest reaches of secu-
lar society, even when their incongruity was marked. Cole himself projected a
sequel to this series, based on Christianity (The Cross and the World, left in-
complete at his death), in which the empire of love would triumph. The two
series may be seen as parables of the fate of pagan and of Christian man.
Christianity could redeem history, the landscape, the world.

1.1 Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Arcadian State (2nd in series), 1836. Oil on canvas,
391/4 × 631/4 in. (99.7 × 160.7 cm.). New York, The New-York Historical Society.
10 part one

So the strongly moral reception of Cole’s Course of Empire was a salient

part of the age. If, like nature, art was a divine force, and the artist himself
bound by his divine work, morality, served by art and nature, was enlisted
to assist man toward his divinity, and didactically encouraged at all turns.
Despite the suggestion of some critics that the love of nature had its amoral
aspects, the opposite idea was energetically cultivated. “. . . In regard to land-
scape art,” wrote the critic H. T. Tuckerman, “it is apparent that the impres-
sion must depend upon the habits of observation and the degree of moral
sensibility of the spectator.”21 Emerson was, as usual, more optimistic: “Nor
can it be doubted that this moral sentiment which thus scents the air, grows
in the grain, and impregnates the waters of the world, is caught by man and
sinks into his soul. The moral influence of nature upon every individual is
that amount of truth which it illustrates to him.”22 To a writer in The Crayon
in 1855, “the man to whom nature, in her inanimate forms, has been a de-
light all his early life, will love a landscape, and be better capable of feeling
the merits of it than any city-bred artist. . . .”23 The Southern Literary Mes-
senger in 1844 treated the problem in an article called “The Influence of the
Fine Arts on the Moral Sensibilities,” by the Reverend J. N. Danforth, who
observed: “(The painter) seeks to stir the deep sea of human sensibility. He
desires to reach the most retired and secret foundations of feeling in man,
and hence he must commune for days and nights with nature herself in her
multiplied forms and in her beautiful developments. Some minds are more
affected by natural scenery than by any other source of moral influence.”24
So it was “the legitimate and holy task of the scenic limner,” as Tuckerman
put it, to interpret nature.25 And Durand, whose writings on the whole lack
the sententiousness that afflicted many of his contemporaries, concluded:

It is impossible to contemplate with right-minded, reverent feeling, (nature’s)

inexpressible beauty and grandeur, for ever assuming new forms of impres-
siveness under the varying phases of cloud and sunshine, time and season,
without arriving at the conviction
—“That all which we behold
Is full of blessings”—
That the Great Designer of these glorious pictures has placed them before us
as types of the Divine attributes, and we insensibly, as it were, in our daily
contemplations,
—“To the beautiful order of his works
Learn to conform to the order of our lives.”26
 Introduction: The Nationalist Garden and the Holy Book 11

All that the artists and public had to do was to read what William Sidney
Mount called “the volume of nature—a lecture always ready and bound by
the Almighty,” and virtue presumably would triumph.27 For the Holy Book
was open to all. To read, interpret, and express its truths required dedica-
tion, cultivation, and sensibilities enlightened by Christian morals.
The close connection between nature and art as routes to spiritual un-
derstanding had been asserted earlier by the German writer Wilhelm
Wackenroder in “Outpourings from the Heart of an Art-Loving Friar” (1797):

I know of two miraculous languages through which the Creator has enabled
men to grasp and understand things in all their power, or at least so much of
them—to put it more modestly—as mortals can grasp. They enter into us by
ways other than words, they move us suddenly, miraculously seizing our en-
tire self, penetrating into our every nerve and drop of blood. One of these
miraculous languages is spoken only by God, the other is spoken by a few
chosen men whom he has lovingly anointed. They are: Nature and Art.
Since my early youth, when I first learned about God from the ancient
sacred books of our faith, Nature has seemed to me the fullest and clearest
index to His being and character. The rustling in the trees of the forest and
the rolling thunder have told me secrets about Him which I cannot put into
words. A beautiful valley enclosed by bizarre rocks, a smooth-flowing river
reflecting overhanging trees, a pleasant green meadow under a blue sky—all
these stirred my innermost spirit more, gave me a more intense feeling of
God’s power and benevolence, purified and uplifted my soul more than any
language of words could have done. Words, I think, are tools too earthly and
crude to express the incorporeal as well as they do express material reality.28

Like such German contemporaries as Caspar David Friedrich, nineteenth-

century American artists united nature and art in the single votive act of
landscape painting. Thus they spoke the two “miraculous languages” at once.
In that they were blessed with creative gifts, they reproduced in little the
divine act of Creation. Their interpretation of their duties ranged from a
humble naturalism to a baroque romanticism. Humble in their exaltation
and exalted in their humility, they were perfect media between nature and
their fellow man, between the God in them and their human estate. As cu-
rates of nature interpreting its Holy Book, as proxies for the divine, they were
implicated in tasks that demanded as fine discriminations as modernist art,
though the terms of their involvement were, if anything, more complex.

God has promised us a renowned existence, if we will but deserve it. He speaks
this promise in the sublimity of Nature. It resounds all along the crags of the
Alleghenies. It is uttered in the thunder of Niagara. It is heard in the roar of
two oceans, from the great Pacific to the rocky ramparts of the Bay of Fundy.
12 part one
His finger has written it in the broad expanse of our Island Seas, and traced it
out by the mighty Father of Waters! The august TEMPLE in which we dwell was
built for lofty purposes. Oh! That we may consecrate it to LIBERTY and CON-
CORD, and be found fit worshippers within its holy wall!
—James Brooks
The Knickerbocker, 183529

With such a range of religious, moral, philosophic, and social ideas pro-
jected onto the American landscape, it is clear that the painters who took it
upon themselves to deal with this “loaded” subject were involved not only
with art, but with the iconography of nationalism. In painting the face of
God in the landscape so that the less gifted might recognize and share in
that benevolent spirituality, they were among the spiritual leaders of
America’s flock. Through this idea of community we can approach a firm
understanding of the role of landscape not only in American art, but in
American life, especially before the Civil War. The idea of this community
through nature runs clearly through all aspects of American social life in
the first half of the nineteenth century, and its durability is still evidenced
by its partial survival as the myth of rural America.
While I am not concerned here with the reasons why this myth was so
necessary and durable, we should investigate further the idea of commu-
nity. God in or revealed through nature is accessible to every man, and ev-
ery man can thus “commune” (as the word was) with nature and partake in
the divine. God in nature speaks to God in man. (This can be seen as a way
of moving man back to the center of the universe, using as passport a dis-
creet humility, which is confident, however, of its ultimate virtue and godli-
ness.) And man can also commune with man through nature—a communing
which requires for its representation not the solitary figure, but two figures in
a landscape, the classic exemplar of which, in American landscape art, is
Durand’s portrait of Cole and Bryant, Kindred Spirits (plate 4). This picture
is evidence not only of a singular contemplation after a transcendental model,
but of a sharing through communion, of a potential community.
The sense of community fostered by the natural church was reinforced
by an all-pervasive nationalism that identified America’s destiny with the
American landscape. In 1848, James Batchelder, in a book called The United
States as a Missionary Field, wrote: “Its sublime mountain ranges—its capa-
cious valleys—its majestic rivers—its inland seas—its productiveness of soil,
immense mineral resources, and salubrity of climate, render it a most desir-
 Introduction: The Nationalist Garden and the Holy Book 13

able habitation for man, and are all worthy of the sublime destiny which
awaits it, as the foster mother of future billions, who will be the governing
race of man.”30
There was a widespread belief that America’s natural riches were God’s
blessings on a chosen people. Perhaps it is safe to say that despite its inter-
national complexion, nineteenth-century nature worship was more strongly
nationalistic in America than elsewhere. For nature was tied to the group
destiny of Americans united within a still-new nation, “one nation, under
God.” This is perhaps a key explanation for the acceptance of immanence
by the religious orthodoxy.
The community awareness of that one nation, united under God and
nature (or under God as nature), received further reinforcement early in
the nineteenth century from the evangelical revivalism sweeping the coun-
try. Thus, a writer in the Spectator in 1829 observed that the Gospel could
“renew the face of communities and nations. The same heavenly influence
which, in revivals of religion, descends on families and villages . . . may in
like manner, when it shall please him who hath the residue of the spirit,
descend to refresh and beautify a whole land.”31 It was only God’s grace,
according to the Reverend David Riddle in 1851, “not enterprise, or physical
improvements, or a glorious constitution and good laws, or free trade, or a
tariff, or railroads and steamships, or philosophy, or science, or taste . . . that
bringeth salvation, appearing to every man, and inwrought into the heart
of every man, that can save us from the fate of former republics, and make
us a blessing to all nations.”32
That grace had been apparent to the earliest settlers in the midst of America’s
natural bounties. As Tocqueville had said: “There is no country in the world
in which the Christian religion retains a greater hold over the souls of men,
than in America. . . . Religion is the foremost of the institutions of the coun-
try.”33 If, within the decade of the Reverend Riddle’s writing, the axe, grow-
ing technology, and a dawning sense of Darwinian savageries began to
threaten the dream of an American Paradise, and of a nature which was
both benevolent and godly, the belief in a chosen national destiny did a lot
to keep such awareness at bay. No wonder that Christianity and national-
ism, two forms of hope, two imprimaturs of destiny, continually emerged
from the face of American nature.
The unity of nature bespoke the unity of God. The unity of man with
nature assumed an optimistic attitude toward human perfectibility. Nature,
14 part one

God, and Man, composed an infinitely mutable Trinity within this para-
religion. This gave confidence to all aspects of nature study, from the detail
with its microscopic perfection (the microscope further revealed divine truths)
to the grandeur of huge spaces. And in the mutability which landscape pre-
sents, God’s moods could be read through a key symbol of God’s immanence—
light, the mystic substance of the landscape artist. Thus the landscape painters,
the leaders of the national flock, could remind the nation of divine benevo-
lence and of a chosen destiny by keeping before their eyes the mountains,
trees, forests, and lakes which revealed the Word in each shining image.
CHAPTER 2

Grand Opera and the

Still Small Voice

Each precise object or condition or combination or process exhibits a beauty

. . . the multiplication table its—old age its—the carpenter’s trade its—the
grand opera, its— . . .
—Whitman1

He will get to the Goal first who stands stillest.

—Thoreau2

The Leatherstocking novels . . . go backwards from old age to golden youth.

That is the true myth of America. She starts old, old, wrinkled and writhing
in an old skin. And there is a gradual sloughing off of the old skin, towards a
new youth. It is the myth of America.
—D. H. Lawrence3

In the mid-nineteenth century the American preoccupation with nature

manifested itself in several distinct types of landscape painting. Two of these
may now be seen as polarities, though it can also be claimed they shared
similar goals. The large-scale, popular landscapes by such artists as Church,
Bierstadt, and Moran seemed to satisfy the myth of a bigger, newer America.
But a more modest kind of expression, practiced by some of the same art-
ists, and by others who dealt more exclusively with this idiom, may have
indicated some of the nineteenth century’s profoundest feelings about na-
ture. The recognition of this polarity now seems a central issue in under-
standing nineteenth-century American painting.
Both modes continued the late-eighteenth-century notion of America as
the “Virgin Land,” a world unsullied by civilization. In expressing this idea,
15
16 part one

the larger, more operatic paintings tended to impose older European con-
ventions. The smaller paintings seem to have formulated their own conven-
tions by a more original transformation of European models—tempered
perhaps by paradigms of order established by the industrialism rapidly eradi-
cating the primordial wilderness.
The question of what was old and new arises here, in art as well as nature.
In this context D. H. Lawrence’s “true myth” can be seen as only part of a
larger mythology which would include also the myth of the separation from
and attachment to the Old World—the love-hate relationship that trans-
ported American artists to the National Gallery in London, to the Louvre,
to the museums and palaces of Italy, and then compelled them to return.

One of the strongest attachments to Europe revealed itself in the enchant-

ment with history painting, which absorbed such major figures as Copley,
West, Trumbull, Vanderlyn, Allston, Morse, and Cole, signaling an ambi-
tion that has not yet been fully defined. It seems to have been synonymous
with size, engaging the great European masters in rivalry through an appro-
priately aggressive scale, as well as an aggressively announced “nobility.”
Perhaps for these artists large size was automatically endowed with monu-
mentality and grandeur, those aspects of history painting that prompted
Morse to refer to it as the intellectual branch of the art. Presumably, the ideal
could be approached only if it was larger than life. Such grandness of size and
ambition may have helped reaffirm the artist’s status, at least in his own eyes,
in a country which, Copley claimed, treated the artist as a shoemaker.
To some extent, then, the public had to be trained to respect Ambition,
along with the didactic imperatives which accompanied it. Perhaps from
the very beginning the American public (paying admission to see West’s
Christ Healing the Sick at Philadelphia, and, in 1836, netting Cole close to a
thousand dollars for a showing of Course of Empire) approached art with
expectations of entertainment and enlightenment. The ever-present popu-
lar respect for the artistic tour de force was augmented, mingled perhaps
with the awe engendered by contact with the sublime. The overtures to sub-
limity in America’s early history painting were readily transferred to the
landscape, and lead to a study of artistic rhetoric, that style of formal decla-
mation which is the appropriate mode for public utterance. Such a study
also involves a consideration of art as spectacle. Persisting late into the nine-
 Grand Opera and the Still Small Voice 17

teenth century, this art had a clear twentieth-century heir in the film, which
rehearsed many of the nineteenth century’s concerns.

The transfer of the rhetoric and aims of history painting to landscape was
substantially effected by a single artist—Thomas Cole. His career presents
us with the interesting paradox of an artist who, though considered the
country’s leading landscapist, had difficulty in securing commissions for
his cyclical extravaganzas, The Course of Empire and The Voyage of Life.
For Cole’s cycles were effective public art—not unlike the museum art of
today. It was one thing to view such spectacles. It was quite another to own
them, or even to have the wall space to accommodate them. Cole’s serial
narratives involved another important factor. The entire philosophy of
Course of Empire could be grasped only if one proceeded in systematic fash-
ion through the whole series. Voyage of Life obviously could only reach its
foregone conclusion by traversing the river of life with Cole’s Everyman
from infancy (plate 5) to old age—rehearsing the past for the old (fig. 2.1)
and providing a prospective moral textbook for the young.

2.1 Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Old Age, 1842. Oil on canvas, 521/2 × 771/4 in. (133.4 ×
192.6 cm.). Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art.
18 part one

Thus the public was already experiencing a kind of “motion art” with Cole’s
cycles, albeit the spectators were the ones in motion. The kinetic or cinematic
aspects of such art had of course a popular counterpart in the panorama,
which, however, permitted the public to stand still while the canvas unrolled.
The overlap between Cole’s serious cycles, which represented, for him at least,
his most profound philosophical thought, and the popular art of the pan-
orama is an important juncture of the high art of history painting, appreci-
ated by an intellectual elite, and public or popular art.
Cole’s career coincided with the discovery of the American landscape as
an effective substitute for a missing national tradition. America was thus
both new and old—new in that its undiscovered and unsettled territories
were the proper habitat for that radical innocent, the noble savage celebrated
by Rousseau and the Lake Poets; old in that these same forests and mountains
spoke, as Chateaubriand suggested, of America’s most significant antiquity—
one that registered more purely in its uncultivated state.
Once this landscape had become a repository of national pride, the cul-
tivation of the landscape experience (even by challenging it through risk
and danger) was one of the key preoccupations of the age. Critics admon-
ished their readers to experience nature fully, since only the man practiced
in reading nature’s text could appreciate paintings dealing with that experi-
ence. The nature experience was considered a crucial amenity for the moral
man, and, as we have seen, was readily accepted by society as a religious
alternative. Elevated by such moral projections, it was easy for landscape to
assume the mantle of history painting. But there is a certain irony in the
democratization of the elitist Grand Style as it was transformed into land-
scape art. The most ennobling of experiences very readily became the most
widely disseminated form of popular entertainment.
Thus the connection between history painting, landscape art, and the
popular panorama assumes a tantalizing and somewhat paradoxical cast.
The panorama, with its geologic and scientific certitudes and overtones of
documentary edification, was a careful visual encyclopedia of travel fact. It
made little pretense at being anything but a kind of theatricalized National
Geographic. Henry Lewis’s Mammoth Panorama of the Mississippi River,
painted on 45,000 square feet of canvas, representing the Mississippi from
St. Louis to the Falls of St. Anthony, was offered to public view at the Louis-
ville Theater in Kentucky in 1849. Seats were available through a box office—
dress circle and parquet for fifty cents, the second tier of boxes for twenty-five
 Grand Opera and the Still Small Voice 19

cents. Doors opened at seven forty-five and the Panorama commenced

moving at “8½ precisely.”4 What was in fact on offer was a moving picture,
with all its social appurtenances.
The gradual unrolling of a panorama took several hours, generally af-
fording the audience only a glimpse of each of the many sites and objects
depicted. As an experience, it was cumulative and extended in time. The
totality could not be apprehended instantaneously. Commentators and pi-
anoforte music complemented the visual image—a practice that transferred
smoothly to the silent film. As a precursor of the movie travelogue, the pan-
orama had the transience of both the performance and the newspaper. It
was disposable experience and disposable art. As active working art, the
panorama, winding and unwinding on its cylinders before thousands of
viewers, ultimately wore out. Few survive.5

But the kind of easel that was closest to the panorama in intention has sur-
vived, with many of the theatrical overtones of the popular spectacle. The
connection between some aspects of nineteenth-century landscape paint-
ing and the panorama was noted by James Jackson Jarves when he observed:
“The countryman that mistook the Rocky Mountains for a panorama, and
after waiting a while asked when the thing was going to move, was a more
sagacious critic than he knew himself to be.”6 Bierstadt’s Rocky Mountains
(fig. 2.2) and Church’s Heart of the Andes were among the most popular
paintings of their time. Not only did they educate would-be travelers to the
wonders and glories of far-flung places, but they were considered, as the
panoramas had been, artistic tours de force, meticulous in detail, magical
in effect.
Indeed, detail and effect composed their fundamental dialectic, a point
recognized by H. T. Tuckerman in 1867 when he wrote of The Rocky Moun-
tains: “Representing the sublime range which guards the remote West, its
subject is eminently national; and the spirit in which it is executed is at once
patient and comprehensive—patient in the careful reproduction of the tints
and traits which make up and identify its local character, and comprehen-
sive in the breadth, elevation, and grandeur of the composition.”7
Proper “elevation and grandeur” depended to a large extent for Tuckerman
on what he termed “general effect.”8 Perhaps it was inevitable that the Ameri-
can artists seeking grandeur through general effect should refer instinc-
tively to the European convention that most blatantly signified the “ideal”
20 part one

2.2 Albert Bierstadt, The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, 1863. Oil on canvas, 731/2 × 1203/4
in. (186.7 × 306.7 cm.). New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

2.3 Frederic Edwin Church, Heart of the Andes, 1859. Oil on canvas, 661/8 × 1191/4 in. (168
× 302.9 cm.). New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
 Grand Opera and the Still Small Voice 21

in landscape. Thus they looked to Claude for a compositional structure

which, once adapted, remained little more than a superficial imposition of
a worn-out structural cliché. In so doing they were following the example
of the history painters, who had heeded Sir Joshua Reynolds’s advice that
the artist take a shortcut to nature by learning from those who had already
solved the problems. Fortunately the definition of general effect seems also
to have included handling of light and atmosphere, and here Claude, and
Turner as well, were put to far more constructive use. Light and atmosphere,
in the best operatic works of Church and Bierstadt, often succeeded in es-
tablishing a unity through what might be termed “excessive” effect, disarm-
ing judgment with a dazzle of color that masked compositional inadequacies.
Tuckerman was apparently astute enough to recognize that, while
Claudian compositional clichés (see p. 197) rarely had a dynamic function
but stamped themselves on a surface comprised of details, those details some-
times became, through sheer accretion, a unity in themselves. Of Heart of
the Andes (fig. 2.3), he remarked that “four of five pictures might easily be
cut out of this one; it is full of the most photographic imitation of natural
objects and effects.”9
Quite apart from the tacit recognition that Church could indeed have
made use of photographs to certify various details within the picture,
Tuckerman’s observation postulates either a composition without unity
which simply did not hang together, or the kind of cumulative situation in
which aggregations of detail found their own cohesion. In the latter in-
stance, the part could stand for the whole, as in a section of a painting by
Pollock, whose work raises somewhat similar questions of detail, effect, and
ambition. (Indeed abstract expressionism in its flirtation with the idea of a
grand style—in which the idea of abstraction is now substituted for the
idea of nature—is the locus of a similar struggle between indigenous ambi-
tions and European conventions.) As with the panorama, experiencing these
landscape paintings involved a gradual revelation, segment by segment, of-
ten enhanced by the common practice of viewing them through opera
glasses, further isolating detail through a stereoscopic intimacy that still
remains curiously satisfying.
By and large the contemporary critics were more than satisfied, often in
fact overwhelmed, and the public followed suit. According to Tuckerman,
“the American work of art which attracted most attention, and afforded the
greatest promise and pleasure in the spring of 1863,” was Bierstadt’s Rocky
22 part one

Mountains, “one of the most essentially representative and noble illustra-

tions of American landscape art.”10
Jarves was one of the few to protest what he called “the direction of exag-
gerated actions and effects . . . bigness, greatness, largeness” culminating in
“full-length landscapes.”11 In 1864 he wrote critically of Church’s paintings”
“Who can rival his wonderful memory of details, vivid perception of color,
quick, sparkling, though monotonous touch, and iridescent effects, pictur-
esque arrangements of material facts and general cleverness? With him color
is an Arabian Nights’ Entertainment, a pyrotechnic display, brilliantly enchant-
ing on first view, but leaving no permanent satisfaction to the mind, as all
things fail to do which delight more in astonishing than instructing.”12 Such
criticism, though perhaps a bit harsh, might also be applied to Olana, Church’s
palatial home, the Arabian Nights fantasy he designed to overlook the Hudson
in 1872. A congress of glittering parts, a delirium of exotic effects, Olana was
the architectural embodiment of the flamboyance with which Church often
approached landscape in both North and South America.
Jarves also disagreed with other critics on the relation of such paintings
to the spectator. Of Bierstadt’s Rocky Mountains he wrote: “All this quality
of painting is more or less panoramic, from being so material in its artistic
features as always to keep the spectator at a distance. He can never forget his
point of view, and that he is looking at a painting.”13 Yet the public and
critics who admired the panoramas made a special point of emphasizing, as
did a letter to the Missouri Republican in 1849 about Lewis’s Panorama of the
Lower Mississippi, that “the artist had succeeded in imposing on the senses
of the beholder and inducing him to believe that he is gazing, not on can-
vas, but on scenes of actual and sensible nature. . . .”14
The issue however was paradoxical in that the spectator’s experience could
be simultaneously intimate and distant—the kind of communal intimacy
that is a commonplace of the film and the theater experience. The possibil-
ity of simultaneous intimacy and distancing often occurs too with works of
enormous scale when, intimidated by size, we are drawn closer, by a curious
tropism, to engage detail or be enveloped by atmosphere. The scanning of
detail through opera glasses would have augmented this intimacy, dispel-
ling communal distance through the privacy of individual focus. Yet per-
haps his awareness of the communal or popular nature of such an experience
led Jarves, one of the period’s most vocal exponents of an ideal, elitist art, to
reject any claims on the part of the large landscapes to being high art. In
 Grand Opera and the Still Small Voice 23

effect, he failed to recognize the subtle conversion of Grand Style ambition

to the “full-length landscape.”
That ambition had been at least partly recognized by Tuckerman when
he spoke of Church’s “enterprise,” quoting the comment of a London critic
in 1863 on seeing Church’s The Icebergs: “The picture altogether is a noble
example of that application of the landscape-painter’s art to the rendering
of the grand, beautiful and unfamiliar aspects of nature, only accessible at
great cost of fatigue and exposure and even at peril of life and limb, which
seems to be one of the walks in which this branch of the art is destined to
achieve new triumphs in our time.”15
This reference to risk and danger also emphasizes the tour-de-force ap-
peal of such works.16 Such a tour de force invoked ideas of sublimity per-
taining to nature and the artist, and this is of some importance in connecting
the “full-length landscapes” to the earlier Grand Style. For one of the myths
associated with these works had to do with their newness, with the idea that
the “grand, beautiful and unfamiliar aspects of nature” were approached
freshly by American artist-adventurers who were, in Tuckerman’s phrase,
“unhampered by pedantic didaction.”17 Yet, as we have seen, it was the wil-
derness rediscovered via Claude and Turner, in at least a partial restatement
of Reynoldsian eclecticism. The friction between new landscape and old con-
ventions, which might have been expected to generate some energies, remained
minimal. Americans immersed in awe before these painted natural wonders
were often viewing them through European spectacles. Lawrence’s myth does
not apply in this instance.
Where could it apply? Where in America could we find the old skin really
sloughing off? It is a question that leads immediately into larger issues and
needs continual qualification. For even the myth that some American con-
ventions were developed wholly pragmatically, out of the experience of the
land, may require amending. The “newest” landscapes produced in America
at this time were not the large, operatic pieces wheeling in their Claudian
flats from the wings, but small, intimate paintings whose horizontal exten-
sions mimic the format of the huge panoramas. These are the quietistic
paintings we now call “luminist.” And for these too some European proto-
types must be considered.

If the operatically sublime drew on the ideal art of Claude and Turner for
inspiration, the transcendental luminist paintings, modest in size and
24 part one

apparent ambition, may have drawn on the Dutch tradition. If the larger
paintings utilized a baroque rhetoric, the smaller paintings employed the
frugality of classic understatement. Both modes can be said to rely on detail
and effect—but with a considerable difference. Detail in the larger paint-
ings often elicited awe. But as Jarves rightly observed, the “artist’s labor trail”
remained, and this painterly reminder of the artist’s presence—a testament
to his impresario-like sublimity—interposed itself between the spectator
and the painted object.
In the luminist painting, the eradication of stroke nullifies process and
assists a confrontation with detail. It also transforms atmospheric “effect”
from active painterly bravura into a pure and constant light in which reside
the most interesting paradoxes of nineteenth-century American painting.
They are paradoxes which, with extraordinary subtlety, engage in a dialec-
tic that guides the onlooker toward a lucid transcendentalism. The clarity
of this luminist atmosphere is applicable both to air and crystal, to hard
and soft, to mirror and void. These reversible dematerializations serve to
abolish two egos—first that of the artist, then the spectator’s. Absorbed in
contemplation of a world without movement, the spectator is brought into
a wordless dialogue with nature, which quickly becomes the monologue of
transcendental unity.
Scale and size enter this problem in a provocative way. In contrast to
Church’s Heart of the Andes, measuring 66 by 119 in., a luminist painting by
Heade might measure as little as 10 by 18 in. Church, like the panoramists,
seems to be equating grandness with largeness, and the relationship of the
spectator to the picture remains, as already discussed, rather problematic.
Only in the most fortuitous circumstances does such experience become
genuinely environmental.
In a luminist painting, on the other hand, monumentality seems accom-
plished through scale, but not size. Proportionate to the objects in the pic-
ture, the space, even more than in the large works, gives an impression of
limitless amplitude. A perfect miniaturized universe offers to the spectator
an irresistible invitation in terms of empathy. The spectator is urged to con-
ceptualize his size and enter the luminist arena in which figures, when they
exist, are no larger than twigs.
Significantly, the luminist artist duplicated the horizontal extensions of
the panorama in their pictures’ proportions. I say significantly because I am
suggesting that they had a profound understanding of the structural means
 Grand Opera and the Still Small Voice 25

whereby the popular panorama could be transformed back into high art. In
contrast to the baroque atmosphere of the operatic works, the classic orga-
nization of the luminist pictures, halting the diffusion of the rutilant atmo-
sphere, brought the nineteenth century as close as it could come to silence
and the void.
This transcendence, consonant with an age steeped in Emerson, Sweden-
borg, and spiritualism, was achieved not only in the paintings by such luminists
as Lane and Heade, but in smaller works, also luminist in feeling, by some of
the same Hudson River men who could turn out Grand Style landscape.
Church, Bierstadt, and especially Kensett, in such paintings as Lake George
and View from Cozzen’s Hotel near West Point (New-York Historical Society),
could achieve luminism’s perfect equipoise. And since Kensett particularly is
known to have had constant and steady sales throughout his lifetime, it seems
obvious that there was some audience for these works.
It is very possible that the artists distinguished between a public and a
private role to which appropriate conventions might be assigned, and that
there existed a public and a private taste. Official public taste seems to have
been unmoved by luminist quietism—not the first time that the best art of
a period would be hidden behind more overt and enterprising performances.
If indeed the luminists did have recourse to Dutch examples such as van
Goyen and van de Velde to confirm their unframed vistas and indepen-
dence of Claudian conventions, they might have expected critical neglect.
For the Dutch realists were constantly devalued by the critics, including
Jarves, who perpetuated Sir Joshua’s insistence on the ideal. Jarves shared
Sir Joshua’s contempt for the homely, unassuming “imitation” of the Dutch.
This must have been a good part of the reason that Jarves, though un-
willing to accept the geological cosmoramas of Church and Bierstadt as
high art, did not recognize the luminist transformation of Dutch proto-
types into a transcendent hyper-realism that met his own definition of high
art: “the effect of high art is to sink the artist and spectator alike into the
scene. It becomes the real, and in that sense, true realistic art, because it
realizes to the mind the essential truths of what it pictorially discloses to the
eye. The spectator is no longer a looker-on, as in the other style, but an
inhabitant of the landscape.”18
As is the case with many critics, Jarves did not recognize the art he called
for. But at least he was the only important critic who was not beguiled by
26 part one

the rhetoric of the operatic landscapes. For the others, it was simply easier
to embrace the obvious sublime in the large works, which offered such vi-
carious dangers to life and limb, than to enter selflessly into the transcen-
dental world summoned through luminist quietude (fig. 2.4). On the one
hand, Western humanism maintains its anthropomorphic bias. On the other,
American art declares a certain kinship with oriental ideas.
The American East and West are also deeply involved in this dichotomy.
Though often executed by eastern artists, the operatic paintings frequently
dealt with the landscapes of the American West, and surely partook of the
frontier myth so convincingly described (despite all subsequent revisions)
in Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier hypothesis. That frontier, as defined
by Turner, would have satisfied Lawrence’s concept of a constant American
rejuvenation:
The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wil-
derness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries,
tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and
puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and

2.4. Fitz H. Lane. Brace’s Rock, Eastern Point, Gloucester, ca. 1864. Oil on canvas, 10 × 15 in.
(25.4 × 38.1 cm.). Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art.
 Grand Opera and the Still Small Voice 27

arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. . . . Little by little he trans-
forms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe. . . . The fact is,
that here is a new product that is American. . . . Moving westward, the fron-
tier became more and more American . . . the advance of the frontier has
meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth
of independence on American lines.”19

The irony, however, is that most of the artists dealing with the frontier
did not really invent new artistic conventions but assembled their operatic con-
ceits from the esthetics of history painting, from the late-eighteenth-century
concepts of the sublime, and from the ideal compositions of Claude and
later J. M. W. Turner. The large paintings dealing with the West were not more
and more American, but often more and more baroque in their rhetoric and
ambition. Perhaps, however, one might qualify this with the afterthought that
the whole frontier hypothesis, in its idea of constant expansion—what Turner
called “this perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life”20—was by defi-
nition baroque in its quality of becoming.
Yet Turner spoke too of “a return to primitive conditions on a continu-
ally advancing frontier line” and of “continuous touch with the simplicity
of primitive society.”21 His reference to the primitive is provocative. For in
terms of Wölffinian development, the closest state to the primitive is not
the baroque, but the classical. In the history of American painting, the art
that keeps in continuous artistic touch with the primitive is that of the
luminists. Though some artists painted luminist pictures in the West, and
though we can find luminist silence there, luminist art had little relation-
ship to the expanding frontier myth, but maintained itself, if sometimes
precariously, in a classic state.
In contrast to the operatic landscape, luminism is classic rather than ba-
roque, contained rather than expansive, aristocratic rather than democratic,
private not public, introverted not gregarious, exploring a state of being
rather than becoming (plates 6, 7). It did not impose the conventions of a
European formula on the landscape, but discovered, possibly in Dutch paint-
ing, structural epigones which it then transformed. In this transformation,
the myth of a pristine nature could be recovered convincingly. It was largely
recovered, not so much in the new West as in New England, a stronghold of
the East that Turner might have considered corrupted by European civiliza-
tion. In the East, too, nature was threatened by an industrialism that at the
same time, by emphasizing clarity and measurement, may have offered para-
digms fortifying the certainties of time and place in luminist painting.
28 part one

It seems clear that the dichotomy we have been speaking of resulted from
different responses to social, psychological, esthetic, and philosophical pres-
sures. In literature, although there are never point-for-point parallels,
Whitman and Dickinson are often considered the instructive exemplars of
this polarity. More recently, it manifested itself in abstract expressionism
with De Kooning and Rothko. Thus perhaps we have characterized two types
of expression in America, one which strains the boundaries of art in pursuit
of its aims and one which reinforces the nature of art while redefining it.
Each pole also gathers to itself a definition of sublimity—one reconfirming
a traditional interpretation, the other departing from and restructuring it.
CHAPTER 3

Sound and Silence:

Changing Concepts of the Sublime

In the literature of landscape painting, the world “sublime” has played a

suitably “exalted” role. Its venerable history has been documented in such
studies as Samuel H. Monk’s The Sublime,1 and the characteristics it ac-
quired in the late eighteenth century have until now generally stood for its
interpretation. In the nineteenth century, however, the word, already loaded
with meaning, took on additional baggage. By mid-century, we can speak
of several interpretations of the sublime, so that the original concept, which
more or less maintained its traditional meaning, existed side by side with its
offspring. These later sublimes not only subtly alter the original meaning of the
word, but affect our understanding of landscape attitudes in mid-nineteenth
century America.
The late-eighteenth-century sublime, interpreted largely in terms of
Burke’s definition, was associated with fear, gloom, and majesty. Majesty
had to do with scale and size, exemplified particularly by mountain scenery.
The sublime was primarily an esthetic, and to experience it was to have an
esthetic reaction. This reaction provoked intimations of infinity and thus
of Deity and the divine.2 It was an overwhelming divinity, dwarfing the
observer who, though he aspired to transcendence, rarely forgot his own
insignificance. Such humility magnified awe. As Mrs. Radcliffe put it, in
The Italian: “Here, gazing upon the stupendous imagery around her, look-
ing, as it were, beyond the awful veil which obscures the features of Deity,
and conceals Him from the eyes of His creatures, dwelling as with a present
God in the midst of His sublime works; with a mind thus elevated, how
29
30 part one

insignificant would appear to her the transactions, and the sufferings of

this world! How poor the boasted power of man, when the fall of a single
cliff from those mountains would with ease destroy thousands of his race
assembled on the plains below.”3
Though silence, too, was sometimes part of the older sublime, it was
generally suspenseful, attended by terror and dread, and often interrupted
by the uproar of cataracts, earthquakes, fires, storms, thunder, volcanoes:
“Nothing is more sublime than mighty power and strength. A stream that
runs within its banks is a beautiful object; but when it rushes down with the
impetuosity and noise of a torrent, it becomes a sublime one.”4 The eigh-
teenth-century interest in Longinus took up his suggestion that “Nature
impels us to admire not a small river ‘that ministers to our necessities,’ but
the Nile, the Ister (Danube) and the Rhine; likewise the sun and the stars
‘surprise’ us, and Aetna in eruption commands our wonder.”5 Kant, who
transferred the sublime from a quality residing in the object to the perceiver’s
state of mind, associated sublimity with natural cataclysms—lightning, storms,
mountains, waterfalls.
Thus, even for the philosopher who influenced so much transcendental
idealism, the sublime reflected overwhelming natural energies. Nature was
often conceived of as wild and savage, coinciding with the vogue for Ossian’s
poetry and for Salvator’s landscapes. And the connection of the sublime
with the picturesque, with pictures (Gilpin speaks of picturesque sublimity
and picturesque beauty), opens the door to the other pictorial hero of the
moment, Claude, who was, of course, because of his calm repose, put for-
ward as an example of the beautiful in contrast to Salvator’s sublimity.
This older romantic-Gothick sublime endured well into the American nine-
teenth century. As concept and vision, it was nourished, first, by the unculti-
vated wilderness of the east, then by the penetration of the majestic western
territories. Many of its attributes can be recognized in the more ambitious
works of the Hudson River school, which often drew on the conventions of
Claude and on the moods of Salvator. The active energy and noisy cataclysm
of Church’s adventures in South America relate to the older sublime.
In his diary of 1857 in Ecuador, Church writes of his journey to the vol-
cano Sangay (July 11th) (fig. 3.1):

I knew there could be no view of Sangay this night without a scramble

and as there was a couple of hours to spare I seized my sketch book and
commenced the ascent of the hill behind us. It seemed not very high but the
 Sound and Silence: Changing Concepts of the Sublime 31

3.1. Frederic Edwin Church, Distant View of the Sangay Volcano, Ecuador, 1857. Oil and
graphite on thin paperboard, 815/16 × 145/16 in. (22.7 × 36.4 cm.). New York, Cooper-Hewitt,
National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution.

exertion of working through the grass was tremendous and I toiled and toiled
while every little eminence which I gained revealed a still more elevated one
above, but I persevered and was rewarded finally, by planting my feeting [sic]
on the summit. Clouds hung around the mountains everywhere and I looked
in vain in the direction of Sangay for a sight of the mountain or smoke—So
turning my back, I commenced a sketch of the picturesque mountains at the
Southwest, where the clouds did not hang low enough to cover the snow line.
Gradually the clouds broke away, the sun came out and gilded with refined
gold every slope and ridge that it could touch, and the most lovely blue con-
trasted with the rich color—
My sketch finished, I turned my back and lo! Sangay, with its lofty plume
of smoke stood clear before me. I was startled with the beauty of the effect—
above a serrated, black, rugged pile of rocky mountains two columns arose,
one creamy white against the blue sky melted itself away into thin vapor and
was lost in the azure. The other, black and sombre, piled up in huge rounded
forms cut sharply against the rich white of the first, and piling itself up higher
and higher gradually diffused itself into a yellowish smoky vapor out of which
occasionally would burst a mass of the black smoke. . . .
I commenced to sketch the effect as rapidly as possible, but constant changes
took place and new beauties revealed themselves as the setting sun turned the
black smoke into burnished copper and the white steam into gold. At the inter-
vals of two or three minutes an explosion would take place; the first intimation
was a fresh mass of smoke with sharply defined outline rolling above the
32 part one
black rocks and immediately a dull rumbling sound which reverberated
among the mountains. I was so delighted with the changing effects that I
continued making rapid sketches of the different effects until night overtook
me and a chilly dampness warned me to retrace my steps. . . .6

Church’s emphasis is on the aural as well as visual drama of the experi-

ence. The sublime, from this point of view, is clearly very difficult to attain.
One must scale the heights, risk “life and limb,” as Tuckerman noted, at
“great cost of fatigue and exposure” to experience it.7 The journey itself is
not only a tour de force, but assumes a special moral significance.
The introduction of a pious morality often signaled the increasing Christian-
ization of the sublime. In such operatic paintings as Heart of the Andes or
Cotopaxi (fig. 3.2), the senses are blurred in a paroxysm of activity. Cotopaxi
erupts. Sounds fill the air. One is reminded of the noisy conversions of the
evangelical revival especially prevalent in the upstate New York area that
spawned so many Hudson River painters: shouting, biting, groaning, etc.
The tumult of such paintings corresponds to the moment of destruction in
the Apocalypse and the moment of conversion in revivalism. Here sublim-
ity overwhelms with a deafening roar. It maintains its ties with the older

3.2 Frederic Edwin Church, Sketch for Cotopaxi, 1861. Oil on canvas, 7 × 113/4 in. (17.8 ×
29.8 cm.). Private Collection.
 Sound and Silence: Changing Concepts of the Sublime 33

sublime through its stress on man’s insignificance in the face of God’s ter-
rible power.
Yet, in the writings of artists and critics alike, these awesome connota-
tions of divinity, traditionally attached to the sublime through intimations
of infinity, become more specifically religious, even Protestant, in nature.
That Church’s histrionic paintings called to mind the Apocalyptic consump-
tion of the world by fire is suggested by Tuckerman’s remark, in writing of
Heart of the Andes: “Seldom has a more grand effect of light been depicted
than the magnificent sunshine on the mountains of a tropical clime, from
his radiant pencil. It literally floods the canvas with celestial fire, and beams
with glory like a sublime psalm of light.”8
Thus the sublime was being absorbed into a religious, moral, and fre-
quently nationalist concept of nature, contributing to the rhetorical screen
under which the aggressive conquest of the country could be accomplished.
The older sublime was a gentleman’s preserve, an aristocratic reflex of ro-
mantic thought. The Christianized sublime, more accessible to everyone,
was more democratic, even bourgeois. Its social effect was thus far wider.
The change in the meaning of the sublime, then, was intimately connected
with the power the landscape exerted over the American mind, enhancing
the landscape artist’s status as a useful member of his society.

As early as 1835, in his “Essay on American Scenery,” Thomas Cole, Church’s

mentor and teacher, had offered a clue to still another shift in meaning.
Cole introduces the traditional idea of the sublime when he finds in the
mountains of New Hampshire “a union of the picturesque, sublime and the
magnificent,” and in the Sandwich range, especially, a mixture of “grandness
and loveliness . . . the sublime melting into the beautiful, the savage tempered
by the magnificent.”9 But in addition to such familiar late-eighteenth-century
notions of the sublime, Cole cautions the reader to “learn the laws by which
the Eternal doth sublime and sanctify his works, that we may see the hidden
glory veiled from vulgar eyes.”10
Nature is both sublime and sanctified. The task of artist and spectator is
to unveil, to reveal the hidden glory. As we have noted, the idea of revelation,
and also of Revelation, is often found in conjunction with this Christian-
ized sublime. Durand, in his “Letters,” picked up his friend Cole’s theme twenty
years later. To his hypothetical student, he writes: “I refer you to Nature early,
that you may receive your first impressions of beauty and sublimity,
34 part one

unmingled with the superstitions of Art. . . .”11 And though he continues

that “Art has its superstitions as well as religion,” he notes shortly after: “There
is yet another motive for referring you to the study of Nature early—its influ-
ence on the mind and heart. The external appearance of this our dwelling-
place, apart from its wondrous structure and functions that minister to our
well-being, is fraught with lessons of high and holy meaning, only surpassed
by the light of Revelation.”12 For Emerson, the connection between the sub-
lime and Revelation was even more profound: “. . . Revelation . . . attended
by the emotion of the sublime . . . is an influx of the Divine mind into our
mind.”13

But Cole, in the same seminal essay of 1835, also suggested that revelation, as
an experience of the sublime, was not necessarily apocalyptic. He refers to a
moment when, confronted by two lakes in Franconia Notch, he was “over-
whelmed with an emotion of the sublime such as I have rarely felt. It was
not that the jagged precipices were lofty, that the encircling woods were of
the dimmest shade, or that the waters were profoundly deep; but that over
all, rocks, wood and water, brooded the spirit of repose, and the silent en-
ergy of nature stirred the soul to its inmost depths.”14
This experience of sublimity through repose, this apprehension of silent
energy, had important connotations for the future. “I would not be under-
stood that these lakes are always tranquil,” Cole continues, “but that tran-
quility is their great characteristic. There are times when they take a far
different expression, but in scenes like these the richest chords are those
struck by the gentler hand of nature”15 (fig. 3.3).
With a sublime discovered not in sound, but in silence (in what Emerson
called “the wise silence” of the Over-Soul), we move into another philo-
sophical region. Such a concept is essentially mystical, recalling Meister
Eckhart, who was rediscovered by the German idealists so avidly read by
Emerson. Eckhart spoke of “the central silence” of the soul, in which it is
attuned to “this utterance of God’s word.”16
Silence in the older sublime was unsettling, even awesome. The element
of peace and tranquility in the later sense of the sublime is in opposition to
the earlier concept. That there was some audience for such quiet sublimity
is suggested by Tuckerman’s record of criticism of a painting of Lake George
by Kensett: “Mr. Kensett has long been accepted as a most consummate
master in the treatment of subjects full of repose and sweetness, and been
 Sound and Silence: Changing Concepts of the Sublime 35

3.3 Thomas Cole, American Lake Scene, 1844. Oil on canvas, 181/4 × 241/2 in. (46.4 × 62.2
cm.). Detroit, The Detroit Institute of Arts.

honored by critics and painters for the simple and unpretending character of
his works. . . .” Tuckerman then observes, “The subdued tone of the autumnal
atmosphere and foliage in this picture is tender and true; its effect is singu-
larly harmonious; how exquisite the clouds, warm the atmosphere, and effec-
tive the large oak in the foreground; and above all, what sublime repose.”17
If the older sublime could be characterized by the vigorous sound of a cata-
ract, the repose of Lake George, steeped in silence, found its aural equiva-
lent in unruffled water. Water has a special significance in American landscape
painting, linking different kinds of esthetic and landscape. The subject of
much contemporary comment, the “unruffled mirror” motif bears strong
feelings.
Even in the large, dramatic compositions, which maintain contact with
the older sublime, water often inserts a quota of stillness, symbolizing a
spirit untroubled in its depths and unifying both surface and depth in its
36 part one

reflection of the world above. The artist and spectator, after scaling the
picture’s height and descending to its valleys in an empathy that was en-
couraged, could here find rest. Thus when we see pockets of still water in
nineteenth-century American landscape we may speak of a contemplative
idea, a refuge bathing and restoring the spirit, and of a compositional de-
vice marrying sky and ground by bringing the balm of light down to the
earth on which the traveler stands.
When Cole, in the same essay, speaks eloquently of the “purity” and “trans-
parency” of water and isolates “the unrippled lake, which mirrors all sur-
rounding objects” and expresses “tranquility and peace,” and in which the
most perfect, and therefore the most beautiful, reflections may be found, he
is voicing a form of idealism which once more recalls the traditional lan-
guage of Christian mysticism.18 Clear, pure water has always been an obvi-
ous Christian symbol, frequently of the Virgin. It reappears now, in the
writings of Emerson and of Thoreau, who called a lake “the landscape’s
most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which
the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”19 Of Walden, he wrote,
“Walden is a perfect forest mirror. . . . Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the
same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky
water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it. It is a
mirror which no stone can crack . . . a mirror in which all impurity pre-
sented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun’s hazy brush. . . .”20
Such expanses of water, “like molten glass cooled but not congealed,”21
occur most frequently in American art in the transcendental luminist land-
scapes, which suggest to us Emerson’s observation: “The laws of moral na-
ture answer to those of matter as face to face in a glass.”22 (plates 8, 9) The
still, glassy surfaces of luminist landscapes, perfect mirrors of God’s word,
recall Eckhart’s “The eye and the soul are also mirrors, and whatever stands
in front of them appears within them.”23 In paintings by Heade, Lane, Gifford,
Kensett, and countless others who practiced this quietistic mode at least
occasionally, silence, soul, and mirror are all related, swept and dusted, as
Thoreau suggests, by light.
Light is, of course, more than any other component, the alchemistic me-
dium by which the landscape artist turns matter into spirit. For Durand,
sunlight was, among other things, a type of the divine attribute.24 For Cole,
the sky itself was “the soul of all scenery, in it are the fountains of light, shade
and color. . . . It is the sky that makes the earth so lovely at sunrise, and so
 Sound and Silence: Changing Concepts of the Sublime 37

splendid at sunset. In the one it breathes over the earth the crystal-like ether,
in the other the liquid gold.”25
In American art especially, light has often been used in conjunction with
water to assist spiritual transmutation, either dissolving form, as in some of
Church’s large South American pieces, or rendering it crystalline, as in the
works of Lane. In the former, light is more closely attached to what we gen-
erally call atmosphere, and has a diffusive, vaporous quality. In the latter,
light itself partakes of the hard shiny substance of glass.
In all instances, the spirituality of light signals the newly Christianized
sublime. In the large paintings by Church and Bierstadt light moves, con-
sumes, agitates, and drowns. Its ecstasy approaches transcendence, but its
activity is an impediment to consummating a complete unity with Godhead.
In its striving it is Gothic, in Worringer’s terms, and human.26 Though it
draws on the older concepts of the sublime, it extends the esthetic to a reli-
gious attitude, maintaining nonetheless a distance from Deity. Although over-
whelming scale establishes the insignificance of artist and viewer, the painting,
through the stroke which activates atmosphere, avoids negation of the artist’s
ego. Perhaps the difference between the two later concepts of the sublime lies
precisely in the extent to which such paintings are still anthropomorphic.
In the smaller, luminist paintings, also executed occasionally by Church
and Bierstadt, light, because of its silent, unstirring energy, causes the uni-
verse, as Emerson would have it, to become “transparent, and the light of
higher laws than its own” to shine through it.27 For Emerson, the soul in
man “is not an organ . . . not a faculty, but a light. . . . From within or from
behind, a light shines through us upon things and makes us aware that we
are nothing, but the light is all.”28 Such a concept is not unlike Eckhart’s idea
of the soul “coming into the unclouded light of God. It is transported so far
from creaturehood into nothingness that, of its own powers, it can never
return to its agents or its former creaturehoood.”29
Eckhart’s “nothingness” involves a mystic abandonment of self which
ultimately distinguishes the American transcendental landscapes from those
which maintain an anthropomorphic tie to the ego in the midst of spiritual
experience. The admonitions to the painter to lose sight of himself in the
face of nature came from many quarters. We find it in the popular periodi-
cals and in the artists’ journals, as well as in transcendental writing.30 But in
actual practice, only in luminist quietism does the presence of the artist, his
“labor trail,” disappear. Such paintings, in eliminating any reminders of the
38 part one

artist’s intermediary presence, remove him even from his role of interpreter.
In their quiet tranquility, they reach to a mystical oneness above time and
outside of space. In this new concept of sublimity, oneness with Godhead is
complete, and the influx of the divine mind is no longer mediated by the
theatrical trappings of the late-eighteenth-century Gothick.
Part Two


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CHAPTER 4

The Geological Timetable:

Rocks

The Trinity of God, Man, and Nature was central to the nineteenth-century
universe. Nature itself was illuminated by another trinity: art, science, and
religion (fig. 4.1). Nature’s truths, as revealed by art, could be further vali-
dated by the disclosures of science, which revealed God’s purposes and aided
the reading of His natural text. At mid-century, landscape attitudes were
firmly based on this unity of faith, art, and science—a precarious unity, as
we shall see. Common to all three was an idea that obsessed the period:
Creation.
Behind much landscape art in America was a desire to approximate the
moment of Creation itself. This was so whether the artist respectfully du-
plicated nature in the work of art (Durand), or whether his aim was to
imitate the creative powers of God (Cole). Cole’s reference to “those scenes
of solitude from which the hand of nature has never been lifted”1—his con-
cern for these “undefiled works” of God—partly reflected the ideas of
Rousseau and the late-eighteenth-century sublime. But the urge to touch
origins became a quest for primal truths that would redeem the present.
So strong was the belief in the powers of science that there was no dif-
ficulty in aligning its aims with those of art. “By unfolding the laws of
being . . .,” wrote James Jackson Jarves, science “carries thought into the
infinite, and creates an inward art, so perfect and expanded in its concep-
tions that material objects fashioned by the artist’s hand become eloquent
only as the feeling which dictated them is found to be impregnated with,
and expressive of, the truths of science. The mind indignantly rejects as
41
42 part two

4.1 Albert Bierstadt, A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie, 1866. Oil on canvas, 83 ×
1421/4 in. (210.8 × 361.3 cm.). New York, Brooklyn Museum.

false all that the imagination would impose upon it not consistent with the
great principles by which God manifests himself in harmony with Creation.
As nature is His art, so science is the progressive disclosure of His soul, or
that divine philosophy which, in comprehending all knowledge, must in-
clude art as one of its forms.” Jarves, aware perhaps of the contradictions
inherent in his proposition, tried to reconcile an inspirational art with sci-
entific truth. Art, he went on, “should exhibit a scientific correctness in ev-
ery particular, and, as a unity, be expressive of the general principle at its
center of being. In this manner feeling and reason are reconciled, and a
complete and harmonious whole is obtained. In the degree that this union
obtains in art its works become efficacious, because embodying, under the
garb of beauty, the most of truth.” Truth and beauty, those pillars of the
nineteenth-century mind, stand firm. And art will be “valuable as an el-
ementary teacher by reason of its alliance with science. . . .”2
Such thoughts summarize fairly accurately those of the age—aware of
frictions between reason and feeling, between truth and beauty, between
historical and mythical time. To a degree these themes engaged advanced
 The Geological Timetable: Rocks 43

thinking everywhere. But in America, they were intensely experienced within

the context of landscape painting.

Science had rapidly become an article of the American faith in progress. As

Russel Nye puts it: “Nearly every leader of American thought agreed that
science provided the best possible tool with which man might discover those
fundamental laws and truths—in nature and human nature—on which
progress depended.”3
For Jefferson, scientific knowledge “should be useful in social, moral, legal,
cultural, and spiritual affairs,” reaching into “the mass of mankind . . . [to]
circle the extremes of society, beggars and kings.”4 Perry Miller has noted that
America was quickly able to identify science with the national destiny. As
Richard Harlan announced at the University of Pennsylvania in 1837: “What
may not be expected in a country like our own? where the monstrous forms
of superstition and authority, which tend to make ignorance perpetual, by
setting bounds to the progress of the mind in its inquiry after physical truths,
no longer bar the avenues of science; and where the liberal hand of nature has
spread around us in rich profusion, the objects of our research.”5
In the first half of the century, the American sciences and the art of land-
scape painting developed rapidly and concurrently. Botany, zoology, me-
teorology, astronomy, geography, geology, emerging from under the rubric
of natural philosophy and natural history, separated out into quickly mov-
ing currents. Early in the century, astronomy, because it was “the perfect
form of contemplation,” could more than any other science “exalt the soul
and fill it with sublime conceptions of the great Author of nature. . . .”6 Very
quickly, however, it was challenged by geology, which remained the locus of
some of the most controversial arguments about God, man, and religion
for the better part of the century.
In the aged rocks and primeval forests so exhilarating to the romantic
poets and artists resided crucial clues to Creation. It was the artists’ task, as
much as the scientists’, to discover and interpret the truths of nature. When-
ever science, especially geology, could assist this pursuit, it was appropri-
ated for artistic purposes.
Mircea Eliade speaks of myths as being “always an account of a ‘creation,’”
dealing only with “that which really happened.”7 In this sense, geology was
the Great Myth of the nineteenth century. It offered Americans a past at
44 part two

once more recent and more remote: the wilderness, ever new in its virginity,
also stretched back into primordial time. That past was crucial in establish-
ing an American sense of identity—sought nowhere more than in land-
scape painting. By augmenting science with inspiration, the artist could get
closer to the elusive enigmas of Creation, and also approach solutions that
might confirm America’s providential destiny.
So we find Jarves noting of Bierstadt’s landscapes: “The botanist and ge-
ologist can find work in his rocks and vegetation. He seizes upon natural
phenomena with naturalistic eyes.”8 While Tuckerman, writing of Church,
remarks:

His taste in reading suggests a scientific bias; he has long been attracted by
the electrical laws of the atmosphere, and has improved every opportunity to
study the Aurora Borealis. . . . The proof of the scientific interest of such
landscapes as have established Church’s popularity, may be found in the vivid
and authentic illustrations they afford of descriptive physical geography. No
one conversant with the features of climate, vegetation and distribution of
land and water that characterizes the portions of North and South America,
as represented by this artist, can fail to recognize them in all his delineations.
It is not that they merely give us a vague impression, but a positive embodi-
ment of these traits. The minute peculiarities of sky, atmosphere, trees, rocks,
rivers and herbage are pictured here with the fidelity of a naturality.9

The artist’s descriptive fidelity had, of course, to be combined with Tucker-

man’s idea of “general effect.” Church’s Cotopaxi, he wrote, “is both in gen-
eral effect and in authentic minutiae . . . absolutely and scientifically true to
the facts of nature and the requirements of art.” Even more important: “we
recognize the manner and method of Nature in her volcanic aspects.”10 This
grand concern—to reveal the actual “manner and method of Nature”—
goes far beyond specific detail. It may be, in its most profound sense, what
Tuckerman means by “general effect.” Getting the general effect raised the
role of the artist to its noblest apogee. More modestly, the desire simply to
know may have led the artists to join the westward expeditions, to read what
they could of contemporary science and study the specimens of flowers
pressed and dried into their herbariums. Truth to specific detail conferred
credibility on their landscapes. But science was most important because,
as Jarves put it, it talked “face to face with spirit, disclosing its knowledge
direct to mind itself.”11 So revealing nature’s “manner and method” re-
quired a certain worldview, a scientific frame of reference through which
 The Geological Timetable: Rocks 45

nature’s basic working principles could be grasped and made a part of the
work of art.

At mid-century, the artists’ belief in the unity of God and nature remained
undisturbed, nor was it apparently shaken by the publication of The Origin
of Species in 1859. This attitude was consistent with the tone of pre-Darwin-
ian science, which ingeniously rationalized each step towards Darwinism
with a powerful religious idealism. The “new science” has perhaps been read
too quickly into references to organic change in the pre–Civil War era.12
This derives from the doubtful premise that an awareness of organic change
alone (apart from natural selection and mutation of species) was equiva-
lent to Darwinism. It also leads to some misunderstanding of the art of the
period.13
Until Origin appeared, organicism could still be explained as one more
indication of God’s ordered control of all things on earth (and in heaven).
In 1842, the same year that Darwin wrote his preliminary essay for Origin,
the American geologist-theologian Edward Hitchcock wrote:
It appears that one of the grand means by which the plans of the Deity in
respect to the material world are accomplished is constant change: partly
mechanical, but chiefly chemical. In every part of our globe, on its surface, in
its crust, and we have reason to suppose, even in its deep interior, these changes
are in constant progress. . . . In short, geology has given us a glimpse of a great
principle of instability, by which the stability of the universe is secured; and
at the same time, all those movements and revolutions in the forms of matter
essential to the existence of organic nature are produced. Formerly, the ex-
amples of decay so common everywhere were regarded as defects in nature;
but they now appear to be an indication of wise and benevolent design—a
part of the vast plans of the Deity for securing the stability and happiness of
the universe.14

Such scholars as Gillispie, Eiseley, and Lovejoy have dealt at length with
the work of Darwin’s forerunners, though, predictably, there are disagree-
ments about the importance of their contributions. Eiseley notes: “By the
end of the eighteenth century, the idea of unlimited organic change had
spread far and wide. It certainly was not a popular doctrine, but it had long
been known in intellectual circles, largely through the popularity of
Buffon.”15 Indeed, Buffon has been singled out, along with Sir Charles Lyell,
the American physician William Wells, and the controversial Robert Cham-
bers, as an important precursor of Darwin’s theories.16 Lovejoy especially,
46 part two

in a historic article, “The Argument for Organic Evolution before The Ori-
gin of Species” (1909), holds that the theory of evolution was substantially
complete before Darwin. Lovejoy’s article concludes with A. W. Benn’s sug-
gestion that Robert Chamber’s The Vestiges of the Natural History of Cre-
ation (1844) would generally have been accepted “as convincing, but for
theological truculence and scientific timidity. And Chambers himself only
gave unity to thoughts already in wide circulation. . . . The considerations
that now recommend evolution to popular audiences are no other than
those urged in the ‘Vestiges.’”17 In Genesis and Geology (1951) Gillispie sug-
gests that Lovejoy does not adequately allow for the inclusion “in the whole
scientific situation” of “the persistence into the 1840’s of the idea of a su-
perintending Providence in natural history.”18 As Gillispie’s study makes clear,
the widespread belief in the providential role of God was not really chal-
lenged until Origin.
In science, as in art, the seeds of new theories germinate beside older ideas
more firmly planted in the cultural soil. If Chamber’s Vestiges was rejected
when it appeared, it was probably not only because of “theological truculence
and scientific timidity” but because providential ideas were still too perva-
sive. To understand American landscape painting in the pre-Darwinian era,
we must appreciate the role of providence in the shaping and control of
nature as conceived by science before Origin.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries geology was domi-
nated by the polemic battle of the Neptunists and the Vulcanists (or Plu-
tonists). The Neptunists, followers of Abraham Werner (1750–1817) believed
that stratification of the earth’s crust was caused by the precipitation of
layers of rock out of a universal sea which had covered the earth.19
The Vulcanists supported James Hutton (1726–97), who held that “dy-
namic forces in the crust of the earth created tensions and stresses which, in
the course of time, elevated new lands from the ocean bed,” while other
exposed surfaces eroded.20 Hutton found the “decaying nature of the solid
earth” to be “the very perfection of its constitution as a living world.”21 Re-
lated to the clash between the Wernerians and the Huttonians, respectively,
were the theories of catastrophism and uniformitarianism. Catastrophism
held that all the large world changes were due to sudden and violent cata-
clysms, punctuated by long periods of calm; the uniformitarians believed
geological phenomena were produced by natural forces operating uniformly
 The Geological Timetable: Rocks 47

over long periods of time.22 The symbolism of Werner’s sea was also appeal-
ing to those who wished to remind the world of the Noachian deluge. Eiseley
notes that “by the end of the eighteenth century, catastrophism . . . was the
orthodox and accepted view of geology upon the past history of the earth.”23
That history, however, soon began to lengthen. Gillispie observes that by
1820 the age of the earth had been vastly extended, and “the effort to con-
nect Holy Writ directly to earth history was now felt to have been discredit-
able to all concerned. The actual origin of the earth’s surface could no longer
be identified with specific scriptural events. On matters such as this . . . the
Huttonian attitude had prevailed.”24 Nonetheless, “the main positions of
providential natural history were still secure. . . .”25 Even when biblical ac-
counts had been scientifically disproved, the geologists found ways to ac-
commodate new scientific discoveries to the divinity of Creation. That most
geologists, in England and America, were also clergymen strengthens the
point. As T. H. Huxley put it, “Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle
of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules.”26
Early in the century providential planning was further popularized as
the concept of design. This was largely through the influence of William
Paley’s Natural Theology (1802), a widely used text still in the Harvard cur-
riculum as late as 1855.27 Even Darwin had early read and absorbed Paley’s
famous dictum:
There cannot be design without a designer; contrivance without a contriver;
order without choice; arrangement, without any thing capable of arranging;
subserviency and relation to a purpose, without that which could intend a
purpose; means suitable to an end, without the end ever having been con-
templated, or the means accommodated to it. Arrangement, disposition of
parts, subserviency of means to an end, relation of instruments to a use, im-
ply the presence of intelligence and mind.28

Design held steadily in the pre-Darwinian era, a blueprint perhaps for

the Platonic ideas with which artists like Thomas Cole invested the land-
scape. Cole, unlike Hitchcock at about the same time, still thought in terms
of defects: “By true in Art I mean imitation of true Nature & not the imita-
tion of accidents, nor merely the common imitation that takes nature in-
discriminately. All nature is not true. The stunted pine, the withered fig
tree, the flower whose petals are imperfect are not true . . . the imitation of
art should be the imitation of the perfect as far as can be in Nature, & the
carrying out of principles suggested by Nature.” And, “What I mean by true
48 part two

in Nature is—the fulfillment in themselves, the consummation . . . of cre-

ated things, of the objects & purposes for which they were created.”29
Cole’s idea of perfect self-fulfillment and purpose in nature might be
considered beside John Dewey’s illuminating essay “Darwin’s Influence upon
Philosophy” (1909). Dewey observes that from the Greeks to Darwin “the
classic notion of species carries with it the idea of purpose. In all living
forms, a specific type is present directing the earlier stages of growth to the
realization of its own perfection. . . . Nature, as a whole, is a progressive
realization of purpose strictly comparable to the realization of purpose in
any single plant or animal.”30
This, Dewey reminds us, was the “regnant philosophy” of Europe for over
two thousand years. In the pre-Darwinian era organicism stopped firmly
short of the mutability of species. Species were still fixed, and if change en-
tered the picture, constancy, as Hitchcock suggested, lay behind the change.
Gillispie writes: “Mutation of species was not seriously under discussion
before 1844, and not seriously in prospect until 1859—nowhere, that is, ex-
cept in Darwin’s immediate and restricted circle.”31
Fixity of species was still connected, however tenuously, to the Great Chain
of Being, which as Lovejoy suggests had begun to change subtly by the late
eighteenth century.32 The older idea of the Chain of Being, with each rung
of the ladder of nature carefully separated, seems, however, to have main-
tained itself well into the nineteenth century.33 As Eiseley has pointed out,
“the Scala Naturae in its pure form asserts the immutability of species.”34
This immutability of species, crucial to the mechanism of design, remained
essentially undisturbed until Origin.

Pre-Darwinian science, then, accommodated discovery to design. Each new

revelation was quickly enlisted as a proof of providential creation. Para-
doxically, the last thing the age intended was to disprove God. But it had an
obsession to uncover and share His earthly secrets. The artists, like the sci-
entists, wanted to discourse “face to face with spirit.” If science could help
them, they eagerly accepted its aid. To assume a scientific attitude towards
nature, to read its “manner and method” through the lens of science, was, in
this sense, a religious act.
What could the American artists have known of current scientific ideas
and attitudes? Which aspects of the pre-Darwinian breakthroughs filtered
into their awareness through periodicals, books, or lectures? Until we know
 The Geological Timetable: Rocks 49

more about the artists’ libraries and reading habits, we have little to go on.
But the evidence at hand prompts a few speculations.35
They were surely familiar with Sir Charles Lyell, the British geologist whose
theories profoundly affected Darwin’s early development.36 Darwin, who read
Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830) during his voyage on the Beagle, later wrote:
“I always feel as if my books came half out of Lyell’s brain, and that I never
acknowledge this sufficiently; . . . for I have always thought that the great
merit of the Principles was that it altered the whole tone of one’s mind. . . .”37
In the 1830’s, during one of his frequent visits to America, Lyell commis-
sioned the Pennsylvania artist Russell Smith to do a painting of Niagara Falls.
Smith also did scientific illustrations for Lyell,38 as well as for Benjamin Silliman,
the founder of the prestigious American Journal of Science and Arts, which
presented many of the more recent scientific theories. Lyell, who fought mu-
tability for a long time and only accepted it reluctantly,39 gave a series of eight
lectures at the Broadway Tabernacle in New York in 1840.
Who sat in the audience he instructed on the rock formations of the
Palisades across the Hudson? Which artists might he have inspired when he
mentioned Mt. Aetna, so frequently painted by American landscapists in
Italy (fig. 4.2)? Echoing some aspects of the sublime, he spoke of the mood

4.2 Thomas Cole, Prospect of Mt. Etna, 1844. Oil on canvas, 321/2 × 48 in. (82.6 × 121.9
cm.). New London, Conn., Lyman Allyn Art Museum.
50 part two

that prevailed there except when floods occurred: “The silence which per-
vades on this account is quite remarkable, for no torrents dash from the
rocks, nor is there any movement of running water as in most mountainous
countries. Not a rill runs down the sides. All the rain that falls from the
heavens, and all the water from the melting snow, is instantly absorbed by
the porous lava.”40
By then, Lyell was well known and respected in American artistic and
literary circles. Emerson reported in The Dial in 1842: “After holding annual
meetings in New York and Philadelphia, the Geologists assembled in April
of this year in Boston, to the number of forty, from the most distant points
of the Union. . . . Mr. Lyell from London was present.”41
Emerson owned at least one copy of Lyell’s famous and influential Prin-
ciples, in an 1837 edition.42 According to Whicher: “He read Lyell about 1836;
and about that time a new note slips into his forest thoughts. It spoke of
‘archaic calendars of the sun and the internal fire, of the wash of rivers and
oceans for durations inconceivable’; of ‘Chimborazo and Mont Blanc and
Himmaleh,’ of the ‘silent procession of brute elements.’ . . . ‘Why cannot
geology, why cannot botany speak and tell me what has been, what is, as I
run along the forest promontory, and ask when it rose like a blister on heated
steel?’”43
More than anyone else, it was Lyell who, in 1830, extended the earth’s age
indefinitely in the general mind. Yet this enhanced rather than destroyed
the sense of wonder at Creation, exchanging the 6,000-year Mosaic time-
table for a regressive infinity more appealing to the growing romantic ap-
petite for the primordial. This transfer from biblical to geological time, from
textual youth to a literal antiquity read in strata and fossils, did not violate
the idea of the providential role in Creation. As Hitchcock wrote in 1842: “A
minute examination of the works of creation as they now exist, discloses
the infinite perfection of its Author, when they were brought into existence;
and geology proves Him to have been unchangeably the same, through the
vast periods of past duration, which that science shows to have elapsed since
the original formation of our earth. . . . Geology furnishes many peculiar
proofs of the benevolence of the Deity.”44 What we know of the landscap-
ists’ attitude to geology indicates that the new scientific discoveries rein-
forced, rather than ruptured, their faith. As the Hudson River landscapists
were developing, the world aged into this primeval infinity. The landscap-
ists already had a poetic base for their sensibility for time and wildness in
 The Geological Timetable: Rocks 51

the works of the English Lake Poets with which they were so familiar, and in
the works of such American poets as Bryant. But to verify poetic intuitions
with science must have offered them that element of the specific which was
a pragmatic American need, even in discourse with the ideal.
The ideal was, in effect, made actual through geological revelation. In
some says, this was the perfect merger of the truth and beauty sought in
each esthetic quest. Cole, who took a Wordsworthian pleasure in America’s
hoary trees, whose romantic sense of “time” was integral to how he painted
the landscape, whose works are a dialogue between the cultivated antiquity
of past civilizations and the natural antiquity of the untouched wilderness,
spoke easily of geological time in his essay “Sicilian Scenery and Antiqui-
ties” (1844). Of Aetna he wrote: “From the silence of Homer on the subject,
it is supposed that in his remote age the fires of the mountain were un-
known; but geologists have proof that they have a far more ancient date.”45
Cole owned at least one book on geology, Comstock’s Geology, which
shared his library shelf with a book on the history of quadrupeds, two vol-
umes by an “Oxford Graduate,” and a great deal of poetry, including
Coleridge, Keats, Schiller, Southey, Byron, Cambell [sic], Wordsworth, Ossian,
Milton, and Thompson.46 In his copy of the Literary World for Saturday,
October 16, 1847, he would have been unlikely to miss an article, just preced-
ing a notice on the Art Union, reporting on the meetings of the American
Association of Naturalists and Geologists. Here he could read that “Professor
Agassiz made a report on the geographical distribution of animals along the
coast of New England. His remarks tended to the conclusion of separate and
local creation of animals. . . .” He might also have noted the reports on Mr.
Hall’s investigation “into the Paleontology of the lower geological strata of
New York”; Professor Henry’s experiments on light and heat; Commander
Wilkes’s observations on the depth and saltness of the ocean; Professor
Emmons’s paper on the distribution of inorganic matter in forest and fruit
trees; and Professor H. D. Rogers on the geological age of the rocks of Maine,
a subject surely pertinent to Cole’s visits in the forties to Mount Desert.47
Cole’s interest in the new scientific developments is also signaled by his
letter to Benjamin Silliman dated November 11, 1839:

My friend, Mr. Wm. Adams of Zanesville, Ohio has informed me that several
weeks ago he forwarded to you a collection of Fossils that he had procured at
my request. He apologizes for having allowed so great a length of time to elapse
since I requested him to get these Fossils and is very desirous of ascertaining
52 part two
whether they arrived in safety, or are considered by you as interesting or valu-
able. . . . I am very much disappointed in not having had the opportunity of
gratifying my desire of visiting New Haven during the past summer, but I
shall endeavor to console myself with the hope that another summer will not
pass without renewing the agreeable impressions my former visit made.

Silliman answered on November 15, 1839, that he had not yet received the
fossils, and added, “It is gratifying to us all that you recollect your visit here
with pleasure & we hope it may be renewed at any time when your conve-
nience will permit. . . . Short as your visit was it left on every member of my
family the most agreeable impression and we would be most gratified to
have it renewed. . . .”
The references to Cole’s visit remain provocative. How much contact did
American artists have with scientific figures of Silliman’s stature? Silliman,
the famous Yale professor of chemistry and natural history, was, we know, a
staunch friend and supporter of the history painter John Trumbull. He went
on geology trips with another history painter, artist-inventor Samuel Morse,
and was familiar with the scientific efforts of Charles Willson Peale. He was
also in contact with Robert Gilmor, Jr., Cole’s early patron, and was related
by marriage to another patron, Daniel Wadsworth. Of the leading land-
scapists, he knew not only Cole, but Durand.48 The founder of the “sole or-
gan” of research “with both a nationwide circulation and an audience in
Europe,”49 Silliman was also the first president of the Association of American
Geologists (1840), reaching thousands of Americans through his lectures.
Despite his contact with advanced scientific ideas, Silliman insisted that
all nature’s associations were “elevated and virtuous.” He was reluctant to
abandon scriptural truth completely, and included a chapter on the geo-
logical action of the Flood in a geology textbook he edited. Only “with this
double view” could he feel that “Science and Religion may walk hand in
hand.”50
Since Silliman’s comments about nature’s virtues were made in the 1820’s,
his attitudes might be dismissed as those of an earlier generation. Yet even
at his most enlightened, his concept of the relation between science and
religion, between virtue and nature, endured in his own thought—as in
that of many of his contemporaries—with much of the obstinacy of the
rocks under discussion. As late as 1859, the year of Origin, a writer in The
Crayon speculated about “The Relation between Geology and Landscape
Painting” and reminded the landscapist that “his picture is a representation
 The Geological Timetable: Rocks 53

of moral principles and sentiment; not merely an imitation.” The landscap-

ist always has

companions, who entertain and instruct. . . . Each stone bears upon its surface
characters so plainly legible that he ‘who runs may read.’ The parti-colored
lichens add grace and symmetry to the massive boulders, which have jour-
neyed from the Polar seas, as they reposed upon the breast of some crystal
iceberg. These the artist sees and enjoys, and when the last touch is given to his
sketch and the pencil is laid aside, his thoughts revert to those old times, when
flora and fauna existed supreme, since breath had not yet given life to man. . . .
It is for his own interest and reputation as an artist, to understand what will
conduce to the adornment of his work and what will detract from its perfec-
tion, and consequently, though perhaps unintentionally, he is a geologist.

Like Emerson, the writer poses questions as much concerned with scientific
enigmas as with artistic and poetic ones: “Continually meeting with differ-
ent strata, the query naturally arises, why this diversity? He meets with im-
mense fissures and volcanoes and asks himself whence did they originate
and by what convulsion were they produced? To him, therefore, properly
belongs the study of geology as he more thoroughly than any other can
imitate what nature has produced.”51
At least until the year this was written, the landscape artists’ speculations
about geology and the earth’s age were infused with the “moral principles
and sentiment” that reinforced providential planning. The artists’ status as
interpreters of godly design could only be enhanced by geological knowl-
edge. By drawing nearer to the moment of Creation—and thereby to its
“cause”—they endorsed, as Cole had stressed, their own role as Creators.

With every geological discovery America grew older. Geological time, tran-
scending exact chronology, was infinite and thus potentially mythical.
Through geology, chronological time was easily dissolved in a poetic antiq-
uity that fortified the “new” man’s passion for age.
From this point of view, the “nature” of the New World was superior to
the “culture” of the Old. The axe wounded God’s “original” creation even
more blasphemously than did the artist who allowed his imagination to
tamper with God’s nature. Civilization’s axe, chipping away at American
nature, made it younger by removing evidence of natural antiquity. It could
add a cultural veneer, but nothing like the cultural antiquity of Europe.
Americans would do better to hold onto their only antiquity, the primor-
dial certificate of God’s hand. God’s donation of this ancient land further
54 part two

underscored their sense of imperial destiny. How could they abandon a con-
cept of providential planning that so neatly reinforced the national purpose?
An early familiarity with Lyell’s advanced ideas,52 which so nourished
Darwin, never caused Emerson to waver in his belief in divine planning.
How surprising, then, that in addition to the predictable works by
Swedenborg and the Persian poets, Emerson had in his library a copy of
Robert Chambers’s Explanations, a Sequel to Vestiges of the Natural History
of Creation (1846), as well as an 1845 copy of Vestiges itself.53 What could
Vestiges have meant to Emerson—since, as Lovejoy maintains, Chambers
had already voiced in Vestiges the crux of Darwin’s revolutionary theory?54
What did Emerson think about this controversial book, perhaps the most
important single work before Darwin’s Origin, one about which Darwin
himself had reservations, and which had been widely rejected by Darwin’s
strongest supporter, T. H. Huxley?55
In a letter to Samuel Gray Ward, on April 30, 1845, Emerson wrote:
Did you read Vestiges of Creation. The journals I am told abound with stric-
tures & Dr Jackson told me how shallow it was, but I found it a good approxi-
mation to that book we have wanted so long & which so many attempts have
been made to write. All the competitors have failed, & the new Vyvian, if it be
he has outdone all the rest in breadth & boldness & one only want to be
assured that his facts are reliable. I have been reading a little in Plato (in
translation unhappily) with great comfort and refreshment(.)56

A few months later, on June 17, he wrote to Elizabeth Hoar: “New books
we have but you do not care for those Lord’s Poems & the Life of Leibnitz.
Eothen & the Vestiges you have read? the Vestiges, the Vestiges? Farewell,
dear sister. . . .”57
In his journal for that year he wrote: “we owe to every book that interests
us one or two words. Thus to Vestiges of Creation we owe ‘arrested develop-
ment.’ . . . To Plato we owe a whole vocabulary.”58 Elsewhere, at the end of a
long discussion of Vestiges, he noted: “Well, and it seems there is room for a
better species of the genus Homo. The Caucasian is an arrested undertype.”59
Is it significant that on the few occasions when Emerson mentions Ves-
tiges, he tends to mention Plato, literally in the same breath? For all his
interest in Vestiges, it never seems to have shaken his Platonic confidence in
an absolute backdrop behind nature’s flux. As Whicher wrote on Emerson’s
ultimate attitude to evolution: “At the heart of nature, where before he had
seen a matter opposed to life, he now saw vitality and change. But this dis-
 The Geological Timetable: Rocks 55

solution of the present order of nature only strengthened his belief in her
governing laws.”60
Whicher puts it succinctly: “beyond motion lies rest.” Emerson’s concept
of evolution did not imply a “Darwinian belief in the transmutation of spe-
cies by natural selection, but simply ‘a series of events in chronological se-
quence; life being regarded historically as later in appearance than inorganic
matter, and the higher forms of life as following the lower in a graduated
scale of ascent.’ Behind and through the natural sequence worked the same
higher Cause.”61
Emerson’s main reservation about Vestiges was its theological tone:

What is so ungodly as these polite bows to God in English books? He is al-

ways mentioned in the most respectful and deprecatory manner, “that au-
gust,” “that almighty,” “that adorable providence,” etc. etc. . . . Everything in
this Vestiges of Creation is good, except the theology, which is civil, timid,
and dull. . . . It is curious that all we want in this department is collation. As
soon as the facts are stated we recognize them all as somewhere expressed in
our experience or in history, fable, sculpture, or poetry. We have seen men
with tails in the Fauns and Satyrs. We have seen Centaurs, Titans, Lapithae.
All science is transcendental or else passes away.62

Vestiges offered Emerson a provocative continuity from a classical and

mythological past perhaps as real to him as these new revelations of science.
Despite his reservations about the “ungodly” theological tone, something
in the providential references must have satisfied him. Emerson may not
have grasped the radical implications of Vestiges, with its speculations on the
transmutation of species. Ever the great assimilator, he simply added Vestiges
to his poetic cosmology, where it jostled Plato and the Persian poets, but did
not disturb them. Besides Vestiges, Emerson’s bookshelves held William Paley’s
The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1788), Edward Hitchcock’s
The Religion of Geology and Its Connected Sciences (1855), and Thomas Hills’s
Geometry and Faith, a Fragmentary Supplement to the Ninth Bridgewater Trea-
tise (1849).63 All reaffirmed providential planning and guidance.
Having accommodated Vestiges, then, how would Emerson have dealt
with Darwin? Though there is no indication that Darwin was in his library,64
he knew of Origin almost immediately after its publication. On February 5,
1860, he wrote to his wife, Lidian, from Lafayette, Indiana: “—I have not yet
been able to obtain Darwin’s book which I had depended on as a road book.
You must read it—‘Darwin on Species.’ It has not arrived in these dark
56 part two

lands.”65 Emerson had further access to Darwin’s ideas through T. H. Huxley,

whose writings he knew.66 Lidian Emerson herself wrote to their son on
January 18, 1864, favoring Agassiz in the famous Darwin-Agassiz controvery.67
And on those rare occasions when he made written mention of Darwin,
Emerson was apt to speak of Darwin and Agassiz in the same breath, as
though the whole issue were a simple affair of preference open to debate.68
The scarcity of references to Darwin is revealing. In all likelihood as he
did with Chambers, Emerson happily fitted Darwin’s ideas into the ideal
framework of a providential theory he never really abandoned. Of the two
famous Harvard scientists with whom he might have formed a friendship—
Asa Gray, Darwin’s supporter, and Louis Agassiz, Darwin’s chief American
antagonist—he predictably chose Agassiz, to whom he entrusted the edu-
cation of his daughter.69 The great debate that affected the view of Nature
and God in America was conducted between these two scientists.
Though Gray tried hard to accommodate Darwinism to design, it was
Agassiz who, when asked how species had originated, responded: “A species
is a thought of the Creator.”70 Agassiz’s concept was of a plan of Creation
which “has not grown out of the necessary action of physical laws, but was
the free conception of the almighty Intellect, matured in his thought, be-
fore it was manifested in tangible external forms. . . .”71 This fused perfectly
American providential beliefs and the American concern with Mind.
The general American attitude to Darwinism and to providential plan-
ning may be gauged by Agassiz’s enormous popularity. His Contributions to
the Natural History of the United States (1857) drew 2,500 subscriptions, “a
support such as was never before offered to any scientific man for purely
scientific ends.”72 Agassiz was one of the eleven original founders, in 1856, of
the Saturday Club, along with Emerson, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., James
Russell Lowell, Samuel Gray Ward, and Benjamin Peirce, later superinten-
dent of the U.S. Coastal Survey.73 His name was mentioned to Ward by
Emerson as early as December 26, 1849.74 Longfellow was elected to the club
in 1857 at Agassiz’s suggestion, and Hawthorne in 1859. Asa Gray was not
invited to join until 1873, the year of Agassiz’s death.75
Agassiz’s role was so prominent that outsiders called the group “Agassiz’s
Club.” The voluble Swiss scientist to whom Thoreau offered specimens—
fish, insects, and birds—had settled permanently in America in 1846. He
had attended Schelling’s famous lecture series “The Relation of the Real and
the Ideal” at the University of Munich, which doubtless further endeared
 The Geological Timetable: Rocks 57

him to Emerson, who wrote of him in 1852: “I saw in the cars a broad-
featured, unctuous man, fat and plenteous as some successful politician,
and pretty soon divined it must be the foreign professor who has had so
marked a success in all our scientific and social circles, having established
unquestionable leadership in them all; and it was Agassiz.”76
Edward Waldo Emerson, in The Early Members of the Saturday Club,
makes a point of noting that Dana “especially abhorred Darwinism, and
the godlessness that he found in the scientific theories of later investiga-
tors. Agassiz’s religious feeling and struggle against Darwin must have been
a comfort to him.” 77
Agassiz, then, had a special significance for the members of that elite
Saturday brotherhood. He represented the forces of science used for faith,
and his professional and popular success preserved the idea of providential
planning. Oliver Wendell Holmes described the Saturday meetings thus:
“At that time you would have seen Longfellow invariably at one end—the
east end—of the long table, and Agassiz at the other. Emerson was com-
monly near the Longfellow end, on his left. . . . The most jovial man at table
was Agassiz; his laugh was that of a big giant.”78 Agassiz had every reason to
laugh. He was admired by many of the leading figures of his day. They in
turn were delighted to have in their midst a man whose scientific creden-
tials, such as his work in glaciology, were impeccable. He could also tell
them what they wanted to hear—that God was inviolable, and that all the
latest scientific developments traced His guiding hand into nature’s small-
est details. Science was, as Emerson suggested, “transcendental.”
In 1857, some members of the Saturday Club founded the Adirondack
Club (fig. 4.3). The chief instigator was W. J. Stillman, who induced many
members of the Saturday group to buy and thus preserve 22,500 acres in the
Adirondacks around Ampersand Pond for $600. Since he was co-editor of
America’s leading art journal, The Crayon, Stillman’s admiration for Agassiz
is not unimportant:

For Agassiz, I had the feeling which all who had came under the magic of his
colossal individuality. . . . his wide science gave us continual lectures on all
the elements of nature—no plant, no insect, no quadraped hiding its secret
from him. The lessons he taught us of the leaves of the pine, and of the vicis-
situdes of the Laurentine Range, in one of whose hollows we lay; the way he
drew new facts from the lake, and knew them when he saw them. . . . the daily
dissection of the fish, the deer, the mice (for which he had brought his traps)
were studies in which we were his assistants and pupils.79
58 part two

4.3. William J. Stillman, Philosopher’s Camp in the Adirondacks, ca. 1857–58. Oil on canvas,
201/8 × 30 in. (51.1 × 76.2 cm.). Concord, Mass., Concord Free Public Library.

Stillman commented that when Agassiz and Jeffries Wyman, a doctor who
was Hersey Professor of Anatomy at Harvard Medical School, had discus-
sions on scientific subjects, “science seemed as easy as versification when
Lowell was in the mood, and all sat around inhaling wisdom with the moun-
tain air.”80
Emerson’s library, of course, included several of Agassiz’s books: A Jour-
ney in Brazil (1868), inscribed to Emerson; Lake Superior: Its Physical Char-
acter, Vegetation and Animals, Compared with Those of Other and Similar
Regions . . . (1850); and Methods of Study in Natural History (1863). It also
included an Address Delivered on the Centennial Anniversary of the Birth of
Alexander von Humboldt, given by Agassiz under the auspices of the Boston
Society of Natural History (1869),81 with a note including a summary of
Emerson’s remarks. Though the relationship with Agassiz may have helped
distance Emerson from Darwin, both he and Agassiz admired Darwin’s great
predecessor—and Agassiz’s early mentor—Humboldt. Emerson owned not
only the famous Cosmos, in what might have been an incomplete 1847 set,
 The Geological Timetable: Rocks 59

but Humboldt’s Aspects of Nature, in Different Lands and Different Climates

. . . (1849), and The Travels and Researches of Alexander von Humboldt . . . a
Condensed Narrative of His Journeys in The Equinoctial Regions of America,
and in Asiatic Russia . . . (1833).82 “The wonderful Humboldt, he wrote in his
journal in 1845, “with his extended centre, expanded wings, marches like an
army, gathering all things as he goes. How he reaches from science to sci-
ence, from law to law, tucking away moons and asteroids and solar systems
in the clauses and parentheses of his encylopaedical paragraphs!”83
Yet Humboldt’s most fervent American admirer, in the arts at least, was
not Emerson but the landscape painter Frederic E. Church. On the shelves
of Olana, Church left behind him a five-volume edition of Cosmos (1849–
59), Humboldt’s Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America . . .,
volumes 1 and 2 (1852), and an 1849 edition of the Aspects of Nature—the
very same works (though sometimes in different editions and translations)
owned by Emerson.84
Church also owned copies of Darwin’s The Expression of Emotion in Man
and Animals (1873) and The Journal of Researches into the Natural History
and Geology of the Countries Visited during the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle round
the World, volumes 1 and 2 (1852).85 For Darwin, of course, Humboldt was—
next to Lyell—his most important early influence. Humboldt inspired him,
as he did Church later, to undertake his South American journey. Through
Humboldt, Darwin arrived at the theory of natural selection that would
challenge God and the idea of nature as God. For Church—and Emerson—
Humboldt’s science was simply another route that further revealed God’s
encompassing purpose.

Church is the great exemplar of how the official concerns of the age found
their way into landscape painting. His interests were broader, his involve-
ment in natural science more intense, than those of any artist of his era. He
is a paradigm of the artist who becomes the public voice of a culture, sum-
marizing its beliefs, embodying its ideas, and confirming its assumptions.
In his work, science, religion, and art all pursued the same goal, their har-
monious coexistence embodying the ideal world-view of the nineteenth
century before it was betrayed by the very instruments it used to advance its
cause—observation, pragmatism, and science itself.
Church clearly understood the need to provide America with appropri-
ate images and icons. With Emerson and Agassiz he completes still another
60 part two

trinity: of transcendentalism, providential science, and devotional art. To both

Church and Emerson, Humboldt offered an immensely attractive prospect—
merging exploration, exoticism, baroque energy, and pragmatic observa-
tion infused with flashes of transcendence.
In his introduction to Cosmos, Humboldt observes: “Nature is a free do-
main, and the profound conceptions and enjoyments she awakens within
us can only be vividly delineated by thought clothed in exalted forms of
speech, worthy of bearing witness to the majesty and greatness of the cre-
ation.”86 From the outset, he shares not only the landscapists’ concern with
Creation, but their need for a rhetoric appropriate to nature’s majesty. “In
considering the study of physical phenomena,” he continues, “not merely in
its bearings on the material wants of life, but in its general influence on the
intellectual advancement of mankind, we find its noblest and most impor-
tant result to be a knowledge of the chain of connection, by which all natu-
ral forces are linked together, and made mutually dependent upon each
other; and it is the perception of these relations that exalts our views and
ennobles our enjoyments.”87 Humboldt’s language throughout Cosmos is
not always so didactic. But the tone of his introduction must have appealed
to Church’s Grand Style ambitions. Pragmatic observation, suitably “en-
nobled” by rhetoric, could be applied to the highest artistic purpose. Church’s
strivings after sublimity could only have received further confirmation, if
not indeed their initial impulse, from Humboldt’s observation that “every-
where, the mind is penetrated by the same sense of the grandeur and vast
expanse of nature, revealing to the soul, by a mysterious inspiration, the
existence of laws that regulate the forces of the universe.”88
Humboldt made the tropics as appealing to Church as he had to Darwin:

He who, with a keen appreciation of the beauties of nature manifested in

mountains, rivers, and forest glades, has himself traveled over the torrid zone,
and seen the luxuriance and diversity of vegetation, not only on the culti-
vated sea-coasts, but on the declivities of the snow-crowned Andes, the
Himalaya, or the Nilgherry Mountains of Mysore, or in the primitive forests,
amid the net-work of rivers lying between the Orinoco and the Amazon, can
alone feel what an inexhaustible treasure remains still unopened by the land-
scape painter between the tropics in both continents. . . . Are we not justified
in hoping that landscape painting will flourish with a new and hitherto un-
known brilliancy when artists of merit shall more frequently pass the narrow
limits of the Mediterranean, and when they shall be enabled, far in the inte-
rior of continents, in the humid mountain valleys of the tropical world, to
seize, with the genuine freshness of a pure and youthful spirit, on the true
image of the varied forms of nature?89
 The Geological Timetable: Rocks 61

The botanical veracity of Church’s plant studies, the astute observation

of his erupting volcanoes, show the accuracy of the best descriptive science.
Examining the notebooks, drawings, and rapid oil sketches, pausing over
the delicate, careful drawings of ferns and tropical details, one thinks im-
mediately of Humboldt’s advice to the artist in the section “Landscape Paint-
ing in Its Influence on the Study of Nature”:

Colored sketches, taken directly from nature, are the only means by which
the artist, on his return, may reproduce the character of distant regions in
more elaborately finished pictures; and this object will be the more fully at-
tained where the painter has, at the same time, drawn or painted directly
from nature a large number of separate studies of the foliage of trees; of leafy,
flowering or fruit-bearing stems; of prostrate trunks, overgrown with Pothos
and Orchideae; of rocks and of portions of the shore, and the soil of the
forest90 (fig. 4.4).

Yet Humboldt, like Church, never abandons the age’s demands for a blend
of the real and the ideal. He refers to “the ancient bond which unites natural
science with poetry and artistic feeling” and to the distinction which “must
be made in landscape painting, as in every other branch of art, between the
elements generated by the more limited field of contemplation and direct
observation, and those which spring from the boundless depth of feeling
and from the force of idealizing mental power. The grand conceptions which
landscape painting, as a more or less inspired branch of the poetry of na-
ture, owes to the creative power of the mind are, like man himself, and the
imaginative faculties with which he is endowed, independent of place.” But
“an extension of the visible horizon, and an acquaintance with the nobler
and grander forms of nature, and with the luxurious fullness of life in the
tropical world” would clearly be useful.91 He even maintains that “much aid
might be further derived by taking photographic pictures, which, although
they certainly cannot give the leafy canopy of trees, would present the most
perfect representation of the form of colossal trunks, and the characteristic
ramification of the different branches.”92
Both Darwin and Church responded to Humboldt’s sense of “Nature con-
sidered rationally . . . submitted to the process of thought, [as] a unity in
diversity of phenomena; a harmony, blending together all created things, how-
ever dissimilar in form and attributes; one great whole . . . animated by the
breath of life.”93 Church also shared Humboldt’s recognition of the heroic
and imaginative possibilities of landscape painting: “Landscape painting . . .
62 part two

4.4 Frederic Edwin Church, Tree with Vines, Jamaica, West Indies, May 1865. Oil on paper-
board, 1115/16 × 91/16 in. (30.3 × 23 cm.). New York, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Mu-
seum, Smithsonian Institution.
 The Geological Timetable: Rocks 63

requires for its development a large number of various and direct impres-
sions, which, when received from external contemplation, must be fertil-
ized by the powers of the mind, in order to be given back to the senses of
others as a free work of art. The grander style of heroic landscape painting
is the combined result of a profound appreciation of nature and of this
inward process of the mind.”94 In such passages, Humboldt not only re-
hearses the tone of the Grand Style, but touches on that ubiquitous concern
with Mind so readily extended in America to Universal Mind.
Church must have pored over his volumes of Cosmos, then executed his
luxuriantly baroque views of tropical scenery seduced by the fiery heat of
Cotopaxi, whose conical form, Humboldt had noted, was the most beauti-
fully regular, “among all the volcanoes that I have seen in the two hemi-
spheres.”95 Though photography may have helped Church to hold on to
“various and direct impressions,” it in no way compromised his vision of a
heroic landscape art that was easel painting’s closest approximation to the
panorama.96 Humboldt had even advised that “panoramas are more pro-
ductive of effect than scenic decorations, since the spectator, inclosed, as it
were, within a magic circle, and wholly removed from all the disturbing
influences of reality, may the more easily fancy that he is actually surrounded
by a foreign scene.”97
Church’s “full-length” landscapes, such as Heart of the Andes, made the
spectator feel that he was “actually surrounded by a foreign scene,” and
achieved the purpose Humboldt envisaged for panoramic works: “to raise
the feeling of admiration for nature” and to increase “the knowledge of the
works of creation, and an appreciation of their exalted grandeur.”98 Hum-
boldt suggested that “besides museums, and thrown open, like them, to the
public, a number of panoramic buildings, containing alternating pictures
of landscapes of different geographical latitudes and from different zones
of elevation, should be erected in our large cities.”99 Church made a public
sensation when he flanked Heart of the Andes with black crepe curtains, lit it
by gas jet, and surrounded it with tropical vegetation taken from the site. In
one month, receipts totaled more than three thousand dollars. As popular
spectacle, Heart of the Andes fulfilled all Humboldt’s prophecies for the
painter who opened up the “inexhaustible treasure” of the tropics.
But Church’s sensational reputation as a painter of theatrical travel-
ogues detracts from the real point. Behind the popular success was an al-
most agonized desire to make the spirit of nature gleam through each detail,
64 part two

“revealing to the soul,” as Humboldt put it, “by a mysterious inspiration,

the existence of laws that regulate the forces of the universe.” Church’s South
American journeys, like Humboldt’s and to some extent Darwin’s, were part
of a spiritual quest.
When Darwin sailed on the Beagle late in December 1831, he took along
Humboldt’s Personal Narrative, as well as Milton, the Bible, and Volume 1 of
Lyell’s Principles of Geology.100 When he reached Brazil’s tropical rain forests
he wrote: “I never experienced such an intense delight. . . . I formerly ad-
mired Humboldt, I now almost adore him; he alone gives my notion of the
feelings which are raised in the mind on entering the Tropics.”101
That Church, like Darwin, “adored” Humboldt, is indicated by a letter to
Bayard Taylor of June 13, 1859, voicing his regret “when a friend communi-
cated the sad intelligence of Humboldt’s death—I knew him only by his
great works and noble character but the news touched me as if I had lost a
friend—how much more must be your sorrow who could call him friend.”102
Heart of the Andes, Church’s pictorial affirmation of God in nature, vari-
ously hailed as Paradise, Eden, and the redemption of Easter Sunday,103 was
painted in 1859—the year that saw Darwin’s Origin published, and Hum-
boldt’s death.
The ironies of that pivotal year speak for themselves. Darwin and
Church—both sharing Humboldt’s passion for the tropics, his love of ex-
otic adventure, his pragmatic observation, his synthetic intuitions—had each
been involved in a quest for truth which they hoped would reveal Creation.
The physical difficulties of their voyages to South America were similar.
Darwin, we are told,
planned (in 1835) to cross the Cordilleras by the highest and most dangerous
route. . . . He took with him two guides, ten mules, and a madrina, a mare
with a bell around her neck. . . . They rode for hour after hour in the icy wind,
stopping only for Darwin to clamber up rocks, geological hammer in hand,
fighting for breath at the high altitudes. On the ridges the atmosphere was so
rarefied that even the mules were forced to stop every 50 yards. . . . At night,
they slept on the bare earth. Yet the rewards were great: “The peaks, already
bright in the sun, appeared in gaps in the mist [to be] of stupendous height
. . . cloudless, airy everlasting look.”104

When Church was en route to Guaduas on June 2, 1853, “Suddenly, the

mules left the road and took us to a point filled with thorns and vines, and
after being very scratched by the thorns and caught by the vines, we natu-
rally decided that it could not be the right road to Guaduas.”105 On July 11,
 The Geological Timetable: Rocks 65

1857, not far from Sangay: “We were now about 13,000 feet above the sea—
and we were frequently obliged to dismount in order to assist the animals
through some difficult passage. The rain of last night made the ground very
slippery. . . . We had just crossed a river with very steep banks and my horse
was toiling up the opposite bank through the long grass on the very edge of
the slope, when he made a misstep and instantly horse and rider were
somersetting down the bank. . . .”106
Yet for Church also there were rewards: “An extraordinary stillness struck
me which was heightened by the rapid silent motion of the clouds about
the mountain tops, we are near them now, and the rolling of the smoke
from the burning of paramo grass. How silent these mountains are . . . a
slight rainstorm gathered in the east and passed to the south and on the
falling mist among the mountains the sun produced a curious prismatic
effect although quite common in these countries” (July 10, 1857).107
For Darwin, risk and adventure were intrinsic to the quest. He was will-
ing to accept whatever results logic and intelligence dictated. Church’s ad-
venture was part of the heroic stance of the artist in search of the ideal. His
exalted purpose demanded physical travail. By bringing the aims of the land-
scapist closer to the divine intention of the Creator, he unveiled the myster-
ies of Creation to embody them in his art.
Darwin wished to uncover the truth. Church encouraged truth to re-
flect a spirit he refused to doubt. He used science and observation wher-
ever they could serve this purpose. As Louis L. Noble points out in his
broadside for Heart of the Andes (1859): “Some apprehension of the process
of landscape-making by the instrumentalities of the Creator, is necessary in
order successfully to conduct the process of landscape-painting by the feeble
instrumentalities of man. . . .”108
That apprehension was precisely Tuckerman’s “manner and method of
Nature,” an idea closely connected, as we have seen, to “general effect” and
also to Jarves’s “general principle.” If Tuckerman cautioned the landscapist
to strike the proper balance between detail and general effect, Humboldt
showed concern that the scientist achieve this equilibrium, and in so doing
offered Church not only the inspiration for his tropical adventures, but a
fortification of the esthetic that dominated his age:

I think we ought to distinguish here between him whose task it is to collect

the individual details of various observations, and study the mutual relations
existing among them, and him to whom these relations are to be revealed,
66 part two
under the form of general results. . . . There is, perhaps, some truth in the
accusation advanced against many German scientific works, that they lessen
the value of general views by an accumulation of detail, and do not sufficiently
distinguish between those great results which form, as it were, the beacon lights
of science, and the long series of means by which they have been attained. This
method of treating scientific subjects led the most illustrious of our poets
(Goethe) to exclaim with impatience, “The Germans have the art of making
science inaccessible.” An edifice cannot produce a striking effect until the scaf-
folding is removed, that had of necessity been used during its erection.109

For Church, the scaffolding was intense observation—the careful delin-

eation of each frond, leaf, and flower. In Heart of the Andes he could be
accused of so indulging in microscopic detail that the “general principle” of
nature was lost—implied only by the remains of a Claudian composition
that carried distant overtones of heroic, ideal intention. Yet his own con-
temporaries, including his friend Noble, had seen in Heart of the Andes “a
knowledge of the roughening and the smoothing of the earth, by the pow-
ers which haunt its sunless caverns, and toil and content upon its face . . .
essential . . . to an intelligent perception of that face, as we behold it. To the
artist who would truthfully picture it, certainly, indispensable knowledge.
Without that, his work cannot have the expression and significance of the
actual—cannot have that organic unity—cannot have that all pervading
life, energy and beauty which conspire to make it a genuine creation of art,
in contradistinction to the work of the mere mechanic.
“What is said of the earth, may be said of the living growth upon it. In
obedience to subtle forces rise the organic structures of the vegetable king-
dom.” The artist must know all this for if not, “a want of it will find, in the
pictured plants, trees and woods, a corresponding want of truthfulness, and
therefore, of necessity, want of proper expression, strength and beauty.” For
Noble, “in no other section of the globe (Humboldt himself not excepting
the Alps and the Himalaya) could the landscape painter acquire such an
extent and variety of knowledge suited to his purposes, and receive such
inspiration and impulse.”110
Church shared this feeling and maintained it. Nearly ten years later he
wrote to his friend William Osborn (September 29, 1868): “The Alps disap-
pointed us both—and I have no desire to revisit them. . . . You will perhaps
raise your eyebrows when you hear my sweeping remarks about the Alps—
but they have nothing which is not vastly exceeded by the Andes and lack
many important features which make the Andes wonderful and exclusive.”111
 The Geological Timetable: Rocks 67

The meticulous detail of Heart of the Andes (fig. 2.3) helped its spectacu-
lar success, accommodating the public’s delight in “near looking.” But once
the specific “truths” were certified, Church was also deeply concerned with
the issue of “general principle.” Humboldt had observed: “The distinction
between dissimilar subjects, and the separation of the general from the spe-
cial, are not only conducive to the attainment of perspicuity in the compo-
sition of a physical history of the universe, but are also the means by which
a character of greater elevation may be imparted to the study of nature. By
the suppression of all unnecessary detail, the great masses are better seen,
and the reasoning faculty is enabled to grasp all that might otherwise es-
cape the limited range of the senses.”112
Though Heart of the Andes may stress detail over effect, Church’s other
paintings of the tropics are more synthetic, suppressing, as Humboldt put
it, all unnecessary detail, so that the “greater masses are better seen.” In such
paintings as The Andes of Ecuador (plate 6) and Cotopaxi, the handling of
light transforms each scene into Humboldt’s “one great whole animated by
the breath of life.” Light identifies compositional with cosmic and spiritual
unities which in turn subsume scientific apprehension of the “manner and
method of Nature.” Though Church reports on his scientific homework in
small bits of foreground detail, a consuming light engulfs the terrain. Here,
parting company with Darwin, and even with Humboldt, he stands with
Emerson and Agassiz. For such dazzling worlds were surely originated by
Agassiz’s “thought of the Creator,” by Emerson’s “fire, vital, consecrating,
celestial, which burns until it shall dissolve all things into the waves and
surges of an ocean of light” by which “we see and know each other, and
what spirit each is of.”113
This spiritual context puts Church’s scientism firmly in the service of
religion, as it did the researches of those geologist-clergymen whose “extin-
guished” bodies surrounded the cradle of Darwinian science. Church re-
sisted Darwin’s revelations by means of an attachment to Revelation that
endured in America as long as landscape painting was a national force. That
mystical light faded with his generation, its departure hastened by the ad-
vent of a new “scientific” light—impressionism.
Church’s reconciliation between science and spirit was reflected in his
reading. He studied the latest researches of Tyndall on clouds and glaciers,
of Lomell on light, of Rood on perception, and Chevreul on color. Yet he
also read works such as Geikie’s Hours with the Bible or The Scriptures in the
68 part two

Light of Modern Discovery and Knowledge (1888) which claimed that the
Bible “is the only story of the origin of our race which we can harmonize
with our natural conception of God or with science . . . the full light of
sciences does not eclipse the truth of the Bible, but only leads us, by its
discoveries, to understand the sacred pages aright.”114
As late as 1882, Church received from William M. Bryant a copy of his
Philosophy of Landscape Painting where Church could read, as in earlier,
pre-Darwinian literature, that “religious conceptions are ever inextricably
involved in the art of the world, and landscape painting finds its true sig-
nificance and strictly legitimate task in the representation of those phases
of nature that are most profoundly expressive of the Spiritual and Divine.”115
Church’s library at Olana is an extraordinary testament to the artist’s con-
tinued efforts to accommodate post-Darwinian science with religion. In his
1891 volume Natural Selection and Tropical Nature (a reprint of essays first
presented in the 1870’s), Alfred Russel Wallace—a scientist perhaps as re-
sponsible as Darwin for evolutionary ideas—suggests that Darwin “really
had faith in the beauty and harmony and perfection of creation, and was
enabled to bring to light innumerable adaptations, and to prove that the most
insignificant parts of the meanest living things had cause and a purpose.”116
In Church’s copy of Louis Figuier’s World Before the Deluge (1865) Dar-
win is mentioned only for his ideas about coral formations and megatheroid
animals, while the author maintains that “geology is . . . far from opposing
itself to the Christian religion, and the antagonism which formerly existed
has given place to a happy agreement. Nothing proves with more certainty
than the study of geology, the evidences of eternity and divine unity; it shows
us, so to speak, the creative power of God in action. We see the sublime
work of creation perfecting itself unceasingly in the hands of its divine Au-
thor, who has said ‘Before the world, I was.’”117
In 1892, John Fiske, in The Idea of God As Affected by Modern Knowledge,
brought it all full circle when he maintained: “Without adopting Paley’s
method, which has been proven inadequate, we may nevertheless boldly
aim at an object like that at which Paley aimed. . . . Although it was the
Darwinian theory of natural selection which overthrew the argument for
design, yet. . . . when thoroughly understood, it will be found to replace as
much teleology as it destroys.”118
Teleology indeed, remained remarkably intact for most of the American
landscape painters of Church’s generation. Darwin came into the picture
 The Geological Timetable: Rocks 69

too late to upset the reverential tone that had characterized the American
landscape tradition from its outset. That tradition was rooted too deeply in
pictorial conventions of the Christianized sublime, and—more important—
in the national purpose and destiny. Realism and idealism—the overt dia-
lectic with which the age consciously defined its identity—expressed and
masked an explosive bundle of contradictions—to which we are now heirs
and with which modernism has coped by a variety of strategies.
The age was not simple. The artists, as part of the age, revealed in their
aesthetic the contradictions in their society between science and art, be-
tween empiricism and the ideal, between analysis and synthesis, between
technology and nature. An ecumenical spirit of reconciliation was the only
course for artists who wished to accommodate science, religion, and art. In
this, they reflected their society, dissolving contradictions in a spiritual light
that was ultimately an act of faith.
Of these artists, Church was the greatest ecumenical spirit. Huntington
suggests that for all the advice Church got from Humboldt, he got a thou-
sand times more from Ruskin.119 Though there is some validity to this—
since Church shared Ruskin’s insistence on a spiritual principle animating
all artistic endeavors, however soundly grounded in science—Church did
not fear the “dessication of nature” by science in the same way as did Ruskin,
who wrote that “the man who has gone, hammer in hand, over the surface
of a romantic country, feels no longer, in the mountain ranges he has so
laboriously explored, the sublimity or mystery with which they were veiled
when he first beheld them, and with which they are adorned in the mind of
the passing traveller.”120 By and large, Ruskin also thought Darwinism falla-
cious, stating on at least occasion, in 1872: “I have never heard yet one logi-
cal argument in its favour, and I have heard, and read, many that were beneath
contempt.”121 For Church, a spiritual accommodation of Darwinism was
sufficient, without recourse to contempt.
Like Emerson, who wrote of the Vestiges and Plato in the same sentence,
and uttered the names of Agassiz and Darwin in one breath, Church simply
found in science and idealism, in pragmatic relativity and absolutism, the
elements of his world-view. His sensibility was that of the grand synthe-
sizer. For all his partiality to detail, he wanted Humboldt’s “greater masses”
to be “better seen.” His art can be seen only in terms of sublime unities, with
light, the great organizer, the measure of his grand Ambition. It is the prime
70 part two

example of the last concerted effort of an artistic community to preserve

the idea of a privileged nature—reflecting divine truth, bearing lessons,
healing the spirit. He was thus, at that time, the “national” painter, offering
in the accommodations and reconciliations of his art a rare embodiment of
the public concerns of his society—seeing in the alliance between art and
science an opportunity to follow the “progressive disclosure of His soul.”
CHAPTER 5

The Meteorological Vision:

Clouds

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

. . . Such fantastic feathery scrawls of gauze-like vapor on this elysian ground!

We never tire of the drama of sunset. I go forth each afternoon and look into
the west a quarter of an hour before sunset, with fresh curiosity, to see what
new picture will be painted there, what new panorama exhibited, what new dis-
solving views. Can Washington Street or Broadway show anything as good? Every
day a new picture is painted and framed, help up for half an hour, in such lights
as the Great Artist chooses, and then withdrawn, and the curtain falls.
—Henry David Thoreau1

Sky in American art has a clearly identifiable iconography. The painters of a

culture deeply imbued with transcendental feeling found in it the purity of
renewal, the colors of hope and desire, heavenly reflections of earthly
nostalgias. They also cast upward to the sky the shrewd empirical glance
that constantly corrected their powerful system of ideal beliefs. The sky is a
finely tuned paradigm of the alliance between art and science. In that mu-
table void, the landscape artist’s concerns—poetic, ideal and symbolic, em-
pirical and scientific—were sharpened rather than blurred. As the source of
light, spiritual as well as secular, the sky relieved absolutism with infinite
moods, unchanging ideals with endless process. No wonder the artists fixed
their particular attention on those moist cargoes that described the void in
brief but repeated compositions: clouds.
The Americans had a strong precedent for their interest in clouds in Con-
stable, who was well known to them. In the same year, 1855, that The Crayon
71
72 part two

published Jasper Cropsey’s important essay “Up Among the Clouds,”2 it also
printed C. R. Leslie’s note on skies, which itself incorporated Constable’s
famous letter of October 1821:
I have done a great deal of skying, for I am determined to conquer all diffi-
culties, and that among the rest. That landscape painter who does not make
his sky a very material part of his composition, neglects to avail himself of
one of his greatest aids. . . . It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in
which the sky is not the key-note, the standard of scale, and the chief organ
of sentiment. . . . The sky is the source of light in Nature and it governs every-
thing; even the common observations on the weather of every day are alto-
gether suggested by it . . . (fig. 5.1)

Leslie remarks that on the back of each of Constable’s studies were “memo-
randa, of the date, the time of day, the direction of the wind, and other
remarks: for instance—‘Sept, 6th, 1822, looking S.E.; 12 to 1 o’clock, fresh
and bright between showers; much the look of rain all the morning, but
very fine and grand all the afternoon and evening.’”3

5.1 John Constable, Study of Clouds, ca. 1822. Oil on paper. 187/8 × 231/4 in. (47.9 × 59 cm.).
Oxford, U.K., Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology.
 The Meteorological Vision: Clouds 73

The meteorological tone of these notations is attributed by Kurt Badt to

Constable’s possible knowledge of Luke Howard’s pioneering Climate of
London, published from 1818 to 1820, just before Constable’s spurt of cloud
studies in 1821–22.4 Howard’s “Essay on the Modifications of Clouds”—the
first chapter of the first volume—was offered to the Askesian Society in
London in the winter of 1802–3, and then published, in 1803, in Tilloch’s
Philosophical Journal.5 Around 1812, it formed the basis for Thomas Forster’s
first chapter in his Researches About Atmospheric Phenomena, which Con-
stable referred to in a letter to George Constable on December 12, 1836.6
The stress on the catalytic effect of meteorological sources on Constable’s
content has not gone unchallenged. Louis Hawes, objecting to Badt’s thesis,
emphasizes the empiricism of Constable’s cloud observations.7 But one
theory need not exclude the other. One can maintain, as Hawes does, that
Constable was an empiricist who observed very closely, and also accept Badt’s
premise that Constable’s marvelous observing faculties may have received
order and direction from a knowledge of Howard’s pioneering work. Both
scholars, perhaps, base their views on different theories of perception. Con-
stable, we may be sure, used (as any artist does) whatever would assist him
in his cloud studies—just as the Americans brought a whole esthetic-religious-
scientific body of ideas to their study of the skies.
Whatever the source of Constable’s meteorological awareness, it is paral-
leled in the American tradition from Allston’s Landscape, American Scenery:
Time, Afternoon, with a Southwest Haze (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) to
Burchfield’s and Hopper’s careful citing of time and weather in their titles.
Some Americans developed an obsessive concern with weather: one thinks
of Mount replacing earlier technical notes with weather data in the sixties;
of Cole’s meticulous observations; of Homer’s long waits for the right mo-
ment in his late sea studies.
Yet the conceptual foundations of such meteorological concerns were to
be found early in the nineteenth century in Europe, and involved one of its
greatest culture heroes—Goethe, whose ideas are so frequently paralleled
in American thought. If there is some controversy about Constable’s reli-
ance on Howard’s work, there is none about Goethe’s relation to it. When
Goethe discovered Howard he became obsessed with him. Goethe knew
Howard’s “Essay on the Modification of Clouds” from a translation of the
first half of the Annalen der Physik of 1815.8 In 1820 he wrote “The Shape of
Clouds According to Howard”9 (fig. 5.2), and followed it with a poem “To
74 part two

5.2 Luke Howard, Light cirro-cumulus beneath cirrus, 1803–11. Pencil and watercolor on
paper, 611/16 × 91/8 in. (17 × 23 cm.). London, England, Science Museum.

the Honored Memory of Howard,” on the theme of making the impalpable

palpable:

He grips what cannot be held, cannot be reached,

He is the first to hold it fast,
He gives precision to the imprecise, confines it,
Names it tellingly!—yours be the honor!—
Whenever a streak (of clouds) climbs, piles itself
together, scatters, falls,
May the world gratefully remember you. 10

Howard’s classification of clouds into nimbus, stratus, cumulus, and cir-

rus also inspired Goethe to write poems that went so far as to establish for
them a hierarchy of noble spirituality—not unlike the artistic hierarchy of
his day. Thus, the cirrus was a cloud in which “the noble impulse mounts
always higher.”11 Goethe’s preoccupation with clouds was scientific and sym-
bolic.12 He valued Howard’s work because it gave order to the mutable heav-
ens, enabling anyone who looked at the sky to see with system. But he also
valued it because it aided the onlooker to divine the eternal system which
 The Meteorological Vision: Clouds 75

was the ultimate source of all natural order: Sich im Unendlichen zu finden—
to fine oneself in the infinite.13
Goethe’s obsession with Howard and clouds transmitted itself to the
Dresden circle of painters, especially Carl Gustav Carus, who wrote his fa-
mous Nine Letters on Landscape Painting between 1815 and 1824. After reading
Goethe on clouds and on Howard, Carus acknowledged that his own ideas
“about the condition of landscape painting in modern times found release.”
In Goethe’s poem to Howard, Carus found “the idea of a second kind of
perfection in art based on higher knowledge.” Here and in later, similar
poems, pure and perfect scientific knowledge was transfigured into poetic
vision through a rebirth of the spirit. Goethe’s poetic insight, based on “long
and earnest atmospheric studies,” was for Carus an example of art as “the
crown of science.”14 Understanding based on observation and study could
probe infinite enigmas. The sky, the quintessence of air and light, was “the
real image of the infinite . . . the most essential and most glorious part of the
whole landscape.”15 The Dresden circle shared Carus’s enthusiasm. Around
1821, the Norwegian Johann Christian Dahl started investigating clouds in
Dresden, possibly stimulating Karl Blechen to similar studies.16 The Ger-
man interest was intense, and like the American, it closed the cycle between
observation and spirit.
While the Americans’ pragmatic and scientific instincts can be identified
with Constable, their profound philosophical affinities are aligned with the
German and Scandinavian landscape painters (see Chapter 10). As Carus
maintained, once the landscape painter understood earthly life, he must
then have explained to him “the influences of the fourth and most spiritual
element”—fire and light—so that he might undertake his work with a feel-
ing of reverence and worship.17 Clouds and light in America must be con-
sidered against this background of pragmatism, science, and Deity.

In “Up Among the Clouds,” Cropsey sounds like Carus when he quotes,
“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His
handiwork” (fig. 5.3). Yet he also counsels the artist to “look out on the
widespread horizon, and study some of its phenomena and laws,” and fol-
lows with a rush of sharp observations referring to the “luminous, palpitat-
ing air . . . constantly varied . . . more deep, cool, warm or grey—moist or
dry—passing by the most imperceptible gradations from the zenith to the
horizon—clear and blue through the clouds after rain—soft and hazy when
76 part two

5.3 Jasper Cropsey, Cloud Study, 1850. Pencil, white gouache, and gray wash on paper, 67/8
× 5 in. (17.5 × 12.7 cm.). Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., Newington-Cropsey Foundation.

the air is filled with heat, dust and gaseous exhalations. . . .”18 This knowl-
edgeable observation predicates that mix of seeing and knowing, of prag-
matism and scientific understanding, integral to the American vision of
nature. In the case of clouds, there are also neo-Platonic echoes, those ech-
oes which frequently arise when discussing the relations of the specific to
the type.
Knowledge of the type to which specific cloud configurations belonged
enabled the artist to impose order on the momentarily seen and observed—
and thus pierce its essence. Variety observed could reveal a basic truth of type.
The specific reality, carefully observed, could lead to an understanding of the
ideal. In the case of clouds, their transient uniqueness, making observation
urgent, clarified the dialogue between the particular and the typical.
From here it would not be difficult to arrive at a Ruskinian idea of truth,
both material and spiritual. Ruskin, who devoted a lot of energy to clouds
 The Meteorological Vision: Clouds 77

in Modern Painters, also stimulated the Americans’ interest. Cropsey quotes

him several times in his short essay. Ruskin’s stress on Turner’s skies is re-
flected in Cropsey’s references here to Turner; he does not refer to Con-
stable at all.
How does Turner fit into this iconography of clouds? The Americans, as
we have seen, shared some of Constable’s pragmatism and what now seems
his awareness of meteorological ideas. But the stress on poetic vision found
in the Germans and in Ruskin leads to Turner’s imagination rather than to
Constable’s eye. The Americans rarely could allow imagination to remove
itself too far from reality. Thus Cole found Turner’s later works, especially,
“gorgeous but altogether false.”19 But neither could the Americans easily
settle for Constable’s matter-of-fact naturalism. Despite his reverential ac-
knowledgment of the idea of God in nature,20 Constable was perhaps more
interested in passionately depicting nature through painterly codes than in
pursuing its elusive inner spirit. This also applies to his clouds.
Quite apart from what they read of Ruskin’s luminous apologia for the
artist, the Americans were appreciative of Turner’s cloud effects. During his
visit to London in 1840, Durand studied Constable’s clouds at C. R. Leslie’s,21
but, according to his son John, also visited Turner. At the time he found
Turner “factitious and artificial,”22 but years later (1855) in the “Letters on
Landscape Painting” he noted, “Turner gathered from the previously unex-
plored sky alone, transcripts of Nature whose mingled beauty of form and
chiaroscuro have immortalized him, for the sole reason that he has therein
approached nearer to the representation of the infinity of Nature than all
that have gone before him.”23 In the Crayon of the same year, Leslie’s note on
Constable’s skies begins with a brief nod to Turner’s “transcendent power
of expressing atmospheric phenomena” which “more than atoned for ec-
centricities that would have ruined a lesser man. . . .”24
So it is not surprising that Cropsey at the same time finds “Turner . . .
almost the only artist, ancient or modern, that has given us successful stud-
ies of the beautiful clouds of this region.”25 The region Cropsey refers to
here is that of the cirrus, “the highest and most distant cloud formation.”
Quoting Bloomfield, Shelley, and Wordsworth, Cropsey finds in the cirrus
“infinite beauty,” “unobtrusiveness,” “extreme delicacy,” and “completeness
of form”; while his description is not as exalted as Goethe’s “noble impulse”
mounting “always higher,” it conveys the ethereal spirit of this most elevated
of cloud forms. The cumulus, however, most stimulates Cropsey’s fantasy,
78 part two

with “its grand masses of dreamy forms floating by each other, sometimes
looking like magic palaces, rising higher and higher, and then topling [sic]
over in deep valleys, to rise again in rides like snowy mountains, with
lights and shadows playing amid them, as though it were a spirit world of its
own. . . .” And he quotes Shakespeare: “Sometimes we see a cloud that’s
dragonish; / A vapor, sometimes like a bear or lion, / A towered citadel, a
pendent [sic] rock.”26
If Cropsey finds the cirrus ethereal and the cumulus an invitation to
fantasy, he reserves for the nimbus, the rain cloud, some of nature’s most
imposing effects: “the breaking up of mists and fogs . . . and creeping vapors
that climb the mountain sides.” “It must have large claim,” he says, “upon
our ideas of beauty, on account of its being the cloud in which the rainbow
appears.”27 The rain region is “in its grandest moods more impressive than
all the other cloud regions—awakening the deepest emotions of gloom,
dread, and fear; or sending thrilling sensations of joy and gladness through
our being.”
“Gloom, dread, and fear” is of course the terminology of the earlier
Gothick sublime. Cropsey draws on a familiar opposition of the beautiful
and the sublime when he notes that the “cirrus and cumulus regions awaken
soothing and poetical thoughts of serenest beauty,” but the rain region, “ow-
ing to its nearness, and stronger grade of color, and the more powerful im-
pressions it is capable of producing . . . is susceptible of the highest and
noblest results in Art. . . . Its impressiveness and gloom have led artists to
choose it in compositions, involving great and powerful emotions. . . .”
Cropsey finds it impossible to assign any particular color to this region “be-
cause it is susceptible of all the modifications of color arising from reflec-
tions, changes of form, dust and vapors from the earth, atmospheric distances
and sunlight.”28 His entire essay is a provocative mix of observation, poetry,
esthetics, and science.
Like many Americans of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—
including Washington and Jefferson, who carefully recorded weather in their
journals—the American artists of Cropsey’s moment were meteorologically
aware. The pre–Civil War demand for a national meteorological service re-
ceived a powerful impetus from Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian. Around
1849 Henry began displaying daily weather maps; by 1860 he had about 500
stations reporting data to the Smithsonian.29 Weather, everyman’s subject,
had become everyman’s “scientific” hobby.
 The Meteorological Vision: Clouds 79

In 1855, the year of Cropsey’s essay, the United States Government began
to publish the extraordinary Reports of the Explorations and Surveys to As-
certain the Most Practicable and Economic Route for a Railroad from the Mis-
sissippi River to the Pacific Ocean, more familiarly known as the Pacific
Railroad Reports. The thirteen imposing volumes issued between 1855 and
1861 were filled not only with zoological, botanical, and geological data but
with the most specific meteorological information. The expeditions included
artists and scientists, dissecting, describing, classifying rocks, animals, and
plants. It was a moment when art could be seen, in Carus’s term, as the
crown of science.30 Eight of these volumes were on Frederic Church’s shelves
at Olana,31 where they were ultimately joined by the advanced scientific
inquiries of Tyndall and Lomell.32
In addition to his scientific probings, Church, like Cropsey, had also been
reading Modern Painters.33 What special insights into clouds might he have
gained from Ruskin? In the section “Truth of Skies” in Modern Painters I,
Ruskin, prescriptive as ever, advised: “. . . If artists were more in the habit
of sketching clouds rapidly, and as accurately as possible in the outline,
from nature, instead of daubing down what they call ‘effects’ with the brush,
they would soon find there is more beauty about their forms than can be
arrived at by any random felicity of invention, however brilliant, and more
essential character than can be violated without incurring the charge of
falsehood. . . .”34
Church did not have to wait for Ruskin to tell him this—it had been the
practice of his teacher, Cole, since at least 1825. Ruskin fortified what the
Americans were already doing. His color observations again parallel the kind
of pragmatic notations found in Cole’s and Church’s drawings. “If you watch
for the next sunset,” wrote Ruskin, “when there are a considerable number
of . . . cirri in the sky, you will see . . . that the sky does not remain of the
same color for two inches together; one cloud has a dark side of cold blue,
and a fringe of milky white; another, above it, has a dark side of purple and
an edge of red; another, nearer the sun, has an underside of orange and an
edge of gold; these you will find mingled with, and passing into the blue of
the sky, which in places you will not be able to distinguish from the cool
gray of the darker clouds, and which will be itself full of gradation, now
pure and deep, now faint and feeble. . . .”35
Ruskin, like Goethe, had his own hierarchy of clouds—this, however, a
connoisseur’s hierarchy. The central cloud region, the habitat of the ordinary
80 part two

cumulus, was “comparatively uninteresting.” In a comment worthy of Sir

Joshua, he notes that cumuli are the favorite clouds of the Dutch painters,
“quite good enough for all ordinary purposes . . . for cattle to graze, or boors
to play at nine-pins under. . . .” Even nature, he adds with satisfaction, is not
fond of these clouds and so introduces “some manifestation of finer forms,
sometimes approaching the upper cirri, sometimes the lower cumulus.”36
The incipient irony of the connoisseur, however, is a minor Ruskinian
note. Even in dealing with these lower forms, the artist’s truth could be
tested by how he expressed “infinity always and everywhere, in all parts and
divisions of parts.”37 Infinity, a word also cherished by Goethe, was always
the redemptive feature. Mid-nineteenth-century esthetics could hardly ex-
ist without it, and where could it find a better resonance than in the skies?
Like Cropsey, Ruskin found more to provoke his imagination in the rain
cloud of the lower region, where “all that is beautiful may be made manifest
. . . all that is hurtful concealed. . . .”38 Praising such climatic effects in Turner,
Ruskin noted the “absolute necessity of scientific and entire acquaintance
with nature, before this great artist can be understood.”39 And here enters,
once again, a major matter of conscience for the nineteenth-century artist—
the practical relation between scientific knowledge and poetic truth. While
Goethe and Carus had seen empirical observation as a route to transcen-
dental infinity, the practical discretions involved in a successful consum-
mation of the particular and the general were matters of considerable
soul-searching.

Like the Americans, Ruskin was wary of scientific truth unelevated by artis-
tic truth. As late as 1872, in The Eagle’s Nest, he cautioned that if the artist “is
quite sure that he can receive the science of [things] without letting himself
become uncandid and narrow in observation, it is very desirable that he
should be acquainted with a little of the alphabet of structure—just as much
as may quicken and certify his observation, without prejudicing it. . . . The
first thing you have to ask is, Is it scientifically right? That is still nothing,
but it is essential.”40
The powers of the ideal, however, restrained the empirical and curious
eye. In 1856, in Modern Painters III, Ruskin maintained, like the Germans
and Americans, that “the simplest forms of nature are strangely animated
by the sense of the Divine presence; the trees and flowers seem all, in a sort,
children of God. . . . I much question whether anyone who knows optics,
 The Meteorological Vision: Clouds 81

however religious he may be, can feel in equal degree the pleasure or rever-
ence which an unlettered peasant may feel at the sight of a rainbow.”41
Reading Ruskin, American painters might have been inspired to get it “sci-
entifically right,” though that was “still nothing.” As pragmatic observers, how-
ever, they may have had more faith in the possibility of fusing science and
spirit than had Ruskin. With the revelation of the divine presence in nature as
their ultimate aim, they endlessly drew the mutable faces of the heavens, cap-
turing each quick transformation with eager pencils, fortifying their eyes with
educated minds, seeing and knowing in one reverent perception.
American cloud studies can be traced back at least as far as the early
drawings of Alvan Fisher in 1816.42 The notebooks of Cole, Cropsey, and
Church, among others, testify to their abiding interest in clouds. In 1825, the
young Cole copied in his notebook the formulae for painting skies from
William Oram’s The Art of Coloring in Landscape Painting.43 He gleaned
such information as: “Those which are uppermost are made in their shad-
ows blue white and India Red only.” He followed these instructions with his
own observation of “water governed by the sky,” of “a Misty Morning when
the sun is about an hour high,” of the sky “After Sunset, immediately after
Rain.” Of the morning sky in summer about eight or nine o’clock after rain,
he noted that “the clouds in such a sky ar[e] very romantically shaped. The[y]
fly in strata one above another the under side of each cloud is darker and
bolder than the upper. . . . The clouds in the highest part are the warmest
into their shades, but their lights perfectly white.” This 1825 notebook is
filled with observations of the look of the sky at a specific moment. He notes
“a very fine sky about 4 o’clock in the afternoon in March the sun to the
right—the large center cloud extremely light. . . . The Rainbow is on the
outer edge of the rain and gradually mingles with it.”44 Such empirical ob-
servations abound in Cole’s notebooks (fig. 5.4).45 The myriad particulars
of those mutable events—clouds—could, in good neoclassic fashion, in-
struct the artist’s understanding of the general. Significantly, in the note-
books of the American landscapists, clouds are rarely generalized in the
manner Ruskin had found so heinous in the Old Masters.
Cole studied clouds in America and abroad—where he looked at the sky
as much as at the ancient monuments. Cropsey’s interest in clouds is indi-
cated by numerous undated notebook drawings as well as by his singular
essay.46 But it is Church who exhibits the most frequent, even obsessive,
preoccupation with the changing effects of clouds (fig. 5.5). Like Cole,
82 part two

5.4 Thomas Cole, Untitled, atmospheric study with notations (formerly called Cloud Studies),
1825. Pen and pencil on lined paper, 711/16 × 65/8 in. (19.5 × 16.8 cm.). Detroit, The Detroit
Institute of Arts.
 The Meteorological Vision: Clouds 83

5.5 Frederic Edwin Church, Landscape Sketch, Hudson Valley, June 30, 1866. Pencil on pa-
per, 49/16 × 81/2 in. (11.7 x 21.6 cm.). New York, The Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Smithsonian
Institution.

Church often used code numbers for colors, and his voluminous notations
reveal a strong urge to arrest the slow boil and slide of cloud formations.47
How does this relate to the impressionists’ grasp of the ephemeral? The
Americans’ awareness of change was strongly monitored by a necessity to
stop it, making of each moment, as Emerson had said, a “concentrated eter-
nity.” This attitude is reflected in Church’s encounter with Sangay in 1857: “I
commenced to sketch the effect as rapidly as possible but constant changes
took place and new beauties revealed themselves as the setting sun turned
the black smoke into burnished copper and the white steam into gold. . . . I
was so delighted with the changing effects that I continued making rapid
sketches.”48 Confronting process with “rapid sketches”—matching the rate
of change with speed of execution—enabled Church to research the proper
moment to halt process, or to add up the sum of moments into a synthetic
idea of arrested time. Even in these swift notations, we sense an inclination
to still process as much as to record it.
Pursuing this fugitive vision, Cole, in an 1827 notebook, wrote of the sky
seen from the Mountain House: “Once about noon after a rain there ap-
peared several very imposing effects but to sketch or to describe them is
almost beyond the power of man for one changed into another in so short
84 part two

a time.”49 In this area of the quick sketch—of unpretentious, and often in-
spired data-gathering—Bierstadt’s sky studies occupy an increasingly high
position. In the cloudscapes, Bierstadt, at his best with atmospheric effect,
was free to forget his public, to establish an intimate dialogue with cloud
and sky alone. These modest studies, in which the artist is literally in the clouds,
are some of his most subtle and important works. Generally executed alla
prima in oil, they pose potent oppositions to the technical and rhetorical
machinery of the larger compositions. And they raise a largely unexplored
issue: What were the artists’ attitudes to the sketch in mid-nineteenth-century
America?
Despite our own contemporary predilections for such “unfinished” works,
these sketches—and drawings—were, for all the pleasure the artist took in
them, largely means toward an ambitious goal—the formal picture. With
sketches the artist “fixed” reality, then bore it off to the studio for further
examination. There pragmatic observation could be transformed into the
desired poetic and divine truth; the general idea could quietly transfigure
natural fact. The terms of this transformation were the main esthetic issue: the
narrow but noble obligation within which each artist turned his equivocations—
which were matters of conscience—into style.
How did clouds fare in the larger, finished works? Did they function as
structural factors? If so, how much was truth of type altered to conform to
compositional needs? Are the clouds still recognizable in terms of meteoro-
logical classification? How close did the artists stay to the scientism of their
observation and knowledge? How much did they conventionalize and adapt?
How did clouds condition light and modify the landscape? And how did they
serve to carry out the total esthetic which dominated the artists’ vision?

The major cloud regions isolated by Ruskin and Cropsey, and roughly based
on Howard’s classification, are readily recognizable. The International Cloud
Atlas now lists hundreds of variations on these basic types,50 but the generic
distinctions remain much the same as when Howard established them. Since
both Cropsey and Ruskin laud the rain cloud’s potential, we can expect
some memorable American works to be based on it. A splendid example,
predating both Cropsey and Ruskin, is Cole’s famous Oxbow (1836; Metro-
politan Museum of Art, New York): the passing storm, alternating with bril-
liant light in the distance, wipes across the picture from right to left, creating
patterns of light and dark in the sky that temper the tone of the landscape
 The Meteorological Vision: Clouds 85

below. Here are those overtones of majestic renewal that betray the noble
aims lingering behind even Cole’s humbler views of nature. In Storm in the
Mountains (M. and M. Karolik Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston),
Bierstadt’s ambitious instinct for a rather belated Gothick sublimity directed
him, in contrast to his brilliant but modest cloud studies, to the awesome
potential of the rain cloud. Light and dark clouds swirl into a tunnel-like
wreath that is not only the focus but the substance of the composition, recall-
ing some of the cavernous late-eighteenth-century landscapes of such artists
as Joseph Wright of Derby as well as some of the Gothick tunnels of his nearer
contemporary, Cole. Even the quieter luminist works of Heade and Lane rec-
ognize the rain cloud’s potential for mood. In Heade’s Storm over Narragansett
Bay (Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth), an almost surreal foreboding is in
large part evoked by reflecting the darkness above in the water below, recall-
ing Cole’s comments about “water governed by the sky.” In Lane’s Schooners
Before Approaching Storm (plate 9), the rain cloud is suspended over a still
sea, which counteracts—indeed almost contradicts—the activity above. Paint-
ers of very diverse aims and esthetics, then, did not confine themselves exclu-
sively to one variety of cloud, though any cloud, once introduced, was modified
according to their particular aims. The sky, Constable’s “chief organ of senti-
ment,” was closely observed and stringently managed.
But it was not so much the storm cloud, with its obvious propensities for
sublimity, that attracted the Americans; it was the central cloud region—
the area of the cumulus about which Ruskin had his reservations. Although
Ruskin was obliged to recognize its potential for variety, the rounded forms
of the simple cumulus were, he felt, easily conventionalized and this—to
his irritation—had led not only the Dutch, but Claude, Poussin, and Salva-
dor astray. But he was willing to admit that their deficiencies came from
drawing the cumulus in separate masses. Nature rarely confined herself to
such masses, which formed only a thousandth part of her variety, but built
up “a pyramid of their boiling volumes,” covered the “open part of the sky
with mottled horizontal fields,” broke through these with sunbeams, tore
up their edges with local winds, and scattered “over the gaps of blue the
infinitude of multitude of the high cirri. . . .”51
Only this variety could relieve for Ruskin the banality of the central cloud
region. And variety was precisely what the Americans found in it. Taking
their cues perhaps from the Dutch, they made the widest pictorial use of
this cloud genre. Some of their results might have pleased Ruskin, though it
86 part two

is difficult to imagine him being really pleased by any skies other than Turner’s.
In the transparent, mutable cumulus the Americans found endless possibili-
ties which mirrored the larger esthetic issues behind each painter’s specific
vision. On occasion, however, they were seduced into mannerisms. In
Bierstadt’s Mount Whitney, for all its atmospheric virtuosity, the edges of the
clouds piling up at the left are mechanically rounded. Similarly, Ruskin might
have discarded as false the convention within which the clouds are locked in
Heade’s Sunlight and Shadow: The Newbury Marshes (private collection).
But the pragmatic corrective and the meteorological sensitivities of the
moment kept the Americans from those fallacies Ruskin had identified in
the Old Masters. Even when commandeered to serve symbolic truths, Ameri-
can clouds tended to be specific and easily recognizable. Rather than adapt
the clouds to their needs, the American landscapists carefully studied the
clouds so that they could choose those forms, tones, opacities, and trans-
parencies that best served their structural and esthetic needs. Thus Bierstadt
repeatedly piled extraordinary varieties of cumulus one on the other, to
create a theater of rhetoric beaming down tangible doses of sublimity. As
rhetoricians, Church and Bierstadt favored the tumultuous sky into which
emotion could be projected under the convincing guise of observation and
truth. The rapid changes of light at such times were faithfully observed and
recorded, then placed at the service of a devotional idea—the sky itself as
the vessel of spirit.
Church, perhaps the most industrious of all American cloud students,
chose the ordered formations of a perfectly observed altocumulus to set the
mood for his masterpiece, Twilight in the Wilderness (The Cleveland Mu-
seum of Art). The flame-like shapes, their reflections suffusing the stilled
landscape below, enact a baroque ecstasy in the heavens. Church often pre-
sented a transcendent Deity through this apocalyptic majesty, projecting
those feelings of reverence of which Cropsey and Carus had spoken, in forms
that, however closely observed, engender an almost abstract energy. The sky
is perhaps the most apt locus for the reciprocal energies of observation and
abstract invention to mesh in a definition of divinity.
One American artist—and one alone—was so attached to a particular
cloud that it is virtually a signature of his work. Martin Johnson Heade,
Church’s good friend, chose the cumulus lenticularis to reinforce the hori-
zontals that characterize his extended, miniature panoramas. In such a pic-
ture as Sunset on Long Beach (plate 10), the clouds are, one might say,
 The Meteorological Vision: Clouds 87

further steps ordering a space that aspires to the mensurational infinity of

classicism—a measured rather than immeasurable eternity. Stretching along
the extended canvas, formed with a deliberateness that leaves them no op-
tion but to remain palpable, they seem as much at the service of an ordering
sensibility as merely proffered by the sky itself. Much as he may have re-
spected nature, Heade respected measure more. Yet these “French bread”
clouds do exist in nature at sunset, when the cumulus humilis dwindles to
these simple bars that conveniently fortify his insistent horizontal rhythms.
They establish that preface, as it were, to the quiet transcendence that charac-
terizes his art—though they frequently retain a trace of that eccentricity—
almost mannerism—that sometimes lends an anticipatory, even menacing
mood to his work.
It would be a simple matter to assign to Church and Bierstadt on the one
hand, and to Heade on the other, those versions of a Christianized sublim-
ity defined in Chapter 3, and to relate to these choices of cloud types the
iconographic hierarchies evolved both in Europe and America. Heade, to
apply Goethe’s symbolic system of cloud values, was one of the few to use
the most noble and aspiring cloud, the cirrus. In Omotepe Volcano, Nicara-
gua, he combines it with delicate varieties of cumulus. But on occasion
Bierstadt, the master of cumuli, also studied the cirrus. So we must not
impose categories on a problem that was, in some ways, as varied and amor-
phous as the clouds. It is my contention that these clouds and combinations
were not used unconsciously, but that the sky itself, especially in a tradition
singularly devoted to the concept of light as spirit, was studied closely, and
that its symbolic duties were fully understood.
This is so even when, at first glance, an artist appears to have little inter-
est in clouds. Lane especially seems drawn to a variety of gentle cirrus and
cumulus formations. We are often barely aware of them, until we remember
to look. Lane’s clouds, far from setting the quiet tone of the canvas, follow
it, signaling a specific kind of expressive and symbolic purity. That symbol-
ism can be extended even further—for if the delicate cirrus, on the margin
of invisibility, was the most noble of clouds, the clear sky in its unbroken
infinity approaches divine purity. In the glowing light radiating from Lane’s
harbor scenes, as also in the cloudless skies over Kensett’s beaches, this ideal
is often met, suggesting Goethe’s identification of “the pure cloudless sky
with the calm of eternal bliss.”52
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CHAPTER 6

The Organic Foreground:

Plants

Your voiceless lips, O Flowers! Are living preachers,

Each cup a pulpit, every leaf a book— 1

In Henry Inman’s Mumble the Peg (fig. 6.1), a simple, even banal genre scene,
two children are playing a game. Dominating the foreground is a small,
isolated plant. We look at it with some puzzlement. Does its prominence
signal some message we are missing, some allegory of growth perhaps—or
a plant symbol we cannot recognize? We are aware that an elaborate system
waits to echo the plant’s promptings.
When H. T. Tuckerman responded to Mumble the Peg, he ignored the
plant but concentrated on the “vegetable” life of the two boys: “The fresh-
ness of their looks, like the verdure on which they are stretched, is as the
smile of the best spring that preceded the manhood ‘of our discontent’—
gleaming through the long vista of years.”2 Elsewhere, in an essay on flow-
ers, Tuckerman found in them “the objectless, spontaneous luxury of
existence that belongs to childhood. They typify most eloquently the be-
nign intent of the universe; and by gratifying, through the senses, the in-
stinct of beauty, vindicate the poetry of life with a divine sanction.”3 Children
and flowers were part of an organic cosmology, a sentimental universe that
both illustrated and masked the cultural significance of plants.
Meditating on their “brief duration,” Tuckerman also found in flowers
“a moral significance that renders their beauty more touching, and as it
were, nearer to humanity than any other species of material loveliness.” Flow-
ers, he wrote, “are related to all the offices and relations of human life.” And,
89
90 part two

6.1 Henry Inman, Mumble the Peg, 1842. Oil on canvas, 241/8 × 201/16 in. (61.3 × 51 cm.).
Philadelphia, Pennylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

“instead of looking at them through the microscopic lens of mere curiosity,

or according to the fanciful and hackneyed alphabet that Floral dictionaries
suggest, let us note their influence as symbols and memorials.”4
If nature was the theater of large religious and moral ideas, what role did
flowers and plants play? What did the precise foreground details of the na-
ture paintings mean to the artists? What was their attitude to botany, and to
the organic world-view of their age? Such questions bring us swiftly into
the period’s major controversies: religious, moral, scientific, philosophical.
 The Organic Foreground: Plants 91

The gathering and rendering of plants—part artistic, part scientific—

was a prominent part of the earliest American explorations. Two Englishmen—
John White in the 1580’s and Mark Catesby in the 1730’s and ’40’s were the
great predecessors of the nineteenth-century landscapists, whose notebooks
abound with drawings of leaves and plants. Catesby apologized for his primi-
tivism: “As I was not bred a Painter I hope some faults in Perspective, and
other Niceties, may be more readily excused, for I humbly conceive Plants,
and other Things done in a Flat, tho’ exact manner, may serve the Purpose
of Natural History, better in some Measure than in a more bold and Painter
like Way.”5 The explicitness of his drawings derived from this empirical com-
mon sense: “In designing the Plants, I always did them while fresh and just
gather’d. . . .”6
This interaction of the empirical eye with the categories of natural his-
tory became a major theme of the nineteenth-century artist. The early urge
to label, with its emphasis on classification, persisted longer in America than
abroad, as Americans held tenaciously to the “artificial” system of Linnaeus.
Since this was bound to absolute fixity of species, the American devotion to
this concept and to its religious implications is easily understood. The ten-
dency to categorize also coincided with an American preoccupation—even
obsession—with gathering statistics, and with a practical curiosity about
the new continent—a curiosity that almost brought the botanist Asa Gray
and Nathaniel Hawthorne together as colleagues on the Wilkes expeditions
of 1838.7
By the time Emerson was exposed to the French botanist Antoine Laurent
de Jussieu’s natural method at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris in 1833,8 the
taxonomic grip of the Linnaean system was relaxing. Ideas of organic unity
were abroad, partly through contact with the ideas of the Germans and of
Coleridge. Coleridge’s notion of the organic unconsciousness of genius—
“What the plant is by an act not its own, and unconsciously, that must thou
make thyself to become”9—found little resonance in American artists. His
good friend Allston, one of the few who speculated on the problem of ge-
nius, paradoxically insisted on a real distinction between nature and art.10
But Coleridge’s analogy between men and plants—“the same power in a
lower dignity”11—is paralleled in Emerson and Thoreau. “The greatest de-
light which the fields and woods minister,” wrote Emerson in Nature in
1836, “is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable.
. . . They nod to me, and I to them.”12 The application of Coleridge’s organic
92 part two

notion to the artist (on Shakespeare: “Growth as in a plant”)13 is echoed by

Thoreau’s “Some poets mature early and die young. Their fruits have a de-
licious flower like strawberries.”14 Coleridge’s organic theory of the work of
art (“All is growth, evolution, genesis—each line, each word almost, begets
the following”)15 might result in Thoreau’s conclusion: “Most poems, like
the fruits, are the sweetest toward the blossom end.”16 The organic meta-
phor began to insulate itself into whatever was subject to temporal cycles of
growth and decay.
Thoreau could have been familiar with some of Coleridge’s ideas through
such writings as Aids to Reflection, published in America in 1829 (Emerson
read it the following year).17 But in American literature, the man-plant anal-
ogy went back at least as far as Crèvecoeur in 1782. “Men are like plants,” he
wrote; “the goodness and flavour of the fruit proceeds from the peculiar
soil and exposition in which they grow. We are nothing but what we derive
from the air we breathe, the climate we inhabit, the government we obey,
the system of religion we profess, and the nature of our employment.”18
Crèvecoeur’s comment is an obvious early source for the idea of a na-
tional art rooted in American soil. The Gesamtorganismus, which M. H.
Abrams has treated as “an artistic genre or a national literature . . . con-
ceived to grow in time as a single work grows in the imagination of the
individual artist,”19 was of course a concept of key importance to such Ger-
mans as Johann Gottfried Herder, “the founding father of historical orga-
nology.”20 Reading Herder, Emerson must have been affected by such ideas
as “The first and last question is: What is the nature of the soil? What is it
adapted to? What has been sown therein? What is it able to bear? . . . The
nature, virtue and perfection [of Shakespeare’s creation] rests on this fact,
that it differs from the former; that out of the soil of his time, precisely this
other plant grew up.”21 The environmental nourishment of genius provided
a theoretical framework for analysis. The poets of the Italian and English
Renaissance were, to Coleridge, “like fair and stately plants, each with a liv-
ing principle of its own, taking up into itself and diversely organising the
nutrient derived from the peculiar soil in which (each?) grew. . . . In all their
hues and qualities they bear witness of their birthplace and the accidents
and conditions of their inward growth and outward expansion.”22
In his enthusiasm for such organic parallels, Emerson related human to
natural history:
 The Organic Foreground: Plants 93

All the facts in natural history, taken by themselves, have no value, but are
barren, like a single sex. But marry it to human history, and it is full of life.
Whole floras, all Linnaeus’ and Buffon’s volumes, are dry catalogues of facts;
but the most trivial of these facts, the habit of a plant, the organs, or work, or
noise of an insect, applied to the illustration of a fact in intellectual philoso-
phy, or in any way associated to human nature, affects us in the most lively
and agreeable manner. The seed of a plant—to what affecting analogies in
the nature of man is that little fruit made use of, in all discourse, up to the
voice of Paul, who calls the human corpse a seed. . . .23

Emerson’s reference to Linnaeus again testifies to the prolonged hold of his

system in America. It also recalls the German philosopher who made the
most serious attempt to expand Linnaeus’s contribution: Goethe—who, “for
Emerson, Alcott and Thoreau . . . always remained the most important of
the Germans.”24 Goethe devoted intense energy to the pursuit of this bo-
tanical goal. “I go on reading Linne,” he wrote to Frau von Stein in 1785: “I
have to, since I have no other book with me. It is the best way to read a book
conscientiously. . . . This book was not made for reading, but for recapitula-
tion, and it has done me the most valuable service, since I have thought
about most of the points.”25 Elsewhere he noted, “That which he [Linne]
sought by force to hold apart had, according to the innermost urge of my
nature, to strive toward union.”26 Over eighteen months later, he wrote tri-
umphantly from Rome to Frau von Stein again:

Tell Herder I am near the secret of the reproduction and organization of

plants, and that it is the very simplest you could imagine. . . . Tell him I have
discovered quite definitely and unmistakably where the germ lies hidden,
that I have already a general conception of the rest and that there are only a
few points now to fix more precisely. My “Primal-Plant” [the archetype], will
be the most extraordinary creation in the world, one that nature herself might
envy me. With this model and the key to it one can go on and on indefinitely
inventing plants, which must be consistent. I mean plants which, even though
they do not exist, might exist, not just picturesque and poetic shadows or
semblances, but possessing the quality of inner truth and necessity. The same
law will be applicable to all other living things.27

Goethe’s concept of the Urpflanze developed after a seminal encounter

in the mid-1780’s in Padua’s Botanical Gardens with an ancient palm,
Chamaerops humilis L., said to have dated back to 1584. This encounter car-
ried with it all the mystery of invention and genius, and the controversial
value of Goethe’s botanical contributions in The Metamorphosis of Plants
(1790) in no way diminishes this. Agnes Arber notes that Goethe, in his theory
of plant members, “visualized the indescribably various appendicular organs
94 part two

of plants all as expressions of one form—the leaf. In his wider study of

morphology he went further in the same direction, and he reached the con-
cept of a single type in accordance with which everything was fashioned.”28
Goethe, Arber suggests, was here utilizing a type concept that “is a device
for figuring out the problems of existence to which those who see these
problems on broad lines have frequently resorted.”29
The point is well taken. But Arber rejects the idea of Platonic references
in the type concept as Goethe uses it. She sees his Blatt as “a conjectural
concept, enabling a hypothetical situation to be visualized.”30 It seems to
me, however, that his archetypal plant did have some Platonic overtones. In
this, it relates to Thomas Cole’s neo-Platonic quest for a “true nature” which
would fulfill its predestined purpose: “. . . the most beautiful leaf & flower
will be that which has performed its various functions to the greatest per-
fection.”31 Again, one recalls John Dewey’s observation on the classic notion
of species, whereby a specific type directs the earlier stages of growth to
realize its own perfection. From this teleological inevitability, Goethe pos-
ited plants that might exist, “possessing the quality of inner truth and ne-
cessity.” This, then, is the pre-Darwinian vision: the orderly development of
defined species to their appointed perfection, never subverted by the short
circuits of mutation. In this ideal unwinding, the organic image of growth
from seed to flower is powerfully infused by the authority of a divine will.

More than any other American artist, Cole would have responded to Goethe’s
concept of the artist as someone who “in the practice of art . . . can only vie
with nature when [he has] at least to some extent learned from her the
process that she pursues in the formation of her works.” The artist, main-
tains Goethe, should produce “in his works not merely something which is
easily and superficially effective, but in rivalry with nature, something spiri-
tually organic [Geistig-Organisches] . . . at once natural and above nature.”32
Art for Cole was, as we have noted, “man’s lowly imitation of the creative
power of the Almighty”33—an unusual willingness for an American artist
to vie with nature.
He paid in part for the daring of his ambition—a romantic ambition—
through the continued disappointments of unenlightened patronage, which
deprived him—in a plant-like simile—of opportunity for growth. On July
22, 1838, he wrote:
 The Organic Foreground: Plants 95

There is a climbing plant attached to an oak in our grove that I have watched
year after year, & find never getting larger or stronger—In spring, it puts forth
a few leaves and spreads a few green tendrils, but the winter entirely blasts them,
& the slender, woody stem often remains without any increase of size.
My fate resembles thine
I toil to gain a sunnier realm of light
And excellence—waste & pine
In the low shadow of this world of night.
The genial seasons sometimes bear me up,
Till Hope persuades, I ne’er again shall stoop,
But quickly comes the withering blast to blight
By rich and prided growth, & I remain
The same low thing to bud—to blight again.34
The bud-bloom-decay simile stands beside Cole’s concept of perfect na-
ture in much the same way that evolutionary concepts of organicism begin
to stand beside fixity of species and type. In this book, the rigorous hold of
the latter in America had been emphasized. But the initial threats to the type
concept could occur more readily in the vegetable than in the mineral—and
geological—world. Concepts of organic change and of fixity increasingly
existed side by side. Both donated common metaphors through which the
age unconsciously betrayed its thinking. The dominant metaphor was based
on the inorganic and also classic obsession identified with measure, preci-
sion, mineral absolutism. This larger metaphor “explained” the world. The
vast stretches of time and space now accessible to the imagination were
structured with the mensurational habits of the physical sciences, habits
which dominated much of the artists’ thinking as well.35 This set of assump-
tions shared by both artists and scientists gave the society—and the art—its
extraordinary consistency. The subject retains vast opportunities for research.
But as the nineteenth century progressed, the other—organic metaphor—
was also present, though on a more domestic and intimate scale. We might
speculate that the organic metaphor revealed the individual psyche, while
the mensurational metaphor still dominated the communal mind. Life, in
this personal image, was a kind of sublime wasting sickness, its brevity the
source of further moral lessons. Indeed, as Cole’s poem illustrates, the per-
vasive moral system quickly invaded the organic metaphor. Men are plants,
they strive towards the light, they cannot flourish in darkness, their fruits
are rich or blighted. Out of this world of unceasing process could erupt
those threats to fixity of species.
Goethe ingeniously maintained fixity of type in his Urpflanze by incor-
porating within it the delirium of process. On May 17, 1787, he wrote to
96 part two

Herder: “It had occurred to me that in the organ of the plant which we
ordinarily designate as leaf, the true Proteus lay hidden, who can conceal
and reveal himself in all forms. Forward and backward, the plant is always
only leaf, so inseparably united with the future germ that we cannot imag-
ine one without the other.”36 “It is a becoming aware,” he had written earlier
to Frau von Stein, “of the forms with which nature so to speak, always plays,
and in playing brings forth manifold life.”37
This union of being and becoming is at the center of the transcendental-
ism of Emerson and Thoreau, where nature and process were means of
exploring the relation of time to eternity. Grass, wrote Thoreau, “is a sym-
bol of perpetual growth—its blade like a long green ribbon, streaming from
the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on
again, lifting its last year’s spear of withered hay with the fresh life below. . . .
So the human life but dies down to the surface of Nature; but puts forth its
green blade to eternity.”38 Emerson attacked the idea with his usual energy
and ended with a memorable phrase: “Genius detects through the fly, through
the caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg, the constant individual,
through countless individuals the fixed species, through many species the
genus; through all genera the steadfast type, through all the kingdoms of
organized life the eternal unity. Nature is a mutable cloud which is always
and never the same.”39
Emerson read Goethe’s Introduction to Morphology and The Metamor-
phosis of Plants between 1830 and 1840, remarking that this “laid the philo-
sophic foundations of comparative anatomy in both vegetable and animal
worlds.”40 But as Vogel reminds us, “he found in the writings of this Ger-
man not so many new ideas as the confirmation of those already long estab-
lished in his mind.”41 Being and becoming are not only the two sides of a
universal coin that have, singly or jointly, concerned philosophers and sci-
entists for centuries. In the early nineteenth century, they also represent a
particular juncture of neoclassicism and romanticism, of Newtonian me-
chanics and proto-evolutionary organicism.
The absolutism and flux subscribed to by both Emerson and Thoreau
could coexist in America as long as absolutism prevailed, as long as the
green blade struck eternity. Thus while finite time was represented by plant
similes of seasonal change and cyclical mortality, eternity was not far away.
“At one leap,” wrote Thoreau, “I go from the just opened buttercup to the
life everlasting.”42
 The Organic Foreground: Plants 97

This absolutism informs the botanical references in the art and writing
of the period. All things, all processes—particularly the engines of poetry—
move inexorably from the particular to the eternal, which forms their ever-
present backdrop. Cole’s poem of autumn written in 1842 is typical:
The yellow forest lies beneath the sun
Quiet; although it sufferth decay.
The brooklet to the Ocean-deep does run
With gentle lapse and silent, melts away;
The clouds upon the evening sky are bright
But wasting mingle with the glorious light.
So may the soul in life’s declining hours
Like the still forest never once complain
And flow unmurmuring adown its course
Like yonder brooklet to the Eternal Main;
And as the clouds upon the sunset sky
Be mingled with the radiance on high.43

Cole’s poetry is a virtual anthology of the common ideas of the day. The
sentiments are somewhat worn. Time was organic: “Another year like a frail
flower is bound / In time’s sere withering aye to cling.”44 Mortality infected
all: “Beauty doth fade—its emblem is a leaf / That mingles with the earth in
quick decay.”45 And he could always gather himself for the obligatory tran-
scendent leap: “All things live to die and die to be renewed again / Therefore
we should rejoice at death and not complain.”46
Mortality and the seasons, man in the autumn of his life, floral destiny as
a vegetable analogue for human destiny: these are longstanding common-
places in intellectual history, new neither to the nineteenth century nor to
America. But at that moment in America there was a rich fusion between
the eighteenth-century picturesque and the new “organological” readings
of history, philosophy, esthetics, and science. The new disciplines were pow-
erfully transfused by cyclical nostalgias. Predictably, Cole, the most philo-
sophical of the American landscapists, attached his theories of time and
mortality to seasonal images in his poetry and in his major cyclical paint-
ings. There the bud-bloom-decay-renewal metaphor was amplified into
meditations on life, civilization, and religion. While The Course of Empire
ended on the pessimistic note of Desolation, the last series, The Cross and
the World, promised spiritual redemption. Between these, The Voyage of Life
offered reassuring angels welcoming Old Age into the heavenly realm. Of
Childhood in that series Cole wrote, “The rosy light of the morning, the
luxuriant flowers and plants, are emblems of the joyousness of early life.”47
98 part two

The flowers, like childhood itself, were a kind of heavenly abundance, and
the pastoral identification of life with the seasons was complete.
In this regard—the seasons as metaphor—one American painter, Cropsey,
occupies a curious position. His colors, flushed with autumnal excess, sig-
nify an extreme fidelity to nature at the picture’s expense (a form of con-
ceptual integrity). In these autumnal paintings, Peter Bermingham—who
refers to Cropsey as “Cole’s following of one”—sees an “interesting link be-
tween the last vestiges of seasonal treatment with allegorical overtones,” as
in Edward Hitchcock’s Religious Lectures on the Peculiar Phenomena of the
Four Seasons of 1853, and “the ultra-objective approach of Darwin.”48 Though
he touches on the Hudson River school’s concern—a somewhat retardataire
concern—with decay and erosion, Bermingham emphasizes that “for
Cropsey . . . there was nothing melancholy about the wonders of nature,
sublime though they seemed to be.”49
But however they might be concerned with time and transience, one
wonders if the Hudson River men were ever really melancholy. Much of
their moral nostalgia seems to have been, like young Werther’s, part of the
age’s emotional equipment. Nostalgia, which like sentimentality has been
called “unearned emotion,” side-tracked the troubling moral issues raised
by progress into comfortable meditations on time’s passage.
However much he brooded about “the Ruffian Type,” Cole opposed this
melancholy with spiritual optimism. Though autumn leaves were annual
reminders of transience, hopes of spiritual renewal were ever-present. Flow-
ers and greenness refreshed his thoughts. “O for single blade of grass! if it
were only one inch in length, it would cheer my drooping spirits.”50 As with
Thoreau (“greenness so absorbs our attention”51), an inch of green grass
could lift Cole’s spirits; a leaf could spell eternity: “How the soul is linked in
harmonies & associations! A word spoken now recalls a word spoken years
back. . . . One thing brings into the mind’s vision another very dissimilar—
A feather may remind one of greatness & Empire; a mist, of Heaven; a rock,
of the unsubstantial nature of things; a leaf may suggest to the mind a child
paradise a departed parent or a living friend—”52
The linkage Cole refers to reverberates through all his writings. It is of
course a period habit—to relay thought through well-established cycles in
an allegorical system of reminiscence. For Cole and his contemporaries the
scent of flowers was assimilated into a universe of associations. Of his visit
to Vaucluse in October 1841, he wrote: “. . . I descended the valley, crossed
 The Organic Foreground: Plants 99

the little bridge at the village, and climbed the crag on which the ruin stands.
. . . Roofless, many of its walls thrown prostate, its halls and courts are filled
with flowering plants and odoriferous shrubs, thyme, and lavender. I plucked
some flowers as a memento, and departed.”53 “No one,” wrote Thoreau, “has
ever put into words what the odor of water-lilies expresses. A sweet and
innocent purity. The perfect purity of the flower is not to be surpassed.”54
The period found in flowers and their odors further proof of an accommo-
dating Deity’s generous plenitude. Returning toward Fair Haven, Thoreau
perceived at Potter’s fence:
the first whiff of the ineffable fragrance from the Wheeler meadow—as it
were the promise of strawberries, pineapples, etc. in the aroma of the flow-
ers, so blandly sweet—aroma that fitly foreruns the summer and the autumn’s
most delicious fruits. It would certainly restore all such sick as could be con-
scious of it. . . . It is wafted from the garden of gardens. . . . If the air here
always possessed this bland sweetness, this spot would become famous and
be visited by sick and well from all parts of the earth. It would be carried off
in bottles and become an article of traffic which kings would strive to mo-
nopolize. The air of Elysium cannot be more sweet.55

This tone was, for the most part, echoed by the artists. But recent schol-
arship has attempted to correct the idea of the age’s undiluted optimism by
following into the darker psychological territory explored by Leslie Fiedler
in his analysis of the American novel. “Like Hawthorne,” writes Theodore
Stebbins, Martin Johnson Heade “was a child of the Puritans; similarly, Heade
apparently shared the writer’s deep sense of sin, as well as his conviction of
the reality and permanence of evil.”56 Stebbins stresses Heade’s awareness of
the flower as a symbol of female sensuality. Heade’s flowers (plate 11) cer-
tainly have a sinuous, sensual and exotic energy, and if they do associate
with women and with evil, they are a rare instance of pessimism—of, we
might say, floral pessimism—in American art. For by and large, the artists
enthusiastically endorsed the world view of their age. No corrosive ironies
entered the garden. There is little in the visual art to parallel such literary
conceits as deadly beauty and ambiguous attraction.
Evil was more readily recognized by a Hawthorne, a Poe, or a Melville,
who have few correspondences in this regard in the visual arts of their mo-
ment. In “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Hawthorne’s hero, Giovanni Guasconti,
rejoices that “in the heart of the barren city, he had the privilege of over-
looking a spot of lovely and luxurious vegetation. It would serve . . . as a
symbolic language to keep him in communion with Nature.”57 Giovanni
100 part two

strolls in Doctor Rappaccini’s garden, inhales the fragrance of a shrub created

specially by the doctor and becomes, like his beloved Beatrice, a noxious ava-
tar: “There was a swarm of summer insects flitting through the air in search
of the food promised by the flower odors of the fatal garden. . . . He sent forth
a breath among them, and smiled bitterly at Beatrice as at least a score of
insects fell dead upon the ground. ‘I see it! I see it!’ shrieked Beatrice. ‘It is
my father’s fatal science!’”58 Nature is poisoned by man’s science. Beatrice
becomes a sister to the deadly shrub. We are far from Thoreau’s benevolent
“Old trees are our parents and our parents’ parents.”59 Yet, science was also
establishing the unity of human and vegetable nature. As Asa Gray put it,
“The fact is that a new article has recently been added to the scientific creed—
the essential oneness of the two kingdoms of organic nature.”60
The hazardous questions thus posed may have led to reservations about
the scientific process. In the act of investigation, in the possession of knowl-
edge, there was, perhaps, a transgression of godly prerogatives. Some mys-
teries are best left alone. Life falters at the touch of the analytical process. In
the “we murder to dissect” point of view lay the preservation of mystery
and faith. The investigative process focused those conflicts between reason
and feeling, logic and poetry that troubled the romantic mind. “Empirical
science is apt to cloud the sight,”61 said Emerson. While Thoreau noted: “If
you would make acquaintance with the ferns, you must forget your botany.
You must get rid of what is commonly called knowledge of them.”62
Thoreau, who always suffered his difficulties with less optimism, at-
tempted to contain the discipline of science itself: “Science does not em-
body all that men know, only what is for men of science.”63 The cursory
lip-service paid by scientists to the idea of Deity troubled him: “Men of
science, when they pause to contemplate ‘the power, wisdom and goodness’
of God, or as they sometimes call him, ‘the Almighty Designer,’ speak of
him as a total stranger who it is necessary to treat with the highest consider-
ation. They seem suddenly to have lost their wits.”64 He resisted the en-
croachment of science on faith with ingenuity and eloquence:

The mystery of the life of plants is kindred with that of our own lives, and the
physiologist must not presume to explain their growth according to mechani-
cal laws, or as he might explain some machinery of his own making. We must
not expect to probe with our fingers the sanctuary of any life, whether ani-
mal or vegetable. . . . Science is often like the grub which, though it may have
nestled in the germ of a fruit, has merely blighted or consumed it and never
truly tasted it. Only that intellect makes any progress toward conceiving of
 The Organic Foreground: Plants 101

the essence which at the same time perceives the effluence. The rude and
ignorant finger is probing in the rind still, for in this case too, the angles of
incidence and excidence [sic] are equal, and the essence is as far on the other
side of the surface, or matter, as reverence detains the worshipper on this,
and only reverence can find out this angle instinctively. Shall we presume to
alter the angle at which God chooses to be worshipped?65

The angle Thoreau was obviously seeking, the angle beyond science, “at
which God chooses to be worshipped,” is familiar through Ruskin’s advice:
For all his own purposes, merely graphic, we say, if an artist’s eye is fine and
faithful, the fewer points of science he has in his head the better. But for
purposes more than graphic, in order that he may feel towards things as he
should, and choose them as we should, he ought to know something about
them. . . . Cautiously, therefore, and receiving it as a perilous indulgence, he
may venture to learn, perhaps as much astronomy as may prevent his care-
lessly putting the new moon wrong side upwards; and as much botany as will
prevent him from confusing, which I am sorry to say Turner did, too often,
Scotch firs with stone pines.66

Not too much science for artists—or writers. But surely some. The con-
flict between knowledge and poetry was acutely experienced by Thoreau
and brought to some kind of temporary resolution. He provides a remark-
able model of the nineteenth-century conscience troubled by science, here
experienced on the level of language: “Some of the early botanists, like Gerard,
were prompted and compelled to describe their plants, but most nowadays
only measure them, as it were. . . . I am constantly assisted by the books in
identifying a particular plant and learning some of its humbler uses, but I
rarely read a sentence in a botany which reminds me of flowers or living
plants. Very few indeed write as if they had seen the thing which they pre-
tend to describe.”67 Yet earlier, he had noted: “How copious and precise the
botanical language to describe the leaves, as well as the other parts of a
plant! Botany is worth studying if only for the precision of its terms,—to
learn the value of words and of system.”68
Thoreau’s readings in botany were serious, disciplined, and historical; he
found the works of Theophrastus, “the father of botany,” a great stimulus—
“they were opera”69—and read Linnaeus’s Philosophia Botanica “which
Rousseau, Sprengel, and others praised so highly—I doubt if it has ever
been translated into English. It is simpler, more easy to understand, and
more comprehensive, than any of the hundred manuals to which it has given
birth.”70 He not only read the “fathers of the science,” but quotes Asa Gray in
the journals. He found, in 1851, ready analogies between Gray’s description
102 part two

of plant organs and human beings, and went on to absorb these into the
moral idealism that preserved intact the idea of a godly nature:

There is, no doubt, a perfect analogy between the life of the human being
and that of the vegetable, both of the body and the mind. . . . I am concerned
first to come to my Growth, intellectually and morally (and physically, of
course, as a means to this, for the body is the symbol of the soul), and to bear
my Fruit, do my Work, propagate my kind, not only physically but morally,
not only in body but in mind. . . . As with the roots of the plant, so with the
roots of the mind, the branches and branchlets of the root are mere repeti-
tions for the purpose of multiplying the absorbing points, which are chiefly
the growing or newly formed extremities, sometimes termed spongelets. It
bears no other organs. So this organ of the mind’s development, the Root,
bears no organs but spongelets or absorbing points.71

Arber notes that Goethe, typically, asked at one point “how he could be
expected to concern himself with such an organ as the root, which shows
no ascending progress.”72 But Thoreau found in Gray’s work on the root
mysterious and wonderful analogies for intellectual growth: “. . . The most
clear and ethereal ideas (Antaeus-like) readily ally themselves to the earth,
to the primal womb of things. They put forth roots as soon as branches, they
are eager to be soiled. No thought soars so high that it sunders these apron-
strings of its mother. . . . No idea is so soaring but it will readily put forth
roots. . . . No thought but is connected as strictly as a flower, with the earth.
The mind flashes not so far on one side, but its rootlets, its spongelets, find
their way instantly to the other side into a moist darkness, uterine. . . .”73
Yet for all the stimulus he found in his reading, Thoreau’s last journals
return to his distrust of systems and theoretical science:

In proportion as we get and are near to our object, we do without the mea-
sured or scientific account, which is like the measure they take, or the de-
scription they write, of a man when he leaves his country, and insert in his
passport for the use of the detective police of other countries . . . the real
acquaintances and friends which it may have in foreign parts do not ask to
see nor think of its passport. Gerard has not only heard of and seen and
raised a plant, but felt and smelled and tasted it, applying all his senses to it.
You are not distracted from the thing to the system or arrangement. In the true
natural order the order or system is not insisted on. Each is first, and each last.74

“Applying all his senses to it . . .” Nothing so underlines the threat posed

to abstract systems by the empirical sense. It is a poignant, indeed paradoxi-
cal moment, in that through the empirical experimental method Darwin
will effectively remove God from nature. Yet Thoreau, like the artists, was his
 The Organic Foreground: Plants 103

own natural scientist, gathering plants in his “botany-box”—his straw hat—

and studying them with a method he did not himself consider systemati-
cally botanical: “. . . The most natural system is still so artificial. . . . I often
visited a particular plant four or five miles distant, half a dozen times within
a fortnight, that I might know exactly when it opened, beside attending to a
great many others in different directions and some of them equally distant,
at the same time.”75

The artists, we can speculate, mixed theoretical knowledge and observation

in much the same way.
Cropsey’s library included a volume titled Beautiful Ferns (1882), with a
text by Daniel Cady Eaton, professor of botany at Yale; Wood’s Class Book of
Botany (1845); Botany for Ladies, or a Popular Introduction to the Natural
System of Plants, according to the classification of De Candolle, by Mrs. Loudon
(1842), inscribed to Cropsey with regards of J. M. Falconer, 15 May 1847; and
Gray’s First Lessons in Botany and Vegetable Physiology, illustrated by Isaac
Sprague (1857). In addition to such books, which indicate a familiarity, al-
beit popular, with the works of leading botanical names of his period, we
find Trees of the Northern United States by Austin C. Apgar (1892), with the
legend “Trees are God’s Architecture” on the frontispiece; A History of Brit-
ish Forest-Trees by Prideaux John Selby (1842); Gardening for Children, by
Rev. C. A. Johns (1848), which still preserves between its pages the visiting
card of Mr. W. Holman Hunt; Wild Flowers, by Amanda B. Harris (1882);
Pressed Flowers from the Holy Land, by Rev. Harvey B. Greene (1896); The
Life of a Tree, Being a History of the Phenomenon of Vegetation from the Seed
to the Death of the Plant (1849); Twenty Lessons on British Mosses or First
Steps to a Knowledge of that Beautiful Tribe of Plants, by William Gardiner
(1846), which still contains pressed mosses; and Green Field and Their Grasses,
by Anne Pratt (1852).
The frontispiece of Garden Fables or Flowers of Speech by Mrs. Medhurst
(1861) bears this verse by Longfellow: “In all places then, and in all seasons,
/ Flowers expand their light and soul like wings, / Teaching us, by most
persuasive reasons, / How akin they are to human things.” Other members
of the family also cared about growing things. Cropsey’s daughter Lilly (who
painted flowers) owned Indian Summer, Autumn Poems and Sketches (1883)
inscribed with her name, with flower illustrations by L. Clarkson. Mrs. Cropsey
kept a scrapbook of pressed autumn leaves, and in 1847–8 composed a rich
104 part two

herbarium of flowers gathered at Italian monuments, much like the one at

Olana assembled for Cole and Church possibly by Mrs. Church.76
Church’s library at Olana, in addition to the rich resources of Humboldt’s
Cosmos, provided Gray’s School and Field Book of Botany for Beginners and
Young People (1857, 1868), illustrated by Sprague, which possibly belonged,
to judge from an 1886 inscription, to F. W. Church; an 1868 edition of Gray’s
Lessons in Botany, also illustrated by Sprague; Gray’s Manual of Botany of
the Northern United States (1889); Alphonse Wood’s Botany, a Classbook of
Botany for Colleges, Academies (1850) inscribed “H. W. Beecher” and signed
“C. E. Church.”77 Added to these were a large number of general books on
science, religion, and travel—mostly tropical travel—also dealing in some
way with vegetation and botany. Even allowing that some books clearly be-
longed to other members of the Church family, here are vast storehouses of
fact and theory.
In Church’s copy of Robert Hunt’s The Poetry of Science (1854), we read:
In the aspect of visible nature, with its wonderful diversity of form and its
charm of colour, we find the Beautiful, and in the operations of these prin-
ciples, which are ever active in producing and maintaining the existing con-
ditions of matter, we discover the Sublime. The form and colour of a flower
may excite our admiration; but when we come to examine all the phenom-
ena which combine to produce that piece of symmetry and that lovely hue—
to learn the physiological arrangement of its structural parts,—the chemical
actions by which its woody fibre and its juices are produced—and to investi-
gate those laws by which is regulated the power to throw back the white sun-
beam from its surface in coloured rays—our admiration passes to the higher
feeling of deep astonishment at the perfection of the processes, and of rever-
ence for their great Designer. There are indeed “tongues in trees,” but science
alone can interpret their mysterious whispers, and in this consists its poetry.78

If Hunt’s belief in the poetry of science seems more optimistic than

Thoreau’s, it was probably because he was more willing than Thoreau to
adulterate the methods of science with spirit. Church, reading the reference
to the sublime, must have responded to this subtle blend of poetry, mystery,
science, and God.79
The botanical books in the artists’ libraries may have helped them, as
Ruskin suggested, “to get it right.” But, as with clouds, they supplemented
concept and theory with a close investigation of the particular object. Oc-
casionally, reality was perfect enough—through selection, artistic modifi-
cation, or both—to touch upon the ideal type sought by Goethe and Cole.
It also could represent a point on the spectrum between the real and the
 The Organic Foreground: Plants 105

ideal, fostering the understanding of the ideal through the study of indi-
vidual variety favored by Leonardo and after him, Sir Joshua.
The artists’ drawings and sketches are direct, incisive, and botanically
correct. They report on the plant in its actual context—as the individual
representative of a species rather than its archetypical ideal. They habitually
address instructive comments to themselves. In his notebook of 1832, Cole
notes beside an acanthus plant that the leaves are “dark green glossy with
whitish veins.”80 Cropsey’s annotations, though lengthy, are also brisk and
to the point. On a precise drawing of sugar cane he writes: “Leaf coal green
with a whitish stem like the Indian corn[.] Stalk same col. but whitish, and
yellowish where decaying. purplish at the bottom of stalk, rings close to-
gether at the bottom. Some leaves broken off. leaves sometimes 6 or 7 ft
long—stalk 12 or 15 feet smaller stalks inside. leaves generally about 6 or 7
inches apart. one on Each side opposite Each other.” He is always careful to
use Latin names—Linaria vulgaris (toad flax, Cirsium lanceolatum (com-
mon thistle)—and to note when the flowers bloom. When he drew the Yucca
gloriosa (Adam’s needle, in Kensington Garden, in July 1859 (probably dur-
ing the same London stay when he made an appointment with Ruskin at
Denmark Hill for “Wednesday at two o’clock”),81 he wrote: “The flower is of
a bell shape straw col—greenish inside.”82
Cropsey’s plant studies, however, detach themselves from the category of
notes to become drawings of the highest quality. The delicate shading on
leaf or petal, the alertness of his crayon, make him (to resort to a nineteenth-
century habit of classification) the American Watteau of the flower. A study
of laurel leaves is placed on the page with a delicate asymmetry that recalls
oriental flower painting; a single plant, unfolding in light and dark, assumes
the microcosmic intensity of a Dürer (fig. 6.2). There is a control, a fresh-
ness of impulse, that comprise a sophistication largely unacknowledged.
Church’s drawings and sketches ardently report on the multiplicity of
tropical vegetation. The gestures of plants captivated him—the movement
of a tree fern or a frond of wild sugar cane; the aspects assumed by a single
philodendron leaf in different lights. The wet immediacy of his oil sketches
fuses with the organic properties of his botanical subjects. The paint it-
self, a vital juice, becomes an organic metaphor. In studies such as Cardamum
(Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design), the painterly handling of the yellow-
centered purple-and-white blossoms contrasts rather sharply with the ren-
derings of his friend Heade.
106 part two

6.2 Jasper Cropsey, Leaf Study, undated. Pencil and white gouache on paper, 67/8 × 97/8 in.
(17.5 × 25.1 cm.). Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., Newington-Cropsey Foundation.

6.3 Martin Johnson Heade, Magnolia Flower, 1888. Oil on canvas, 153/8 × 24 in. (39 × 61
cm.). San Diego, Calif., Timken Museum of Art.
 The Organic Foreground: Plants 107

Heade’s glossy flowers achieve the quality of becoming through their

writhing linear gestures (fig. 6.3); Church’s from the immediacy of the paint.
In both instances, a sense of organic process is conveyed by formal means.
Yet Heade’s smooth surfaces also embalm his subjects in a crystalline time.
By contrast, Church’s proto-impressionism of touch suggests the flower’s
momentary fleeting life. He reminds us—as do his annotations about “dead
leaves”—that, paradoxically, in some ways, the advocates of the old sublime
may have touched more acutely on Darwinian process than did the practi-
tioners of luminism.
Heade, however, made his flower paintings a somewhat segregated cat-
egory. For the Hudson River men, the flower and plant studies—like their
cloud studies—served a larger purpose. They were indeed microcosms, des-
tined for a larger whole, a part of Humboldt’s “nature considered rationally
. . . a unity in diversity of phenomena; a harmony blending together all
created things, however dissimilar in form and attributes; one great whole
. . . animated by the breath of life.”83
Once more we are reminded of the reconciliation of detail and effect
stressed by contemporary esthetics. Fostered by the growing understanding
of evolution, the union of being and becoming extended itself to the con-
cepts of ideal and real, the macrocosm and microcosm that embraced all
the scientific, philosophic, and esthetic concerns behind mid-century land-
scape painting. The artists collecting “the individual details of various ob-
servations,” in Humboldt’s terms, were discovering “mutual relations,” “under
the form of general results.”84 While those “general results” informed the
entire concept of the landscape, subsuming organic and mineral worlds
alike, the foreground drew the “near looker” close to the surface which mim-
icked the sensation of a leaf felt, a flower scented.
We are especially aware of such details in paintings like Church’s Heart of
the Andes or Bierstadt’s Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mount Rosalie (The
Brooklyn Museum). In the latter, flowering plants at the lower right pull the
observer beyond the surface into the picture. Then, as we are drawn deeper
to stand on this or that abutment of rock, we gradually realize that we are deal-
ing with a synthesis of separate views. Detail and effect are expertly manipu-
lated in impossible juxtapositions that become remarkably believable. Some
contemporary critics were unconvinced: “The whole science of geology cries
out against him. . . . The law of gravitation leagues itself with geological law
against the artist.”85 Yet the painting is a “synthesis” of the preoccupations
108 part two

of the mid-century landscapists—the floral details of the foreground, the

small pool of silence, the valley below stretching to the light-bathed cragged
rocks of the mountains, providential sunbeams framed by Wagnerian clouds.
Within such a synthesis, the flowers and plants, imbued with a formidable
wealth of association, are perhaps the best emblem of being and becoming
fused in one. But in bearing the concerns of the fast-growing botanical sci-
ences, they also represent a threat to, as well as an affirmation of, the reli-
gious optimism of the age.

That threat was heightened by the botany of Asa Gray, who upheld Darwin
against Agassiz. Though, as we know, the artists were aware of Agassiz’s and
Gray’s research and ideas, to what degree still remains problematic. Like
most artists, the landscape painters may have been in search of “what they
could use.” What they could use in Gray was his wealth of empirical botani-
cal detail, his passionate urge to elicit facts—and to relate those facts to some
system that would confirm the data so convincingly offered by the senses.
From Agassiz they could pick up the amplified idealism that surrounded the
results of his research like an otherworldly halo. As his biographer, Edward
Lurie, has pointed out, Agassiz also had deep empirical impulses. To Agassiz,
however, facts were “the works of God, and we may heap them together
endlessly, but they will teach us little or nothing till we place them in their
true relations, and recognize the thought that binds them together as a con-
sistent whole.”86
We might, without too much distortion, see in Gray the provider of the
authentic detail, the figure whose work presided over the artists’ foregrounds
with botanical authority. While Agassiz’s idealism—a great unifying belief
in Mind—might be consonant with the artists’ desires to be true to the
general effect, offering also a way of treating facts as “works of God.” Seen in
the context of the artists’ needs, the two figures’ careers—and their relation
to each other—are almost a model (in another discipline) of the issues that
troubled the age, and of the contradictions that pulled it slowly apart.
Gray himself was an interesting mix of advanced and traditional ideas.
He was one of the first to accept the French “natural” system in lieu of the
Linnaean. Under the influence of the Genevan botanist, Augustin-Pyramus
De Candolle, he became aware of Goethe’s theory of the metamorphosis of
leaves into flowers.87 He also adopted the somewhat retrograde idea of con-
stancy of species.88 While discarding the concept of the Chain of Being in a
 The Organic Foreground: Plants 109

single series, he held at the same time to the idea of order based on design
popularized by Paley. His career brought him inevitably, it seems, into the
orbit of Harvard and Concord. Having relinquished the rare opportunity
to travel to the South Seas with the Wilkes expeditions in the late 1830s, he
went first to a professorial post at the University of Michigan, and then in
1842 to Harvard. At about this time, his biographer Dupree suggests, “men-
tion of Goethe dwindled and disappeared from his textbooks.”89
He heard Lyell’s Lowell Institute lectures in 1845,90 shortly before he de-
livered his own. His exposure to this giant figure who formed such a stepping-
stone for Darwin was surely important in Gray’s development. The following
year he joined Agassiz (and Darwin as well) in criticizing Chambers, con-
sidering his Explanations: A Sequel to the Vestiges of the Natural History of
Creation in an article in the North American Review.91 This was largely be-
cause Chambers had raised—among other points—the idea of a kind of
developmental Chain of Being from one species to another—which Gray
had already rejected in its traditional form. Darwin ultimately corrected
Chamber’s errors and arrived at conclusions that carried through some of
Chambers’s key ideas. Gray was to become Darwin’s strongest supporter in
America.
His passion for original data, confirmed by observation, was similar to
that of many of the artists. Artists and scientists found common cause in
the surveys of the West. Gray was powerfully stimulated by “the first fruits
of the great railroad surveys” in 1854. “Torrey swamped me,” he wrote, “by
sending me a good part of Pope, Bigelow (Whipple’s Expedition), Beckwith
& c.—collections—to be worked up at once for Government Reports.”92 He
was so immersed in material that his friend Joseph Hooker wrote to him in
1861, “What a pest, plague and nuisance are your official, semi-official &
unofficial Railway reports, survey &c. &c. &c. Your valuable researches are
scattered beyond the power of anyone but yourself finding them. Who on earth
is to keep in their heads or quote such a medley of books—double-paged,
double titled & half finished as your Govt. vomits periodically into the great
ocean of Scientific bibliography.”93
What the artists in the field did in miniature, Gray did on a heroic scale—
collecting and categorizing the plants (fed by a steady stream of specimens
from the Surveys), forming the giant herbarium at Harvard. His finest artist-
illustrator, Isaac Sprague (a sometime landscapist who assisted Audubon
110 part two

on an expedition to Missouri), represented these flora with a precise and

literal delicacy that respected the truth and the art of conveying it (fig. 6.4).
These were the illustrations the artists had on their shelves and must fre-
quently have consulted. Beyond this, however, no evidence has yet appeared
to indicate Gray’s involvement with the major artists of his time. His phi-
losophy, so notably lacking in idealism, could hardly move them. Likewise
the transcendental overtones of their enterprise were alien to him. To Gray,
transcendentalism itself was suspect. Dupree notes that “Gray treated
Emerson and Thoreau with a silence that the accident of acquaintance and
the hostility of Harvard to the Concord group cannot fully explain away.
He was hostile to their whole way of looking at nature, to their idealism, to
their German inspiration. . . . In resisting the idealism prevalent in Ameri-
can thought, Gray was starting on a lonely road. . . .”94
This resistance enabled Gray to become one of Darwin’s primary Ameri-
can supporters, to follow that familiar “lonely road” of the modernist scien-
tist or artist. Gray’s advanced thinking isolated him from the support of his
colleagues and from the aspirations of his society at large. While pungent
empirical observation has been a force in American thought, it has been
contained by a strong idealism. Given the power of that idealism in the
nineteenth century, it was predictable that it was not Gray, but Darwin’s
chief antagonist, Agassiz, to whom the public—and the intellectuals—looked
for confirmation of their values. Dupree has suggested that “Agassiz came
to the United States bearing the very essence of German idealistic phi-
losophy.”95 He “embodied all those revolutionary forces which had trans-
formed eighteenth-century rationalism into the German idealism of the
nineteenth century—not only Kant and Goethe but also Schelling and his
Naturphilosophie.”96
Though Laurie has argued that Agassiz did not actually “become a dis-
ciple of Naturphilosophie,” he notes that through the lectures of Oken and
Döllinger, Agassiz learned that “facts, by themselves, were only partial in-
sights. The facts of nature were indications of profound cosmic signifi-
cance”;97 and “by 1843, Agassiz became identified with a view of the world
equally idealistic, equally a priori in its assumptions, as were the generaliza-
tions of Oken and Schelling.”98
Whether or not Agassiz technically subscribed to Naturphilosophie is al-
most, for our purposes, beside the point. He was surrounded by its aura down
to his German credentials. He was perceived this way, and this perception
 The Organic Foreground: Plants 111

6.4 Isaac Sprague, “Nymphaea.” Illustration in Genera florae Americae boreali-orientalis

illustrata by Asa Gray. Boston, 1848–49. Pl. 42. New York, The New York Public Library.
112 part two

of him was compatible with American transcendental philosophy. His com-

ment “A physical fact is as sacred as a moral principle” could have issued
from the mouth of Emerson.99
Agassiz’s reigning position in Boston and Cambridge has already been
described. He also had an excellent rapport with the artists, writers, and sci-
entists whose work and ideas dominated American thought at mid-century,
though our knowledge of his relationships with the artists is still scanty. His
friend, the Reverend James Cooley Fletcher, who gathered specimens along
the Amazon for Agassiz, encouraged Heade to go to Brazil. Agassiz became
an admirer of Heade’s hummingbirds, and shared Heade’s friendship with
the Emperor Dom Pedro II.100 William Trost Richards, in turn, seems to
have admired Agassiz, writing to James Mitchell at Harvard in 1854: “I al-
most envy your Geological Surveys with Professor Agassiz. I have long been
wishing to study in an Elementary Manner Geology. Can you tell me any
thoroughly good book. I must make it part of my discipline for the winter.”101
Noble refers casually to an encounter between Agassiz and Church that
seems matter-of-fact enough to have been part of an ongoing friendship:
“Friday morning, June 17, 1859 / Yesterday, when I came on deck, I found
C—— conversing with Agassiz. Although so familiar with the Alpine gla-
ciers, and all that appertains to them, he has never seen an iceberg, and
almost envied us the delight and excitement of hunting them. But not even
the presence and the fine talk of the great naturalist could lay the spirit of
sea-sickness.”102
In 1862, Bierstadt wrote to Agassiz’s protégé Alpheus Hyatt, a Harvard
paleontologist: “Remember me to Agassiz and tell him how difficult it is [to
get to Colorado] and next summer the government may give us $10,000 to
do what we please with. Let us hope to live a summer yet, in the fat west.”103
Before his trip west with Fitz Hugh Ludlow in 1863, Bierstadt asked Agassiz
to recommend someone to accompany them, but Agassiz replied that he
was “sorry to say that those of my young friends whom I could fairly rec-
ommend as desirable companions on your journey are not in a position for
going and those who could go I would not recommend.”104 In the same
letter (April 28, 1863), Agassiz observed cordially: “I can hardly realize that I
have been in New York without seeing you or even leaving you a note. But I
have been so driven, while at the same time I was not well at all, that I had to
leave again as soon as my absolute duty was performed. . . . Allow me once
 The Organic Foreground: Plants 113

more to congratulate you upon your great success and achievement in your
last picture. I hear only the highest praise of it.”105
Agassiz’s friendships were close. Within the Concord groups, he was val-
ued not only by Emerson but by Thoreau, who dined with him at Emerson’s
on March 20, 1857, and recounted his own experiment “on a frozen fish.”106
Thoreau, the prototypical nature-lover, seems not to have recognized the
rare irony of his description of Emerson and Agassiz shooting game in the
Adirondacks (August 23, 1858): “[Emerson] says that he shot a peetweet for
Agassiz, and this, I think he said, was the first game he ever bagged. He
carried a double-barrelled gun,—a rifle and shotgun,—which he bought
for the purpose, which he says received much commendation. . . . Think of
Emerson shooting a peetweet (with shot) for Agassiz, and cracking an ale-
bottle (after emptying it) with his rifle at six rods!”107
Excluded from these companionable exchanges, and even from such il-
lustrious scientific societies as the Lazzaroni,108 Gray first challenged Agassiz
in a series of debates held at the American Academy in Boston in 1859. By
then, Gray had developed a concept of genetic connection of species di-
rectly antagonistic to Agassiz’s idea that “a species is a thought of the Cre-
ator.”109 In supporting Darwin, Gray showed his ultimate willingness to
accept the idea of transmutation of species subverting the orderly genetic
agenda. He had rejected this idea in embryo in Chambers.
Like Agassiz, Gray held firmly to design—even after accepting Darwin.
But Agassiz’s idealism provoked the more stolidly empirical Gray. The Swiss
professor’s emphasis on Mind offended Gray’s keen awareness of natural
development. For Gray, conclusions drawn from observation had more
meaning than theoretical frameworks into which observations were forced.
In a sense, Agassiz’s conceptual approach was imposed even on God’s meth-
odology. Nothing occurred without God’s thought. It was, in effect, the most
immutable blueprint of providential planning. Creation—or from a cata-
strophic point of view, creations—were the alpha and omega of all exist-
ence. This was the magic the artists and writers were eager for. It stood
behind their encounters with the virgin landscape and transfigured the con-
tent of most nature painting at mid-century.
William James Stillman, commenting on the debates years later, felt that
if Agassiz had lived longer he would have accepted evolution. Yet for a long
time Mind remained invincible in nineteenth-century American culture.
Stillman quotes one of Agassiz’s Cambridge talks:
114 part two
I believe that all these correspondences between the different aspects of ani-
mal life are the manifestations of mind acting consciously with intention
towards one object from beginning to end. This view is in accordance with
the working of our minds; it is an instinctive recognition of a mental power
with which our own is akin, manifesting itself in nature. For this reason, more
than any other, perhaps, do I hold that this world of ours was not the result
of the action of unconscious organic forces, but the work of an intelligent,
conscious power.110

At the Cambridge Scientific Club debate in the spring of 1859, Gray intro-
duced Darwin’s ideas, which he defined about that time as “the only notewor-
thy attempt at a scientific solution” of “the fundamental and most difficult
question remaining in natural history”—“to bring the variety as well as the
geographical associations of existing species more within the domain of cause
and effect.”111 These great debates—one of the keys to nineteenth-century
American thought—had their paradoxes: each point of view, perhaps, re-
sponded to the other’s more provocative signals in ways that obscured poten-
tial areas of agreement. Ultimately, the fundamental issue was God, faith, the
whole social-political-religious apparatus that sustained the society’s consis-
tency and belief in itself. Yet, as Stillman sagely points out, Darwin himself
did not deliberately seek to attack the Creator and overturn the society.
“Agassiz,” Stillman wrote, “maintained the presence of ‘Conscious Mind in
Creation’; Darwin did not deny it explicitly, nor did he admit it.”112
Agassiz’s emphasis on Mind (as well as his genial personality) made him
an American hero. Gray’s more obvious empiricism paralleled some aspects
of American pragmatic observation. But even more, American culture
stressed Mind—Mind raised to the level of divinity, a “mental power with
which our own is akin.” The artists, in their esthetic dilemmas, remained
poised, in a way, between Gray and Agassiz. There is a remarkable similarity
between the fundamental issues debated by the artists and the assumptions
of the two great scientists in their heroic debates. The terminology was dif-
ferent, but the realism-idealism controversy, also involving the forces of
American empiricism, was substantially the same. The issue was not clear-
cut. In the art, as in the science, polarities were blurred by the reciprocal
transactions between opposing ideas that had more in common than their
proponents thought. It was the artists’ habit to negotiate between these ideas,
to find a common ground for their resolution.
Many of the great landscapes are defined by their attempt to resolve these
dilemmas anew in each picture, transcending the routine recipes of the gen-
 The Organic Foreground: Plants 115

eral effect. The artists’ treatment of the plant world, investigated for its speci-
ficity and then extended toward a grand ideal, can be seen ultimately as an
effort to maintain Agassiz’s idea of “conscious mind in Creation.” It was
this idea that fortified the artists’ most profound belief: that landscape was
informed by the Mind of the Creator.113
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Part Three


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CHAPTER 7

The Primal Vision:

Expeditions

Adventure is an element in American artist-life which gives it singular zest

and interest.
—H. T. Tuckerman1

The landscape artist’s prominent role in the exploration of the American

continent was as diverse as that great adventure itself. In style, it ran the
gamut from the simple topographical description of the earlier western ex-
peditions to the baroque glorification of the great surveys of the seventies.
The locale ranged from desert heat through the climatic extremes of the
South American tropics to the icy expanses of the Arctic. The artist was
explorer, scientist, educator, frontiersman, and minister. He ran arduous
risks and suffered extreme hardships which certified his “heroic” status. This
heroism became a kind of tour de force in the vicinity of art.
In Europe, the tour de force generally received its scale from the artist’s
Ambition, set resplendently within a major tradition. In America, it consisted
in simply “getting there.” The artist became the hero of his own journey—which
replaced the heroic themes of mythology—by vanquishing physical obstacles
en route to a destination. For the ambition of the artistic enterprise was substi-
tuted the ambition of the artist’s Quest—itself a major nineteenth-century
theme. In this displacement of the heroic from the work of art to the per-
sona of the artist lay, perhaps, part of the attraction of unexplored territory
for the American artist at mid-century.
Some of the works resulting from the heroic journeys were themselves
vast and monumental. Their size and ambition matched the scale of the
119
120 part three

artist’s physical difficulties. The simplest topographer, like Samuel Seymour,

who accompanied the Long expedition to the Rockies as early as 1819, had
to withstand the hostilities of climate, terrain, and Indians. He achieved the
heroic by the sheer force of will which enabled him to be there: he captured
the landscape in images which, in Tuckerman’s words, would “extend the
enjoyment which time and space limit.” Such images, often disseminated in
the government-sponsored reports, not only fortified the scientific obser-
vations of the artist’s expeditionary colleagues, but underlined the complex
role of the artist-scientist. Tempered by a strong American pragmatism, these
works occasionally extended the artist’s activity beyond that of simple cata-
loguer to that of synthesizer and theorist.
By the 1860’s, Tuckerman could comment that part of the “signal tri-
umph” of such American artists as Church and Bierstadt was that “both
have explored distant regions for characteristic and fresh themes.”2 Yet the
intent behind Church’s wearing journeys to South America and Labrador,
behind Bierstadt’s trip with Lander’s expedition to the Rockies, was not
merely a desire to paint exotic subjects, nor even to acquaint a grateful pub-
lic with fresh geographical glories. Sensationalism, exalted rhetoric, and re-
portage played their parts. But the artists’ deepest intentions were, as
Humboldt required, to reveal the forces that regulate the universe, and to
make everyone who saw their pictures a witness to its laws.
Artists are now scattered, like leaves or thistle blossoms, over the whole face
of the country, in pursuit of some of their annual study of nature and neces-
sary recreation. Some have gone far toward the North Pole, to invade the
haunts of the iceberg with their inquisitive and unsparing eyes—some have
gone to the far West, where Nature plays with the illimitable and grand—
some have become tropically mad, and are pursuing a sketch up and down
the Cordilleras, through Central America and down the Andes. If such is the
spirit and persistency of American art, we may well promise ourselves good
things for the future.
Cosmopolitan Art Journal, 18593

The artistic component of the western explorations requires a more careful

treatment than it has received. There is room here only for a sketch of some
of the highlights. The roster of names includes a member of one of America’s
first artistic families, Titian Ramsay Peale, who in 1819 joined the Long ex-
pedition as a naturalist, along with the landscapist Samuel Seymour. Be-
tween 1832 and 1840 George Catlin visited forty-eight different tribes, “the
greater part of which I found speaking different languages, and containing
in all 400,000 souls. I have brought home safe, and in good order, 310 por-
 The Primal Vision: Expeditions 121

traits in oil, all painted in their native dress, and in their own wigwams; and
also 200 other paintings in oil, containing views of their villages . . . and the
landscapes of the country they live in.”4 Ultimately, like the Humboldt-in-
spired Church, Catlin continued his explorations in South America.
Humboldt’s interest in the American continent also inspired Prince
Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied to explore the North American West in 1832–
34 along with the Swiss artist Karl Bodmer, who recorded the soon-to-be-
extinct Mandan Indians, as well as some striking aspects of the Missouri
landscape. Seth Eastman, who trained at the United States Military Acad-
emy at West Point with C. R. Leslie and R. W. Weir, also painted the Indians
and landscape of the West from the thirties through the fifties while serving
with the army. (He was elected an “honorary member amateur” of the Na-
tional Academy of Design in 1838.) One of the most sophisticated artists
working in the West at that time was Alfred Jacob Miller, who in 1837 ac-
companied the Scotsman Sir William Drummond Stewart on a hunt along
the Seedskeedee and into the Rockies. Miller’s later paintings were done
from sketches taken on the spot many years earlier. Nonetheless, in addi-
tion to some fine Indian paintings and landscapes, he made superb visual
records of the quickly vanishing fur trappers and mountain men.
The artists who participated in the government-sponsored army expedi-
tions of the 1840’s and 1850’s are often, if not less heroic, less well known.
One of the most famous, John Mix Stanley, accompanied Colonel Steven
Watts Kearney’s march to the Pacific in 1846 and recorded with distinction
the landscapes of the Southwest. A veteran artist-explorer who made many
trips through the West in the 1840’s, he also traveled with the Isaac I. Stevens
Pacific Railroad Survey of 1853 into North Dakota and Washington, and
ultimately was called on to complete illustrations for the Beckwith Report
after the death of Richard Kern. The three Kern brothers had accompanied
John C. Frémont’s famous expedition to the Rockies in 1848. Benjamin was
killed on this trip by Ute Indians. Edward and Richard Kern survived to
join a military expedition headed by James H. Simpson into Navajo coun-
try in 1849, and each joined subsequent expeditions as well. Richard was
killed by a band of Pah-Utah Indians on the Gunnison Pacific Railroad Sur-
vey of 1853. Gunnison’s death, along with Kern, left Lieutenant E. G. Beckwith
in charge, and Beckwith’s continuing party was soon joined by one of the
finest of the western illustrators, Baron F. W. von Egloffstein.5
122 part three

Beckwith’s report indicates the difficulties the topographic artist faced:

Proceeding then, for two, three, or four miles upon the trail, the distance, of
course, varying with the formation of the country, the topographer again as-
sumed the most favorable position in the vicinity for his purposes, and re-
peated the labors of the previous hour. In addition to this constant labor along
the trail, it frequently, almost daily, became necessary to leave it and make dis-
tant side trips, ascending elevated mountain peaks and ridges to obtain correct
and distant views of the country, and I cannot speak too highly of the fidelity,
zeal and ability with which Mr. Egloffstein always performed these onerous
labors. . . . It is not necessary here to describe the beauty, extent and grandeur
of the scenes which from these positions, in the pure atmosphere of this por-
tion of our country, greeted him, frequently embracing an area equal to that of
some of our Atlantic States, and presenting a multitude of plain and mountain
outlines, with snow-capped peaks rising just on the verge of the horizon, and
frequently remaining in sight for days, serving as points of reference, and all of
which were carefully traced and noted for the delineation of the country.6

Beckwith’s admiration for the dedication and care with which Egloffstein
performed his “onerous labours” suggests a kind of comradeship under-
scored in the diary which Heinrich B. Möllhausen (fig. 7.1) had kept on his

7.1 H. B. Möllhausen, The Grand Canyon of the Colorado. Illustration from Die Reisen in
die Felsengebirge Nord-Amerikas, 1861. Topeka, Kansas State Historical Society.
 The Primal Vision: Expeditions 123

journey with Lieutenant Whipple’s expedition in 1853–54. Möllhausen de-

scribes a day of rest in camp:

No other than trivial and necessary tasks were undertaken, and in these every
one suited his own convenience, and paid as much attention to his comfort
as possible. The greater part of the company might be seen seated on their
blankets, mending their clothes or their shoes, or reading in old thumbed-
out books, or playing at cards, and here and there, a bearded fellow was lying
on the edge of the water, and in a leisurely manner washing his linen. . . .
From the field-smithy, indeed, are heard the strokes of the hammer, indicat-
ing hands more industriously employed in replacing the lost shoes of the
mules; but the astronomer is falling asleep over his angle measurements and
tables of logarithms, and near him is one supposed to be making an entry in
his journal, but the pencil has fallen from his hand, and his condition seems
to imply the infectious character of laziness. The botanist, however, had early
in the morning carefully laid out a whole pile of damp papers to dry on the
grass, and now, sitting in the shadow of his tent, he is helping the naturalist
to skin a wolf, and taking the opportunity to give him a lecture on anatomy.
. . . I mention these little daily occurrences of our wandering life, as illustra-
tive of the twofold character of the Expedition. Having to open a way through
almost unknown regions, where we might have to defend ourselves from
hostile encounters, it had a dash of the military character; but the inquiry
into the geological formation of the country, and its animal and vegetable
life, and the determination of distances &c., by astronomical observation,
formed, as will be seen, our principal business.7

The artists of the Pacific Railroad Reports varied in quality, but they shared
the same dedication and suffered the same risks. A. B. Gray, J. B. Tidball,
Arthur Schott, J. J. Young, A. H. Campbell—all devoted their artistic as well
as physical energies to enlighten and inspire the readers of the surveys. The
famous reports cost the government over a million dollars to publish.
Though the works of the survey artists, mainly tinted lithographs, were
widely disseminated in the thirteen volumes of the series, most of the art-
ists did not achieve widespread fame.8
By the late 1850’s, however, well-known names begin to appear on the list
of artist-explorers. John F. Kensett went west in 1854, and again in 1857, 1868,
and 1870.9 Albert Bierstadt made the first of several journeys to the Rockies
with Colonel Frederick Lander’s expedition in 1859.10 The 1870’s was the
period of the great national surveys. Clarence King reconnoitered the forti-
eth parallel; Ferdinand V. Hayden traveled through the Rockies and Colo-
rado; George M. Wheeler journeyed through the Southwest; and Major John
Wesley Powell made the almost legendary trip along the Colorado River
through the rapids of the Grand Canyon.11 By then the list of artists had
124 part three

expanded to include Thomas Moran, who began a life-long career as a ma-

jor western artist with the Hayden survey of 1871.12 Samuel Colman went
west probably for the first time in 1870, possibly again in 1871, in 1886, 1888,
and finally in 1898–1905.13 Worthington Whittredge traveled to New Mexico
probably in 1866 with General Pope, then joined Kensett and Sanford R.
Gifford on a railroad trip to Denver in 1870, possibly returning west the
following year.14 In Denver, Gifford left his friends and traveled for a while
with Hayden.15 Whittredge’s account is revealing:
When he [Gifford] accompanied Kensett and myself to the Rocky Moun-
tains he started fully equipped for work, but when he arrived there, where
distances were deceptive, he became an easy prey to Col. Hayden, who of-
fered him a horse. He left us and his sketch box in cold blood in the midst of
inspiring scenery. We neither saw nor heard from him for several months,
until one rainy day on the plains we met him travelling alone in the fog to-
wards our ranch by the aid of his compass. He had done literally nothing in
the way of work during a whole summer spent in a picturesque region. Yet
we dare not say that he did not study.16

As early as 1853 Frederic Church made his first trip to South America,
returning there in 1857. His friend Heade in 1863 visited and painted the
Brazilian forests. Church chased icebergs in the Arctic Circle with Noble in
1859. William Bradford visited Labrador in 1861 and continued to visit the
Arctic until at least 1869. Four of these artists—Church, Bierstadt, Moran,
and Bradford—are better known for their paintings of “fresh” subject mat-
ter than for anything else. To this list of artist-explorers, we can add the
more important photographers who joined the western expeditions:
Alexander Gardner, William H. Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan, C. E. Watkins,
Eadwaerd Muybridge, among others.17 Even this abridged record makes an
impressive catalogue. What were they really looking for?

What are the temples which Roman robbers have reared—what are the tow-
ers in which feudal oppression has fortified itself—what are the blood-stained
associations of the one, or the despotic superstitions of the other, to the deep
forests which the eye of God has alone pervaded, and where Nature, in her
unviolated sanctuary, has for ages laid her fruits and flowers on His altar!
—Charles Fenno Hoffman18

The opposition between Europe’s antiquity and their own wilderness had
given Americans an alternative past. They could not look back on a long
tradition as could other cultures which, as some travelers in Arcadia pointed
out, were often bloody and despotic. But they could relate to an antiquity
 The Primal Vision: Expeditions 125

still unspoiled by man—purer and by implication closer to God. Nascent

American history was at that moment being bloodied by Indian conflicts,
but this did not bother many of them. As Tocqueville noted, “honest citi-
zens” commented to him: “This world here belongs to us. . . . God, in refus-
ing the first inhabitants the capacity to become civilised, has destined them
in advance to inevitable destruction. The true owners of this continent are
those who know how to take advantage of its riches.”19
Natural antiquity beckoned the American adventurer-hero across com-
pelling spiritual as well as physical frontiers. It sometimes drew simulta-
neously on the tradition of cultivated antiquity. The resulting mixture of
themes, associations, and conventions even now tends to defy disentangle-
ment, and the language used by travelers and artists alike to describe the
fresh new lands was at times couched in terms of European associations.
Marching toward New Mexico, Worthington Whittredge was impressed
by the vastness of the plains: “Nothing could be more like an Arcadian land-
scape than was here presented to our view.”20 Albert Bierstadt, on his first trip
west with Lander’s expedition, compared the Rockies to the Bernese Alps. Of
the Wahsatch region he wrote: “The color of the mountains and of the plains,
and indeed, that of the entire country, reminds one of the color of Italy; in
fact, we have here the Italy of America in a primitive condition.”21
These associations are tantalizing. Italy had always offered to Americans
the promise of a timeless Arcady. In America, the heroic quest penetrated
the mythic past of natural antiquity, restoring timeless beginnings. This
perception of a remote and timeless antiquity could slowly be released into
the present and future by the “hand of man,” which sloughed off age with
each civilizing incursion.
Tocqueville, on his journey to America in 1831–32, remarked that “in but
few years the impenetrable forests will have fallen. The noise of civilization
and of industry will break the silence of the Saginaw. . . . It is this conscious-
ness of destruction, this arrière-pensée of quick and inevitable change that
gives, we feel, so peculiar a character and such a touching beauty to the
solitudes of America. One sees them with a melancholy pleasure; one is in
some sort of a hurry to admire them. Thoughts of the savage, natural gran-
deur that is going to come to an end become mingled with splendid anticipa-
tions of the triumphant march of civilization.”22 Tocqueville’s arrière-pensée
seems appropriate here, as does Thomas Cole’s reminder that American
126 part three

sublimity was that of a “shoreless ocean un-islanded by the recorded deeds

of man.”23 In America, the untouched void represented by natural antiquity
also tempted artists to fill it in.
Choosing vistas that resembled Arcadia was one strategy for drawing on
the bank of associations stored in the cultivated past. Samuel Colman, trav-
eling west after the railroad had penetrated the western territories, painted
calm, serene vistas very like those of the Roman campagna which had occu-
pied him and his fellow-artists a bit earlier. Such views, with their dry, pink-
ochre tonalities and horizontal extensions, simply replaced Roman aqueducts
with natural rock.
A still more expedient method was to impose artistic conventions, espe-
cially Claude’s, upon the natural terrain. Thus the exotic South American
landscape hardly disturbed Church’s stock Claudian formulae. Thomas Moran
merged Claude’s compositions and Turner’s atmosphere in baroque compo-
sitions that quote the seventeenth century traditions. Humboldt himself, in
his introduction to Cosmos, had spoken, as we have seen, of the necessity for
“exalted” forms of speech, worthy of bearing witness to the majesty and great-
ness of Creation. He thus opened the door to conventions of rhetoric familiar
to the heroic landscape art of the late eighteenth century, and beyond these,
to baroque formulae. These traditional canons of sublimity were lavishly ap-
plied in the paintings of Church, Bierstadt, and Moran at a time when the
exploration of North and South America was well advanced. These artists
were relatively late arrivals in the long procession of artist-explorers.
Many of the earlier works could be read, as suggested, as simple topographic
recordings (on occasion they were modestly amplified by the conventions of
the late-eighteenth-century picturesque). Though the development is not
totally consistent, we can follow a Wölfflinian progression from the more
linear and occasionally primitive early works to the baroque engines of
Church and Moran (fig. 7.2). This suggests that the process of discovery
itself, as it developed its own history and past, became subject to the “civi-
lizing” influence of artistic conventions. Such artistic “civilizing,” along with
the verbal associations, withdrew newness from the terrain at the very mo-
ment it was exalting it. The act of seeing was a form of possession that
donated to the new landscape those perceptual habits we call conventions,
in turn determined by the ideas of the age.
For the vast expansive prairies, the immense extensions of space, the awe-
some mountains, the forbidding and majestic scale that characterized the
 The Primal Vision: Expeditions 127

7.2 Thomas Moran, The Chasm of the Colorado, 1873–74. Oil on canvas mounted on alu-
minum, 843/8 × 1443/4 in. (214.3 × 367.6 cm.). Washington, D.C., Smithsonian American
Art Museum.

varied landscape of the West could only then, as now, be called “sublime.”
Yet, as we have seen, sublimity had many faces. Tocqueville, during his fort-
night in the American wilds, spoke of “a silence so deep, a stillness so com-
plete, that the soul is invaded by a kind of religious terror. . . . More than
once in Europe we have found ourselves lost deep in the woods, but always
some sound of life came to reach our ears. . . . Here not only is man lacking,
but no sound can be heard from the animals either . . . all is still in the
woods, all is silent under their leaves. One would say that for a moment the
Creator has turned his face away and all the forces of nature are paralyzed.”24

The theme of silence and solitude, variously interpreted, runs through these
western accounts, as it does through the many uninhabited paintings. To
Washington Irving “. . . there is something inexpressibly lonely in the soli-
tude of a prairie. The loneliness of a forest seems nothing to it. There the
view is shut in by trees, and the imagination is left free to picture some
livelier scene beyond. But here we have an immense extent of landscape
without a sign of human existence.”25 Francis Parkman, who was also op-
pressed by the monotony of the plain, in which “no living thing was moving
128 part three

. . . except the lizards that darted over the sand and through the rank grass
and prickly pears at our feet,” found the area near Fort Laramie “a sublime
waste, a wilderness of mountains and pine-forests, over which the spirit of
loneliness and silence seemed brooding.”26
But if Irving and Parkman were a bit disenchanted with the desolate plains
and prairies, Worthington Whittredge, on his journey with General Pope,
was deeply moved by them: “I had never seen the plains or anything like
them. They impressed me deeply. I cared more for them than for the moun-
tains, and very few of my western pictures have been produced from sketches
made in the mountains, but rather from those made on the plains with the
mountains in the distance. Whoever crossed the plains at that period, not-
withstanding its herds of buffalo and flocks of antelope, its wild horses,
deer and fleet rabbits, could hardly fail to be impressed with its vastness and
silence and the appearance everywhere of an innocent, primitive existence.”27
That innocence was one theme, of course, of James Fenimore Cooper’s
Leatherstocking novels, in which Cooper made reference to the “holy calm
of nature”: “the air of deep repose—the solitudes, that spoke of scenes and
forests untouched by the hands of man—the reign of nature, in a word, that
gave so much poor delight to one of [Deer-slayer’s] habits and turn of
mind.”28 Silence and solitude were the natural companions of that type of
sublimity perhaps closest to the Creator. (And indeed, sublimity and Cre-
ation, those two master words of the landscape attitude in the nineteenth
century, are also key words for the esthetic and intent of exploration.)
Tocqueville’s silence, in the deepest sense, offered the serenity of “universal
peace” when the “universe seems before your eyes to have reached a perfect
equilibrium” and the “soul, half asleep, hovers between the present and the
future, between the real and the possible, while . . . man listens to the even
beating of his arteries that seems to him to mark the passage of time flow-
ing drop by drop through eternity.”29 This was the same silence Cole found
three or four years later in Franconia Notch, where the overwhelming emo-
tion of the sublime was provoked by “the spirit of repose” brooding over
nature, and “the silent energy of nature stirred the soul to its inmost depths.”30
In the East also, Thoreau could write: “Those divine sounds which are
uttered to our inward ear—which are breathed in with the zephyr or re-
flected from the lake—come to us noiselessly, bathing the temples of the
soul, as we stand motionless amid the rocks. The halloo is the creature of
walls & masonwork; the whisper is fitted in the depths of the wood, or by
 The Primal Vision: Expeditions 129

the shore of the lake; but silence is best adapted to the acoustics of space.”31
Such acoustics were available too in the vast expanses of the West. Solitude
could lead to peace or dread, immense space to universal tranquility or over-
whelming awe—that is, to the newer, more tranquil sublimity or to the older,
rhetorical one. The artists were capable of practicing both simultaneously.
In consonance with the rhetorical heroism of their quest, the older sublime
was generally more in evidence.
Both concepts of the sublime drew more directly on religious feelings
than the late-eighteenth-century version. Many of the travelers’ associations
when confronted with western nature were overtly religious. On encounter-
ing the Tucumcari region, Heinrich Möllhausen spoke as an artist-geologist
when he found himself “here on the wide plain rejoicing the eye by the
regularity of its structure, and setting one to calculate how many thousands
of years Nature must have been at work chiselling and dressing these stones,
before she could have brought the original rough mountain mass to its
present form.”32 His geological sense of time in no way impeded his spiri-
tual sense: “Here, as amidst the wilderness of waters, in the dark primeval
forest, among the giant mountains, Nature builds a temple that awakens
feelings not easily to be expressed; but the pure joy we feel in the works of
the Almighty Master may well be called worship. . . . The fact that clear springs
so often gush out amongst the rocks amidst these grand scenes, inviting the
wanderer to rest near them, may even suggest the idea that hard rock has
been thus smote and the water made to gush forth, to detain man the longer
before these natural altars.”33
The idea of the West as a “natural church” occurs repeatedly. Washington
Irving, setting out to tour the prairies, was at a certain point “overshadowed
by lofty trees, with straight, smooth trunks, like stately columns; and as the
glancing rays of the sun shone through the transparent leaves, tinted with
the many-colored hues of autumn, I was reminded of the effect of sunshine
among the stained windows and clustering columns of a Gothic cathedral.
Indeed there is a grandeur and solemnity in our spacious forests of the West,
that awaken in me the same feeling I have experienced in those vast and
venerable piles, and the sound of the wind sweeping through them supplies
occasionally the deep breathings of the organ.”34
Clarence King, too, having ascended Mount Tyndall, found that “the whole
mountains shaped themselves like the ruins of cathedrals—sharp roof-ridges,
pinnacled and statued; buttresses more spired and ornamented than Milan’s;
130 part three

receding doorways with pointed arches carved into blank facades of gran-
ite, doors never to be opened, innumerable jutting points with here and
there a single cruciform peak, its frozen roof and granite spires so strikingly
Gothic I cannot doubt that the Alps furnished the models for early cathe-
drals of that order.”35 For the writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow, who like King at one
stage traveled with Albert Bierstadt, the artist making his color-studies amid
western nature sat in a “divine workshop.”36
King felt, as he sat on Mount Tyndall, a “silence, which, gratefully con-
trasting with the surrounding tumult of form, conveyed to me a new senti-
ment. I have lain and listened through the heavy calm of a tropical voyage,
hour after hour, longing for a sound; and in desert nights the dead stillness
has many a time awakened me from sleep. For moments, too, in my forest
life, the groves made absolutely no breath of movement; but there is round
these summits the soundlessness of a vacuum. The sea stillness is that of
sleep; the desert, of death—this silence is like the waveless calm of space.”37
Ludlow, confronting the Valley of the Yosemite from Inspiration Point,
saw “a sweep of emerald grass turned to chrysoprase by the slant-beamed
sun—chrysoprase beautiful enough to have been the tenth foundation-stone
of John’s apocalyptic heaven. . . . Not a living creature, either man or beast,
breaks the visible silence of this inmost paradise; but for ourselves, standing
at the precipice, petrified, as it were, rock on rock, the great world might
well be running back in stone-and-grassy dreams to the hour when God
had given him as yet but two daughters, the crag and the clover. We were
breaking into the sacred closet of Nature’s self-examination.”38
In this context, the ambition of the artist-explorers goes far beyond that
of the enterprising adventurer in search of excitement. There was, surely,
something of the entrepreneur in much of the large-scale popular art that
came out of the exploration; Bierstadt made poster-like replicas of his west-
ern experiences years later. But the most profound intentions of the artist-
explorers coincided exactly with their role as curates of the natural church.
They were rehearsing and reliving Genesis through the landscape, just as
the geologists were attempting to do. Their cooperation with the scientists
of the expeditions was a natural function of their similar roles. Together,
they were archaeologists of the Creation, uncovering beginnings with all
the proprieties of their sacred mission.
To them, the newness of the landscape insured the freshness of their vi-
sion, and thus its sanctity. That vision, unsullied by the intervention of the
 The Primal Vision: Expeditions 131

layman, arched from the “undefiled” land—fresh as Creation itself—through

the eye of the artist, that devout interpreter, to the pictorial image. Knowl-
edge of Creation could to a large extent insure artistic creation. That cre-
ation would maintain its absolute integrity against organic decay or man’s
desecration. The eager spectator, in receiving the image, also received a sa-
cred blessing. To penetrate Creation, even by proxy, was to assume at least
some of the attributes of the Creator.
According to Whittredge, Gifford told him that “no historical or legend-
ary interest attached to landscape could help the landscape painter, that he
must go behind all this to nature as it had been formed by the Creator and
find something there which was superior to man’s work, and to this he must
learn to give intelligible expression.”39 Whittredge recalled Gifford’s remarks
only in general terms, but he added that though “these ideas were not new
or wonderful . . . he impressed me as a man earnestly looking into a prob-
lem, as in truth he was.”40 One suspects that Whittredge did not find these
ideas new or wonderful because they were usual and even ordinary for the
landscape painters of the mid-century.
Whittredge, born in Ohio, had early developed a feeling for the prairie and
for a kind of primitivism which he sought again on a later western journey (fig.
7.3). Probably this was why Kit Carson represented for him a special solitary

7.3 Worthington Whittredge, On the Plains, Colorado, 1872. Oil on canvas, 30 × 50 in. (76.2
× 127 cm.). St. Johnsbury, Vt., St. Johnsbury Athenaeum.
132 part three

sensibility: “I had all my life wanted to meet a man who had been born with
some gentle instincts, and who had lived a solitary life, either in the woods,
or somewhere where society had not affected him and where primitive na-
ture had had full swing of his sensibilities.”41
Such nature feelings, and such a preference for the gentle, solitary spirit,
were of course as much a part of New England transcendentalism as of
western exploration. Thoreau had stated in Walden: “For the most part it is
as solitary where I live as on the prairies. . . .” And, “I am no more lonely
than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or
a horse-fly, or a humble-bee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a
weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a
January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.”42 These thoughts were as
evident in the small, narrow paintings of the New England luminist Lane as
in the large works describing the infinitely extending prairies.
In aiming for a solitary vision resulting from a single, primal encounter
with the most “undefiled” nature, these landscapists can be seen as repre-
sentatives of R. W. B. Lewis’s Adamic man. Though the more bombastic of
them, Church, Bierstadt, and Moran, could turn that encounter into an
apocalyptic revelation, rehearsing Creation through Resurrection, the qui-
eter images found more apt counterparts in transcendental philosophy. All
aspects—the quiet and the bombastic, the outgoing and the reflective—
were joined in the work of the poet most associated with the western quest.
Whitman’s ebullient verses had in them much of the baroque adventures of
Church and Moran, yet in Leaves of Grass he could write eloquently of a
noiseless, patient spider:

I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;

Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them.43

To him, the “western central world” was “that vast Something, stretching
out on its own unbounded scale, unconfined, which there is in these prai-
ries, combining the real and ideal, and beautiful as dreams.”44 For Whitman,
the “beauty, terror, power” of the West were “more than Dante or Angelo
ever knew,” and he was as struck by the atmosphere as was Thomas Moran,
who was already painting the atmospheric effects Whitman described so elo-
quently: “. . . perhaps as I gaze around me the rarest sight of all is in atmo-
 The Primal Vision: Expeditions 133

spheric hues. The prairies . . . and these mountains and parks seem to me to
afford new lights and shades. Everywhere the aerial gradations and sky ef-
fects inimitable; nowhere else such perspectives, such transparent lilacs and
grays. I can conceive of some superior landscape painter, some fine colorist,
after sketching awhile out here, discarding all his previous work, delightful
to stock exhibition amateurs, as muddy, raw, and artificial.”45
Like Whittredge, Whitman delighted in the long, level plains:
Then as to scenery . . . while I know the standard claim is that Yosemite,
Niagara Falls, the upper Yellowstone and the like, afford the greatest natural
shows, I am not so sure but the prairies and plains, while less stunning at first
sight, last longer, fill the esthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest, and make
North America’s characteristic landscape. Indeed through the whole of this
journey . . . what most impressed me, and will longest remain with me, are
these same prairies. Day after day, and night after night, to my eyes, to all my
senses—the esthetic one most of all—they silently and broadly unfolded. Even
their simplest statistics are sublime.46

For Whitman, “a typical Rocky Mountain canyon, or a limitless, sealike

stretch of the great Kansas or Colorado plains, under favoring circumstances,
tallies, perhaps expresses, certainly awakes, those grandest and subtlest
element[al] emotions in the human soul, that all the marble temples and
sculptures from Phidias to Thorwaldsen—all paintings, poems, reminis-
cences, or even music, probably never can.”47 Yet he still had high hopes for
the effect of the western landscape on American art, and wondered: “The
pure breath, primitiveness, boundless prodigality and amplitude, strange
mixture of delicacy and power, of continence, of real and ideal, and of all
original and first-class elements, of these prairies, the Rocky Mountains,
and of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers—will they ever appear in, and
in some sort form a standard for our poetry and art?”48
In embodying the fresh new amplitude he sought, Whitman was himself
a type of Adamic hero. As Lewis puts it, Whitman thought of the poet as the
vicar of God, the son of God, God himself.49 Yet our artist-curates, in search-
ing the vast uncharted territories, had scarcely less ambition. Insofar as the
multiple versions of solitude, silence, and, by final implication, sublimity
touched on the Creator, they touched on their most important motivation.
Behind the recourse to the cult of the wilderness, primitivism, and the ar-
tistic alliance with science was that single aim: to get back to the beginning.
The artists sought not only Tuckerman’s “fresh and characteristic themes.”
They wanted to be the first to behold God’s work since the moment of
134 part three

nature’s birth, and in this primal vision, to behold God. Like Thoreau’s poet,
they were “Nature’s brothers.” They toiled across the prairies, climbed their
mountains, tracked icebergs, and ascended volcanoes—all so that when they
were asked: “What see you when you get there?” they could answer, with
Natty Bumppo: “Creation . . . all creation” (fig. 7.4).50

7.4 Albert Bierstadt, Yosemite Valley, Glacier Point Trail, ca. 1873. Oil on canvas, 54 × 843/4 in.
(137.2 × 215.3 cm.). New Haven, Conn., Yale University Art Gallery.
CHAPTER 8

Man’s Traces:
Axe, Train, Figure

Axe
All then was harmony and peace—but man
Arose—he who now vaunts antiquity—
He the destroyer—amid the shades
Of oriental realms, destruction’s work began—
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And dissonant—the axe—the unresting axe
Incessant smote our venerable ranks. . . .
—Thomas Cole
“The Complaint of the Forest”1

There are daily used for mining and building purposes, one hundred and
twenty-five thousand feet, BM, of lumber and square timber, the cost of trans-
porting which cost $20 per thousand, making an annual consumption of one
hundred and eight thousand cords of wood, and 40 million feet of lumber. . . .
[coming from] the inexhaustible forests of California.
Evidence Concerning Projected Railway . . .2

While Thoreau meditates on his use of the axe to make himself a dwelling
place in nature, he also mourns lost trees, which he misses like human be-
ings.3 National identity is both constructed and threatened by the double-
edged symbol of progress, the axe that destroys and builds, builds and
destroys. The paradoxes of this relationship to nature are sharply revealed
in the “civilizing” of the land. Progress toward America’s future literally
undercut its past.
135
136 part three

In chopping away at the forests, Americans were not only terminating

the primordial age that made America unique. They were also leveling what
William Cullen Bryant had called God’s first temples. Insofar as this in-
volved an attack on America’s religion of God-in-nature, it was a profane
act. But expediency strongly suggested that nature could be “humanized”
without violating nature-as-God.
Central to this rationalization was the idea of the Garden.4 Conceivably,
wilderness could be transformed through the pastoral ideal into a rural Para-
dise, resembling the biblical Eden painted by Cole in another version of his
Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (1827–28, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).
At the right, a verdant Eden is represented with the same Claudian gentility
that distinguishes Cole’s Arcadian State in The Course of Empire, (1836) while
on the left Adam and Eve are expelled into a “howling” wilderness, set with
picturesque, storm-ravaged trees that go back to Salvator.5 The picture could
be read as a text on nature and culture, with fallen man faced with the task
of recovering culture from the wilderness. Like no other American artist,
Cole mediated this dilemma of the wilderness. Seven years after he painted
the Expulsion, he wrote that “although an enlightened and increasing peo-
ple have broken in upon the solitude, and with activity and power wrought
changes that seem magical, yet the most distinctive, and perhaps the most
impressive, characteristic of American scenery is its wildness.”6
How could this dilemma be, if not resolved, at least lived with? How
much could man touch God’s “undefiled works?” Was there a point beyond
which progress and cultivation should not go? At what point did the arc
from virgin wilderness through the pastoral ideal to the industrial land-
scape swerve from constructive accord with God’s will to human destruc-
tiveness toward nature? From these questions arose early ecological
awarenesses that have led almost teleologically to the ones we bear so heavily
now. In 1789, Dr. Nicholas Collin in “An Essay on Natural Philosophy and
Its Relationship to the Development of the New World” observed: “Our
stately forests are a national treasure, deserving the solicitous care of the
patriotic philosopher and politician. Hitherto, they have been too much
abandoned to the axes of rude and thoughtless wood-choppers. . . . In many
parts of the country a preservation and encrease of the timber for fuel and
domestic uses render these queries important.”7
But Yankee “efficiency” understood domestic needs more readily than
the ecological responsibilities so apparent to these thoughtful early artists,
 Man’s Traces: Axe, Train, Figure 137

writers, scientists, and philosophers. When the lesson hit home, there was
just enough time (and nature) left to establish the artificial enclaves known
as parks. To some extent, landscape gardening attempted to deal with the
problem of respecting nature. Yet nature’s prolixity had, apparently, to be
edited. A. J. Downing cautioned his readers in 1859 that “the Beautiful, em-
bodied in a home-scene” was attained “by the removal or concealment of
everything uncouth and discordant, and by the introduction and preserva-
tion of forms pleasing in their expression, their outlines, and their fitness
for the abode of man.”8 So “undefiled” nature hardly had a chance, whether
ravaged by friend or foe. Tocqueville’s sensitivity to this is striking: “All that
one feels in passing through these flowery wildernesses where everything,
as in Milton’s Paradise, is ready to receive man is a quiet admiration, a gentle
melancholy sense, and a vague distaste for civilized life, a sort of primitive
instinct that makes one think with sadness that soon this delightful solitude
will have changed its looks. . . . The facts are as certain as if they had already
occurred. In but few years these impenetrable forests will have fallen.”9
After the colonial period, according to Hans Huth, the “axe was even
accepted as the appropriate symbol of the early American attitude toward
nature.” No one describes this attitude better than Cooper in The Pioneers.
As Billy Kirby, a professional logger, goes to work, he treads the woods like
Hercules, measuring the trees with deliberation:
Commonly selecting one of the most noble, for the first trial of his power, he
would approach it with a listless air, whistling a low tune; and wielding his
ax, with a certain flourish, not unlike the salutes of a fencing master, he would
strike a light blow into the bark, and measure his distance. The pause that
followed was ominous of the fall of the forest, which had flourished there for
centuries. The heavy and brisk blows that he struck were soon succeeded by
the thundering report of the tree, as it came, first cracking and threatening . . .
finally meeting the ground with a shock but little inferior to an earthquake.
From that moment the sounds of the ax were ceaseless, while the falling of
the trees was like a distant cannonading. . . . [Ultimately] the jobber would
collect together his implements of labor, like the heaps of timber, and march
away, under the blaze of the prostrate forest, like the conqueror of some city,
who, having first prevailed over his adversary, applies the torch as the finish-
ing blow to his conquest.10

The battle and the conquest are, for Cooper, but “little inferior to an
earthquake,” and man’s violence has an effect close to the most elemental of
natural calamities. Billy Kirby was in the vanguard of the so-called march
of civilization, with history and progress as cohorts. The artist’s job, as a
138 part three

minority view saw it, was to get there first and document a doomed nature.
Facing nature’s inevitable decline, this task teems with ironies. Only when
the colonist had cleared the forest and made it fit for “man’s abode” could
he approach the luxury of loving it. Roderick Nash has observed that “ap-
preciation of wilderness began in the cities” and that “in the early nine-
teenth century American nationalists began to understand that it was in the
wildness of its nature that their country was unmatched.”11 And as Tocqueville
observed, the mortality of nature suddenly made it more desirable. The
“consciousness of destruction” gave a “touching beauty to the solitudes of
America. . . . one is in some sort of hurry to admire them.”12 The artists had
to hurry. The reviewer of Cropsey’s landscapes in the Literary World of 1847
reminded them that “. . . even the primordial hills, once bristling with shaggy
pine and hemlock, like old Titans as they were, are being shorn of their
locks, and left to blister in cold nakedness in the sun. . . .”13
Cole, the first fully equipped landscape painter in America, was one of
the first to recognize the problem. More astute philosophically than his suc-
cessors, he had a fuller grasp, I think, of the implications of civilization. Yet
his paintings were also more readily touched by “art” than those of any of
his landscape peers. His “nature” had already been “civilized” by art history,
in its way as potent a challenge to the primordial wilderness as the axe.
Obviously, Cole enjoyed exercising this graceful option. It was kinder to let
the ancient trees stand, altering them at will in a composition, or imposing
Claudian pastorales on them when the mood demanded. The artist made
the necessary changes on the canvas. Nature remained intact.
Cole’s sense of temporal crisis was repeatedly expressed in his poetry and
notebooks, and he invented such titles as “On seeing that a favorite tree of
the Author’s had been cut down.” The famous “Complaint of the Forest”
notes: “We feed ten-thousand fires! In one short day / The woodland growth
of centuries is consumed. . . .”14 The stress is on the disparity between natu-
ral time and man’s time, which, in its extraordinary accelerations, can con-
sume eons of growth. This destruction was radically emphasized by geological
revelations such as Lyell’s in 1830 that the age of the world extended indefi-
nitely back into time. Geological time, with all its poetic possibilities, domi-
nates the landscape paintings of this period. Time—“hallowed,” “hoary,”
“mellow,” a kind of mythic infinity extending beyond human measure—
suffuses the way the artists confront the “patriarchal trees.” The late-eighteenth-
 Man’s Traces: Axe, Train, Figure 139

century concept of the picturesque so successfully employed by Cole in many

of his landscapes could be handily adapted to signify this time awareness.
But Cole’s strong feelings about the axe also found abrupt expression in
paintings in which the cut stump suggests a new iconology of progress and
destruction. Going back to Gilpin’s tree that records the “history of some
storm,” the new iconology sets up a dialogue between the ravages of time
and the ravages of man which has persisted until the present. In Cole’s art,
natural time offers a rhetorical springboard for meditation:
Stop the Ruffian Time! Lay hold!
Is there then no power so bold!
None to meet his strength midway—
Wrest from him his precious prey,
And the Tyrant-Robber slay.15

Preoccupied as he is with the passage and effects of natural time, Cole al-
ways ends up with an affirmation of faith:
And anon shall one appear
Brighter than the Morning Star:
He shall smite that Spectre frore
Time shall, clasped by Death no more,
Take a new name—Evermore.16

The effects of man’s time, of man’s destruction, obviously could never

offer the same opportunities for meditation on God’s immemorial will. Yet
Cole, caught like all his contemporaries between nature and culture, was
willing to admit that “the cultivated must not be forgotten, for it is still
more important to man [than wilderness] in his social capacity.”17 None-
theless, his use of the stump symbol has few poetic overtones, making only
a wry understated commentary on this modification of God’s nature. In
paintings such as the Expulsion, The Oxbow (Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York), and Landscape with Dead Tree (Rhode Island School of Design),
Cole used the storm-ravaged tree, a palimpsest of time associations, almost
as a signature. This natural picturesque is of a totally different order from
what we might call the man-made or unnatural picturesque, the cut stump
of the wood-chopper, utilitarian man feeding his ten thousand fires. The
blunt factualism of the stump symbol is clear from a comparison of Cole’s
two paintings of a favorite scene in the Catskills, executed with and without
“the mighty trunks, the pride of years.”18
140 part three

In View on the Catskill, Early Autumn (1836–37; fig. 8.1), a tree richly en-
dowed with an umbrella of leafage dominates the left foreground, and a
taller spray of delicate trees provides a Claudian frame at the right. Six years
later, another version of the same site, River in the Catskills (fig. 8.2), is slightly
altered in accordance with Cole’s concepts of compositional license and his
free use of notebook sketches. In addition, no tall trees are now present to
serve as focusing or framing devices. The formal effect of this is to change
the pictorial structure from the obviously pastoral and Claudian-derived to the
more direct horizontal design favored by the luminists. Perhaps some of the
trees in the first version had never actually existed in the site itself. Cole may
have imposed them on what looks like a horizontal landscape in order to
heighten the pastoral effect. (This may be particularly true, I feel, of the
trees at the right.) In the second version the trees are glaringly absent. Evi-
dence of some prior existence remains in the prominent stump at the left.
Closer examination shows that in the first version a small stump occupies
the far left foreground; it persists in the later painting, in much the same
place, but the full-leafed tree is gone, and the foreground is strewn with
fallen branches.
The two pictures demonstrate some progress from the ideal to a more
pragmatic encounter with the real, from mythic time to human time. For
Cole that reality was filled with poignancy. In a letter to his patron Luman
Reed on March 26, 1836, Cole lamented that “they are cutting down all the
trees in the beautiful valley on which I have looked so often with a loving
eye. This throws quite a gloom over my spring anticipations. Tell this to
Durand—not that I wish to give him pain, but that I want him to join with
me in maledictions on all dollar-godded utilitarians.”
Two days later, Cole, ever the temperate gentleman, wrote again to Reed:
After I had sealed my last letter, I was afraid that what I had said about the tree-
destroyers might be understood in a more serious light than I intended. My
“maledictions” are gentle ones, and I do not know that I could wish them any
thing worse than that barrenness of mind, that sterile desolation of the soul, in
which sensibility to the beauty of nature cannot take root. One reason, though,
why I am in so gentle a mood is, that I am informed some of the trees will be
saved yet. Thank them for that. If I live to be old enough, I may sit down under
some bush, the last left in the utilitarian world, and feel thankful that intellect
in its march has spared one vestige of the ancient forest for me to die by.19

In the same group of letters, Cole corresponded with Reed about the
Course of Empire commission. Though this series was praised by a public
 Man’s Traces: Axe, Train, Figure 141

8.1 Thomas Cole, View on the Catskill—Early Autumn, 1836–37. Oil on canvas, 39 × 63 in.
(99.1 × 160 cm.). New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

8.2 Thomas Cole, River in the Catskills, 1843. Oil on canvas, 271/2 × 403/8 in. (69.9 × 102.6
cm.). Boston, Museum of Fine Arts.
142 part three

which paid willingly to see it, that public seemed unaware that the pictures’
didacticism could apply to them. Course of Empire was a fantasy about im-
perial pagan ambition. America, a Christian nation, could not succumb to a
similar fate. The so-called March of Empire, in America, was always shielded
by its Christian intent. God had given white America the mandate to de-
velop the land and endowed it with the technology to do so. God’s blessings
could never be withdrawn. Unfortunately, the noble savages, or Indians, for
all their connection with a primitivism for which nineteenth-century Ameri-
cans were already nostalgic, were not similarly blessed. As Tocqueville had
noted, Americans felt that “God, in refusing the first inhabitants the capac-
ity to become civilized, has destined them in advance to inevitable destruc-
tion. The true owners of this continent are those who know how to take
advantage of its riches.”20
Thus, the moral of Course of Empire went largely unnoticed by the Ameri-
can public that acclaimed it, a public confident—almost smug—about its
ability to take advantage of the continent’s riches. The land was being cleared
for man’s abode; Billy Kirby was now the conqueror. And the stump, sud-
denly filling the foregrounds of other American paintings of the period,
becomes a symbol of the march of civilization.
The roseate foreground of Sanford Gifford’s Twilight on Hunter Moun-
tain (plate 12) is punctuated with such reminders of past sylvan glories,
which occupy and measure the space like so many fallen soldiers on a battle-
field. One has a sense of the aftermath of a special kind of crusade or war, in
which man, triumphant (in this case a settler and his herd), achieves a kind
of pastoral calm at the center of the enormous clearing. But there is little
doubt that something has been given up in return for this “progress.” Simi-
larly with Gifford’s Home in the Wilderness, cultivation is the result of sacri-
fice, not only of man’s time, labor, and exposure to hardship, but of some
aspects of nature’s very existence. In Home in the Wilderness the stumps
have a choppy staccato rhythm that somehow approximates the sound of
Cole’s “dissonant axe.”
That sound was, as Tocqueville suggested, “the noise of civilization and
of industry.”21 It broke into the silence that the transcendental artists and
philosophers were, at the very same moment, defining as a key correlative
of the mid-nineteenth century. “Good as is discourse,” wrote Emerson, “si-
lence is better, and shames it.”22 Thoreau concurred: “To the highest com-
munication I can make no reply; I lend only a silent ear.”23 And, “Occasionally
 Man’s Traces: Axe, Train, Figure 143

we rise above the necessity of virtue into an unchangeable morning light, in

which we have not to choose in a dilemma between right and wrong, but
simply to live right on and breathe the circumambient air. There is no name
for this life unless it be the very vitality of vita. Silent is the preacher about
this, and silent must ever be, for he who knows it will not preach.”24
The visual corollary of silence is stillness. Stillness and silence are the
antipodes of the progressive noise and action of civilization. The modest
luminist paintings embodying this silence are testaments to a profound
yearning of the age. Yet their private quietude was ignored in favor of the
more active “public” paintings of the Hudson River men, which often, as
with Church and Bierstadt, invited entry by their very scale. The noise of
civilization could also enter, and the sound of the axe followed. Those Hudson
River landscapes that are marked by the stump symbol introduce the double-
edged sense of accelerated time that defines new values, replacing myth with
history, the individual with the community. The stump, then, signifies the
community participation that constructs the social fabric.
The sound of the axe also adds a final footnote to the earlier sounds of
the “old sublime.” The sensibilities that had reacted to the “shouts of Niagara
from the abyss” and to the groans and roars of Cotopaxi and Sangay now
become aware of what Cole called “this human hurricane” of the axe. Par-
taking, probably without fully understanding it, of the positive overtones of
the “sublime” noise of progress, they allow cultivation to overshadow de-
struction while the wilderness takes on form and manner.

Train
I like to see it lap the miles,
And lick the valleys up. . . .
—Emily Dickinson25

Colonizing the landscape cleared by the axe and bearing with it the sounds
of civilization, the railroad carried the new iconology further (fig. 8.3). The
nineteenth century endowed its desire to join places with a mystical material-
ism. So the railroad enterprise was made radiant by the transcendent opti-
mism known as progress. Leo Marx reports that by the 1830’s, the locomotive
was already “becoming a kind of national obsession,” and that “between
1820 and 1860 the nation was to put down more than 30,000 miles of rail-
road track, pivot of the transportation revolution which in turn quickened
144 part three

8.3 Alexander Gardner, View Near Fort Harker, Kansas, 216 Miles West of Missouri River;
Across the Continent on the Kansas Pacific Railroad (Route of the 35th Parallel), ca. 1867–68.
Albumen print, 6 × 8 in. (15 × 20.3 cm.). Rochester, N.Y., George Eastman House.

industrialization.”26 Any comments on the cultural significance of railroads

must ground themselves firmly in Marx’s pioneering work on the nine-
teenth century’s most ruthless emblem of power.
The Iron Horse was welcomed by most communities without reservation.
Numerous new towns owed their existence to the railroad, which engendered
a new resort trade by virtue of one of industry’s end-products—leisure. The
railroad threw bridges across the landscape in a way that made the bridge a
metaphor for identifying access with understanding. Its linear imperialism
bore with it a heavy sociological cargo. Like the great highways of the twen-
tieth century and the great rivers of the pre-technological era, the railroad
spawned its own culture. Railway culture was possibly the first modern cul-
ture to fulfill the ancient desire to compress space and purchase time. In-
deed, time itself—as vast engines slid along the ever-converging rails, wooden
 Man’s Traces: Axe, Train, Figure 145

sleepers clicking off space as if on a horizontal clock—became a technological

dimension.
The exhilaration and rush of progress was easily identified with this new
force. Yet American “self-recognition,” as Perry Miller puts it, also perceived
“an irreconcilable opposition between Nature and civilization.”27 American
identity equivocated between both in a kind of perplexed vibration. Tech-
nology, the so-called applied science, nourished the American passion for
the utilitarian, a passion expressed by a rhetoric that often seems, in America,
to follow the identification of utility with a perception of moral correct-
ness. Marx has brilliantly characterized the language accompanying the rail-
road enterprise as the “rhetoric of the technological sublime.” Thus: “Objects
of exalted power and grandeur elevate the mind that seriously dwells on
them, and impart to it greater compass and strength. . . . Alpine scenery and
an embattled ocean deepen contemplation, and give their own sublimity to
the conceptions of beholders. The same will be true of our system of Rail-
roads. Its vastness and magnificence will prove communicable, and add to
the standard of the intellect of our country.”
In one of those special ironies occasionally doled out to us by history, the
rhetoric of the technological sublime developed concurrently with the na-
ture rhetoric. This identification blurred the issue in a way that legitimized—
indeed sanctified—the great materialist urge. Very early on (1787), Tench
Coxe saw a bounteous nature as an encouragement to amass wealth—if
that wealth were, of course, purchased through the morality of work: “Provi-
dence has bestowed upon the United States of America means of happiness,
as great and numerous, as are enjoyed by any country in the world. A soil
fruitful and diversified—a healthful climate—mighty rivers and adjacent
seas abounding with fish are the great advantages for which we are indebted
to a beneficent creator. Agriculture, manufactures and commerce, naturally
arising from these sources, afford to our industrious citizens certain subsis-
tence and innumerable opportunities of acquiring wealth.”28 It soon be-
came apparent that nature and the machine would both be harnessed to the
same purpose—to fulfill the American concept of a future clearly blessed
by an understanding God. This resulted in what could be described as laissez-
faire morals: whatever happened was ultimately for the nation’s good. Perry
Miller’s enormous “national ego” was convinced of its invincible rightness.
The rhetorical assimilation of the railroad provoked Whitmanesque ex-
cursions. The railroad was
146 part three
. . . a Titanic colossus of iron and of brass, instinct with elemental life and
power, with a glowing furnace for his lungs, and streams of fire and smoke
for the breath of his nostrils. With one hand he collects the furs of the arctic
circle; with the other he smites the forests of Western Pennsylvania. He plants
his right foot at the source of the Missouri—his left on the shores of the Gulf
of Mexico; and gathers into his bosom the ever-flowing abundance of the
fairest and richest valley on which the circling sun looks down.29

This benevolent genie, controlling nature, was itself part of nature. As

Perry Miller remarks: “the force of Nature, the majesty of Niagara, were
transmuted into machinery and locomotives by passing through the brain
of man.”30 Thus, the whole idea of progress, having passed through Mind
(now the mathematical and engineering faculties of Mind—the other pole
of Emerson’s “We want our dreams and our mathematics”), could be ex-
tended to transcendental ideas that subsumed all of life as part of the same
optimistic unity. Emerson, who could convert most negatives into positives
tried especially hard to see the benefits of the machine with a kind of dogged
sunniness: “Luckily for us, now that steam has narrowed the Atlantic to a
strait, the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element
into the national mind, and we shall yet have an American genius.”31 In
1856, considering English industrialism in English Traits, he began to voice
his distrust of the effects of the machine: “In a change of industry, whole
towns are sacrificed like ant-hills, when the fashion of shoestrings super-
sedes buckles, when cotton takes the place of linens, or railways of turn-
pikes, or when commons are enclosed by landlords. Then society is
admonished of the mischief of the division of labor. . . .”32
Yet as Marx has pointed out, Emerson ended English Traits with the same
positive nationalist refrain he so often voiced: “If it be not so, if the courage
of England goes with the chances of a commercial crisis, I will go back to
the capes of Massachusetts and my own Indian stream, and say to my coun-
trymen, the old race are all gone, and the elasticity and hope of mankind
must henceforth remain on the Alleghany ranges, or nowhere.”33
Thoreau, always more tough-minded than Emerson, heard the sound of
technology differently: “The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods
summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some
farmer’s yard, informing me that many restless city merchants are arriving
within the circle of the town.”34 Though Marx reminds us that to Thoreau
the train first sounded more like a partridge, Thoreau’s ambivalence leans,
if ambivalence can, toward the hawk. Hawthorne, too, had heard “the whistle
 Man’s Traces: Axe, Train, Figure 147

of the locomotive—the long shriek, harsh, above all other harshness, for the
space of a mile cannot mollify it into harmony. It tells a story of busy men,
citizens from the hot street, who have come to spend a day in a country
village, men of business; in short, of all unquietness; and no wonder that it
gives such a startling shriek, since it brings the noisy world into the midst of
our slumbrous peace.”35 The country-city, silence-noise oppositions set up
here are, of course, nature-culture oppositions. Hawthorne’s perception of
the shriek that disturbs nature’s stillness brings to mind Morris Graves’s
eloquent images of the 1940’s, of birds “driven mad by the sound of ma-
chinery in the air.” The sound pollution of the machine carries with it the
nascent urban threat to pastoral calm, altering distance and place, presag-
ing a telescoped world in which the machine would cannibalize nature—in
transcendental terms, its own parent.
How did the artist meet this obvious challenge that threatened to rip
whole tracts out of the Book of Nature? Though the machine provided cer-
tain paradigms of simplicity and measure for the American artist, who of-
ten utilized and invented, as well as admired it (as Eakins admired the
locomotives at the Paris International Exposition of 1867),36 it was still, in
Marx’s terms, in the Garden, and its threats to Paradise were evident enough.
Yet how remote and insignificant are the trains that discreetly populate the
American landscape paintings of the mid-century! The assertive symbol of
the new age of steam is confined to distant twists of smoke, beneath which
the eye searches for the linked line that bespeaks the new invention. Again
and again one detects a train in an American landscape where one’s eyes
had not before picked up its presence. A close look at Cole’s River in the
Catskills yields a miniature train. In Cropsey’s Starrucca Viaduct and Inness’s
Delaware Water Gap (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) the train
takes as much prominence as it will generally be given, but even here it is far
away, its sound blending—as does the image—into more bucolic murmurs.
Often in such pictures the locomotives emit plumes of smoke and steam
that mingle with the clouds. Such a blend of man-made and natural vapors
suggests several interpretations. First, that the steam cloud has been ab-
sorbed by the larger modality of nature per se, just as smoke and steam
dispel into clear air. As part of the transcendental whole the artists wished
to preserve, it requires no more accent or isolation than a distant tree or
pool. It might indeed, should we pursue this interpretation, signify the sym-
bolic fusion of man and nature through Mind—secular invention subsumed
148 part three

into the larger creation, as the fuliginous emblem of power grazes mildly
through the landscape.
In a convincing thesis eloquently put forward by Kenneth Maddox, the
train becomes part of a landscape tradition of the pastoral which is “predi-
cated . . . upon the clearing and cultivation of the American wilderness—an
ideal that temporarily combines both nature and civilization, yet which is
finally destined to be transformed into an American art distinguished by its
machine and technological forms.”37 Such a thesis properly assumes that an
artistic convention is a closed system that repels whatever disturbs its pre-
mises. In art we have a fascinating history of technological inventions pre-
senting art conventions with no option but to exclude them. The automobile
in twentieth-century art provided one such example. There were few effec-
tive ways of including it within an existing realist convention until the ap-
pearance of American pop art. That in itself indicates a need for a fuller
understanding of the relationship between high and popular art. In the Ameri-
can prints—the popular form of the nineteenth century—contemporary with
the paintings, the train receives full foreground examination. The prints were a
form of reportage: this is how this new beast looked. The rhetoric of its pres-
ence was signified by the point of view—how large it bulked—and the sense of
modernity and power conveyed as it lay there quietly smoking or shuddering.
But according to Maddox’s premise a powerful pastoral convention could
allow the train to enter the painting only on that convention’s terms.
Indeed, Maddox’s researches give us a paradoxical insight. He has recog-
nized hosts of trains where one previously did not know they existed. Are
we then not dealing with a matter of camouflage as much as announce-
ment? Can we speculate, to amplify his thesis, that there are other forces
keeping the train at a distance, as well as—through a very American sense
of veracity and conscience—forcing it at least into the picture? Its presence,
absence, or placement was, we may be sure, not just a matter of an exclusive
artistic convention alone. It partook of the larger issues of conscience wherein
the artists balanced their responsibilities toward Creation and the machine,
toward the primeval and the cultivated, toward God and man. Certainly the
verbal rhetoric and the visual evidence seem out of kilter and it seems ap-
propriate to ask why.
The artists’ reluctance to recognize the dynamic importance of smoke
and locomotive could, as noted, be interpreted as a desire to tailor the ma-
 Man’s Traces: Axe, Train, Figure 149

chine and its effects to the pastoral dream. It could also be seen as an un-
willingness to deal with this new man-made reality. Certain guilts and re-
pugnancies were surely attached to the desecration of nature for the sake of
“human” civilization.
The American landscapists, whose ideality so often emerged out of the
specific, may have found themselves facing implications which were almost
impossible for them to absorb and accept. The integrity of the artistic con-
vention may have been augmented by a sense that the train was profoundly
antagonistic to the landscape before their eyes.
So it is with a shock that we find a train forcing its way toward us out of
the middle distance to become the main protagonist in George Inness’s
Lackawanna Valley (1855; plate 13). This is one of the most puzzling pictures
in American art, as well as one that aptly embodies the moment of juncture
between nature and civilization. To the left are tall, graceful trees, placed
precisely where Claudian convention dictates, complete with reclining fig-
ure, and symbolizing the pastoral mode. But the busily smoking locomo-
tive approaching from the right center suggests that the elegiac mood is
transitory, if not illusory. The foreground is scattered with the stumps of
trees, to a degree that gives the picture a somewhat “documentary” look.
Marx still finds enough of the pastoral here to speak of the “industrialized
version of the pastoral ideal.”38 Yet some of the shock of this picture—and it
is, I think, a shocking picture—is due to the fact that the pastoral idea has
been so rudely treated. In Durand’s ambitious Progress (fig. 8.4), painted
two years earlier, the accommodation, while not fully convincing, is less
abrupt. On the left of that picture are vestiges of the picturesque—a storm-
ravaged tree, and even Indians, emblems of the “old nature.” New nature, at
the right, is the Garden in which the puffs of smoke from steamboats, build-
ings, and a locomotive inoffensively announce the age of progress. The bal-
anced reconciliation of nature and culture seems to have been achieved.
Durand includes few of the wounds, such as the stump, necessary to achieve
the happy balance he presents.
How did Inness feel about his subject? What does The Lackawanna Valley
tell us about the artist’s attitude toward one of the most pressing issues of
his day, especially since this is among the few landscape paintings that forces
the issue? Here we encounter difficulties. Inness, who started as a Hudson
River artist, was in fact by instinct and equipment a generation in the fu-
ture. He was a unique figure, not of the party of “nature” as the Hudson
150 part three

8.4 Asher Brown Durand, Progress, 1853. Oil on canvas, 48 × 7115/16 in. (121.9 × 444.7 cm.).
Tuscaloosa, Ala., The Westervelt-Warner Collection of Gulf States Paper Corporation.

River painters understood it. The picture is also unique in his work. Al-
though he included trains several times in other paintings, the train never
was so prominent in his work again. The reason the picture was painted at
all removes some, but not all, of our questions. A commission from the
Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad, it can be seen as a celebra-
tion of the age of steam in its conquest of time and space. We may be sure
that that is the way the executives of the railroad saw it.
Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., who has conducted the most meticulous examina-
tion of this picture and issue, tends to stress the optimistic accommodation
of Inness’s painting: “Inness does not condemn but rather condones, even
glorifies, the situation he represents.” Inness’s feelings, Cikovsky notes, “are
directly opposed to one of the central concerns of the Hudson River School—
the pictorial hymning of America’s purity and power through wilderness
landscape. . . .”39 Lackawanna Valley “may indeed represent Inness’ declara-
tion of independence from the current conventions (ideological and stylis-
tic) of American landscape painting of the Hudson River School, and be an
 Man’s Traces: Axe, Train, Figure 151

assertion of the modernity of his art, both through the novel artistic means
that he employs, and equally through the glorification of the railroad, a well
understood symbol of progress and ‘the Present.’”40 Maddox finds the pic-
ture “a ‘classic’ solution to Leo Marx’s definition of the ‘middle landscape’
ideal,” and suggests that Inness renounced “the wilderness mystique for the
cultivated landscape.”41
I think Cikovsky and Maddox are both correct in their interpretation of
the picture, but my instinct is to modify slightly the painting’s optimistic
reading. As I understand Cikovsky’s comments, Inness emphasizes the power
and energy of the machine in a way his colleagues would not have done.
However, not only the prominent presence of the train but the stumps in
the foreground42 lead me to suspect some ambiguity in Inness’s attitude
toward the progress he depicts. Of all the landscape artists (for the most
part totally innocent of irony) he is perhaps the only one who might have
entertained it. Though Inness was of the same generation as Church, Cropsey,
and Gifford, he grew quickly into a personal style nourished by Barbizon.
Indeed Lackawanna Valley was painted the year after his first visit to Paris.
The painting, as Cikovsky suggests, belongs to a very different sensibility
and expressive intent than that of his Hudson River contemporaries. The
picture’s interpretation remains open, and it is impossible to read it “cor-
rectly.” It is a singular and somewhat mysterious picture. It underlines the
dangers of reading “intention,” particularly when our attitudes to the ma-
chine and nature have suffered such radical alterations.

Though generally the artists did not look closely at the train, confining it to
the middle and far distance, they quickly used it as a moving platform from
which to inspect the landscape. Judging from Dickens’s American Notes
(1842), the early conditions were far from perfect: “There is a great deal of
jolting, a great deal of noise, a great deal of wall, not much window, a loco-
motive engine, a shriek, and a bell. The cars are like shabby omnibuses, but
larger: holding thirty, forty, fifty people. The seats, instead of stretching from
end to end, are placed crosswise. . . . In the center of the carriage there is
usually a stove, fed with charcoal or anthracite coal; which is for the most
part red-hot. It is insufferably close; and you see the hot air fluttering be-
tween yourself and any other object you may happen to look at, like the
ghost of smoke. . . .”43
152 part three

But whatever their feelings about the destruction of nature, the artists,
writers, and photographers were readily seduced by the railroads offering
excursions, such as the one on the Baltimore and Ohio in June 1858, which
presented, in five days from Baltimore to Wheeling, an opportunity to col-
lect picturesque views. A contemporary description noted: “Latterly, steam
and the fine arts have scraped acquaintance. The real and the ideal have
smoked pipes together. The iron horse and Pegasus have trotted side by side
in double harness, puffing in unison, like a well-trained pair. What will be
the result of this conjunction Heaven knows. We believe it marks the
commencement of a new era in human progress. . . .”44
It was not uncommon during this period for artists to ride outside on the
engine cab and from this precarious perch to sketch the passing countryside.
Though some of the Hudson River men braved the discomforts of pre-railroad
travel to the western reaches of the continent, as did the artists who accompa-
nied the early expeditions and the Pacific Railroad Reports, the railroad made
later trips by the same and other artists much more comfortable.
Bierstadt, of course, first traveled west with Lander’s expedition in 1859;
he did his 1863 trip with Ludlow partly by rail, at the railroad’s expense,45
and returned west by rail in 1871 and in the 1880’s. Whittredge, having spent
his youth in Ohio, went further west in 1866 by horseback, but traveled by
railroad in 1870 and possibly in 1871. Kensett went west in 1854, partly by rail
in 1857, and again by rail in 1868 and 1870. Sanford Gifford went by rail in
1870 with Kensett and Whittredge and again in 1874. Samuel Colman made
his first trip west by rail in 1870, possibly again the following year, in 1886,
1888, and between 1898 and 1905.46 Whitman, typically embracing the ma-
chine as part of his larger encompassment of world, went west by rail in
1879 and commented on “the distances joined like magic.”47 Like Tuckerman,
earlier, he found zest in adventure, remarking on the “element of danger”
which was still felt, even by those more insulated from landscape and Indi-
ans by the Iron Horse.
Some of that danger was recorded in paintings which dealt with life on
the frontier, such as Theodor Kauffman’s Railway Train Attacked by Indians
(1867; private collection). And the popular printmakers, as we have said,
took great delight in limning the locomotive, giving it that visibility not
generally found in the landscape paintings (Across the Continent: “West-
ward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way”). But the most exciting visual en-
counters with the railroad were those that took place through the mediation
 Man’s Traces: Axe, Train, Figure 153

of yet another machine—the camera. The photographer, having already

accommodated one machine within his artistic practice, had much less diffi-
culty than the painters in accommodating still another.
Photography first entered the western terrains when the powerful es-
thetic system that had sustained the vision of nature was at its apogee in the
mid 1860’s. Through the seventies and eighties, while that system was col-
lapsing, the photographers roamed the western territories with remarkable
results; their work sometimes triumphantly sustained the conventions of
the picturesque, at other times escaped them, as extraordinary data pushed
into their pictures with pragmatic authority. So a major function of the
artist was taken over by the photographer—the provider of authentic evi-
dence. Armed with the machine, their work stamped with its imprimatur,
the artist-photographers confirmed the existence of the fantastic and of
themselves as the agents of its transfer. The truth of the photographic image
was one of its most durable conventions and that truth was accepted as an
article of faith by the photographers themselves and by their public.
As witnesses, their primary role was to document man’s progress into
the wilderness. Here, the railroads that often hired them offered the most
plangent evidence. The laying down of the tracks forced an intimate and
incremental knowledge of the terrain; length by length, the tracks surveyed
the wilderness, progress also clocked by wooden sleeper after sleeper laid
across them. This grid-like ladder burrowed through tunnels, cut through
sidings, leaped across chasms, toiled up gradients and slid triumphantly
down. In the photographs, the tracks documented the powers of civiliza-
tion, their geometries projecting the infinite resources of Mind.
By the time A. J. Russell recorded the historic Driving of the Golden Spike
at Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869, which united the Atlantic and Pacific
coasts through the joining of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific rail-
roads, the landscape photographers had amassed an impressive amount of
evidence. They functioned either as railroad employees like Russell and
Gardner, who worked for the Union Pacific, or initially as speculators, like
Jackson, Muybridge, and Watkins, who hoped to benefit from the public
interest in the new landscape. Some of the master photographers of the
period—Jackson, Watkins, O’Sullivan, Muybridge—ultimately became cru-
cial members of the big government surveys of the late 1860’s and ’70’s. The
results of their efforts are now acknowledged as major contributions to the
visual arts in the nineteenth century.
154 part three

Why has it taken so long to acknowledge this contribution? Perhaps part

of the answer resides in the nature of the medium itself. As I have specu-
lated elsewhere:

For those of us trained on paintings, the never-touched surface of the photo-

graph is elusively impersonal; its smooth tonality baffles our usual anxious
readings. The image has a factual lucidity that holds the surface. This instru-
ment [the camera], with its new “truth,” in many ways fulfilled a mid-19th-
century injunction against “manner.” Subject to the same proscriptions as
painting, narrowly bounded on the one side by manner and on the other by
the “merely mechanical,” photography complied with the necessities of
contemporary esthetics even as it transformed them. This transformation
took place well within the context of contemporary nature attitudes.

In dealing with the raw landscape, the photographers often produced

photographs that can be seen in terms of painterly conventions. The inter-
changes between Bierstadt, Watkins, and Muybridge, Jackson, Moran, and
Gifford require a study in themselves. Watkins particularly resuscitated the
Claudian sublime, by literally finding it. Again and again, however, in a dia-
lectic now familiar to us, the photographers also pursue and represent si-
lence, the iconography of which is equally familiar.48
But photography has also provided us with an unusual opportunity to
study the railroad and its tracks—a closer view than the painters generally
allow us. In Opening of the Wilderness (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), T. P.
Rossiter focuses on five engines at rest, their cowcatchers spread elegantly
in front of them like fans, the plumes of smoke like those of cavalry charg-
ers. It is a daring attempt by a painter to bring the powerful new giants into
the pastoral clearing. To contemporary eyes, it must have incarnated the
energy of progress itself: the new architecture of the round-house, the stumps
testifying to fallen and consumed natural “monarchs.” Such a picture must
have been replete with the rhetoric of the “technological sublime.” There is
something Wagnerian about this armored grouping in the forest, more than
a hint of an inevitable future purchased at an unknown price.
But such moments are rarely given to the painters, whose closer views gen-
erally confine themselves to variations on the theme of the pastoral watcher
studying the distant train, as in Robert Havell, Jr.’s Two Artists in a Landscape
(Cooperstown, New York State Historical Association). Here, the train moves
laterally toward the left to what is apparently a waiting station, while a horse
and cart point—in a too easily offered metaphor—in the opposite direction.
 Man’s Traces: Axe, Train, Figure 155

What a shock it is to come upon Jackson’s photograph, Cañon of the Rio

Las Animas (fig. 8.5), where we ourselves replace the pastoral watcher, our
gaze now turned abruptly upwards to where the train, snaking through the
rock, suggests the mineral identities of both. The point of view is rare in
painting. We are conscious of being too close to the cliff above, of having to
strain our gaze upward. We are, in fact, “in the picture,” and aware of the
struggle of the photographer to reach this site. The elevated train, in itself
awesome, sends up mists of smoke that masquerade as natural atmosphere,
partly consummating that fusion of the natural and the man-made sug-
gested by rock and train.
More frequently, the photographs deal with the tracks. The tracks of course
prompt fascinating speculations about the actual measurement of the land-
scape, as distinct from the conceptual biases of those who painted it. Such mea-
surement in itself actualizes the painter’s attempt at possessing the landscape.

8.5 William Henry Jackson, Cañon of the Rio las Animas. Mammoth prints of Colorado and
Wyoming, 1875?–85? Albumen print (P. 1077). New York, The New York Public Library.
156 part three

The tracks remind us of a whole culture’s desire for certainty through mea-
surement and statistics, illustrated by the figure of Thoreau measuring snow
each morning at either side of the railroad tracks. By charting infinity, the
tracks give it its finite end-point.
That end-point often appeared on the horizon of the landscape photo-
graphs (Watkins’s Cape Horn, Oregon). The tracks may or may not stand
for Emerson’s idea of “a railway journey in the direction of nature.”49 For
the oblique perspectives into the American distance seem nothing so much
as man-made, even art-like, as they mimic a mensurational perspective go-
ing back at least as far as Alberti. The horizontal railroad ties (Carbutt’s
Westward the Monarch) set up rhythmic progressions that function for the
photographers as the planar “steps” had functioned for the luminist classi-
cists. Yet no matter how classic the landscape in which they appear, they
seem extra-natural. The axe represented subtraction, and left behind the
vestigial trace of action—the stump. The tracks are an addition, spanning
the spaces with shockingly regular geometry, stamping man’s orderly con-
trol on the wilderness as much as if he had laid down a ruler. Yet that con-
trol is as double-edged as the axe. It accelerates time and telescopes distance;
it relieves the danger and tediousness of protracted travel, making settle-
ment easier. But it also carries within it, literally and figuratively, the germs
of “culture.”
Thus the scaling and location of the figure in relation to the landscape
and track take on special meaning. In Russell’s Granite Cañon from the Wa-
ter Tank, the specks of figures are spatial coordinates and little else. The
tracks, the result of the ant-like industry of these distant creatures, mark
out a sublimely vast distance, demonstrating the role of communal Mind in
dominating nature. One is not sure from this photograph, where space is
the controlling factor, that the domination is fully effective. But the tracks
hold their space more firmly than the figures, which seem fragile enough to
roll down the inclines and be absorbed by the sliding stones. Man as part of
nature’s processes here shares its organic fragility. But his product is less
vulnerable. Its geometry courts absolute time.
In other photographs the figures assume rueful, ironic significance. Some-
times isolated as a measurement, the figure in the landscape often turns, for
the first time, to the spectator, returning the camera’s gaze, its posture ex-
pressing awareness that it is no more than a unit of measure, a stick to give
scale, yet also aware that it is a living stick. This slight self-consciousness in-
 Man’s Traces: Axe, Train, Figure 157

habiting a unit of measure is enhanced by its attraction to the lodestone of

the camera, the universal donor of consciousness to self. We recall the figures
in the luminist landscapes, similarly situated by the artist for similar func-
tions, but always absorbed in the hush of their surroundings, unaware of the
painter whose slow process takes place far from where the figure sits or stands.
Often alone in the vast spaces where, as Whitman would have it, even the
“statistics are sublime,” the figure beside the track (as in Russell’s Malloy’s Cut,
fig. 8.6) seems also caught between natural and man-made forces. The track
is an active agent of the transformation of nature into culture. Such figures
often seem contemplative. They join with others in photographs in which the
figure is set simply in natural surroundings. The solitary meditative figure is
the literal trace of man’s presence in nature, and a primary unit of nineteenth-
century iconography. We would do well, then, to consider this figure as it
presents itself in the paintings and photographs of the period.

8.6 Andrew J. Russell, Malloy’s Cut Near Sherman. New Haven, Conn., Yale University,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
158 part three

Figure
Rarely a major protagonist in American landscape, the figure is more often
engulfed in space, and sometimes absent. In Europe the figure in the land-
scape bulks larger than in America. One hesitates to stress this, because the
difference (which also varies from country to country in Europe) is small.
Yet even minute differences register something about the cultural attitudes
to man and nature in Europe and America.
In some of Friedrich’s landscapes, as in some of Lane’s, the figure, its
back to the spectator, contemplates the landscape. Occasionally the scale of
the figure is very close to that of American works (compare Friedrich’s sepia
drawing Landscape at Sunrise [fig. 8.7], or his Seashore with Fisherman [Kunst-
historisches Museum, Vienna] and Lane’s Owl’s Head, Penobscot Bay [fig.
8.8]). There are provocative affinities between these horizontal composi-
tions with figures on a darkened ground contemplating distances filled with
light (Lane) or mist (Friedrich). The figures are scaled to be at one with
nature, hinting at an ideal harmony.
The turned back—a major nineteenth-century motif—can, as in these
examples, act as a surrogate inviting the spectator into the picture. It can
also shut him out. Sometimes in Friedrich’s work the figure enlarges to a
point where it begins to occlude nature. Rather than inviting passage into
deep space, the figure begins to seal it off. Man becomes far more important
than nature. In Friedrich’s Wanderer over the Sea of Mist, the change in scale
switches contemplation into alienation, so that the mist pouring through
the mountain passes below now signifies an abyss of separation.
In America, the figure rarely reaches the scale where the individual psyche
can displace the transcendental void. The individual remains absorbed in
and by nature. Even when the figures are larger than usual, as in Kindred
Spirits (plate 4), Durand’s posthumous tribute to Cole, showing Cole and
the poet Bryant contemplating nature, the spectator is not excluded. He
becomes a third party to their discourse. The figures of Cole and Bryant are
not as large—relative to nature—as those in Friedrich’s Two Men Observ-
ing the Moon (fig. 8.9). The Americans contemplate a sublime gorge, filled
with light, each detail of rock and tree carefully limned—the perfect exem-
plar of the American negotiation between the real and the ideal. In the
more overtly romantic Friedrich, vestiges of pictorial anthropomorphism
animate the roots and branches of the tree. The ambience is less “real” on
 Man’s Traces: Axe, Train, Figure 159

8.7 Caspar David Friedrich, Landscape at Sunrise, undated. Brown ink drawing, 43/4 × 7 in.
(11.9 × 17.8 cm.). Weimar, Germany, Nationale Forschungs- und Gedenkstätten der
klassischen deutschen Literatur in Weimar.

8.8 Fitz H. Lane, Owl’s Head, Penobscot Bay, Maine, 1862. Oil on canvas, 153/4 × 261/8 in. (40
× 66.4 cm.). Boston, Museum of Fine Arts.
160 part three

8.9 Caspar David Friedrich, Two Men Observing the Moon, 1819–20. Oil on canvas, 133/4 ×
171/2 in. (35 × 44.5 cm.). Dresden, Germany, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden,
Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister.

many levels; details are more generalized, the painting flatter, less spatially
dense, and more abstract in execution.
Though both pictures are probably specific portraits, Friedrich’s figures
are identifiable only in the physiognomies of their backs. The protagonists
in the Durand are fully recognizable. But their individuality does not sepa-
rate them from nature. Friedrich’s onlookers, on the other hand, gaze at the
moon as if from a box in the theater. This separation approaches alienation
again, and also belies easy assumptions about the “romanticism” of such a
picture—that man and nature are “one.” Worringer once commented that
the northern temperament annihilates the individual through mysticism at
the same moment that it claims its individuality.50 Both elements co-exist
in Friedrich’s oeuvre. There are instances when—as in many American
 Man’s Traces: Axe, Train, Figure 161

luminist works—Friedrich seems to contain man and nature in one tran-

scendental arc. But he also frequently points toward that other direction which
emphasizes rather than erases the self, perhaps a prelude to the alienations—
from nature and self—of the expressionist psyche.
The famous American individualism rarely extended itself during this
period into the impractical realms of alienation. As usual, Emerson could
be depended on to soothe the disruptions of individuality with a general-
ized idea: “It seems to be true that the more exclusively idiosyncratic a man
is, the more general and infinite he is, which, though it may not be a very
intelligible expression, means, I hope, something intelligible.”51 This is an-
other facet of the age’s ingenuity in keeping traffic moving positively be-
tween the real and the ideal; Cole and Bryant are in dialogue not only with
each other as kindred spirits, but with each other through the equally kin-
dred spirit of nature itself. No picture states more clearly the ideal conso-
nance between man and nature. With the increase in alienation at the end
of the century, both nature and the individual psyche, now out of gear with
each other and themselves, mutate into disrupted fragments.
The specificity of Durand’s nature conversation piece is, however, an ex-
ception in American landscape painting; usually the figure is only a discreet
reflex of a larger idea. On the rare occasions when that figure appears, its
pedigree refers readily back to the tiny figure, dwarfed by nature, respect-
fully inhabiting the engines of the eighteenth-century sublime and pictur-
esque. (Beyond this figure lie the pastoral acres of Claude and occasionally
Poussin; beside these, a tradition of the landscape occupied by genre figures
[Le Nain]. Further back are the crowds of Altdorfer and Bruegel and the great
example of Giorgione, where figures and landscape seem exhaled in a single
inspired breath. All these, and hosts of others, can be read as signifying the
terms by which an age defines its tenancy in the world, and all are direct or
indirect ancestors of the figures that inhabit the American wilderness.)
But it is the small figure ubiquitous in European—particularly English—
painting of the eighteenth century that emigrates into American painting
in the early decades of the nineteenth century. There it maintains its size
and scale until after one of the great disruptions of the national psyche—
the Civil War, which, coinciding with the advent of Darwinian science, the
spread of technology, and a new internationalism, altered irrevocably the
conditions sustaining that figure’s dialectical relationship with nature.
162 part three

We can “read” the American landscape first in terms of the presence or

absence of the figure. Its absence in American landscape has a more loaded
meaning than in Europe. Bierstadt’s scene of uninhabited nature, i.e., Lander’s
Peak (plate 3), penetrates what Ludlow called nature’s “sacred closet.” Man
has not yet entered Eden. Sublimity belongs only to God. We know that the
idea of Creation—of a primal and untouched nature—had an immense
resonance for the American psyche. The uninhabited landscape amplifies
this thought. The spectator, with no surrogate to license his entry into the
picture, is all eyes, and the virgin space suggests that looking is a spiritual
act composed of wonder and purification. (One type of figure can be intro-
duced into this landscape without disrupting this—the Indian, who, as a
function of nature, symbolizes its unexplored state. The Indians in Bierstadt’s
landscapes represent nature, not culture. Like the forests, the Indian exists
in a state of nature, before he is cut down. His tenancy as a natural citizen is
premised on his inseparability from nature. When separated, he dies.)
In Church’s large tropical paintings, like Heart of the Andes (fig. 2.3), the
figures are hidden, like animalcules, in recesses in the foreground or middle
distance—self-absorbed, conscious of the immediate surroundings which
we see above and beyond. The empathetic observer, isolating them with
opera glasses or rolled paper, could for a moment gain a distant intimacy
with their tasks.
Though enveloped by the theatrical drama, these figures never actually
drown in it. Church sets up paths for them to walk on, crosses for them to
worship at. Somehow undaunted by the sublime terribilità, they inch along
the paths of still-primeval nature, indeed walk all over it. As they explore
within the picture, they encounter nature as “spectacle” in much the same
way that we ourselves are called to witness Church’s “exalted nature.” When
set apart from the natural drama, as in Rainy Season in the Tropics, where
tiny figures traverse a darkened path in the lower right corner, they are not
alienated from it, as Friedrich’s separated figures so frequently are. Their
active presence reinforces the anthropomorphic aspect of Church’s tran-
scendentalism. By not fully surrendering their humanity to nature’s do-
minion, they are more divisible from the natural furniture than are the
luminist figures, which often become a function of matter.
In a less dramatic way, many of the Hudson River men, including Church
and Bierstadt on occasion, established the small figure in the landscape as a
comfortable pastoral inhabitant. The Garden is already cultivated in Church’s
 Man’s Traces: Axe, Train, Figure 163

early New England Scenery (1851; George W. V. Smith Museum, Springfield,

Mass.), as the figure follows a covered wagon across a foreground bridge.
Two years earlier, in a similar composition (Haying near New Haven), the
foreground is occupied by a hayfield, in which farmers perform their ap-
propriate tasks. One has a sense of specific roles available within the larger
natural dramas these figures witness or are indifferent to. Busy or at rest,
assuming the postures of the mundane and everyday, the figures in these
early works sometimes meet in small groups of a rudimentary social na-
ture. More than in Church’s tropical scenes, these figures (set apart formally
and symbolically by planar distinctions) maintain a distance from nature:
this allows for a more purposeful activity within nature, diminishing tran-
scendental unities in favor of what we might call a middle phase of recon-
ciliation between man and nature. The Garden is already acculturated to
the point where it presents fewer problems to its human inhabitants, who
stroll casually through the landscape or work with unconscious absorption
at daily tasks, as in Durand’s Haying or Cropsey’s American Harvesting. Like
their Claudian models, the pastoral pictures, whether by Church, Bierstadt,
Cole, Cropsey, or Durand, develop this facility of relationship between figure
and landscape. Thomas Doughty was perhaps the earliest to set this tone,
though he maintained the earlier picturesque scale.
Yet in Doughty also we encounter the thematic motif of the figure in the
landscape that I find most tantalizing: the single figure, engaged in some
sort of meditative dialogue with nature, “whose back makes us conscious of
our own.”52 In paintings like Romantic Landscape with a Temple or In Nature’s
Wonderland (The Detroit Institute of Arts), this figure—though often dwarfed
by nature—firmly holds his place. We find this figure in the nature paint-
ings of many Hudson River men (throughout Doughty’s work, in Durand’s
Early Morning at Cold Spring, occasionally in Cole): yet it is a more frequent
motif in the art of luminist painters such as Lane and Heade, fortifying the
contemplative silence that characterizes the works themselves.
Like their Hudson River colleagues, Lane and Heade sometimes put their
figures to work—haying, setting out to sea, fixing boats. Yet the relationship
of these figures to a nature which is neither sublimely awesome nor bo-
vinely pastoral is different. The paintings are often scaled down to the small
figure. The solitary figure, especially, operates as a spatial coordinate, often
becoming as much a part of nature as the trees and rocks, which join with it
in a harmonious unity devoted to maintaining geometric and Newtonian
164 part three

absolutes. This formal unity between figure and elemental nature corre-
sponds to a philosophical unity—more often established here than in other
landscape paintings of the period. Man here is “part or parcel of God” and,
correlatively, of His nature.
Often such figures are far away, totally absorbed, beyond hailing distance.
The middle-distance figure in Heade’s Stranded Boat (plate 14) does not move
or take action; it relates solely to the general mood of stillness and absorption.
The atmospheric clarity in most luminist paintings suggests that sounds would
carry, as they do in real landscape. Yet the figures in luminist paintings do not
make a sound. Rather, they augment the silence. From Church’s distant fig-
ures come the tinkle of mule bells, far cries, and shouts. The luminist figure,
consonant with the quietistic mood, is unconscious of itself, and of us. It
meditates inwardly, and the landscape meditates through it. It seems a func-
tion of a single idea—embracing water, rock, figure, twig, etc., with that single
“bell jar” mood. In such primary luminist images as Owl’s Head, Penobscot
Bay (fig. 8.8), we are indeed aware of our own backs, watching ourselves
through a surrogate absorbed in the transcendental vision.
Such figures appear again, as suggested earlier, in the western landscape
photographs of the 1870’s, though from somewhat different needs and pre-
mises. The photographs, in fact, rehearse these two options: the tiny figure
dwarfed by awe as the last outpost of sublimity is opened up, or conversely,
standing motionless against a sheet of light, of water or sky, in a way that
echoes luminist painting.
The photographs make more frequent use of the silhouette technique to
focus on man’s presence. We may speculate whether this is related to the actu-
ality of the photographic situation. Whatever the reason, the photographer
has less control over reality than his painter colleagues, who can adjust it
according to their ideal needs. Man is there, in nature, and his thereness, some-
times more obvious in the photographs than in the paintings, is in the nature
of irrefutable evidence. On occasion, as in Russell’s Skull Rock, the small fig-
ures in the foreground melt deliberately into the stones, while allowing their
companion to pose at the pinnacle of the rock like a pyramid builder who has
reached the top. As in Jackson’s photograph of the train snaking through the
mountains, there is some desire for chameleon-like unobtrusiveness.
More often, however, we are conscious of these figures. The contemplative
figure is a striking motif, engrossed in luminist quietude as in Jackson’s
View on the Sweetwater (fig. 8.10). As in luminism, neither man nor nature
 Man’s Traces: Axe, Train, Figure 165

8.10 William Henry Jackson, View of the Sweetwater, the Twin Peaks, camp at middle dis-
tance, 1870. Photograph, 71/4 × 41/4 in. (18.4 × 10.8 cm.). Philadelphia, The Academy of
Natural Sciences, Ewell Sale Stewart Library.

assumes dominance. If such figures are contemplating nature, what may we

assume their contemplation means?
The contemplation of nature in the American nineteenth century re-
quires a volume of its own. To contemplate is “to consider with continued
attention; meditate on; study.” Its synonyms are “behold, observe, ponder.”
Meditation on nature in the nineteenth century was a recognized avenue to
the center of being. The very act of observing nature was virtuous, because
nature conveyed a “thought which . . . is good.”53 “Looking” became an act
of devotion. The morally correct beholder partook not only of Nature’s
goodness but of Deity. Emerson said: “The ruin or the blank that we see
when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis of vision is not coinci-
dent with the axis of things, and so they appear not transparent but opaque.
The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is be-
cause man is disunited with himself. He cannot be a naturalist until he
satisfies all the demands of the spirit. Love is as much its demand as percep-
tion. Indeed, neither can be perfect without the other. In the uttermost
meaning of the words, thought is devout and devotion is thought. . . .”
166 part three

Emerson further tried to define the correct moral posture: “There are inno-
cent men who worship God after the tradition of their fathers, but their
sense of duty has not yet extended to the use of all their faculties. And there
are patient naturalists, but they freeze their subject under the wintry light
of the understanding. Is not prayer also a study of truth—a sally of the soul
into the unfound infinite?”54
The Emersonian unity of man and nature involved also the recognition
of the unity of mind, God, and nature, and their relation to history:

Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely that the mind is One,
and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.
Thus in all ways does the soul concentrate and reproduce its treasures for
each pupil. He too shall pass through the whole cycle of experience. He shall
collect into a focus the rays of nature. History no longer shall be a dull book.
It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. . . . what does history yet
record of the metaphysical annals of man? What light does it shed on those
mysteries which we hide under the names Death and Immortality? Yet every
history should be written in a wisdom which divined the range of our affini-
ties and looked at facts as symbols.55

Thus, for Emerson, the individual could thrust mind into nature and be-
come history incarnate. Emerson premised total unity: “the unity in variety—
which meets us everywhere. All the endless variety of things make an identical
impression. . . . A leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time, is related to the
whole and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a micro-
cosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.”56
The Emersonian unity is perhaps best epitomized by the famous trans-
parent eyeball metaphor.57 Meditation, defined here as musing, pondering,
solemnly reflecting on sacred matters as a devotional act, was perhaps the
best route to this mystical surrender of self. Thoreau felt it too:
If with closed ears and eyes I consult consciousness for a moment, immedi-
ately are all walls and barriers dissipated, earth rolls from under me, and I
float, by the impetus derived from the earth and the system, a subjective,
heavily laden thought in the midst of an unknown and infinite sea, or else
heave and swell like a vast ocean of thought, without rock or headland, where
are all riddles solved, all straight lines making their two ends to meet, eter-
nity and space gambolling familiarly through my depths. I am from the be-
ginning, knowing no end, no aim. No sun illumines me, for I dissolve all
lesser lights in my own intenser and steadier light. I am a restful kernel in the
magazine of the universe.58

This meditative surrender of self is most often conveyed by the luminist

paintings in which, indeed, all straight lines evoke an eternity of which the
 Man’s Traces: Axe, Train, Figure 167

figure, itself the embodiment of thought or Mind, partakes. In the frequent

absence of such figures, we, the viewers, assume this role.
Yet the figures, when present, demand to be “read” in the light of con-
temporary nature attitudes. When, for example, we encounter the small fig-
ures walking through the sublime South American vistas of Church, we are
reminded of Whitman’s idea of “Nature, true Nature, and the true idea of
Nature, long absent,” which “must, above all, become fully restored . . . the
whole orb, with its geologic history, the cosmos, carrying fire and snow,
that rolls through the illimitable areas, light as a feather, though weighing
billions of tons.”59 Such figures not only reinforce attitudes to science, De-
ity, cosmology, and morality. They are themselves insertions of culture into
nature. We might see them, as we have, as part of nature, and even, within
the meditative framework of transcendentalism, as involved in a mystical
surrender of self to nature as God. But they can also be seen at times as
intruders in the Garden of Creation, man bringing with him into “unde-
filed” nature, the structure designed for his survival.
There is here some of the moral blindness already signaled by the ico-
nography of the stump and locomotive. It has to do with the optimism of what
we may call the age of Emerson. All things of earth—man-made, nature-
derived, or natural—are part of God and partake of His essential goodness.
There is no evil. Where has it gone? To find it, we have to move to the litera-
ture of the era, but even here there are paradoxes. Those who try with diffi-
culty to relate Melville to this moment might do better to recognize his
essential anachronism. Melville himself gave us the clue in writing of
Hawthorne: “Certain it is . . . that this great power of blackness in him de-
rives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity
and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply
thinking mind is always and wholly free.”60 Melville can be placed earlier
than his age, or later, but his attitude to sin and evil makes him hard to fix in
mid-nineteenth-century America, just as Poe and even to some extent
Hawthorne are. They relate to one another, and to certain aspects of Ameri-
can and European thought. But the glare of mid-century American opti-
mism throws their shadows in odd directions. If this optimism begins to seem
too undiluted to be totally true, it still had its undaunted celebrators. Poe,
Hawthorne, and Melville offered correctives to it within the literature of their
time. As I have said, they had few parallels in contemporary American paint-
ing. Melville’s sensibility in Moby Dick more readily meets our comments on
168 part three

Friedrich than it does that of any American painter. Melville wrote of the
young Platonist on the masthead who has been “lulled” by the sea

into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie . . . that at

last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible im-
age of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature. . . . In
this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes dif-
fused through time and space; like Crammer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes,
forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.
There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently
rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable
tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand
an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over
Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather,
with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the
summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!61

This fear is compounded of a heavier dose of realism than transcen-

dentalism allowed. The selfless dream could turn into the pragmatic night-
mare of individual identity. The deadly danger of nature also is recognized
in a way largely foreign to American painters. In a perceptive essay on Ameri-
can literary history, Stanley Bank has commented: “The total irony of
Melville’s sadly neglected Pierre is that in America’s seeming innocence there
is as much crime and depravity as could be found in any world, that Ameri-
can innocence lies in not recognizing evil rather than in not participating
in it.”62
Nature’s wonder, nature’s majesty, nature’s sublime power, nature’s em-
bodiment of Deity were contemplated by the small meditating figures in
these landscapes without much recognition either of nature’s negative as-
pects or of the destructive potential of the “culture” symbolized by the ac-
tion of the axe, the locomotive, and the figure of man himself. For the most
part, these unobtrusive symbols are inserted into the landscape paintings
with a discretion that suggests an unwillingness to recognize their hazard-
ous implications. Whitman, perhaps the latest adherent of this attitude, best
personifies it in his person and art:

The axe leaps! . . .

The shapes arise!
Shapes of the using of axes anyhow, and the users
and all that neighbors them, . . .
Shapes of the friends and home-givers of the whole earth,
Shapes bracing the earth, and braced with the whole earth.63
 Man’s Traces: Axe, Train, Figure 169

Whitman could see “over my own continent the Pacific Railroad surmounting
every barrier”64 and discovered that “Man, so diminutive, dilates beyond the
sensible universe, competes with, outcopes space and time, meditating even
one great idea.”65 The poet, says Whitman, “shall go directly to the creation.
. . . Nothing can jar him . . . suffering and darkness cannot—death and fear
cannot. . . . The sea is not surer of the shore or the shore of the sea than he is of
the fruition of his love and of all perfection and beauty.”66 For Whitman, “the
question of Nature, largely considered, involves the questions of the aesthetic,
the emotional, and the religious—and involves happiness.”67
That happiness was implicit in the nature paintings of the nineteenth
century, recording a vulnerable present, offering images of a past we pres-
ently regret, as axe, train, and man only hint at the future to come. The
outlines of that future were blurred by optimism and submerged in the
unconscious assumptions of a chosen people. The responsibilities of the
artist’s estate included sharing generously with the less enlightened and gifted
the great denominator of happiness—America’s nature.
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Part Four


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CHAPTER 9

Arcady Revisited:
Americans in Italy

After he had returned to Rome for the third time, in December 1856, Will-
iam Wetmore Story wrote: “To whatever the hand of man builds, the hand
of Time adds a grace, and nothing is so prosaic as the rawly new” (fig. 9.1).1
Later his biographer, Henry James, wondered: “How can one hope to find
the right word for the sense of rest and leisure that must in olden summers
have awaited here the consenting victims of Italy, among ancient things all
made sweet by their age, and with Nature helping Time very much as a ten-
der, unwearied, ingenious sister waits upon a brother, heavy of limb and dim
of sight, who sits with his back against a sun-warmed wall.”2
In William Wetmore Story and His Friends James found the proper words
to retrieve for the reader the sense of “irrecoverable presences and aspects,
the conscious, shiny, mocking void, sad somehow with excess of serenity”3
that concerned him. For James himself had breathed “the golden air” of
Italy soon enough after Story to share and understand his experience. “There
was,” he wrote, “half a century ago, in the American world in general,
much less to give up, for ‘Europe,’ than there is today, but, such as it was,
Story gave it up all. . . . And I may add that when I speak of the ingenuous
precursor as giving up, I so describe in him but the personal act of ab-
sence. That was often compatible in him, after all, with the absolutely
undiminished possession of the American consciousness. This property
he carried about with him as the Mohammedan pilgrim carries his carpet
for prayer, and the carpet, as I may say, was spread wherever the camp was
pitched.”4
173
174 part four

9.1 John Rollin Tilton, The Campagna, 1862. Oil on canvas, 225/8 × 363/8 in. (57.5 × 92.4
cm.). Boston, Museum of Fine Arts.

The American pilgrim, it seems, rarely left his American consciousness

behind him. Yet he was often willing to become Italy’s “consenting victim.”
What was the nature of this seduction, and why, around the mid-century,
did hundreds of American artists invite it? A seduction implies love, ro-
mance, passion—all words used by the nineteenth-century artists and writ-
ers who succumbed to the charms of Italy. Denis de Rougemont has noted
that passion “means suffering, something undergone, the mastery of fate
over a free and responsible person.”5 He also observes that “European ro-
manticism may be compared to a man for whom sufferings, and especially
the sufferings of love, are a privileged mode of understanding.”6
The artists’ love affair with Italy had this need for an understanding not
possible in the raw New World Story had found prosaic. It was not so much
that Italy was more beautiful than America, but that it was older, a property
not generally considered to enhance seductiveness. But age, when coupled
with cultivation, can be enticing. Italy was, in fact, so replete with the wis-
dom of the ages that it was removed from time. Time, in Italy, must have
seemed universal and mythic. After a sufficient number of histories, after
 Arcady Revisited: Americans in Italy 175

Etruria, ancient Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Baroque,
time underwent a curious compression which was also an infinite exten-
sion. The present was so diminished in importance that it left only the past
and the future, or the past as future.
Thus, Charles Sumner wrote to Story in 1860: “I wish that I were there. I
should like to feast my eyes on an Italian landscape, with glimpses at Italian
art, and to feel that I was in Italy. But life is real, life is earnest—does not
Longfellow say so?—and I have hard work here which I mean to do.”7
One wonders how many of the artists made this distinction between real
life—American life—and Italian life. At the Capitoline Museum, Hawthorne,
glancing out the window of the gallery containing the Faun after Praxiteles,
noted “a vague sense of ponderous remembrances; a perception of such
weight and density in a by-gone life, of which this spot was the centre, that
the present moment is pressed down or crowded out, and our individual
affairs and interests are but half as real here as elsewhere. . . . Side by side
with the massiveness of the Roman Past, all matters that we handle or dream
of nowadays look evanescent and visionary alike.”8
By these standards, Italian life, as experienced by the American, was tanta-
mount to a release from the pressures of life. In an atmosphere of golden
reverie, the spirit could move freely, mortality could be both indulged and
relieved by sentiment, and urgent social and political matters subsumed in a
sense of human perfectibility once accomplished and now lost, in turn set-
ting those pleasant esthetic emotions reverberating through the ancient world.
De Rougemont has observed of courtly love, “Whatever turns into a real-
ity is no longer love.”9 So Italy had to remain either a reality made dream or
a dream made real. In either case, as long as the dream aspect endured the
participant would breathe the “golden air” with unique intoxication. “No
Rome of reality was concerned in our experience . . . ,” wrote James; “the
whole thing was a rare state of the imagination, dosed and drugged, as I
have already indicated, by the effectual Borgia cup, for the taste of which
the simplest as well as the subtlest had a palate.”10
The soul of this dream was art. Thus James continued: “Nothing, verily,
used to strike us more than that people of whom, as we said, we wouldn’t
have expected it, people who had never before shown knowledge, taste, or
sensibility, had here quite knocked under. They haunted Vatican halls and
Palatine gardens; they were detached and passive on the Pincian; they were
176 part four

silent in strange places; the habit of St. Peter’s they clung to as to a vice; the
impression of the Campagna they stopped short in attempting to utter.”11
For Italy itself was a museum of the past. One did not have to visit the
galleries of the Uffizi or the Vatican. Everywhere—whether walking past
the Florentine palazzi or driving on the Roman Campagna—one was inun-
dated with art. The American went from a situation in which art was the
exception to one in which it was commonplace. As James put it, in the words
of Mrs. Hudson, Roderick’s mother: “ ‘To think of art being out there in the
streets!’”12 Referring elsewhere to the “incomparable entertainment of Rome,”
James observed that “almost everything alike, manners, customs, practices,
processes, states of feeling, no less than objects, treasures, relics, ruins, par-
took of the special museum-quality.”13 Whereas the pathetic American ex-
patriate artist in James’s “Madonna of the Future” states:
We’re the disinherited of Art. We’re condemned to be superficial! We’re ex-
cluded from the magic circle! The soil of American perception is a poor little
barren artificial deposit! . . . An American, to excel, has just ten times as much
to learn as a European! . . . We lack the deeper sense! We have neither taste
nor tact nor force! How should we have them? Our crude and garish climate,
our silent past, our deafening present, the constant pressure about us of un-
lovely conditions, are as void of all that nourishes and prompts and inspires
the artist as my sad heart is void of bitterness in saying so! We poor aspirants
must live in perpetual exile.14

Though James’s hero responds, “ ‘You seem fairly at home in exile . . . and
Florence seems to me a very easy Siberia,’”15 the point is well made. One
could argue certain artistic benefits on both sides of the Atlantic, as when
Bryant cautioned Cole, departing for Europe, to keep that “wilder image
bright.” But James put it well when he wrote of the “state of being of the
American who has bitten deep into the apple . . . of ‘Europe’ and then has
been obliged to take his lips from the fruit. . . . The apple of ‘America’ is a
totally different apple, which, however firm and round and ruddy, is not to
be . . . negotiated, as the newspapers say, by the same set of teeth.”16
The apple of Italy was surely, at that moment, more gently yielding to the
tooth. American nature, particularly the ancient unspoiled forests, could
offer accumulated time. But it was not a time mellowed and ennobled by
association. As Cole had noted: “He who stands on Mont Albano and looks
down on ancient Rome, has his mind peopled with the gigantic associa-
tions of the storied past; but he who stands on the mounds of the West, the
most venerable remains of American antiquity, may experience the emo-
 Arcady Revisited: Americans in Italy 177

tion of the sublime, but it is the sublimity of a shoreless ocean un-islanded

by the recorded deeds of man.”17
Noble phrases it acutely: “The great difference between Italian scenery
and all other, with which he was acquainted, lay, with Cole, less in its mate-
rial than in its moral and historic elements. Hitherto he had walked with
nature in her maidenhood, her fair proportions veiled in virgin robes, affi-
anced indeed to human associations, but unpolluted, unwasted by human
passion. But now he was in converse with her, after long centuries of mar-
riage with man.”18
In some ways, cultivated antiquity was preferable to natural antiquity.
For cultivated antiquity could offer the added benefit of example. Italy was
the didactic museum of the past. James Jackson Jarves, disturbed by the
familiar sight of American tourists in Santa Maria della Salute racing by the
ceiling paintings, “whose sole reminiscences of European travel are the num-
ber and not the quality of sights,” tried to remind Americans in 1855:

Europe is a storehouse of Art, but its value and lessons are lost in a great mea-
sure upon the nations that gave it birth. Still those silent voices speak. Out of
old churches, mouldering tombs, time-honored galleries, there go forth eter-
nal principles of truth, if rightly studied able to guide the taste and warm the
heart of young America, and urge her on in the race of renown. . . . I . . .
would press home to the heart of every American who goes abroad, the ne-
cessity, if he would do his duty to his own country, of reading and interpreting
to his countrymen, so far as in him lies, these sacred writings on the wall.19

As Gombrich has stressed, art comes mainly from art. In Italy, the os-
motic process was supremely efficient, and art could be absorbed along with
the “golden air.” The taste for ancient ruins and statuary, the clear identifi-
cation by Americans with the imperial ambition that still marks Rome, are
easily understandable. Nor does one have to wonder too long why the Ameri-
cans were intrigued by such artists as Guido and Guercino. Guido espe-
cially, to judge from the paintings which still hang in the Palazzo Corsini,
offered a suitable blend of bathos and sentiment, quite in keeping with some
of the more lurid nineteenth-century American examples, which generally
transferred the religious to a genre iconography. It seems quite clear why
the famous portrait of Beatrice Cenci which hung in the Palazzo Barberini
below Story’s apartments meant so much to them—though the popularity
of this painting led Story to protest: “Pictures and statues have been staled
by copy and description, until everything is stereotyped, from the Dying
178 part four

Gladiator, with his ‘young barbarians all at play,’ and all that, down to the
Beatrice Cenci, the Madame Tonson of the Shops, that haunts one every-
where with her white turban and red eyes.”20
Yet for Hawthorne, in 1858, Guido’s portrait of the “Madame Tonson of
the Shops” maintained its glory: “Its spell is undefinable—and the painter
has wrought it in a way more like magic than anything else. . . . It is the most
profoundly wrought picture in the world; no artist did it, nor could do it
again; Guido may have held the brush, but he painted better than he knew.
I wish, however, it were possible for some spectator, of deep sensibility, to
see the picture without knowing anything of its subject or history; for, no
doubt, we bring all our knowledge of the Cenci tragedy to the interpreta-
tion of it.”21
Hawthorne could have read in the 1858 edition of Murray’s Handbook of
Rome and Its Environs that, “according to the tradition, it was taken on the
night before her execution; other accounts state that it was painted by Guido
from memory after he had seen her on the scaffold.”22 Today, confronting
the painting at eye level in the Palazzo Corsini, the spectator can still find a
haunting vulnerability in the child-like mouth and a pained innocence in
the eyes. Even in a less sentimental age, we cannot escape the association.
And what, in fact, would have remained for the nineteenth century not only
of Guido’s portrait, but of Italy, without association?
The nostalgic and moral overtones of association permeating the present
enabled the nineteenth-century artists to see “the dirt of Rome” as “color”23
and caused them to transform a world of “beggars, pickpockets, ancient
temples and broken monuments, and clothes hanging to dry about them”
(Hawthorne)24 into “the Italy we dreamed of; not the Italy of fleas, couriers,
mendicants and postilions, but of romance, poetry and passion” (Story).25
Yet it was not enough for Italy to be transformed into a land of romance,
poetry, and passion. In one of the most popular travel books of the period,
George Stillman Hillard cautioned his readers: “As Rome cannot be compre-
hended without previous preparation, so it cannot be felt without a certain
congeniality of temperament. Something of the imaginative principle—the
power of going out of one’s self and forgetting the actual in the ideal, and
the present in the past—the capacity to sympathize with the dreamer, if not
to dream—a willingness to be acted upon, and not to act—these must be
wrought into the being of him, who would catch all the inspiration of the
place. . . .”26
 Arcady Revisited: Americans in Italy 179

The artists themselves had to become part of the dream, to live what was
in effect an esthetic life-style, closed to them under what Story had called
“the bluer, but harder, more metallic American sky.” Under the “vast, ten-
der, and delicate” Italian sky, “looking down over the mysterious Campagna
and listening to the continuous plash of fountains and the song of nightin-
gales, you feel Italy, the Italy of Romeo and Juliet.”27
Constant contact with cultivated antiquity posited all possible contrasts
to the raw antiquity of the American wilderness. Nature was not an element
to confront with awe in its new and primitive state, but a familiar old friend,
drenched in poetry, footprinted by the great civilizations. To become part
of that cultivation was to become, in a sense, a work of art.
Thus, there was an art-like convention to the frequent rituals which punc-
tuated a typical day in Rome, whether these were the careful round of visits
to the Vatican, the Borghese, or the Palazzo Barberini, or the drives on the
Campagna. As James noted, “for rides . . . drives, walks, excursions of what-
ever sort, feasts al fresco, pictures ad infinitum, archaeology lively or severe”
the Campagna offered “an education of the taste, a revelation of new sources
both of solitary and of social joy” satisfying the “sense” and the “soul.”28
And art-like conventions attached themselves to modes of seeing and
experiencing. Washington Irving observed:

There is a poetic charm . . . that diffuses itself over our ideas in considering
this part of the globe. We regard everything with an enthusiastic eye—thru a
romantic medium that gives an illusive tinge to every object. ’Tis like behold-
ing a delightful landscape from an eminence, in a beautiful sunset. A delicious
mistiness is spread over the scene that softens the harshness of particular
objects—prevents our examining their forms too distinctly—a glow is thrown
over the whole that by blending and softening and enriching—gives the land-
scape a mellowness—a sweetness—a loveliness of coloring—not absolutely
its own, but derived in a great measure from the illusive veil with which it is
oerspread.29

The enthusiastic eye, the romantic medium, was surely responsible for
the “coloring” that Italy assumed, transforming even the meals of “maca-
roni, fried fish, Bologna sausage and stufatino”30 to which the poorer artists
were condemned into the food of the gods. More appetizing fare, further
supplemented by rich Italian wine, accompanied Harriet Hosmer and the
Brownings on the picnics on the Campagna that she so enjoyed, and
Hosmer’s passion for Rome moved her more than once to compare it to
Paradise: “If I should come out of Paradise to this place, I should think it
180 part four

perfect. . . .”31 And, “. . . there is something in the air of Italy, setting aside
other things, which would make one feel at home in Purgatory itself. In
America I never had that sense of quiet, settled content such as I now have
from sunrise to sunset.”32 As William Stanley Haseltine’s daughter observed
in her biography of her father, “Meat, herbs, bread, water and wine; news
from home by one’s plate; a fragrant cigar in one’s pocket; the morning’s
work accomplished; the sun shining; youth beckoning—what more could
Paradise offer?”33
In Rome, the Americans (and the English-speaking community in gen-
eral) clustered in the area of the Piazza di Spagna, as they still do today.
They ate at the Trattoria Lepri on the Via Condotti (Melville records that he
dined there on nineteen cents in 1857),34 and then crossed the street to the
Caffé Greco, where they could mix with artists and writers of all nationali-
ties, especially German and Austrian, and collect the mail which, if not sent
to the bankers Packenham and Hooker up the block at 20 Piazza di Spagna,
was held for them in an old gray cigar box still extant.
An observer at the Greco in 1842 remarked: “When you enter you find
the smoke so dense that you can hardly see across the room, but through it
dimly appear the long beards, fierce moustaches, slouched hats, slashed vel-
vet jackets, frogged coats, and wild but intellectual countenances which char-
acterize most of the young artists of Rome. All are smoking or taking their
dinner coffee, or talking in a confusion of languages, compared to which
Babel was an asylum for the deaf and and dumb.”35
We can, to some extent, retrace steps, by considering what little we know of
places of residence. Longfellow lived on the Piazza Navona in 1827, Hawthorne
at 37 Via di Porta Pinciana in 1858; the Brownings were at 28 Via del Tritone in
1859–60 and at 126 Via Felice in 1860–61. Emerson stayed at the Penzione
Tellenbach, Piazza di Spagna, in 1872. The Spanish Steps had been glorified by
the presence in the early 1820’s of Keats and Severn at 26 Piazza di Spagna, in
a small house with a patio opening onto the steps. Byron lived at no. 66, Mrs.
Jameson at no. 53, and Story, before making the Palazzo Barberini his perma-
nent home, stayed, in 1852, at no. 93. Kensett lived nearby, at 53 Via Due Macelli.
In 1831, Cole, using Claude’s old studio, known as the “Tempietto,” on the
corner of Via Gregoriana and Trinità dei Monti, at the top of the steps, was
only a few houses away from the former studios of Poussin, at 9 Piazza della
Trinità, and Salvator, on the Via Gregoriana. Morse, who often joined Cole on
the Campagna, lived at 17 Via dei Prefetti.
 Arcady Revisited: Americans in Italy 181

Margaret Fuller lived, in 1847, on the Via del Corso, then at 6o Piazza
Barberini, and in 1849, struggling for the short-lived Roman Republic, occu-
pied the Casa Dies on Via Gregoriana, along with the Storys and other fugi-
tive Americans. Henry James, having spent his first moments in Rome at the
Hotel d’Inghilterra on Via Bocca di Leone in 1859 (an establishment which
had housed the Storys in 1849), stayed at 101 Via del Corso in 1872. The
Brownings and the Pages were at 43 Via Bocca di Leone around 1853–54.
Thackeray, like James, was at the Inghilterra in 1869, and also lived above
the Caffé Greco at 86 Via Condotti. Mrs. Jameson was at 176 Via di Ripetta
in 1859. The Storys, who counted among their intimates the Brownings and
Margaret Fuller, lived on the second floor of the Palazzo Barberini from
1856 on. The landscape painters John Rollin Tilton and Thomas Hotchkiss
also occupied rooms there. In 1858, J. G. Chapman was at 135 Via Babuino,
and G. L. Brown was at 7 Vicolo dei Aliberti, off Via Babuino. William Page
had a studio at 39 Via Babuino in the 1850’s. In 1857–58, William Stanley
Haseltine was at 107 Via Felice, in a house occupied also by Gregovorius,
and his friend James Freeman lived at 18 Trinità dei Monti.
As to the large colony of sculptors, the Englishman John Gibson was at 4
Via della Fontanella; the American Harriet Hosmer lived for a while on the
Via Gregoriana and at 5 Via Margutta. In 1858 she had a studio adjoining
Gibson’s. Randolph Rogers lived at 53 Via Margutta and also, in 1858, at 4
Piazza Barberini. William H. Rinehart was at 58 Via Sistina; J. H. Haseltine,
William’s brother, at 30 Via Babuino. Thomas Crawford lived in the Villa
Negroni near the Baths of Diocletian and built his studio within the Baths.
In Florence, the artists and writers gathered at the Caffé Doney, where
Melville loved to have breakfast and afternoon tea. The sculptor Hiram Pow-
ers lived for many years on the popular artists’ street Via dei Serragli, at no.
111. John Cranch, Horatio Greenough, and Samuel Morse were at 4488 Via
Valfonda. Cole also lived there in 1831. Christopher P. Cranch had a studio
in the Palazzo dei Servi di Maria on Via Gino Capponi, where Durand,
Casilear, and Rossiter stayed in 1840–41. Emerson in 1873 and Melville in
1857 stayed at the Hotel du Nord on Piazza Santa Trinità. Miner Kellogg
lived at 23 Via Santa Maria in 1841. William Page, in 1850, had a studio at 17
Via dei Serragli. Ruskin, arriving with his parents in 1840, stayed at the Ho-
tel Schneiderff. From 1845 on he stayed at the Hotel dell’Arno and the Gran
Britannia. The Brownings, of course, spent most of their time in Italy, not
long after their arrival in Florence in 1847, at the famous Casa Guidi.36
182 part four

Despite this list of addresses, assuring us that they were indeed there,
their descriptions of Italy sound a continual note of disbelief—as though
the experience itself was not really apprehended, or fully possessed. We may
wonder whether the illusiveness of Italy was a function of its elusiveness,
whether Italy, as the beloved seen through Irving’s romantic medium, could
ever be possessed. Yet, surely, somewhere, life was real. It was real enough
for the Italian poor, whose “misery indigence . . . ignorance” and “beggary”
even Irving saw as the result of “baneful effects of despotic governments—
of priest craft & superstition, of personal oppression and slavery of thought.”37
And it was real enough in some ways for the struggling American artists, of
whom, wrote the astronomer Maria Mitchell, who was there in 1857–58,
“every winter, there are a thousand . . . in Rome . . . and of the thousand
artists in Rome very few are successful.”38
Thomas H. Hotchkiss (plate 15) wrote to Samuel P. Avery in November
1862: “In the art world of Rome the prospects look very gloomy for the
coming winter; with the present rate of exchange very few will leave home
and of these none are likely to buy pictures.”39 Though Hotchkiss wrote
again in May to say: “I have had much better success this winter in selling
pictures than I expected. I shall be able to get through until next winter very
comfortably,”40 his reputation never extended far beyond his fellow artists
during his lifetime, and remained buried for a century. Yet his paintings of
the Roman Campagna capture James’s golden air with all the mellowness
described earlier by Irving, “derived in a great measure from the illusive veil
with which it is oerspread.”
For the artists who persisted in staying, whether wealthy American tour-
ists bought their works or not, that veil must have been sufficient to obscure
the difficult realities of living. The Italian sunshine made America seem
very cold. As Harriet Hosmer wrote: “I glory in the Campagna, the art is
divine, and I dearly love the soft climate. I should perish in the cold winters
at home. . . .”41 Yet Haseltine’s daughter remarks of that period: “Sunshine
they obtained in plenty; warmth was questionable; no central heating; no
fireplaces in the huge, carpetless, brick-paved rooms of the old palazzi; the
only symbols of light and warmth were the soft, subdued oil-lamps, which
one wound up with a key, and a copper brazier, in the middle of the room,
filled with burning charcoal, and which, if not properly lit, gave out enough
carbon-monoxide to put one to sleep.”42
 Arcady Revisited: Americans in Italy 183

But if Italy could at times be cold in the winter, the presence of the sun-
shine, or perhaps even the thought of it, was sufficiently warming, as Sir
Joshua might have put it, for the imagination. For the veil that spread itself
before their eyes as they painted the Italian landscape was not only Irving’s
illusive veil, but the veil of the artistic conventions they adopted. Here, on
Claude’s own soil, they could use not only their own eyes but the eyes of
art, putting the Claudian conventions to fullest use. Even before they made
the voyage across the Atlantic, Claude, the artist of Gilpin’s picturesque
beauty, had for many of them epitomized the tranquility evoked by the
quiet vistas of the Campagna. For Harriet Hosmer, “the long line of the
Alban and Sabine hills” was “too serene to be disturbed by either the joys or
sorrows of mortals.”43
Mortality here could be replaced by immortality. The removal to the
golden dream included artistic removal to earlier dreams. That removal came
quite close to the present through familiarity with the works of Turner, but
he too had kept his eyes on the Claudian paradigm, though amplifying the
atmospheric veil of light that stood for time and association as it glowed
over the ancient ruins.
One must not, however, overstress the example of artistic conventions.
For the artists were also exposed to the same scenes that confronted Claude
and Turner, subject to the same romantic glow, seduced by the same ruins.
For Christopher Cranch, “there were open-air pictures waiting to be painted
everywhere around us, and on the wonderful Campagna, so that there was
a perpetual stimulus to draw and paint.” Cranch, indeed, seems to have found
“the climate . . . so mild that working out of doors was usually practicable.”44
It is not unreasonable to assume that the American lover, enthralled like
Claude and Turner by the same beautiful “older woman,” took a similar
path of artistic pursuit.
This pursuit, enduring as it did well into the sixties, was something of an
anachronism. For it was founded on an ideal of the picturesque, on an es-
thetic of the ruin, which belonged more properly to the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, and which indeed had attracted many European
artists to Italy at that time. Perhaps it is only natural that when American
art reached some youthful maturity, it should in turn follow this example.
But by then the cult of nature and the admiration for wilderness had grown
sufficiently strong in America to offer a viable alternative for the landscape
painter. In the eyes of many Americans, it was, indeed, preferable.
184 part four

Even Cole, returning from Italy where his heart and feelings were most
fully nourished, felt obliged to write to the U.S. consul in Rome in 1842:
“Must I tell you that neither the Alps nor the Apennines, no, nor even Aetna
itself, have dimmed in my eyes the beauty of our own Catskills?”45
The American wilderness was real, and thus, for all its potential for sub-
limity, had none of the dream quality necessary for the courtly love lavished
on the Italian Campagna. The American artist could marry the wilderness,
which was, in many ways, more familiar to him. But Italy was his mistress
and the affair could maintain its potency as long as the elusive mystery was
maintained. The love potion was compounded of the mental “distancing”
of time and of Irving’s softening glow, which stemmed as much from the
eye of the beholder as from the patina of age. As in most love affairs, the
efficacy of the potion depended not only on the actual charms of the be-
loved but on the mental and emotional attitude of the lover. That attitude
sought further to enhance the beloved by viewing her in optimum, often
cosmetic, circumstances.
Thus the penchant for moonlit scenes, for the “Vatican by torchlight and
the Coliseum by Bengal lights,”46 for viewing Rome “bathed in moonlight—
sleeping in a pale shroud of faint mist. Far away, like a dream, dim and
delicate . . . St. Peter’s against the thickened horizon; near by the Quirinal
tower . . . the obelisk before the Trinità dei Monti . . . its dark needle at the
end of the Gregoriana, and a thousand domes and towers and arched log-
gias . . . [rising] all around, from the roofs.”47
“We took advantage of the first fine moonlight to visit the Coliseum . . . ,”
wrote Christopher Cranch in 1846. “We took our way toward the ruins,
stopped to contemplate the old Forum, the Arch of Septimius Severus, the
Pillar of Phocas, and all the ruins in that vicinity, —all steeped in the love-
liest of moonlights. We passed under the small Arch of Titus, and stood
before the Coliseum. For some time we stood, or walked around on the
outside, reserving the impression of entering, like something too rare and
sacred to be hastily snatched. . . . At last we drew slowly to the centre, and
never have I beheld before anything to compare with that scene.”48 If moon-
light was romantic even on James’s “coarse Hudson,” it was much more so
in Keats’s Italy, where it added further to the veiled timelessness that was
part of the spell. Perhaps this was why Hawthorne so much admired George
Loring Brown, preferring him, indeed, to Claude, and writing with rare
pleasure of “a moonlight picture . . . really magical—the moon shining so
 Arcady Revisited: Americans in Italy 185

brightly that it seemed to throw a light even beyond the limits of the pic-
ture. . . . it was a patient, and most successful wooing of a beloved object,”
which at last rewarded him by “yielding itself wholly.”49
Was it, perhaps, the removal to timelessness that caused the artists fre-
quently to omit the human figure from their portrayals of the Italian land-
scape? For human mortality had little place in this dream. The landscape
itself sat for its portrait. What figures were included were generally small
and so much a part of the landscape, so thoroughly accommodated to the
image, that we are not especially aware of their presence. Elihu Vedder once
remarked: “It is strange, how, when I paint landscapes, I don’t seem to care
for the figures; that is, I feel as if I ought to put them in, but don’t most of
the time.”50
Claude often used figures as exponents of the myths to which he attached
them. The American landscape artists felt no special need to excuse their
preoccupation with the landscape through the use of mythological themes.
The landscape was the myth. Its golden air, as James rightly pointed out,
caused subjects to “float by . . . as the fish in the sea may be supposed to float
by a merman, who doubtless puts out a hand from time to time to grasp, for
curiosity, some particularly iridescent specimen. But he has conceivably not
the proper detachment for full appreciation.” As James so rightly suggested,
there were some artists and writers, and he counted Story among them, for
whom Italy was “too much”; and “was it not this too much that constituted
precisely, and most characteristically and gracefully, the amusement of the
wanton Italy at the expense of her victim?”51
Yet, for those who successfully met the challenge of “wanton Italy,” we
might at least conclude, from the works that remain to us, that the lover
served his mistress well, responding to her charms with appropriate artistic
gestures that fully characterized the depth of his emotion and enthrallment.
In Volterra, Cole wrote in his notebook:

I have witnessed some truly glorious sunsets and lovely twilights—one in

particular from the western declivity of the mountain, I watched with feel-
ings of singular delight as it faded away. The tone of the landscape was most
heavenly; all the great plain was in deep shadow, reposing in an atmosphere
whose hues can never be expressed in language; the ordinary terms, “silvery”
and “golden,” give but a dim notion of it. It was such an atmosphere as one
could imagine angelic beings would delight to breathe, and in which they
would joy to move. . . . I am not surprised that the Italian masters have painted
so admirably as they have; nature in celestial attire was their teacher.52
186 part four

And Christopher Cranch exulted:

I have not seen any place that combines so much a landscape painter can
make use of as Tivoli. There is the great ravine with the old picturesque town
overlooking it, and its one beautiful relic of classic times, the Sibyl’s temple.
There are the grottos, the deep, weird chasms, where waterfalls shoot down
roaring, as into the mouth of hell, and disappear to the eyes. . . . There are the
beautiful views of the Villa of Maecenas and the distant Campagna, with the
dome of St. Peter’s looming up on the far horizon. There is the Villa d’Este, a
wonderful old place, with its fanciful fountains all in ruins, and its magnifi-
cent sombre cypresses, the most beautiful I have yet seen.53

While Hawthorne wrote of the Val d’Arno:

Now that the moon is on the wane, there is a gentler lustre, but still bright;
and it makes the Val d’Arno with its surrounding hills, and its soft mist in the
distance, as beautiful a scene as exists anywhere out of heaven. . . . This mist,
of which I have so often spoken, sets it beyond the limits of actual sense and
makes it ideal; it is as if you were dreaming about the valley—as if the valley
itself were dreaming, and met you halfway in your own dream.54

What larger realities could have intruded on this dream? Henry Greenough,
in his novel Ernest Carroll, saw contemporary Italy as “the skeleton of some
mighty mastodon, among whose bones jackals, mice, and other vermin were
prowling about. The great frame was there, but the life and strength which
animated it was departed.”55 Yet contemporary Italy had sufficient energy to
be involved in an intense political struggle for unification. What effect could
such a struggle have on the American expatriates who were busy dreaming
their dream?
We know that Margaret Fuller, a good friend of Mazzini and deeply de-
voted to the interests of her husband, the Marchese d’Ossoli, involved her-
self emotionally and practically with contemporary political events.56 But
how many other members of the English-speaking community responded
to Italian domestic problems with similar vigor? Cole had written explicitly
to Dunlap in 1834, almost two years after his return from Italy, that “what I
believe contributes to the enjoyment of being there [in Italy] is the delight-
ful freedom from the common cares and business of life—the vortex of
politics and utilitarianism, that is forever whirling at home.”57
Yet by 1848, when the Storys arrived in Rome, they were just in time for
the French siege of the following year. Story was thoughtful enough about
the political issues of Italy to mention them in a letter to James Russell
Lowell, and Lowell replied on March 10, 1848: “. . . if you mention political
 Arcady Revisited: Americans in Italy 187

changes, Italy has been getting herself born again ever since I can remem-
ber, and will have to be delivered by a Caesarian operation after all. Besides,
have we not ours?”58 James, speaking of the “most incoherent birth of the
time, the advance of French troops for the restoration of the Pope, the battle
waged against the short-lived ‘popular government’ of Rome by the scarce
longer-lived popular government of Paris,” notes: “It was at this battle that
foreign visitors ‘assisted’ as in an opera-box. . . . They arrived in time to seat
themselves well, as it were, for the drama, to get seated and settled before it
begins. . . .”59
The idea of Italy as spectacle, so removed from the consciousness of the
“visitors” that they could never really experience Italy’s problems as actual
ones, persists. Just as they loved to visit the Pergola Theatre for concerts, to
see Ristori at the Cocomero, to watch Molière’s Tartuffe at the Metastasio, in
some ways they saw Italy’s revolution as “delightful Revolution . . . which . . .
promoted afternoon drives and friendly parleys.”60 As James interprets it,
Mrs. Browning especially enjoyed the drama, writing to a friend: “ ‘The child’s
play between the Livornese and our Grand Duke provokes a thousand pleas-
antries. Every now and then a day is fixed for a revolution in Tuscany, but
up to the present time a shower has come and put it off.’ ”61
Yet though James observes that “Mrs. Browning thirsted for great events,”62
Clare Louise Dentler has noted: “. . . Story said . . . to her Italy was a living
fire, her interest was centered in the political life of the Italians and in the
wrongs they had suffered. For the entire time that she lived here she de-
voted her heart, brain and pen to the Italian cause. . . . The Italian patriots
always found a sympathetic welcome at Casa Guidi and it became their
rallying place.”63
Some Americans also cared enough about Italy’s actual problems to help
the cause of the Republic where they could. Mrs. Story noted that during
the French attack their good friend “Frank Heath went to the Hospital with
Margaret and returned so full of interest and sympathy that he at once set
on foot a subscription.”64 The Storys themselves assisted when possible. James
quotes Story on May 6, 1849: “Went in the evening to the Trinità dei Pellegrini
to carry the American subscription for the wounded in the late battle.”65
George Wynne, in Early Americans in Rome, writes of the Republic: “Dur-
ing its short life and while under siege by a French expeditionary force, some
determined U.S. residents joined the defenders, nursed the wounded and
put their scarce cash into the public purse. Finally, when it was all over and
188 part four

the French in control of the city, American officials furnished passports to the
leaders of the revolution to help them reach safe haven. In some cases they
smuggled them out personally disguised as members of their household.”66
Yet he adds, “Lest these remarks give the impression of great numbers, it
was only a handful of Americans who were actively committed to the de-
fense of the Roman Republic. But this small group was dedicated to the hilt.
Foremost among them was Margaret Fuller. . . . In lesser measure there were
the Storys, sculptor Crawford.. . .”67 Elsewhere he notes, “While some of the
American colony acted merely as spectators, others joined the defenders of
Rome. We have sure notice of only two, the sculptor Thomas Crawford, and
the painter Frederick Mason who helped defend the Porta San Pancrazio. . . .
the Rome daily Contemporaneo reported that 268 foreigners had joined the
defenders of Rome. . . . It is a logical supposition that among the 268 for-
eigners figured a number of American artists and students who had thrown
in their lot with the city’s defenders.”68
Of them all, despite the natural logic of American partisans of democracy
joining a fight for freedom, it seems to have been Margaret Fuller Ossoli
who was most realistically engaged. Thus, as correspondent for the New
York Tribune, she wrote: “It was fearful to see the villas with fragments of
rich fresco still clinging to the rafters between the great holes torn by the
cannonade. Roses and oleander bloomed amid the ruins. A marble nymph
with broken arm looked sadly from her sun-dried fountain. I saw where
thirty-seven men were buried beneath one wall. From a barricade protruded
a pair of skeleton legs. A dog stared stupidly at the dead soldier uncovered
by its digging.”69 With the American Civil War still more than a decade away,
she could add: “O men and women of America, spared such a sight as these,
what angel do you think has time to listen to your tales of woe?”70
After her death, Mazzini wrote: “The poor Margaret Fuller came from
the United States with God knows what preconceptions about us . . . but
after an hour she became our sister. Her candid mind open to all that was
noble glimpsed the love our purpose inspired.”71 Thus he offers, in a way,
the key to Fuller’s involvement, quite apart from her open and candid mind:
she became their sister. And by her love for and probable marriage to the
Marchese d’Ossoli, she transferred her sense of actuality from America to
Italy, dispensing, as we can see from her observation above, with the dream.
Still, it is probably fair to say that James’s interpretation of the American
attitude to Italy’s problems was generally correct. From the late forties to
 Arcady Revisited: Americans in Italy 189

the late sixties when Italy was experiencing the birth trauma of unification,
American visitors indulged their dream of an Italian past. It was not that
they were insensitive. When they could, they extended themselves to be help-
ful, in a human way, to the beleaguered Italians. Nor were they insensitive to
the terrible struggles of a divided America around the same time. But dream-
ing relieved them of the painful necessity of coping with the problems of
either place. They were abroad as lovers, not spouses. They could be “heart-
sick during a walk on the Pincian while the French were coming” from the
sight of the destruction of “numbers of the fine trees in Villa Borghese,
hewn down, for the construction of defences, to their stumps,”72 but the
suspicion persists that this was only because the intrusion threatened their
dream. Real necessity, American necessity, was distanced by an ocean, and
by the mythic time which enveloped them.
Reminders of home came, of course, in the morning post. The Ameri-
cans were interested enough, as Haseltine’s daughter suggests, in the politi-
cal and social events at home to watch the mails with anticipation. When
Church visited Rome in 1868 he wrote, on November 4, to his good friend
William Osborn: “We Americans in Rome —are of course much exercised
about the election which took place yesterday. . . . I can have no doubt about
the election of Grant—still —I should like to hear that it is all right.”73 Five
days later he wrote again: “The election of Grant is very inspiring. Heaven
help our country and bring us safely out of the confusion that at present
prevails and make clear the turbid waters by settling the dirty politicians in
the profoundest depths of oblivion. My pleasantest thoughts nowadays are
when they are about our home on the Hudson and all the surroundings. . . .”
In the same letter he noted, “We are almost as comfortable around our table—
illuminated by a carcel lamp and warmed by an oak fire—as if we were
lighted by petroleum and basked by hickory coals in our own cottage—
But—the Tiber is not the Hudson. . .”74
Church arrived in Rome at a time when, he noted on January 23/28,
1869, “Americans are as plentiful here as ants in an anthill—and just about
as active—and the amount of stuff they buy is astonishing—copies, new
pictures—sculpture—jewelry—mosaic—antiquities—bronzes, etc.” He ob-
served that “from the studio building we have represented in Rome—
McEntee—Gifford—Thompson—Weir—Hazeltine—Church—six, part of
them have no studios, but are here to see and travel. Gifford has just gone to
the East.”75 Yet January 1869 was very close to the achievement of Italian unity
190 part four

and to the end of the era of major American expatriation in Italy. The Ameri-
cans’ artistic focus was about to shift to Paris and Munich (though Venice, in
another way, continued to hold a spell over such artists as Whistler).
Church’s attitude to Rome was a bit atypical. He found Italian scenery
pretty and sentimental, and much preferred, given the eastern inclinations
so clearly demonstrated at Olana, the barren, parched landscape of Syria,
where he had stopped before his Roman visit. To Martin Heade, who was
staying in his studio at 51 West Tenth Street, Church observed on October 9,
1868: “I have no comments to make on Rome. I thereby distinguish myself
from the crowd who scratch interminable letters about the ‘Eternal City’ as
they delight to call it.”76
On November 16, he wrote again to Heade:
Keeping house on the Pincian Hill—good cook—buys such admirable meats
etc. that I am obliged to pay nearly double what other people do—Still we are
very comfortable—Healy is here—T. Buchanan Read—and several other
American artists—McEntee and Hazeltine have studios in the same building
with me. I have just finished a small Syrian picture for a Bostonian and am
hard at work at a big “Damascus.” . . . I paint until 2—then dine—and after—
see sights—sketch some and penetrate into the profoundest recesses of the
dirtiest old-old master shops. . . . There is no use writing about Rome—The
subject is as thread bare as the priests here—[.]77

Obviously, Church had not fallen victim to James’s wanton Italy, as had
such genuine expatriates as Brown, Tilton, or Story. An exchange of letters
between Story and James Russell Lowell is instructive. Lowell wrote on Sep-
tember 25, 1849: “You talk about my being a man of leisure. Why, besides
what other writing I have done, I have for fourteen months contributed a col-
umn a week and for four months a column a fortnight to the ‘Anti-Slavery
Standard.’ . . . You are a man of leisure there in Italy, whose climate makes
loafers of us all.”78
In 1852, Story wrote to Lowell: “Such a summer as we have had I never
passed and never believed in before. Sea and mountain breezes all the time,
thunder-showers varying with light and shade the Campagna, donkey-rides
and rambles numberless—a long, lazy, luxurious far niente of a summer. . . .
All that I wanted was to have some old friend with me. . . . Every day that I live
here I love Italy better and life in America seems less and less satisfactory.”79
Yet in what, exactly, did this dissatisfaction with America reside? Surely,
the American artists did not transplant themselves to Italy simply to experi-
ence an endless dolce far niente. In a later letter, from Dresden, Lowell him-
 Arcady Revisited: Americans in Italy 191

self admits to “a horrible homesickness and—shall I confess it?—longing

for Italy.” And he continues: “I agree with you as to the wants one feels at
home. When I look back and think how much in me might have earlier and
kindlier developed if I had been reared here, I feel bitter. But on the other
hand, I prize my country-breeding, the recollections of my first eight years,
my Hosey Biglow experiences as something real, and I mean to make a poem
out of them some day that shall be really American.”80
Italy, then, offered to the individual the possibility of developing his fin-
est tastes and potentialities. The mistress offered all the refinements of civi-
lization that could help the individual to become his best self. The artist
especially had to benefit through such an encounter, for, as Hawthorne ob-
served, “artists . . . lifted by the ideality of their pursuits a little way off the
earth” possessed “a property, a gift, a talisman, common to their class, enti-
tling them to partake somewhat more bountifully than other people in the
thin delight of moonshine and romance.”81
The poet Frederick Tuckerman, a cousin of the famous critic, preferred
the intellectual aspects of Italy to the commercial and competitive society
of America because, again, there was more possibility in this atmosphere
for the development of human potential. In Sonnet XXV he wrote:

In my first youth, the feverish thirst for gain

That in this noble land makes life so chill,
Was tempered to a wiser trust by pain,
Hope’s early blight—a chastening sense of ill;
And I was exiled to a sunny clime,
Where cloud and flower a softer meaning caught
From graceful forms and holy wrecks of time,
Appealing all to fond and pensive thought;
Enamored of the Beautiful I grew,
And at her altar pledged my virgin soul. . . .82

Yet Hawthorne, who had mixed feelings about Italy, and especially about
Rome, wrote:

It would only be a kind of despair . . . that would ever make me dream of

finding a home in Italy; a sense that I had lost my country through absence
or incongruity, and that earth is not an abiding-place. I wonder that we Ameri-
cans love our country at all, it having no limits and no oneness; and when
you try to make it a matter of the heart, everything falls away except one’s
native State; neither can you seize hold of that unless you tear it out of the
Union, bleeding and quivering. Yet, unquestionably, we do stand by our na-
tional flag as stoutly as any people in the world, and I myself have felt the
192 part four
heart throb at sight of it as sensibly as other men. I think the singularity of
our form of government contributes to give us a kind of patriotism, by sepa-
rating us from other nations more entirely.83

That nationalism, or patriotism, ultimately triumphed with the Ameri-

can landscapists who had gone to Italy. Though the sculptors, tied to their
marble and to their craftsmen, had practical reasons for immersing them-
selves in the Italian dream, the landscape painters also had them, on the
other side of the ocean. There was an alternative to the landscape of history
and association of which Hawthorne had noted so eloquently: “In Italy,
whenever man has once hewn a stone, Nature forthwith relinquishes her
right to it, and never lays her finger on it again. Age after age finds it bare
and naked, in the barren sunshine, and leaves it so.”84
That alternative was American nature—a nature which symbolized America’s
sacred destiny. Even Cole, torn perhaps more than any other American be-
tween natural and cultivated antiquity, had found it necessary, it will be
remembered, to restate his primary allegiance to the Catskills. Such an alle-
giance was both philosophical and practical. Cole’s American paintings were
much better received by a public that wanted pictures to remind them of
their native land. For most contemporary critics, the New York Mirror
summed it up: “His Arcadias and other scenes from the imagination, have
not that originality and truth-telling force which his native pictures have.”85
Despite the numbers of patrons who could be counted on in Rome or
Florence to buy the artists’ landscapes as mementos of the Grand Tour,
American taste during the period under discussion generally preferred
American landscapes. This was partly due to the fact that America was at a
critical moment in the shaping of a national identity largely dependent on
the landscape for moral and religious as well as social justification.
Hawthorne, writing of Hiram Powers, observed: “It makes a very unsat-
isfactory life, thus to spend the greater part of it in exile. In such a case we
are always deferring the reality of life till a future moment, and, by and by,
we have deferred it till there are no future moments; or, if we do go back, we
find that life has shifted whatever of reality it had to the country where we
deemed ourselves only living temporarily; and so between two stools we come
to the ground, and make ourselves a part of one or the other country only
by laying our bones in its soil.”86
The majority of American landscapists who went abroad to dream of
Arcadia ultimately laid their bones in American soil. Only a very few suc-
 Arcady Revisited: Americans in Italy 193

cumbed forever to the dream. Worthington Whittredge, returning to

America, felt the dislocation of which Hawthorne had spoken and wrote:

It was impossible for me to shut out from my eyes the works of the great
landscape painters which I had so recently seen in Europe, while I knew well
enough that if I was to succeed I must produce something new and which
might claim to be inspired by my home surroundings. I was in despair . . . I
hid myself for months in the recesses of the Catskills. But how different was
the scene before me from anything I had been looking at for many years! The
forest was a mass of decaying logs and tangled brush wood, no peasants to
pick up every vestige of fallen sticks to burn in their miserable huts, no well-
ordered forests, nothing but the primitive woods with their solemn silence
reigning everywhere. I think I can say that I was not the first or by any means
the only painter of our country who has returned after a long visit abroad
and not encountered the same difficulties in tackling home subjects.87

Whittredge was not talking only of a return to a more primitive and less
cultivated nature. Behind his comments we may glimpse some necessity to
cope with reality, and a responsibility to produce “something new which
might claim to be inspired by my home surroundings.” How could he pro-
vide the national art for which the critics and public clamored?
To take on such responsibilities involved, for the American landscape
painter, a return to reality tantamount to a return, once the beguiling affair
has abated, to a wife. For Italy, in de Rougemont’s terms, was Iseult, and not
to be wed: “Iseult is ever a stranger, the very essence of what is strange in
woman and of all that is eternally fugitive, vanishing . . . that which indeed
incites to pursuit, and rouses in the heart of a man who has fallen a prey to
the myth an avidity for possession so much more delightful than posses-
sion itself. She is the woman-from-whom-one-is-parted: to possess her is
to lose her.”88
In one concrete way, however, the American landscape painters did pos-
sess Italy, whether for longer or shorter periods of time, in the portraits
they painted of the Italian landscape. Through these, they allow us to pos-
sess it a hundred years later, and to see their efforts as the epitome of the
romantic temperament, its energetic illusions, its emotional idealism, its
blind exclusions, its desire for Paradise, its creation of a world unlike the
reality they so carefully filtered out of their shared romantic dream—one
that has a peculiar poignancy when contrasted with their birthright.
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CHAPTER 10

America and Europe:

Influence and Affinity

When Worthington Whittredge returned from Europe in 1859 he succinctly

posed the problem of the American artist.1 European models were in his
mind’s eye; if emulated, they would stamp his landscapes with the impri-
matur of the great traditions. But only something “new,” inspired by “home
surroundings,” would meet his needs and those of his American colleagues:
“We are looking and hoping for something distinctive to the art of our coun-
try, something which shall receive a new tinge from our peculiar form of
Government, from our position on the globe, or something peculiar to our
people, to distinguish it from the art of the other nations and to enable us to
pronounce without shame the oft repeated phrase, ‘American Art.’ ”2
At this crucial moment in the formation of American culture, the art of
Europe—of the Western world of which America was a distant but integral
part—exerted its authoritative pull. The dilemma was there from the out-
set. Provincialism was tempted to call on Europe for its artistic credentials.
And yet, as Henry James pointed out: “The apple of ‘America’ is a totally
different apple. . . .”3 The American who had bitten deep into the apple of
Europe had to reconcile himself to a different taste.
The ambivalence and insecurity of the provincial jostled the pride and
optimism of the blossoming culture. Emerson, typically, tried to turn Ameri-
can “rawness” into an asset: “Let us live in America, too thankful for our
want of feudal institutions. Our houses and towns are like mosses and li-
chens, so slight and new; but youth is a fault of which we shall daily mend.
This land too is old as the Flood, and wants no ornament or privilege which
195
196 part four

nature could bestow. Here stars, here woods, here hills, here animals, here
man abound, and the vast tendencies concur of a new order.”4
The problem was difficult. “Civilizing” the land meant substituting for
America’s hoary purity something new that, at least from the artist’s point
of view, was less satisfactory. Emerson’s “new order” would remain new only
if it maintained the freshness of American land and life. Making use of
Whittredge’s distinction between America’s primitive woods and Europe’s
“well-ordered forests” required from the artist a subtle balance between
Europe’s landscape art and the pragmatic experience of the American land.
To establish American nineteenth-century landscape painting within the
context of Western landscape demands an examination of all these factors.
If Americans were “civilizing” their landscape through the development of
new towns and communities, the landscape painters had an analogous op-
tion through recourse to European traditions. First among these were the
conventions of Claude, whose pastoral compositions had such an enormous
impact on late-eighteenth-century European art, and on the concept of the
picturesque. This apt term counts among its many connotations the literal
one of seeing nature in terms of other pictures. As Richard Payne Knight
put it: “. . . persons, being in the habit of viewing, and receiving pleasure
from fine pictures, will naturally feel pleasure in viewing those objects in
nature, which have called forth those powers of imitation. . . . The objects
recall to the mind the imitations . . . and these again recall to the mind the
objects themselves and show them through an improved medium—that of
the feeling and discernment of a great artist.”5
Claude had for both Europeans and Americans the “feeling and dis-
cernment of a great artist.” At a moment when the subject hierarchy was
still important, this sentiment could lift landscape to the level of history
painting, transcending Sir Joshua’s “mere reality.” Given Sir Joshua’s impor-
tance to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century artists in America, it
is not surprising that the Claudian “stamp” became a major convention. On
it could be loaded all the connotations of Ambition, of competition with
European culture, that American artists not so secretly harbored. It offered
the artists the assurance that they were “framing” the landscape artfully,
thus making “art” out of nature, and so were eligible for acceptance by their
European confrères. I use the word “framing” deliberately, for the Claudian
convention is most easily recognized by the trees that frame the picture’s
lateral edges, as well as by the dark foreground coulisse, the middle-ground
 America and Europe: Influence and Affinity 197

10.1 Claude Lorrain, Landscape with Mill, 1648. Oil on canvas, 581/2 × 78 in. (148.6 × 198.1
cm.). Rome, Italy, Galleria Doria Pamphili.

scoop of water, and the distant mountain—a set of motifs endlessly per-
muted (fig. 10.1).
Though Gilpin had made the distinction between the “picturesquely beau-
tiful” in Claude and the “picturesquely sublime” in Salvator, only Cole main-
tained it, and depending on mood, alternated between Claude (plate 16)
and Salvator. His Hudson River colleagues telescoped the beautiful and the
sublime into a single convention, still Claude-derived, on which they could
ring changes of mood and space. Claude, used “sublimely,” stands behind
some of Church’s most ambitious canvases of the Andes.
Why did the Claudian convention persevere so tenaciously? The ideal, or
classical, tradition it so richly represented was strong not only in England
but in Germany and Scandinavia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. In using this mode, Americans appropriated its Italianate asso-
ciations, with all the accrued interest of time and myth. They annexed a
museum culture they could only experience as visitors. Thus the Claudian
mode remained a vital force in America long after the so-called classical
198 part four

tradition in European landscape had been modified. Also, the pastoral as-
pect of the Claudian convention reinforced those myths of America as a
new Eden that were so important in the nineteenth century.
Although this American attachment to Claude resembled the European
vogue of a little earlier, it had, I feel, a much larger psychic and philosophi-
cal investment. Perhaps this is why it appears so frequently in American art
as an unquestioned “given.” It establishes the necessary philosophical and
artistic armature on which the artist could then deposit the fresh observa-
tions he derived from the natural world.
These observations, of course, involved space and light. For a group of
artists who had found their religion in nature, something in Claude’s atmo-
sphere answered a need for an idealized, reverent light. On his first trip to
Europe, Cole, visiting London’s National Gallery on July 29, 1829, noted of
number fourteen, Claude’s Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, which along
with Turner may have inspired Cole’s Consummation in Course of Empire:
“The best Claude I have ever seen. The sky and distance of a pearly cool
tone may light and assist—the other parts of the picture darker—The clouds
are light and beautiful and seem as though they were not painted with
brushes but melted into the blue. . . . There are very broad masses of shadow
in the picture but all transparent and gradating into the light beautifully.
The water in the foreground is exquisitely painted and looks like the purest
of water. His touch throughout is mellow melting and appropriate.” Cole
goes on to say: “The sky and distance are smooth as though they have been
pummiced—though here and there you may see where the painter has used
his hand.”6
After another visit to the National Gallery on his second European trip in
1841, Cole noted in his journal (August 24): “The Claudes are still pleasing but
Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba is my favourite—the beauty of the at-
mosphere, the truth, transparency and motion of the water are surprising.”7
Durand, on the other hand, had mixed feelings about Claude, as might
be expected from an artist who could produce not only Claudian-derived
compositions such as Thanatopsis (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
but also some of the most pragmatic examples of realism in American land-
scape painting. In London on June 22, 1840, he wrote in his journal: “I may
now say more emphatically I have seen the Old Masters, several of them
undoubtedly fine specimens . . . and first and foremost in my thought is
Claude. . . . There are 10 of his works in this collection, some of them es-
 America and Europe: Influence and Affinity 199

teemed his very best. I may therefore venture to express my first impres-
sions of Claude—On the whole then, if not disappointed, at the least, I
must say he does not surpass my expectations . . . I will not express an opin-
ion in detail until further examination, yet what I have seen of them is worth
the passage of the Atlantic.”8
On July 3, Durand left the National Gallery “resolved to commence a
landscape in Oil” and began one “as an attempt at some of the principles
presented in the pictures of Claude.”9 Durand then traveled to Italy via Swit-
zerland, Holland, Germany, and Belgium. When he arrived in Florence he
wrote to Cole: “It may be hopeless to expect more perfect light and atmo-
sphere than we find in the seaports and, occasionally, other scenes by Claude.
Still I have not felt in contemplating them that I was so completely in the
presence of Nature, so absorbed by her loveliness and majesty, as not to feel
that the portrait of her might be at least, in some important feature, more
expressive of character.”10
En route to Italy, Durand had done a lot of sketching, and he wrote to his
wife from Geneva: “I have found an agreeable change from the previous
study of pictures to the study of nature, and nature too, in her utmost gran-
deur, beauty and magnificence.”11 Durand, like Cole, studied and admired
Claude, but nature’s presence made him question, however ambivalently,
the need to rely on him.
This questioning is crucial for the American contribution. A strong em-
piricism shaping original solutions to the landscape problem had always
been part of the American sensibility. It could also, perhaps, be part of a
basic primitivism that distinguishes so-called provincial art from the art of
the mainstream. Each pictorial problem is solved afresh; tradition is built,
not by the transfer of pictorial “progress” from one generation to another,
like links on a chain, but rather through a commonality of experience gained
from the process of beginning anew. Correspondences within this tradition
result from starting in the same place—and working through similar prob-
lems to similar results. This is American landscape painting’s great advan-
tage or, for some, its disadvantage. It is what gives its history an identifying
signature.

Direct response to nature involved spontaneous reactions to light and air

and meticulous observation of detail—of the clouds, rocks, plants, and trees
which filled the sketchbooks of the American landscapists, authenticating
200 part four

with fact their more ambitious and ideal works. As we know, in the Claudian
compositions, light and air could represent Tuckerman’s “general effect,”
while particularity of detail met the requirements of “specificity” without
which the ideal in America was unacceptable.
While the high-art Claudian stamp was widely utilized, especially within
the Hudson River milieu, two other landscape solutions that also developed
were ostensibly realist. In luminism, as we have seen, the ideal radiates from
the core of the real in what is now recognized as a more philosophically genu-
ine reconciliation. This and a more purely pragmatic mode, which occurred
less frequently but was part of the vanguard development of plein-airism, are
significant American contributions to the Western landscape tradition.
The luminist mode, often considered free from the influence of pictures,
may have found its paradigms in the Dutch landscapes ruled inferior by Sir
Joshua and devalued by most American critics. James Jackson Jarves was
forced to observe in 1869 that “. . . Dutch art is too well-liked and known for
me to dwell longer on it. Those whose aesthetics are in sympathy with its
mental mediocrity will not desert it for anything I may say.”12
Though Dutch art did not have the intellectual credentials that would have
rendered it acceptable to official criticism, there was, as Jarves indicates, a
strong sympathy for it that remains largely unresearched. It was appreciated
by the artists themselves and by private individuals who were not, it appears,
very vocal. This taste corresponded with a shift of emphasis, around 1850,
from the noble ideal of nature to a quieter realism. This realism, though still
imbued with the ideal, gave nature more say in the dialogue between nature
and art that determined the course of American landscape painting. Evidence
of the taste that assisted this conversion is still scanty.
Dutch paintings were included in such private collections as those of
Robert Gilmor, Jr., Michael Paff, and Thomas J. Bryan, and were shown in
public exhibitions at the American Academy of Fine Arts, the Apollo Gal-
lery, the American Art-Union, and the Boston Athenaeum. The Gilmor col-
lection alone included paintings by van de Velde, van der Neer, van Goyen,
and Cuyp, all of which offered prototypes for American marine landscapes.
A substantial number of works by Dutch artists were to be seen at the Bos-
ton Athenaeum during the years Lane was in Boston, from about 1832 to
1848. The list includes such names as van de Cappelle, Cuyp, van Goyen,
Hobbema, Potter, Jacob and Salomon van Ruysdael, and van de Velde. Lane
showed intermittently at the Athenaeum from 1841 until his death in 1865,
 America and Europe: Influence and Affinity 201

so his contact with the exhibitions in Boston may well have extended be-
yond his removal to Gloucester in about 1848.13
The open lateral edges and straight horizons that distinguish so many
land/sea luminist compositions in America—Lane’s Owl’s Head, Penobscot
Bay, Maine (fig. 8.8); Heade’s Rocks in New England (Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston); Kensett’s Shrewsbury River, New Jersey (New-York Historical Society)—
find parallels in the quiet compositions of the Dutch. The structural simi-
larities are clear from a comparison of a drawing by Cuyp, River Landscape
with Boats (fig. 10.2), with Lane’s Entrance to Somes Sound from the South-
west Harbor (fig. 10.3). Even were the Cuyp a painting, we would find the
American form more solid, the light more concrete, the surface harder. Gen-
erally, the luminists tend to stress the horizontal axis even more, with less
space allocated to skies. Cloud formations in the luminist works are less
prominent—cirrus rather than cumulus—if they appear at all. These dis-
tinctions are relatively minor when compared to the major similarities. The
luminist structural mode, which substitutes the absolutes of an implied ge-
ometry for the picturesque undulations of the Claudian type, finds its most
obvious parallels in seventeenth-century Holland.

10.2 Aelbert Cuyp, River Landscape with Boats. Black chalk, brush with black and gray ink,
71/4 × 121/8 in. (18.5 × 30.8 cm.). Berlin, Germany, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupfer-
stichkabinett.
202 part four

10.3 Fitz H. Lane, Entrance to Somes Sound from the Southwest Harbor, 1852. Oil on canvas,
233/4 × 353/4 in. (60.3 × 90.8 cm.). Private collection.

The Dutch mode, like the Claudian, was partly transmitted through
eighteenth-century England—to which early-nineteenth-century America
looked most naturally for exemplars. The marine tradition founded in En-
gland by Willem van de Velde the Younger was continued in the eighteenth
century by such English artists as Charles Brooking and Peter Monamy.
Their successor, Robert Salmon, was surely one of the agents of transmittal;
he worked in Boston between 1828 and 1842, and his works were known to
Lane. The structural similarities yielded by a comparison of van Goyen’s
Haarlem Sea and Lane’s Sunrise Through Mist: Pigeon Cove, Gloucester offer
such conclusive visual evidence that it is hard to believe they do not result
from a direct (Holland) or indirect (Holland via England) cause and effect.
Yet we cannot overlook the mysterious possibilities of affinity. Webster’s
New World Dictionary defines influence as “the power of persons or things
to affect others, seen only in its effects.”14 Affinity is defined as a “similarity
of structure, as of species or languages, implying common origin.”15 On the
one hand—cause and effect; on the other—similarity of structure with the
suggestion of a common root. The distinctions between these two are not
 America and Europe: Influence and Affinity 203

as clear-cut as we are often led to believe. Sometimes what we call affinity

turns out, after additional research, to be influence. But to extend the dia-
logue between America and Europe beyond influence to affinity joins
America even more firmly with Europe as part of the Western world. Ameri-
can artists held some attitudes that shared common philosophical and ar-
tistic roots with those of their European contemporaries; other attitudes
stemmed more directly from American soil and from the pragmatic en-
counter with the look of their native landscape.
The social similarities between the Dutch republic of the seventeenth
century—with its Protestantism, its respect for humble things, its middle-
class citizens—and the American republic of the nineteenth century indi-
cate basic affinities that require further study. Art historical affinities reside
in a common recourse to so-called “raw” nature, as an alternative to the
Claudian formula. In addition, it is possible that “influence” acted not so
much by cause and effect as by fortifying a proclivity that already existed. In
America, that proclivity clearly related to a more empirical response to the
actual experience—and, I suspect, to a pragmatic, even primitive, freshness
in the approach to picture-making.
John Neal recognized the early American taste for the picturesque in 1829
when he wrote that in landscape painting the public preferred poetry to
prose.16 Is it possible that the luminist artists finally learned to paint prose
rather than poetry by looking at prose painters looking at nature? They
may have gained access to a more direct experience of nature by learning
how to be direct from the conventions of another group of artists. Nature
now is not so much seen through pictures (i.e., the picturesque), but rather
pictures instruct on how to see nature for itself.
In calling this landscape “prose” in Neal’s terms, I do not at all mean that
there is no poetry in it. Quite the contrary. The poetry is an implied extension
of the prose. The distinction here probably hinges on the degree of artificial-
ity present in the earlier poetry. This is not artful poetry imposed on nature,
but nature whose poetry has been delicately floated to the surface.
The question of Dutch influence, open though it may be, is highly im-
portant. It may fill in and clarify a vital aspect of the esthetic dialogue be-
tween Europe and America. The prose-poetry of luminism may well
represent a unique mix of influence and affinity, of pictures and nature,
which indeed answered the problem posed by Worthington Whittredge of
an art which “might claim to be inspired by my home surroundings.”
204 part four

To be instructed by pictures on how to look at nature is a rarely considered

art historical question. Though it is a simple and plausible idea, the concept
that the American work resulted from a direct recourse to nature challenges
some basic art historical theories. Most of us, as we prowl the corridors of
artistic genealogies, subscribe to Gombrich’s notion of art coming from art.
Yet there is a basic danger for the art historian who overlooks the potential
power of the natural experience per se. No matter how much we may wish to
speak of artistic histories, it is important to remember that quite apart from
“art” nature offers its own rich resources to the artist’s eye and mind.
In America as elsewhere, this also led to those pragmatic plein-air pur-
suits which, as developed in France, still dominate the way we see the his-
tory of ninetenth-century landscape. The history of plein-airism in America
needs to be written. A sketch for it would include many of the brilliant
outdoor studies made by Durand in the early 1850’s, which clearly parallel
works done slightly later by Courbet;17 Bierstadt’s studies of clouds and trees;
Kensett’s scumbled rocks; Church’s hurried atmospheric encounters with
erupting volcanoes in Ecuador; and the plein-air researches of Mount (“The
canopy of heaven is the most perfect paint room for an artist”)18 and Homer,
both of whom shared with the French impressionists an admiration for
Chevreul. Mount’s comment about plein-air painting—“My best pictures
are those which I painted out of doors”19—fortifies Baur’s argument for a
native American impressionism20 that grew also out of tonal realist or
luminist concern with light, yet never quite developed the more abstract
color “pulsations” of the French tradition.
Such a study would also consider the history of the “happened-upon”
view. Bearing little resemblance compositionally to the Claudian or Dutch
marine modes, this view abandons the emphasis on lateral edges, either
framed or unframed, and brings the observer more immediately into the
depicted terrain. After the 1860’s such paintings, in which the scene presses
the space closer to the picture plane, were, in an important shift of focus, to
change the size relationships of forms to picture edges. Behind such obser-
vational statistics lie substantial changes of attitude.

France
How surprising that Courbet’s vanguard efforts toward a new landscape
realism find parallels and affinities in the nature studies of an “unimagina-
 America and Europe: Influence and Affinity 205

tive” Hudson River landscapist like Durand. Yet no one familiar with the
works of both artists can deny the similarities between Courbet’s weighty,
heavily troweled rocks, as in The Source of the Loue (fig. 10.4) or The Gour de
Conches (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Besancon), and the rock and tree studies
of his American contemporary. In each instance, nature dictates composi-
tional structures that find their own “natural” order; the exigencies of out-
door circumstances foster painterly spontaneity of stroke; and sensational
responses to light and air shift the surface away from the smooth, flat clo-
sure of the conceptual mode toward the “breathing openness” of a more
optical or perceptual mode.
The established logic of the formal canon leads us from Courbet’s work
to the rock and tree studies of his fellow countryman, Cézanne; extrapola-
tion of a similar order can be made from the studies of the American Durand,
so often stereotyped as a bucolic cow painter. In subject matter, Durand’s

10.4 Gustave Courbet, The Source of the Loue (La Grotte de la Loue), 1864. Oil on canvas,
383/4 × 513/8 in. (98.4 × 130.4 cm.).Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art.
206 part four

bucolic landscapes are furnished like those of such Barbizon artists as Rousseau,
who, in still another variation on the theme of Dutch influence, shares similar
Dutch roots. Yet the weighty economy of Durand’s rocks (fig. 10.5) goes be-
yond the efforts of the Barbizon men, to link more directly to the later works
of none other than Cézanne (fig. 10.6). This is doubtless due not to Durand’s

10.5 Asher Brown Durand, Study from Nature: Rocks and Trees in the Catskills, 1856. Oil on
canvas, 211/2 × 17 in. (54.6 × 43.2 cm.). New York, The New-York Historical Society.
 America and Europe: Influence and Affinity 207

10.6 Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (Fontainebleau?), 1896–99. Oil on canvas, 32 × 253/4 in.
(81.3 × 65.4 cm.). New York, The Museum of Modern Art.

avant-gardism, of which he was totally unconscious, but to his empiricism,

which responded, like Cézanne’s, to the weight of objects in reality. This prag-
matic emphasis on the density and weight of the object in reality is a quality
that has distinguished the American tradition since Copley. Along with philo-
sophical determinants, it impeded the development of a “pure” impression-
ism that would fracture both the object and the picture’s surface.
208 part four

In Courbet’s rocks, the painterly skin is always thicker, more sensually

compelling than corresponding American surfaces, regardless of their spon-
taneity. Courbet’s rocks are weighty largely because of the heavy paint that
depicts them. Durand’s have weight because he takes care to cut the volume
of the rocks themselves into the pictorial space in which they are set. In this
spontaneous American protoimpressionism, which appears not only with
Durand, but at the same time in Kensett’s studies of rocks and waterfalls,
paint surface is never allowed to dominate the depicted scene. For the
Barbizon artist Dupré, “Nature is only the pretext. Art is the goal, passing
through the individual.”21 This paramount elevation of art and its vehicle,
paint, was not possible for the Americans. Durand found it necessary for
the artist to keep “in due subordination the more sensuous qualities with
which material beauty is invested, thereby constituting his representation
the clear exponent of that intention by which every earnest spirit enjoys the
assurance of our spiritual nature, and scorns the subtlety and logic of posi-
tive philosophy.”22 For Durand, nature—which included spiritual nature—
was all. With the Barbizon men, painterly means were beginning to dominate
the natural model. And positivism was crucial for Courbet. Had he known
Durand’s metaphysic, it would have been abhorrent to him. Courbet could
not paint an angel because he had never seen one. All Durand’s rocks and
trees were instinct with spirit.
Thus, plein-airism in France could lead to the erosion of the object, the
abstract apotheosis of paint, and ultimately to the autonomy of art. In
America, though pragmatic observation of the object in light and air led to
some similarities with French plein-airism, the fundamental respect for the
object as a vessel for the ideal had to yield different results. Yet again, it is
necessary to point out the affinities. If art historical importance is gauged
by who did what when, and what was possible to whom, we must recognize
that out of their own empirical relation to nature the Americans reached a
point similar to that approached by Courbet, en route to Cézanne. Such
intersections are of great art historical interest. That the Americans’ spiri-
tual guidelines resulted in a different end product, and thus a different assess-
ment of their position, does not detract from their achievement.
American plein-airism makes a contribution to Western plein-airism be-
cause it was indigenous, not imported, growing out of a similar response to
objects seen outdoors. It came from a need to draw on the experience of
nature, rather than on pictures. And since, interestingly enough, it also drew
 America and Europe: Influence and Affinity 209

on a long tradition that insisted on the weightiness of the object in reality, it

looked beyond impressionism to the post-impressionism of a Cézanne, a
short-circuit that favored the American sensibility.
Extending the concept of affinity further into the century, we are struck
by the way in which some of these constants within the American tradition
continue to dominate. Though Homer’s croquet pictures of the mid and
late 1860’s (fig. 10.7) can be compared with the early works of Monet,23 the
basic empiricism already cited may account for his need to preserve the
tactile identity of objects. Optical knowledge, based more exclusively on
sensations, never seems to have satisfied the American sense of “reality.” We
can justifiably say, I think, that Homer belongs to a post-Darwinian genera-
tion that had largely abandoned the earlier metaphysical idealism, and that
his matter-of-fact realism is a good deal more in accord philosophically
with Courbet than was Durand’s ostensibly objective realism. Yet more than
his European colleagues, Homer maintains the American appetite not only
for the solid identity of each object, but for weighted space, nourishing a
careful correspondence to the three-dimensional world we live in. All this
despite those tendencies toward flatness and surface that also unite him to
the new developments in France.

10.7 Winslow Homer, Croquet Match, 1868–69. Oil on millboard, 913/16 × 155/8 in. (24.9 ×
39.7 cm.). Chicago, Terra Foundation for American Art.
210 part four

10.8 Federico Zandomeneghi, Honeymoon (Fishing on the Seine River), ca. 1878. Oil on
panel, 65/16 × 113/8 in. (16 × 29 cm.). Florence, Italy, Galleria d’Arte Moderna.

Homer’s art also has resonances, just at this moment, with the works of
the Macchiaioli in Italy—especially with the figures in landscape of Silvestro
Lega, Cristiano Banti, Giovanni Fattori,24 and related artists such as Federico
Zandomeneghi. Zandomeneghi’s art, in works like Honeymoon (fig. 10.8),
ca. 1878, has a classic planarism that relates not only to Homer but to the
luminist tradition of which Homer is sometimes a part.25 Can we speculate
here that the long classic Italian tradition may unite these Italian works
with an American art distinguished by planar and classic elements from the
outset? In the nineteenth century both traditions, for all their involvement
with plein-airism at the moment I am discussing, have perhaps a basic pro-
vincial tendency toward conceptualism. Removed from a mainstream that,
in Gombrich’s terms, is testing other formulae for “matching” reality, do
they not share the similar “look” of good provincialism?

England
The formulae tested by the mainstream (French art) came to some extent
from England—from the painterly essays of Constable, so important to the
Barbizon men, and to Delacroix in the 1820’s and 1830’s.26 Constable’s plein-
 America and Europe: Influence and Affinity 211

airism mimicked the idea of the transitory effect in the fleeting action of paint,
the ruggedly tactile surface which could detach itself from nature at the same
time that it described it. What the French took from Constable moved them
increasingly toward the autonomy of the means—of paint itself.
To the Americans, Constable offered less. What effect he had seems tied
to his empiricism. Durand especially admired Constable’s cloud studies when
he saw them at Leslie’s in 1840. Citing their “naturalness and beauty of ef-
fect,”27 he was doubtless also impressed by their pragmatic bent. There are
some affinities between Constable’s objective natural observations and the
Americans’ studies of trees, rocks, and clouds. As we know, Constable’s skies
form an interesting link through Luke Howard between the Americans and
Goethe.28 Constable admired Wordsworth, as did the Americans, and paid
some lip service to the idea of landscape as scripture.29 For all this, I cannot
help feeling—though further research may not bear this out—that Con-
stable’s analytical scientism, and an objectivity quite subjective in its paint-
erliness, removed his methods and results from any strong affinity with or
influence on the Americans.
Nonetheless, the English landscape tradition touched the Americans in
significant ways. The English eighteenth-century painters fortified the
Americans’ awareness of both Claude and the Dutch. The lineage of Claudian
and Dutch motifs in America can be traced through such eighteenth-century
English works as the ideal landscapes of George Lambert and the marine
paintings of Samuel Scott and, as suggested earlier, Charles Brooking. In
the nineteenth century, both Constable and Turner transformed that lin-
eage into something uniquely their own.30 We can find transformations of
similar significance within the American tradition.
Far more than Constable’s, Turner’s effect in America can be specifically
documented. His art, like Constable’s, was a touchstone for the develop-
ment of French impressionism,31 and his reconciliation of light and color in
a single operation paralleled that of Delacroix.32 Turner’s coloristic con-
cerns also linked him to Goethe, whose Theory of Colours he annotated in
the 1840’s, and which he may have known as early as the 1820’s.33 He re-
sponded to Goethe’s treatise with at least two paintings, Light and Colour
(Goethe’s Theory); and Shade and Darkness.34 Constable’s plein-air empiri-
cism may have helped free the naturalist urges of the Barbizon men; but in
the teleological progress toward impressionism, Turner must be given credit
for a further adumbration of the autonomy of paint and color. Ironically,
212 part four

the American heir to his suggestive revelations may have been Whistler,
who seems not to have liked him.35 Given the paradoxes of human behav-
ior, it is not surprising that Turner’s ardent champion, Ruskin, was blind to
Whistler.36
At all events, the expatriate Whistler bore little resemblance to the Ameri-
can landscapists who preceded him. Unlike Ruskin, they had difficulty ac-
cepting Turner’s abstraction, though there was just enough of the ideal in
him to appeal to that pole of the American sensibility. They valued most of
all, perhaps, the Turner they knew through the engravings of the Liber
Studiorum (fig. 10.9). Church, whom David Huntington linked to Turner’s
“cosmic breadth,” seems to have known him mainly through this channel,
and through the eloquent descriptions of Ruskin’s Modern Painters.37
Roger Stein points out that “Americans of 1848 were not on the whole very
concerned with either Turner’s painting or the defense of his reputation—
and even Ruskin’s writings would not basically alter their indifference in
this respect.”38 Yet the artists took Ruskin seriously. Even before the publica-
tion of Modern Painters I in 1843, they had discovered Turner. Allston went

10.9 Joseph Mallord William Turner, Inverary Pier. Loch Fyne. Morning, 1811. Etching and
mezzotint, 81/2 × 113/8 in. (21.7 × 29 cm.). San Francisco, Legion of Honor.
 America and Europe: Influence and Affinity 213

so far as to claim that Turner had “no superior of any age” and advised Cole,
through a mutual friend, to get a copy of the Liber Studiorum. Allston him-
self did not own a copy, and had not even seen one by 1827, but he noted
that “coming from him, I know what it must be.”39
Cole shared Allston’s admiration and was obviously influenced by Turner’s
Building of Carthage (as well as by Claude) for the central picture, Consum-
mation, in Course of Empire. Perhaps we can talk here of Claude redux. But
Cole felt strongly that Turner’s later works were “the strangest things imagin-
able . . . as far as respects colour (colour independent of truth of representa-
tion), they are splendid; but as the Greeks have said, The most brilliant
composition of colours is nothing better than a gaudy show, dazzling the eye
for a moment, but passing afterward disregarded. To this colouring let the
painter add the solid beauties of design and sentiment, and he will convert an
empty amusement of the eye into an elegant entertainment of the Fancy.”40
Insofar as Turner’s art was poetic rather than analytic, his evanescent
abstraction could to some extent be accommodated by an American taste
that had already accepted Allston’s reveries. Yet Turner’s “artificiality” col-
lided with an American bias against mannerism that had also afflicted Cole,
a much less serious transgressor. The American insistence on the solid in-
tegrity of form looked askance at Turner’s filmy dissolutions.
Despite this, he had his American heirs. Durand, having first found him
“factitious and artificial” (during that same 1840 visit to Europe when he
encountered Constable’s works), later claimed, as we have seen, that Turner’s
skies “approached nearer to the representation of the infinity of Nature than
all that have gone before him.”41 Cropsey too, in the cloud essay of 1855,
praised Turner’s skies.42 How influential had Ruskin’s words been by then?
Ruskin himself received copies of Turner’s paintings as votive gifts from
artists: among them the American John Henry Hill, who copied Turner in
1864 and 1865.43 Sanford Gifford, who admired Ruskin early on, was torn
between a distaste for Turner’s indefiniteness and an admiration for his light,
color, and imagination. When Gifford’s good friend Thomas Hotchkiss saw
Ruskin’s Turners in 1860, he especially admired the watercolors, which he
found “more quiet and united in idea and less ambitious.” Hotchkiss spe-
cifically referred to the “delicacy, breadth and unity” of the Turners, as well
as to the color. Though on this visit to London shortly after his arrival in
Europe Hotchkiss saw “several pictures by William Holman Hunt and Rosetti
[sic] and several landscapes by young men of whom I have never heard
214 part four

which are fine,” he felt that “except Turner our painters have done more in
landscape than the English.” For Hotchkiss, Turner was “to my feeling the
greatest of all painters.”44
The American artists who traveled abroad after the mid-century, study-
ing and copying Turner’s paintings, and especially the watercolors (which
offered different lessons from the engravings of the Liber Studiorum), were
distinguished, like Hotchkiss, for their delicate painterly handling of light.
William Trost Richards, who early on (1854) cited the influence of Cole and
Turner in “the purposes and principles of landscape expression,” returned
to Turner throughout his career. In 1878, he was still “trying to digest anew
the Turners and the Sir Joshua Reynolds, and the Claudes.”45
Since Turner’s rivalry with Claude was so much at the root of some of his
work, one wonders how much the Claudian element in Turner augmented
the American concern with him. The Turner influence came a little too late
perhaps to feed the Claudian obsession. By the mid-century he had more to
offer the Americans than a simple fortification of Claudian sublimity. He
offered a more rhetorically painterly sublime, which seems to have struck
its strongest affinity with Frederic E. Church. Affinity here seems at least as
important as influence. Turner and Church genuinely shared a sense of the
older sublime that drew them to such awesome subjects as volcanoes.
Niagara, which brought Church such renown, seemed to Turner, who never
visited America, the greatest wonder in nature.46 These fascinations attest
also to their mutual concern with contemporary science, and with the new
awareness of nature’s “unity.” Yet the greatest resemblance between them
was, I think, their enveloping, all-consuming light.
That light, which prompted critics of both to allude to primeval begin-
nings, was, however, similar and different. Like the French to whom he was
to mean so much, Turner’s light was initially and predominantly paint. The
“substance” of paint (the means) comprised his light, was equivalent to it,
and somehow managed to be both Apocalypse and paint at the same time.
With Church, the Apocalypse came first. Though he left his “labor trail”47
on the surface of the canvas, paint never displaced spirit. Beside Turner he
emerges, for all the dazzling brilliance of his atmosphere, as a devout Ameri-
can artist who still put nature (and God) before art. His exact crystalline
foregrounds often belie the controlled painterliness of his atmospheric dis-
tances. He managed to have it both ways—as Jarves said, to “idealize in
composition, and to materialize in execution.”48 Turner’s vivid skin of paint
 America and Europe: Influence and Affinity 215

found a more genuine parallel in Ryder at the end of the century than in
any of the mid-century landscapists.
Yet they were frequently compared with him. The London Art Journal for
October 1859 claimed that “the mantle of our greatest painter” (Turner)
had fallen on Church “more than any other.”49 James Hamilton, who until
his trip to London in 1854 was affected primarily, as far as we can tell, by
Turner’s engravings,50 afterwards absorbed some of Turner’s feeling for paint.
Like Thomas Moran, who learned so much from him, Hamilton was often
called the American Turner. Moran, like Church, indulged too much in spe-
cific detail to deserve the title, yet his interest in Turner was life-long. He
studied Turner in the Liber Studiorum, first copied his paintings in 1861,
and frequently doused his own works with a golden sauce that may well
have derived from Turner.51 Yet never, with any of these Americans, does
paint become what it clearly was for Turner, the primary life substance of
the painting. As to affinity of intent, Church was perhaps closest: in his
light, as in Turner’s, shines both Revelation and Creation.
Yet even the most painterly Americans at mid-century could not absorb
Turner’s emphasis on the means of art, any more than they could produce
French-type impressionism. Art could never mean more to them than God’s
world. As acolytes of nature, they were always more discreet about how they
disintegrated that world and, even in the midst of dazzling atmosphere,
they tried to preserve its fundamental semblance in as much recognizable
detail as was feasible. Detail clarified and formulated the vessel in which
God’s spirit was stored—Emerson’s fact as “the end and issue of spirit.” Per-
haps this is why we can find more obvious similarities to the Americans in
a later generation of English artists, their pre-Raphaelite contemporaries of
the 1850’s and 1860’s.
The polished surfaces and the industrious respect for the minutiae of
nature have affinities with American landscapes, particularly in the intri-
cate studies of vegetation. The Pre-Raphaelites were involved in a kind of
morality of the difficult. As Henry James put it: “When the English realists
‘went in,’ as the phrase is, for hard truth and stern fact, an irresistible in-
stinct of righteousness caused them to try and purchase forgiveness for their
infidelity to the old more or less moral properties and conventionalities by
an exquisite, patient, virtuous manipulation—by being above all things la-
borious.”52 The Americans seem to have made such industry an even more
direct votive gesture, serving nature-as-Deity in laborious dedication. They were
216 part four

more concerned with revealing a morality in nature itself (Emerson’s

“thought which is . . . good”).53 One senses that the Pre-Raphaelite Brother-
hood was more concerned with the moral qualities of art and artist. Laborious
art-making endowed the artist and his products with moral superiority. This
underlines the selflessness with which American artists regarded even the pro-
cess of artistic labor. The ends to which they were committed did not reflect the
artist’s own moral glory, but God’s moral glory as revealed in nature.
At this moment, of course, Ruskin’s influence was extensive on both sides
of the Atlantic. Stein points out that in America “the Pre-Raphaelites were
usually associated with Ruskin’s name after the publication of his pamphlet
in 1851, but the reverse was not necessarily the case.”54 The American paint-
ers seem to have taken from Ruskin certain pragmatic advice that suited
their journeyman sensibilities. They already spoke his moral and spiritual
language even more eloquently than his British confrères. He served them
best when he verbally articulated that language for them.55
The term Pre-Raphaelite, often rather broadly used in American criticism
at mid-century, always implied careful detail. Tuckerman writes of Kensett,
In some of his pictures the dense growth of trees on a rocky ledge, with the
dripping stones and mouldy lichens, are rendered with the literal minuteness
of one of the old Flemish painters. It is on this account that Kensett enjoys an
exceptional reputation among the extreme advocates of the Pre-Raphaelite
school, who praise him while ignoring the claims of other American land-
scape-artists. But this fidelity to detail is but a single element of his success.
His best pictures exhibit a rare purity of feeling, an accuracy and delicacy,
and especially a harmonious treatment, perfectly adapted to the subject.56

Tuckerman had hit on an important difference between the PRB and the
Americans. The PRB seems to have taken literally Ruskin’s injunction to
paint as many ideas into a picture as possible.57 Their works differed from
the Americans in their horror vacui, their Victorian clutter. Despite their
passion to clarify detail, the Americans—especially the luminists—avoided
this. They often stressed effect as much as detail, and ordered their space
with an intrinsic classicism that made for smooth transitions in an unen-
cumbered pictorial terrain. The PRB also rarely achieved the gleaming lu-
minosity that halates American landscape.
Despite this, there are some rather striking affinities. John Brett’s Massa,
Bay of Naples (fig. 10.10), with its calm water and sun-dappled hills, has
something of the quality of Gifford’s A Home in the Wilderness (formerly
called Mount Hayes) (fig. 10.11). Brett too, occasionally makes use of the
 America and Europe: Influence and Affinity 217

10.10 John Brett, Massa, Bay of Naples, 1873. Oil on canvas, 343/4 × 511/4 in. (88.3 × 130.2
cm.). Indianapolis, Indianapolis Museum of Art.

10.11 Sanford Robinson Gifford, A Home in the Wilderness (formerly called Mount Hayes),
1866. Oil on canvas, 301/4 × 537/16 in. (76.8 × 135.7 cm.). Cleveland, The Cleveland Museum
of Art.
218 part four

“weighted” space so familiar in the American tradition, as in Morants Court

in May (1864). The horizontal extension of Brett’s The British Channel Seen
from the Dorsetshire Cliffs (1871) obviously compares to American luminism;
it also relates to Friedrich’s studies of Rügen. Dyce’s Pegwell Bay, Kent—a Rec-
ollection of October 5, 1858 (London, The Tate Gallery; ca. 1860) also offers a
striking comparison with luminism in the handling of the water and rocks.
Yet the divergent moral premises counter the formal similarities. More
than with the Americans, science seems to have outweighed sentiment for
some members of the PRB. Though William Michael Rossetti found
Courbet’s brusque realism wanting, claiming he had only a “half grasp of
realism,”58 and though Rossetti was concerned, as Allen Staley noted, with
“the sentiment of things as well as their appearance,”59 sentiment may
have been less important for the PRB than it was for the Americans. Ruskin,
who was greatly admired by Brett, liked Brett’s early work, but eventually
faulted him for “absence of sentiment.” Brett’s Val d’Aosta was not “in the
strong, essential meaning of the word, a noble picture. It has a strange fault,
considering the school to which it belongs—it seems to me wholly emo-
tionless. I cannot find from it that the painter loved, or feared, anything in
all that wonderful piece of the world. There seems to me to be no awe of
the mountains there—no real love of the chestnuts or the vines. . . .”60
“Sentiment,” “love,” or if necessary “awe” would elevate landscape paint-
ing to the “nobility” Ruskin valued. That nobility was also prized by the
Americans, who served him better in spirit than some of his own country-
men. Though Brett may be an extreme example within the PRB circle, his
splendidly anti-romantic comment “Sentiment in landscape is chiefly de-
pendent on meterology”61 emphasized cool science in a way that distin-
guished it from the more overt idealism of the Americans. For affinities
here, we have to look elsewhere, to the Germans and to the Scandinavians.

Germany and Scandinavia

When considering American and German landscape painting, scholars usu-
ally stress the Düsseldorf influence, especially in the 1850’s and 6o’s.62
Whittredge, Haseltine, Bierstadt, James MacDougal Hart all studied in
Düsseldorf. Direct connections between their works and their German “mas-
 America and Europe: Influence and Affinity 219

ters” can certainly be cited. Some of Whittredge’s works resemble those of

his painting companion Carl Lessing, whose studio was a gathering place
for Americans in Düsseldorf.63 Whittredge, like Haseltine and Bierstadt, also
admired the rather inaccessible Andreas Achenbach.64
But the Düsseldorf influence has always seemed to me a bit overstressed.
Though Lane, in faraway Gloucester, knew what the Düsseldorf school was
doing,65 it is misleading to assume that American landscapists needed
Düsseldorf, or for that matter Biedermeier,66 to encourage their fixation on
detail. Emphasis on detail was part of the American esthetic long before the
Düsseldorf influence.
There are more striking affinities with the Dresden circle of Caspar David
Friedrich—Germans and Scandinavians whose attitudes to nature and to
picture-making in many ways paralleled those of the Americans. Friedrich
is surely the single European landscapist whose sensibility most closely
matches that of the Americans. Some of his quiet sea pictures coincide with
works by Lane and Heade; his lone trees, mists, and sky studies are echoed
in Bierstadt; his allegorical landscapes relate to Cole; his ice pictures, such
as The Polar Sea, to Bradford and Haseltine; his sailing boats to Allston and
Lane (figs. 10.12 and 10.13). Since Düsseldorf (Bierstadt was born nearby)

10.12 Fitz H. Lane, Study for Brace’s Rock, Eastern Point, Gloucester, 1863. Oil on paper-
board, 51/4 × 81/2 in. ( 13.3 × 21.6 cm.). Private collection.
220 part four

10.13 Caspar David Friedrich, Mist (Der Nebel), 1807. Oil on canvas, 131/2 × 205/16 in. (34.3
× 51.6 cm.). Vienna, Austria, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere.

owed some artistic debts to Dresden, we can naturally cite similarities be-
tween the Düsseldorf-trained artists Bierstadt and Haseltine and the earlier
Friedrich. But influence here seems very far from the point. Friedrich’s af-
finity with the Americans is as much philosophical as formal. When his art is
placed beside theirs, common attitudes to the world and to picture-making
create a striking “resemblance.”
Unexpectedly, he shares their primitivism. If we fail to recognize Friedrich’s
primitive “root” we cannot really understand his art, let alone his affinities
with the Americans. By primitivism, I mean a strong tendency to the linear
and the flatly planar, an abstractness which maintains (even more than the
American works) the mat quality of paint, a frequent recourse to overall em-
phasis of parts, and an inherent bias toward draftsmanship, toward “colored
drawings” rather than paintings. The primitivism is also revealed in small
gaucheries, often in abortive attempts to dissolve linear boundaries in atmo-
sphere. The careful enclosure of image by line has little to do with the sensual
and optical, but much to do with “idea.” The Americans’ ideational root came
 America and Europe: Influence and Affinity 221

out of a strong folk or “primitive” tradition, which tempered the sophisti-

cated academic line throughout the nineteenth century.
Friedrich gives scant but provocative evidence of his connection to a simi-
lar tradition. His earliest works before he attended the Copenhagen Acad-
emy are devotional texts adorned with linear bird creatures reminiscent of
American fractur drawings, or perhaps of Scandinavian folk art. It is rarely
stressed that Greifswald, where Friedrich was born, remained a part of Swe-
den until 1815, when it was ceded to Prussia.67 Also, Suzanne Latt Epstein
has noted that the Copenhagen Academy, where Friedrich studied from 1794
to 1798, had strong connections to the craft and folk arts.68
There are also obvious formal similarities between the works of such
Danish artists as Christen Købke and Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg and
those of the Americans—similarities that underline the significance of
Friedrich’s Scandinavian origin and training. Købke’s Frederiksborg Castle
is dominated by mirror-smooth reflections that recall luminist seascapes or
such luminist genre-landscapes as Mount’s Eel Spearing at Setauket. His
View from Dosseringen (1838; fig. 10.14) looks forward, in its geometric

10.14 Christen Købke, A View from Dosseringen near the Sortedam Lake Looking Towards
Nørrebro (Udsigt fra Dosseringen ved Sortedamssøen mod Nørrebro), 1838. Oil on canvas,
2011/16 × 281/8 in. (52.6 × 71.4 cm.). Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst.
222 part four

10.15 Thomas Eakins, The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake, 1873. Oil on canvas, 397/8 ×
595/8 in. (101.3 × 151.4 cm.). Cleveland, The Cleveland Museum of Art.

simplicity, smooth surface, and handling of light, to Eakins’s Biglin Brothers

Turning the Stake (1873; fig. 10.15). Eckersberg’s View from Trekroner again
has the simplicity of Eakins, or some of the quiet geometry of Homer. His
Section of Nyholm relates to Lane in structure, theme, handling of detail,
light, and even time, as do others of his sea pictures. His cloud studies clearly
echo similar studies by Bierstadt.69
Many questions pose themselves here. How much are these affinities due
to similar attitudes toward “picture-making”? It has long seemed to me that
the similarities between Scandinavian and American art in the nineteenth
century are rooted in the importance of each country’s vigorous folk art. The
conceptual focus and impersonal hand of a strong folk tradition runs parallel
to, and tempers, the more sophisticated tradition, in both America and
Scandinavia. The sophisticated tradition is further conditioned by the strong
neoclassical controls developed by the academies here and abroad (compare
Abildgaard in Denmark, Allston and West in America and England).
Friedrich’s linearity has been considered a result of his neoclassic train-
ing with Abildgaard in Copenhagen. But that neoclassicism may have been
tempered by the Scandinavian folk tradition. If so, we have a similar situa-
 America and Europe: Influence and Affinity 223

tion, formally, to that which nourished the Americans. Friedrich’s method-

ology was sometimes strikingly similar to that of the Americans. Like the
luminists he most resembles, he relied strongly on measure, numbering off
areas in his drawings, using rulers to control his horizons, compasses to
insure the circularity of his moons, and probably the camera lucida or
obscura to render landscape contours. Knowledge and measure directed his
effects more than optical sensations. Yet like the luminists, he converted a
conceptual concern that is largely technical (picture-making) into a con-
ceptual philosophy (or vice versa). His pursuit of the inner image, shared
with the folk artist, becomes a philosophical voyage toward an inner knowl-
edge of reality, such as we encounter with the luminist Lane and the vision-
ary Cole.
“Close your bodily eye,” wrote Friedrich, “so that you may see your pic-
ture first with the spiritual eye. Then bring to the light of day that which
you have seen in the darkness, so that it may react upon others from the
outside inwards.”70 This stress on interior process was not too far from Cole’s
separation of optical reality from inner reality. Cole used the winnowing
processes of memory and time: “. . . you never succeed in painting scenes,
however beautiful, immediately on returning from them . . . I must wait for
time to draw a veil over the common details, the unessential parts, which shall
leave the great features, whether the beautiful or the sublime, dominant in the
mind.”71 Cole always tried to get “the objects of nature, sky, rocks, trees, etc. as
strongly impressed on my mind as possible, and by looking intently on an
object for twenty minutes I can go to my room and paint it with much more
truth than I could if I employed several hours on the spot.”72 This insistence
on Mind, aspiring toward the Ideal, touched on Friedrich.
For Cole, this ideal was a kind of Reynoldsian Platonism achieved through
memory; for Lane it was something held in memory. On one occasion at
least, it was the memory of a picture seen in a dream: “The dream was very
vivid and on awakening I retained it in memory for a long time. The effect
was so beautiful in the dream that I determined to attempt its reproduc-
tion, and this picture is the result. The drawing is very correct, but the effect
falls far short of what I saw, and it would be impossible to convey to canvas
such gorgeous and brilliant coloring as was presented to me. This picture,
however, will give to the beholder some faint idea of the ideal.”73
For Lane, as for Cole and Friedrich, the ideal also had strong spiritual over-
tones. Friedrich maintained: “You should keep sacred every pure impulse of
224 part four

your mind; you should keep sacred every pious sentiment; because that is
art in us! In an inspired hour she will appear in a clear form, and this form
will be your picture!”74 In Friedrich and Cole, “pious sentiment” received
more overt allegorical service than in Lane. Anyone familiar with Cole’s
Voyage of Life will recognize the philosophical and symbolic similarities to
Friedrich’s Times of Year. A text on the latter, by Friedrich’s close friend, G.
H. von Schubert, opens with the purity of childhood: “We awake among
flowers by the clear source of life, where the eternal sky is mirrored in its
virgin purity.”75 In Cole’s painting of Childhood for Voyage of Life (plate 5),
the “rosy light of the morning, the luxuriant flowers and plants” are, in
Cole’s own description, “emblems of the joyousness of early life.”76 Friedrich’s
protagonist is carried along the river until “the inner striving has grown
weary on the last part of the path which was full of rocks and crags . . . on
this side of the river a place of rest is found beneath the cross which rises
peacefully above the cliffs. At last the mind understands that the abode of
that longing which has guided us so far, is not here on earth. Speed on then,
river, down your way! Where your waves flow into the infinite sea on a far
distant shore we have heard of a last place of rest.”77
In Cole’s Manhood, Friedrich’s “rocks and crags” are “bare, impending
precipices” that “rise in the lurid light. The swollen stream rushes furiously
down a dark ravine. . . .”78 In Old Age (fig. 2.1), Cole’s voyager “looks upward
to an opening in the clouds, from whence a glorious light bursts forth; and
angels are seen descending the cloudy steps, as if to welcome him to the
Haven of Immortal Life.”79 More than Cole’s verbal broadside, the painting
Old Age underscores the similarity to Friedrich’s concept. After the turbu-
lence of Manhood, the quiet horizontal calm of the river has become Cole’s
equivalent to Friedrich’s “last place of rest.”
Cole tried to raise landscape to the level of history painting—while la-
menting that the public would never understand the philosophy behind his
paintings. Friedrich sought an allegorical landscape that would incorporate
his most “pious sentiment.” One of the most sensitive writers of the Dresden
circle, Ludwig Tieck, recognized Friedrich’s intention when he wrote: “. . .
He tries to introduce allegory and symbolism in light and shadow, living
and dead nature, snow and water, and also in the living figures. Indeed, by
means of a definite clarity in his ideas and a purposefulness of his imagina-
tion, he attempts to lift landscape above history and legend. . . .”80
 America and Europe: Influence and Affinity 225

In this deliberate symbolism, Friedrich goes further than the Americans;

only Cole’s philosophical series begin to offer parallels. For the Americans
by and large, nature was by definition already Christian and spiritual: it
was, by a priori understanding, read and interpreted as a biblical text. The
insertion of a cross on the mountain was rarely necessary (figs. 10.16 and
10.17). Indeed, the Americans would have agreed with Emerson that “mysti-
cism consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an

10.16 Caspar David Friedrich, The Cross in the Mountains, 1808. Oil on canvas, 451/4 × 435/16
in. (115 × 110 cm.). Dresden, Germany, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Gemälde-
galerie Alte Meister.
226 part four

10.17 Frederic Edwin Church, Scene in the Blue Mountains, Jamaica, 1865. Oil on paper,
mounted on canvas, 105/8 × 173/4 in. (27 × 45.1 cm.). Olana, N.Y., Olana State Historic Site.

universal one.”81 The difference between Friedrich and the Americans lies
in the specific allegorical meaning attached by Friedrich to the landscape, a
meaning compounded by a deliberate theatricality of presentation. The
Friedrich literature makes much of the way in which certain aspects of na-
ture are elevated to symbols.82 Mountains, for example, are said to stand for
the divine. But with the Americans, mountains are the divine. The once-
removed nature of symbolism is thereby short-circuited.
The Americans have clear affinities with the Germans in their erasure of
ego, entry into the infinite, and search for a universal quietism—Emerson’s
“serene, inviolable order.” As Emerson’s library lists eloquently testify,83 the
American transcendentalists were exposed early to German philosophy. How
much they were directly influenced by German ideas, which also arrived via
Coleridge and Carlyle, and how much these ideas fortified their own incli-
nations, as Stanley Vogel suggests, is still a matter of conjecture.84 However,
the philosophical connections between Goethe’s “The works of nature are
ever a freshly uttered word of God,” which Emerson quoted in his journal,
and Emerson’s own “The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the ap-
parition of God”85 clearly underlie some of the formal similarities between
 America and Europe: Influence and Affinity 227

the paintings. Indeed, the philosophical parallels, crucial to the affinity be-
tween Friedrich and the Americans, are legion. The textual evidence indi-
cates an extraordinary number of congruent ideas, particularly between
Emerson, who can now be seen as the unofficial spokesman for the Ameri-
can landscapists,86 and Carus, Friedrich’s friend, biographer, and theoreti-
cal spokesman. Emerson’s famous passage in Nature—“I become a
transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal
Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God”87—has direct af-
finities with Carus. Carus’s man senses the “immense magnificence of na-
ture, feels his own insignificance, and feeling himself to be in God, enters
into this infinity and abandons his individual existence . . . his surrender is
gain rather than loss. What otherwise only the mind’s eye sees, here be-
comes almost literally visible: the oneness in the infinity of the universe.”88
Carus sounds the transcendental and luminist concern with quietism when
he speaks of the feeling of “quiet devotion within you; you lose yourself in
boundless space; your whole being undergoes a quiet refining and cleans-
ing; your ego vanishes; you are nothing; God is all.”89
The formal differences can also be traced back to certain philosophical
roots. Though Schelling’s Naturphilosophie surely had its effect on the de-
velopment of an American nature attitude, his stress on “pure ideas” again
cues our understanding of the difference between Friedrich and the Ameri-
cans. Schelling suggested that the artist “must . . . withdraw himself from
the product [actual nature], from the creature, but only in order to raise
himself to the creative energy and to seize them spiritually. Thus he ascends
into the realm of pure ideas; he forsakes the creature, to regain it with thou-
sandfold interest, and in this sense to return to nature.”90
Schelling’s withdrawal “into the realm of pure ideas” incorporated the
ideal and the real (i.e., his actual) in a way that differed somewhat from the
Americans’ practice. Like Emerson, he emphasized that truth and beauty
were not opposed to, but of a piece with, the actual. But the Americans did
not withdraw as completely from the actual into pure idea; they did not
abandon the details of the material shell to reach “above form” for “essence,
the universal, the look and expression of the indwelling spirit of nature.”91
Translated into formal terms, they did not paint as abstractly as Friedrich.
With Friedrich, we never lose the mat sense of the painted surface. Paint,
remaining paint, keeps the forms essentially abstract—and thus ideational.
228 part four

The object identity that is such a potent aspect of American expression (espe-
cially in the luminist art to which he is most directly linked) is totally absent.
The Americans’ respect for fact in no way hindered them from discovering
within it the same spirit of nature that Schelling sought. They fully recog-
nized that “each material thing” had its “celestial side” (Emerson).92 But the
way in which they adhered to a versimilitude of the object’s surface is one of
their most dramatic differences from Friedrich. In nineteenth-century
America, idea could best be reached through penetration of its material
enclosure. In this way, the artist’s sensibility could reveal, in Ruskinian terms,
the inner and outer, or “moral and material,” truth.93
Following Schelling, Friedrich reached above form for its essence, aban-
doning the sensual details of the material object. In so doing, he also relin-
quished the brilliant light that glistens on the surface of American luminist
landscapes.94 That radiant glow is not paralleled by Friedrich’s surfaces. His
light effects, usually controlled in a carefully modulated middle distance,
exist as color rather than as transparency. His mat surfaces parallel the se-
renity but not the crystallinity of luminism. Spirit in Friedrich’s art is achieved
through a surface generalization that stresses the abstract and symbolic role
of form. As Schelling put it, “This spirit of nature, working at the core of
things, and speaking through form and shape as by symbols only, the artist
must follow with emulation; and only so far as he seizes this with vital
imitation has he himself produced anything genuine.”95 In a painting by
Lane, on the other hand, the inner spirit announces itself more vehemently
through a brilliance deliberately heightened to pierce the outer husk of
material detail. As Emerson had it: “There is no object so foul that intense
light will not make beautiful.”96 For Friedrich then, spirit is abstract. For
the luminists, spirit is light. Though for both, the material world repre-
sented something higher, the more conscious emphasis on symbolism in
the German work enters an arena of allegorical iconography rarely touched
by the Americans.97
The subjective nature of this iconography further separates it from the
American works. In American and German transcendental philosophy and
art there is a strong emphasis on the elimination of ego. But, despite his
even surfaces, Friedrich introduces ego once again. He does this by stressing
a symbolic iconography which imposes his own “meaning” on the face of
nature, and by insisting on the artist’s “feeling” as a guiding “law.”98 Friedrich
 America and Europe: Influence and Affinity 229

tells his students: “Respect the voice of nature in yourselves.”99 He sees “the
heart” as the “only true source of art”100 and suggests that “a painter should
not merely paint what he sees in front of him, he ought to paint what he
sees within himself.”101 He respects subjective originality: “Whatever one
may say about X’s paintings, and however much they may resemble Y’s,
they originated in him and are his own.”102 Allston’s concept of originality,
and to some extent Cole’s, would support this. But, in deferring to nature,
American, especially luminist, art eschewed the obvious interjection of feel-
ing (what Friedrich called “heart”). The artist’s primary function was to act
as a medium between the real and the ideal. So at the core of the American
service to the real, there is often an impersonality that becomes personal
only in its end result. This occurs when the artist, through elimination of
ego, reconciles the self with the Emersonian universal spirit.
For all the similarity, then, between the mystical annihilation of the self by
German nineteenth-century idealism and the abolition of ego in American
transcendental philosophy and painting, for all the parallels between Emerson’s
Oversoul and Carus’s Divine Being in nature, there is a crucial distinction in
the attitude to the ego. The German maintains a situation in which the ego is
both affirmed and banished. As we saw earlier (see Chapter 8), Worringer was
sensitive to this when he noted that mysticism itself contained “a peculiar
state of discord”: “born of individualism, it immediately preaches against its
own origin.”103 The Germans remain for him the “conditio sine qua non of
Gothic. They introduce among self-confident peoples that germ of sensuous
uncertainty and spiritual distractedness from which the transcendental pa-
thos of Gothic then surges so irrepressibly upwards.”104
The German ego, even when striving for mystical annihilation, is some-
how self-consciously present, witnessing its own tragic and human origins.
Though both the American transcendentalists and the German idealists were
steeped in oriental mysticism, the American ego, in Emersonian terms, was
perhaps based more strongly in oriental selflessness, in what Worringer has
called a “human self-consciousness so small” and a “metaphysical submis-
siveness so great.”105 The American transcendentalists, affected, like their
German counterparts, by mystics such as Boehme and Eckhart (as well as
by the German idealists themselves) might indeed have added a still more
potent dose of something akin to oriental mysticism to the American mix.
Of Emerson and the Orient, Arthur Christy notes:
230 part four
It might be questioned whether Emerson was not largely influenced by Eckhart
or at least that part of Western mysticism which is represented by Eckhart
and Boehme. Western mysticism emphatically did influence Emerson. But it
also paved the way to Hinduism, making him receptive to it, for when a thinker
has reached the neti, neti stage he is above many of the frontiers and divisive
boundaries of human thought. Occidental or Oriental, he feels that his lim-
ited powers cannot compass the transcendental vastness of God, yet he is
humanly impelled to describe him in his own small way. The pictures he
forms of the sublime, inscrutable source of the universe are necessarily inad-
equate. This he knows. He knows too that personality implies a distinction of
the self and the not-self, and hence is inapplicable to the Being which in-
cludes and embraces all that is.106

The American transcendental painter approached oriental anonymity

more by the retreat of the ego behind the thing than the German idealist,
whose art became, in the twentieth century, the expressionist exaltation of
the tragic self. Somehow this was attached not just to American pragma-
tism (always less dramatic than the German) but to an American need to
equate thing and Deity without symbolic intervention. When in German
art symbol intervened, feeling and subjectivity could as well. Thus one may
say that in America there was a more complete elimination of ego. Expres-
sionism in America has always been, in my view, imported. Whether tradi-
tional Puritan repression was a factor in erasing demonstrable feeling in
paint is a question that might be considered. Friedrich’s transcendentalism
had its root in Worringer’s Gothic man, for whom “everything becomes weird
and fantastic”; Lane’s transcendentalism related to the Puritan-Unitarian-
Realist palate that Whicher identified in Emerson before he scented the “in-
describable brew called modern philosophy.”107

Clearly, American painters arrived at the American art of landscape and

founded Emerson’s “new order” out of an amalgam of elements only hinted
at in the foregoing chapter. What emerges, I hope, is our sense of the land-
scape art of this period as an integral part of its moment, and of the art of
the Western world. American landscape art is attuned philosophically as
well as art historically to the nature attitudes of the West. The concurrent
ideas of German idealism and American transcendentalism, the concepts
of the ideal and the picturesque, the empirical experience itself, all find their
influences, parallels, and affinities.
Out of a common debt to Claude and the Dutch the nineteenth century
developed a new relation to nature that nourished the greatest efflorescence
 America and Europe: Influence and Affinity 231

of landscape painting in the history of art. The Americans participated in

the great landscape adventure with an art that grew out of its singular rela-
tion to American nature, to the artistic traditions of Europe, and to its own
developing traditions. Beside the pragmatism of Constable, Courbet, and
Barbizon we can place the plein–air efforts of Durand and the Hudson River
men. Beside the audacious poetry of Turner, the atmospheric effects of
Church. Beside the mystic universalism of Friedrich, the luminism of Lane
and the allegories of Cole. Yet, in the final analysis, what emerged was pre-
cisely what Whittredge was looking for: “something distinctive to the art of
our country.”
That “something” raised nature above art or ego, and subsumed self in
spirit. Where the French had stressed means, the Americans stressed ends;
where the Germans injected feeling, the Americans distilled it to a more
impersonal essence. Nowhere in Europe was a similar emphasis placed on
the “weight” of reality, an American constant that was rarely relinquished.
Idea often predominated over eye in the confrontation with nature, and
with the artistic conventions representing nature. Often, too, the ideational
base slid quickly onto an ideal plane, frequently classicized, in luminist art
especially, so that time, opened out into transitory flux by mainstream proto-
impressionism, was locked into an eternal present. Empirical observation,
which in France added a new positivism to existence, in America largely
gave credibility to an experience that was recognizable and true at the same
time that it stressed spirit.
The truths of light and atmosphere that absorbed American artists quickly
served a concept of nature as God, turning landscape paintings into proto-
icons. American landscape was dominated by this concept, which went fur-
ther than the European philosophies that helped generate it. As with other
areas of American art, the perfect solution was one that reconciled the real
and the ideal, the tangible and the ephemeral, that infused the inviolate
“stuff ” of God’s world with Godhead. Thus, the American painters were
able to make of their “natural antiquity” a “new order” in landscape paint-
ing, which was one answer to the difficult resolution of the problem of na-
ture and culture.
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Notes

Preface to the Previous Edition

1. See Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism,
and the American Experience (New York: Praeger, 1969).
2. For the “American Mind” theory, see Gene Wise, “‘Paradigm Dramas’ in the Ameri-
can Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement,” American Quar-
terly, XXXI (1979):306–7.
3. Giles Gunn, Thinking Across the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, and the New Prag-
matism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 167.
4. Ibid., p. 168.
5. Hayden White, The Content of the Form (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1992), p. 211.
6. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 14.
7. Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” in Meaning in the
Visual Arts (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1955), p. 17.
8. See Carlo Argan, “Ideology and Iconology,” trans. Rebecca West, in Critical Inquiry
(Winter 1975):299.
9. See Michael Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1984), pp. 181, 186.
10. See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse On Language
(New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 194.
11. Ibid., p. 131.
12. Erwin Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Re-
naissance Art,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor,
1955), pp. 40–41.
13. See David Miller, ed., American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art
and Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press 1993), p. 1, where Miller writes “the
first level consists of ‘primal’ or ‘natural’ meanings, including the recognition of facts
and expressions (a level generally mistaken, Panofsky contended, for the formal level)”
(italics mine). Unfortunately, since Miller offered no source note for Panofsky’s “con-
tention,” other than Panofsky’s general reference (on p. 28 of Meaning in The Visual

233
234 Notes to Page xvi

Arts) to the three strata of meaning, I can only refer for verification to Panofsky’s
synoptical table (ibid., p. 40). Here, Panofsky does speak, in reference to “primary”
rather than “primal” meaning, of the act of interpretation at level I as a “pre-iconographi-
cal description (and pseudo-formal analysis).” But though he uses the term “pseudo-
formal,” he also uses as a corrective principle of interpretation the “History of style
(insight into the manner in which, under varying historical conditions, objects and
events were expressed by forms).” Once style enters in, it seems to me, we are already
dealing with an art historical factor considerably more complex than the pseudo-
formal, though we are still only at the first level of his table.
See also W. J. T. Mitchell’s consideration of Panofskian iconology in his chapter “The
Pictorial Turn” in Picture Theory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), p.
25, where Mitchell also uses the word “primal” in referring to level I, suggesting that a
“primal scene” of hat-lifting introduces Panofsky’s idea of primary meaning.
I leave it to the reader to belabor the implications of associating “primal” with, or
substituting it for, “primary.” In both instances, it seems to me to reinforce the stress
on the “naturalness” of the hat-lifting episode. Yet Panofsky makes it very clear that in
dealing with the pre-iconographical, though “we grasp these qualities in the fraction
of a second and almost automatically must not induce us to believe that we could
ever give a correct pre-iconographical description of a work of art without having
divined, as it were, its historical ‘locus.’” (Ibid., pp. 34–35.)
14. Argan, op. cit., p. 302.
15. Panofsky, op. cit., p. 28.
16. Ibid., pp. 40–41. In her incisive article, “Panofsky, Iconography, and Semiotics,” in the
Journal of Aesthetics and Criticism, 36 (Spring 1978):292, Christine Hasenmueller, like
Miller and Mitchell, also seems to be undervaluing Panofsky’s reference on Level I to
the history of style as a corrective. “‘Style,’” she writes, “was seen, by implication, as a
changing set of representational conventions that mediate the relationship between
motif and nature. To be sure, Panofsky broadly allowed at a later point in his argu-
ment, that iconological meaning may infuse all aspects of a work of art, including
style. But style remained primarily a factor that conditions interpretation rather than
a locus of meaning.”
Though this is indeed the way level I has generally been read, Hasenmueller has
also noted (p. 289): “Most attempts to analyze Panofsky’s work from the perspective
of semiotics . . . minimize—or ignore—the fact that his concepts are highly inte-
grated with the art historical theory of which they are a part.” And that is precisely the
point. Despite the invocations of Panofsky’s role as a proto-postmodernist, he may
well be writing of style here as a traditional art historian. If so, it might be worthwhile
to consider another great art historian on style. Meyer Schapiro writes: “To the histo-
rian of art, style is an essential object of investigation. He studies its inner correspon-
dences, its life history, and the problems of its formation and change. He, too, uses
style as a criterion of the date and place of origin of works, and as a means of tracing
relationships between schools of art. But the style is, above all, a system of forms with
a quality and a meaningful expression through which the personality of the artist and
the broad outlook of a group are visible. It is also a vehicle of expression within the
group, communicating and fixing certain values of religious, social, and moral life
through the emotional suggestiveness of forms.” Meyer Shapiro, “Style,” first pub-
lished in 1953, rewritten in 1962, in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and
Society (New York: Braziller, 1994), p. 51. See also Michael Holly, (op. cit., 166).
Style thus interpreted brings us very close to the aim of iconology itself. Looked at
in this way, it is hard to escape the implications of all three of Panofsky’s levels. In this
 Notes to Pages xvi–7 235

context, form, style, and meaning are one and the same and should, it seems to me, play
a larger part in the way we assess Panofsky’s references to form at level I. Despite the
didactic separations of his synoptical table, he never meant for the object to be consid-
ered without a recognition of the part form (and style) play in its iconological reading.
17. Panofsky, op. cit., p. 28.
18. Ibid., p. 39.
19. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 10.
20. Alexis de Tocqueville: Selected Letters on Politics and Society, Roger Boesche, ed., trans.
James Toupin and Roger Boesche (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p.
52 (Yonkers, June 29, 1831).
21. Ibid., p. 192 (Clairoix, par Compiègne (Oise) October 18, 1847).
22. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1991),
p. 378.
23. Richard Wrightman Fox and T. Jackson Lears, eds., The Power of Culture (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 1.
24. Some exceptions to this are Franklin Kelly’s catalogue to the Church exhibition at the
National Gallery of Art in 1989, which includes an essay by the historian of science,
Stephen Jay Gould, and Katherine Manthorne’s work on Church in South America.
See Bibliography.
25. Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art (Paris, 1934; New York: Zone Books, 1989),
p. 60.
26. See Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History (New York: Dover, 1932), p. 230.
27. Hasenmueller, op. cit., p. 296.
28. Panofsky, op. cit., pp. 40–41.

CHAPTER 1 Introduction: The Nationalist Garden and the Holy Book

1. Quoted in Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press,
1964), p. 210.
2. Perry Miller, “Nature and the National Ego,” in Errand into the Wilderness (New York:
Harper & Row, 1964), p. 211.
3. Ibid., p. 204.
4. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land (New York: Random House/Knopf, 1950); see Book 3.
5. R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, Phoe-
nix Books, 1958).
6. See Marx, op. cit.
7. Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery” (1835), in John McCoubrey, ed., Ameri-
can Art, 1700–1960, Sources and Documents in the History of Art Series (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), p. 102.
8. Quoted in Louis L. Noble, The Course of Empire, Voyage of Life and Other Pictures of
Thomas Cole, N.A. (New York: Cornish, Lamport & Co., 1853), pp. 58–59.
9. Quoted in Miller, op. cit., pp. 205–6.
10. Quoted in Lewis, op. cit., p. 59.
11. Ibid., p. 61.
12. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks
Atkinson (New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1950), pp. 34, 285–86.
13. “The Over-Soul,” ibid., p. 269.
14. James Jackson Jarves, The Art-Idea (Hurd and Houghton, 1864; reprint, ed. Benjamin
Rowland, Jr., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1960), p. 86.
236 Notes to Pages 8–21

15. Asher B. Durand, undated ms., Durand papers, New York Public Library.
16. Asher B. Durand, “Letters on Landscape Painting,” Letter II, Crayon 1 (Jan. 17, 1855):34;
also in McCoubrey, op. cit., p. 111.
17. Durand, “Letters,” Letter III, Crayon 1 (Jan. 31, 1855):66.
18. Thomas Cole, “Thoughts and Occurrences,” undated entry, c. 1842, New York State
Library, Albany; photostat, New-York Historical Society; microfilm, Archives of Ameri-
can Art.
19. Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” p. 109.
20. New York Mirror 14, no. 17 (Oct. 22, 1856):135.
21. Henry T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists (1867; New York: James F. Carr, 1966), p. 531.
22. Emerson, Nature, in Selected Writings, pp. 23–24.
23. Crayon 1 (1855):81.
24. Southern Literary Messenger 10 (1844):112.
25. Tuckerman, op. cit., p. 512.
26. Durand, Letter II, p. 34; in McCoubrey, op. cit., p. 112.
27. William Sidney Mount, quoted in John I. H. Baur, “Trends in American Painting,”
introduction to M. & M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815–1865, Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949), p. xxvi.
28. Quoted in Lorenz Eitner, Neoclassicism and Romanticism, 1750–1850, Sources and Docu-
ments in the History of Art Series (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 2:26.
29. Quoted in Miller, op. cit., p. 210.
30. Quoted in Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America from the Revolution to the
Civil War (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), p. 57.
31. Ibid., p. 11.
32. Ibid., p. 13.
33. Quoted in Russel Blaine Nye, The Cultural Life of the New Nation, 1776–1830 (New
York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960); p. 219 from Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bra-
dley (New York, 1948), 1:303–4.

CHAPTER 2 Grand Opera and the Still Small Voice

1. Walt Whitman, preface to Leaves of Grass, in The Portable Walt Whitman, selected and
introduced by Mark Van Doren (New York: Viking Press, 1945), p. 46.
2. Henry David Thoreau, Selected Journals, ed. Carl Bode (New York: Signet Classics,
1967), p. 50.
3. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday
Anchor, 1951), p. 64.
4. John Francis McDermott, The Lost Panoramas of the Mississippi (Chicago: The Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 133.
5. Although recent studies (both published and unpublished) have begun to deal more
intensively with the problem of the panorama (see Lee Parry, “Landscape Theatre in
America,” Art in America, Nov.–Dec. 1971, pp. 52–61, and The River: Images of the
Mississippi, Design Quarterly 101/102 [Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1976]), progress
in panorama research is badly hampered by the scarcity of extant visual material.
Nonetheless, one of the most fertile areas for investigation would still seem to be the
relation of the panorama format to the scale and shape of easel pictures in America.
6. Jarves, The Art-Idea, p. 205.
7. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, p. 395.
8. Ibid., pp. 371, 375.
9. Ibid., p. 375.
 Notes to Pages 22–37 237

10.Ibid., p. 389.
11.Jarves, op. cit., p. 190.
12.Ibid., p. 191.
13.Ibid., p. 205.
14.Quoted in McDermott, op. cit., p. 137.
15.Tuckerman, op. cit., pp. 382–83.
16.See also ibid., p. 389.
17.Ibid., p. 372.
18.Jarves, op cit., pp. 205–6.
19.Frederick Jackson Turner, Frontier and Section (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
1961), p. 39.
20. Ibid., p. 38.
21. Ibid.

CHAPTER 3 Sound and Silence: Changing Concepts of the Sublime

1. Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime (1935; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Ann
Arbor Paperbacks, 1960).
2. See Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sub-
lime and Beautiful (1757). Ernest Tuveson has stressed the importance of the divine in
the “natural sublime” of the seventeenth century. But it is significant for my hypoth-
esis that Deity here is associated with vastness of space, and that “the sublime of
nature” is characterized as “an aesthetic which set up as supreme criteria the qualities
of immensity, unlimitedness, and awe.” See Ernest Tuveson, “Space, Deity and the
‘Natural Sublime,’ ” Modern Language Quarterly 12, no. 1 (March 1951):32.
3. Quoted in Monk, op. cit., p. 220.
4. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), quoted in ibid., p. 121.
5. Ibid., p. 17.
6. Riobamba Diary (1857), Olana.
7. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, pp. 382–83, quoting a London critic.
8. Ibid., p. 378.
9. In McCoubrey, American Art, 1700–1960, p. 103.
10. Ibid., p. 110.
11. Durand, “Letters on Landscape Painting,” Letter II, Crayon 1 (Jan. 17, 1855): 34; also in
McCoubrey, op. cit., p. 111.
12. Ibid.
13. Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” in Selected Writings, p. 269.
14. McCoubrey, op. cit., p. 104.
15. Ibid., pp. 104–5.
16. Raymond Bernard Blakney, ed., Meister Eckhart: A Modern Translation (New York:
Harper and Row, 1941), p. 97.
17. Tuckerman, op. cit., p. 512.
18. McCoubrey, op. cit., p. 103.
19. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (New York: New American Library, 1942), p. 128.
20. Ibid., p. 129.
21. Ibid., p. 128.
22. Emerson, Nature, in Selected Writings, p. 18.
23. Blakney, op. cit., p. 167.
24. Durand, “Letters,” Letter VI, Crayon 1 (April 4, 1855):210.
25. McCoubrey, op. cit., p. 107.
238 Notes to Pages 37–46

26. See Wilhelm Worringer, Form in Gothic, ed. Herbert Read (New York: Schocken Books,
1964).
27. Emerson, Nature, in Selected Writings, p. 19.
28. “The Over-Soul,” ibid., p. 263.
29. Blakney, op. cit., p. 159.
30. See for example “Studying from Nature,” Crayon 1 (June 6, 1855):354, where the artist
is admonished, “But this one thing ever remember, that before Nature you are to lose
sight of yourself, and seek reverently for truth, neither being captious as to what its
qualities may be, or considering whether your manner of telling it may be the most
dexterous and draughtsmanlike. It is not of the least consequence whether you ap-
pear in your studies or no—it is of the highest importance that they should be true.”
See also William Sidney Mount: “A painter should lose sight of himself when painting
from nature—if he loves her—if a painter loves nature he will not think of himself—
she will give him variety and raise him from insipidity to grandeur” (journal, un-
dated entry following entry of November 9, 1846, Suffolk Museum and Carriage House,
Stony Brook, L.I.) And of course, see Emerson’s famous “transparent eyeball” state-
ment in Nature (Selected Writings, p. 6).

CHAPTER 4 The Geological Timetable: Rocks

1. Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” in McCoubrey, op. cit., p. 102.
2. Jarves, The Art-Idea, pp. 40–42.
3. Russel Blaine Nye, The Cultural Life of the New Nation, 1776–1830 (New York: Harper
Torchbooks, 1963), p. 60.
4. Ibid., p. 68.
5. Miller, The Life of the Mind, p. 286.
6. Ibid., pp. 279, 278.
7. Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper Torchbooks,
1968), p. 6.
8. Jarves, op. cit., p. 192.
9. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, pp. 371–72.
10. Ibid., p. 380.
11. Jarves, op. cit., p. 40: “Science, apart from its material mission, by which it seconds art
and descends to be a servant of man, has still a nobler purpose, and talks face to face
with spirit, disclosing its knowledge direct to mind itself.”
12. See for example Nye, op. cit., p. 96, where Emerson’s awareness of flux is pinpointed
as the arrival of “the new science.”
13. The organic awareness of pre-Darwinian science went back not only to the late eigh-
teenth century, but, if we wish to pursue it, to the Greeks. See especially Henry Fairfield
Osborn, From the Greeks to Darwin (New York: Macmillan, 1913; the 1894 edition is in
Church’s library at Olana), who finds the germs of evolution in Aristotle, p. 57.
14. Edward Hitchcock, Elementary Geology (New York: Dayton and Newman, 1842), p.
279.
15. Loren Eiseley, Darwin’s Century (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1961), p. 46.
16. Ibid., pp. 45, 100, 120, 136.
17. Arthur O. Lovejoy, “The Argument for Organic Evolution before The Origin of Spe-
cies,” Popular Science Monthly 75 (July–Dec. 1909):549.
18. Charles Coulston Gillispie, Genesis and Geology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1951), p. 301 n. 6.
 Notes to Pages 46–50 239

19. See Eiseley, op. cit., pp. 66–67; see also Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Dar-
winian Revolution (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1962), pp. 83ff.
20. Eiseley, op. cit., p. 71. (I quote Eiseley’s interpretation here.)
21. Quoted in ibid., p. 72.
22. See glossary, in ibid., p. 353, for extended definitions.
23. Ibid., p. 66.
24. Gillispie, op. cit., p. 96.
25. Ibid.
26. Quoted in ibid., p. 3.
27. See A. Hunter Dupree, Asa Gray (New York: Atheneum, 1968), p. 137; see also Nye, op.
cit., pp. 61–62, who cites Natural Theology as “one of the most widely used of all col-
lege texts of the time” and notes that “as late as 1885 the Reverend Thomas Gallaudet’s
Youth’s Book of Natural Theology (1832), a children’s adaptation of Paley, was still popu-
lar.” Perry Miller, in The Life of the Mind, p. 276, notes: “Bishop Paley’s Natural Theol-
ogy . . . was reprinted endlessly in America, used as the standard text in the colleges,
and assiduously conned by the self-educated.”
28. Quoted in Gillispie, op. cit., pp. 36–37; Eiseley, op. cit., p. 178, notes: “Darwin had been
a diligent student of Paley’s Natural Theology. . . .”
29. Thomas Cole, “Thoughts and Occurrences,” undated entry of c. 1842, New York State
Library, Albany; photostat, New-York Historical Society; microfilm, Archives of Ameri-
can Art. Quoted in Louis L. Noble, The Course of Empire, Voyage of Life and Other
Pictures of Thomas Cole, N.A. (New York: Cornish, Lamport & Co., 1853), p. 335, with
some changes.
30. John Dewey, “Darwin’s Influence upon Philosophy,” Popular Science Monthly 75 (July–
Dec. 1909):94, 92.
31. Gillispie, op. cit., p. 225.
32. See Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea
(New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965).
33. Eiseley, op. cit., p. 10.
34. Ibid., p. 8.
35. Church’s library at Olana and Cropsey’s at Hastings-on-Hudson are the most useful
at present, but hopefully with more research our knowledge of the landscape artists’
libraries will expand.
36. Eiseley, op. cit., remarks: “Lyell must be accorded the secure distinction, not alone of
altering the course of geological thought, but of having been the single greatest influ-
ence in the life of Charles Darwin” (p. 98); and “Darwin read the first edition of the
Principles of Geology while on the voyage of the Beagle and became Lyell’s devoted
admirer upon his return” (pp. 99–100). See also Gillispie, op. cit., p. 131. Cropsey’s
shelves at Hastings-on-Hudson contain Lyell’s A Manual of Elementary Geology (1852)
and Principles of Geology (1853), as well as Gideon Algernon Mantell’s Thoughts on a
Pebble, or a First Lesson in Geology (1849).
37. Quoted in Bentley Glass, Owsei Temkin, and William L. Straus, Jr., eds. Forerunners of
Darwin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968), p. 260.
38. See Virginia E. Lewis, Russell Smith (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1956),
pp. 82, 131.
39. See Gillispie, op. cit., p. 225, who notes: “No one rejected mutability more un-
compromisingly than Lyell at the time when he himself was the chief object of cleri-
cal attack.”
40. Sir Charles Lyell, Lectures on Geology Delivered at the Broadway Tabernacle in the City
of New York (1840) (New York: Greeley and McElrath, 1843), pp. 1, 16–17.
240 Notes to Pages 50–56

41. The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion (1840–44; reprint ed.,
New York: Russell and Russell, 1961), 3:133 (July 1842). Identification of Emerson as
the author is in George Willis Cooke, An Historical and Biographical Introduction to
Accompany the “Dial” (New York: Russell and Russell, 1961), 2:205.
42. See Walter Harding, ed., Emerson’s Library (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,
1967), p. 177.
43. Stephen E. Whicher, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Phila-
delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953), pp. 145–46.
44. Hitchcock, op. cit., pp. 275–76.
45. Thomas Cole, “Sicilian Scenery and Antiquities,” Knickerbocker 23, no. 2 (Feb. 1844):109.
46. List of some books in Cole’s library. Cole papers, The Detroit Institute of Arts; micro-
film, Archives of American Art.
47. Copy of Literary World in Cole papers, pp. 255ff; microfilm, Archives of American Art.
48. Cole to Silliman, Nov. 11, 1839, Gratz Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia; microfilm, Archives of American Art. Silliman to Cole, Nov. 15, 1839, New
York State Library, Albany; photostat, New-York Historical Society; microfilm, Archives
of American Art. I am grateful to Katherine Manthorne, who offered a report on Silliman
in my graduate seminar at Columbia University, for these references.
49. Dupree, op. cit., p. 26.
50. Nye, op. cit., p. 61.
51. “The Relation between Geology and Landscape Painting,” Crayon 6 (1859): 255–56.
52. See Eiseley, op. cit., p. 105: “Lyell . . . possessed in 1830 all of the basic information
necessary to have arrived at Darwin’s hypothesis but did not.”
53. Harding, op. cit., p. 54.
54. See Lovejoy, “Argument for Organic Evolution,” p. 546 especially.
55. See Dupree, op. cit., p. 148, and Eiseley, op. cit., p. 133.
56. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk, 6 vols.
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 3:283.
57. Ibid., p. 290.
58. The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward W. Emerson and Waldo Emerson
Forbes, 10 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909–14), vol. 7 (1845–46), pp. 69–70.
59. Ibid., p. 53.
60. Whicher, op. cit., p. 144.
61. Ibid., pp. 165, 141.
62. Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Emerson and Forbes, 7:51–52.
63. Harding, op. cit., pp. 207, 135. See also William H. Gilman [and others], eds., The
Journals & Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 14 vols. (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1960–78), vol. 13, ed. Ralph H. Orth and
Alfred R. Ferguson, where Emerson noted in his journal [Journal DO] for 1852, 3, or
4, “I see beforehand that I shall not believe in the Geologies” (p. 51), and for 1856(?),
“The Bible will not be ended until the Creation is” (p. 54).
64. Harding lists no work by Darwin in Emerson’s personal library. Emerson did take
The Origin of Species out of the Concord Free Library on June 9, 1877. See “Emerson’s
Use of the Concord Library” in Kenneth Walter Cameron, Emerson and Thoreau as
Readers, American Transcendental Quarterly 18, pt. 3 (Spring 1973):69.
65. Emerson, Letters, 5:194–95. Rusk observes (p. 195 n. 41): “Emerson, who had been for
many years an interested spectator of the march of science and a student of earlier
speculations on evolution, must have been deeply stirred by Darwin’s great book.”
Rusk adds, however: “Agassiz, with his unswerving disbelief in the theory of evolu-
tion, must have loomed large on the horizon.” Rusk’s extended footnote catalogues a
 Notes to Pages 56–59 241

few other mentions of Darwin by Emerson, and suggests that in such works as Con-
duct of Life (1860) and Letters and Social Aims (1875), “Emerson definitely shows his
allegiance to the general notion of evolution.” However, Emerson deals so rarely with
Darwin in his voluminous letters and journals that it is hard for me to believe he had
any real understanding of Darwin’s significance and potential impact. One small in-
dication of his efforts to reconcile Darwinism with his spiritual beliefs reads a bit like
a theosophical tract, and is titled “Consolation for readers of Darwin”: “Why is Man
the head of Creation the power of all, but because his education has been so longaeval
& immense? he has taken all the degrees; he began in the beginning, & has passed
through radiate, articulate mollusk vertebrate, through all the forms to the mammal,
& now holds in essence the virtues or powers of all, though in him, all the exaggera-
tion of each subdued <into harmony & their> through the antagonism of their op-
posites, and is at last the harmony, the flower & top of all their being,—their honored
representative. . . . Many individuals have taken their master’s degree prematurely, &
will yet have mortifications & perhaps drop into one of the lower classes for a time.”
(Undated journal, PH Philosophy, Emerson papers, Houghton Library, Harvard Uni-
versity, p. 10. Quoted by permission of the Houghton Library and the Ralph Waldo
Emerson Memorial Association.) I am indebted to the noted Emerson scholar Eleanor
Tilton for this reference.
66. Emerson read T. H. Huxley’s Lectures on Comparative Anatomy, Lay Sermons, and Man’s
Place in Nature. I am grateful to Eleanor Tilton for this information, and generally for
her kind assistance on the difficult problem of Emerson’s relation to Darwin.
67. Lidian Emerson to Edward Waldo Emerson, Jan. 18, 1864. My thanks to Eleanor Tilton
for making this information available to me. (Ms. Tilton has reminded me, however,
that Emerson and his wife often disagreed.)
68. As late as 1872, Emerson wrote to Lidian Emerson (Jan. 9): “I called on Professor
Baird, the ornithologist, who had come to me the day before, & had a valuable con-
versation with him on the present aspects of science, Darwin, Agassiz, &c.” (Letters,
6:195).
69. See Edward Lurie, Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1960), p. 200.
70. Dupree, op. cit., p. 248.
71. Ibid., p. 227.
72. Ibid., p. 229.
73. Edward Waldo Emerson, The Early Years of the Saturday Club, 1855–1870 (Boston and
New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), p. 19.
74. Ibid., p. 9. Emerson thought Agassiz might be too busy: “Agassiz again I suppose
quite too full already of society.”
75. Ibid., pp. 19, 206; see M. A. de Wolfe Howe, ed., Later Years of the Saturday Club, 1870–
1920 (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), p. 67. See also Dupree, op. cit.,
p. 353.
76. Quoted in E. W. Emerson, Early Years, p. 31.
77. Ibid., p. 44.
78. Quoted in ibid., pp. 23–24.
79. Quoted in ibid., pp. 131, 171–72.
80. Quoted in ibid., p. 172.
81. See Harding, op. cit., p. 6.
82. Ibid., pp. 143–44, where vol. 2, pt. 2; vol. 3; and vol. 4, pt. 1 of Cosmos, a 4-vol. set
translated by Mrs. E. Sabine, are listed as wanting (London: Longman, Brown, Green,
and Longmans [etc.], 1847–[5–?]).
242 Notes to Pages 59–68

83. Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Emerson and Forbes, 7:100.
84. Much of Church’s library is still intact at Olana and can be studied there.
85. I am grateful to Alan Dages, of Olana, to Richard Slavin, formerly of Olana, and to
David Huntington for assistance with the problems of Church’s library.
86. Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos, trans. E. C. Otté, 2 vols. (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1850), 1:23.
87. Ibid.
88. Ibid., p. 25.
89. Ibid., 2:93.
90. Ibid., p. 94.
91. Ibid., p. 95.
92. Ibid., p. 98.
93. Ibid., 1:24.
94. Ibid., 2:94–95.
95. Ibid., 1:231.
96. An extensive collection of photographs owned by Church and used as research tools
for specific details and sites still exists at Olana. See also, for a brief consideration of
this problem, Elizabeth Lindquist-Cock, “Frederic Church’s Stereographic Vision,”
Art in America, Sept.–Oct. 1973, pp. 70–75.
97. Humboldt, op. cit., 2:98.
98. Ibid.
99. Ibid.
100. See Alan Moorehead, Darwin and the Beagle (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), pp. 38–
39. Lye11’s second volume reached Darwin at Montevideo (p. 86). Vol. 3 reached him
in Valparaiso when he arrived on July 22, 1834 (p. 153).
101. Quoted in ibid., p. 57.
102. Typescript, Olana. Original, Bayard Taylor papers, Regional Archives, Cornell Uni-
versity Library, Ithaca, N.Y.
103. See David C. Huntington, The Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church (New York:
Braziller, 1966), pp. 51–52.
104. Moorehead, op. cit., pp. 178–79.
105. Baranquilla Diary (1853), Olana; my translation from the Spanish.
106. Riobamba Diary (1857), Olana.
107. Ibid.
108. Louis L. Noble, The Heart of the Andes, broadside (New York, 1859), p. 4. In Church
papers, Olana.
109. Humboldt, op. cit., 1:47.
110. Noble, Heart of the Andes, pp. 4–5.
111. Ms., Olana. In Noble’s After Icebergs with a Painter: A Summer Voyage to Labrador and
Around Newfoundland (New York: Appleton & Co., 1861), p. 65, our sense of Church’s
preoccupation with the Andes is reinforced: “To venture a geological remark: All these
coast highlands correspond with the summits of the Alleghanies, and with those re-
gions of the Cordilleras, C— tells me, which are just below the snow-line. From the sea-
line up to the peak, they correspond with our mountains above the upper belt of woods.
Their icy pinnacles and eternal snows are floating below in the form of icebergs. Imag-
ine all the mid-mountain region in the deep and you have the Andes here.”
112. Humboldt, op. cit., 1:48.
113. Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” in Selected Writings, p. 271.
114. Cunningham Geikie, Hours with the Bible or The Scriptures in the Light of Modern
Discovery and Knowledge (New York: James Pott and Co., 1888), 1:49. Church’s library
 Notes to Pages 68–73 243

at Olana included John Tyndall, The Forms of Water in Clouds and Rivers, Ice and
Glaciers (New York: Appleton, 1872), and Heat Considered as a Mode of Motion: Being
a Course of 12 Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institute of Great Britain in 1862 (New
York: Appleton, 1863); Dr. Eugene Lomell, The Nature of Light with a General Account
of Physical Optics (New York: Appleton, 1876); M. E. Chevreul, The Laws of Contrast of
Colour: And Their Application to the Arts, Bohn ed. (London, 1859); Ogden N. Rood,
Modern Chromatics with Application to Art and Industry (New York: Appleton, 1879).
115. William M. Bryant, Philosophy of Landscape Painting (St. Louis, 1882), with an in-
scription to Church; p. 83.
116. Alfred Russel Wallace, Natural Selection and Tropical Nature (London and New York:
Macmillan, 1891), p. 474.
117. Louis Figuier, The World Before the Deluge (London: Chapman and Hal, 1865), p. 7.
118. John Fiske, The Idea of God As Affected by Modern Knowledge (Boston and New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1892), pp. 156, 158, 163. Church’s library, Olana.
119. Huntington, op. cit., p. 45.
120. Pre-Raphaelitism (1851), in The Art Criticism of John Ruskin, ed. Robert L. Herbert
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1964), p. 34.
121. The Eagle’s Nest (1872), in ibid., pp. 28–29. Ruskin’s attitude to Darwin needs more
research. Like many of his attitudes, it supported a number of ambiguities, and in the
same text he suggested that perhaps he was implying the fallacy of Darwinism “more
positively than is justifiable in the present state of our knowledge.”

CHAPTER 5 The Meteorological Vision: Clouds

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson: A Modern Anthology, ed. Alfred Kazin and Daniel
Aaron (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), p. 39 (from his journals); Henry David
Thoreau, The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen,
14 vols. in 2 (New York: Dover, 1962), 1:319 (Jan. 7, 1852).
2. Jasper F. Cropsey, “Up Among the Clouds,” Crayon 2 (August 8, 1855): 79–80.
3. Crayon 2 (July 11, 1855):26.
4. Kurt Badt, John Constable’s Clouds, trans. Stanley Godman (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1950), p. 51.
5. Ibid., pp. 8, 17.
6. Quoted in ibid., p. 50: “I return the book you lent me so long ago. My observations on
clouds and skies are on scraps and bits of paper, and I have never yet put them to-
gether so as to form a lecture, which I shall do, and probably deliver at Hampstead
next summer. . . . If you want anything more about atmosphere, and I can help you,
write to me. Forster’s is the best book; he is far from right, still he has the merit of
breaking much ground.” The first chapter of Forster’s book is called “Of Mr. Howard’s
Theory of the Origin and Modifications of Clouds.”
7. Louis Hawes, “Constable’s Sky Sketches,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Insti-
tutes 32 (1969):344–64. Hawes stresses the history of Constable’s cloud observations
prior to the early 1820’s and also reminds us of his knowledge of theoretical treatises
such as those of De Piles, Gilpin, Taylor, and Richter (see especially pp. 360ff ). He
notes, p. 346n, “There is considerable likelihood that Constable acquired a general
acquaintance with Howard’s classifications, if only indirectly, a good eight or ten years
or more before commencing his Hampstead studies. Even so, his work throughout
this time and later shows no sign that any such awareness had a decisive effect on his
approach to sky sketching.”
244 Notes to Pages 73–79

8. Badt, op. cit., p. 17 n. 1: “Ueber die Modificationen der Wolken, von Lucas Howard,
Esq.,” Annalen der Physik 21 (1815):137–59, published and translated into German from
a French text by Professor L. W. Gilbert of Halle. Goethe started a correspondence
with Howard and requested autobiographical notes, which he received in 1822 (Badt,
p. 16).
9. Ibid., p. 9.
10. Ibid., pp. 12–13.
11. Ibid., pp. 10–15.
12. For a good consideration of Goethe’s scientific contributions, see Willy Hartner,
“Goethe and the Natural Sciences,” in Goethe: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Vic-
tor Lange (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Spectrum, 1968), pp. 145–60.
13. Badt, op. cit., pp. 18–19.
14. Ibid., pp. 26–27. Badt (p. 28) suggests that Goethe did not share this view of art as the
“crown of science.”
15. Ibid., p. 34.
16. Ibid., pp. 35ff. Badt (p. 37) isolates specifically a cloud study done by Dahl in Naples in
1821 and writes (pp. 38–39): “The young Blechen visited Dahl in 1823 in his Dresden
studio and had the opportunity of examining Dahl’s nature studies closely for three
months. The cloud studies which Dahl had painted shortly before in Italy must have
been amongst them.”
17. Ibid., p. 25.
18. Cropsey, op. cit., p. 79.
19. William Dunlap, A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United
States (1834; New York: Dover, 1969), vol. 2, pt. 2, p. 363.
20. See below, pp. 244, 296 n. 29.
21. See John Durand, The Life and Times of Asher B. Durand (New York: Scribner’s, 1894),
p. 151. Durand observed that “notes on the backs” stated “the hour of the day, direc-
tion of the wind, and kind of weather.”
22. Ibid., pp. 150–51.
23. Ibid., p. 151.
24. Crayon 2 (July 11, 1855):26.
25. Cropsey, op. cit., p. 79.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., p. 80.
29. Nathan Reingold, ed., Science in Nineteenth Century America: A Documentary History
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), p. 129.
30. See Robert Taft, Artists and Illustrators of the Old West, 1850–1900 (New York: Scribner’s,
1953), pp. 254–55. Some sources, including Taft, list only twelve volumes, but vol. 12
was issued in two parts.
31. Vols. 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10.
32. See n. 114, p. 282.
33. Records at Olana indicate that Church owned the following copies of Ruskin’s Modern
Painters (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1851–60): vol. 1, pts. 1–2, Of General Principles and
of Truth, 5th ed.; vol. 2, pt. 3, Of the Imaginative and Theoretic Faculties, 4th ed.; vol. 3, pt.
4, Of Many Things; vol. 4, pt. 5, Of Mountain Beauty; vol. 5, pt. 6, Of Leaf Beauty, pt. 7, Of
Cloud Beauty, pts. 8–9, Of Ideas of Relation. On a visit to Olana I was able to examine
only two volumes on the shelves: vol. 3, pt. 4, and vol. 4, pt. 5. I am grateful to Alan
Dages, Historic Site Manager of Olana, for assistance with this reference.
 Notes to Pages 79–91 245

34. A Graduate of Oxford [John Ruskin], Modern Painters I (1843; New York: Wiley and
Son, 1868), p. 213.
35. Ibid., p. 221.
36. Ibid., pp. 223–24.
37. Ibid., p. 236.
38. Ibid., p. 243.
39. Ibid., p. 249. In the same reference (to Loch Coriskin) he observes: “When rain falls
on a mountain composed chiefly of barren rocks, their surfaces, being violently heated
by the sun, whose most intense warmth always precedes rain, occasion sudden and
violent evaporation, actually converting the first shower into steam. Consequently,
upon all such hills, on the commencement of rain, white volumes of vapor are in-
stantaneously and universally formed, which rise, are absorbed by the atmosphere,
and again descend in rain. . . .”
40. Quoted in Robert L. Herbert, ed., The Art Criticism of John Ruskin (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1964), pp. 26–27.
41. John Ruskin, Modern Painters III (1856; New York: Wiley and Son, 1868), pp. 312–13.
42. For information about the cloud drawings of Alvan Fisher in the collection of the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, I am indebted to Fred Adelson.
43. Notebook (1825), The Detroit Institute of Arts; microfilm, Archives of American Art.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. See Cropsey papers, microfilm, Archives of American Art.
47. See especially the drawings in the collection of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of De-
sign, New York.
48. Riobamba Diary (1857), Olana.
49. Notebook (1827), The Detroit Institute of Arts; microfilm, Archives of American Art.
50. See International Cloud Atlas (Paris: World Meteorological Organization, 1956), vols.
1, 2.
51. Ruskin, Modern Painters I, pp. 231–32.
52. Badt, op. cit., p. 20.

CHAPTER 6 The Organic Foreground: Plants

1. From Horace Smith’s “Hymn to the Flowers,” written by Asa Gray in his sister’s al-
bum; quoted in A. Hunter Dupree, Asa Gray (New York: Atheneum, 1968), p. 46.
2. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, p. 243.
3. “Flowers,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 40 (Jan. 1850):13.
4. Ibid.
5. Mark Catesby, preface to Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands
(1731–43); quoted in Martina R. Norelli, American Wildlife Painting (New York: Watson-
Guptill, 1975), p. 61.
6. Ibid.
7. See Dupree, op. cit., pp. 67ff, and Russel Blaine Nye, Society and Culture in America,
1830–1860 (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), p. 245 n. 17. Had they both gone, they
would have encountered Titian Ramsay Peale, who was a member of the expedition.
8. Ralph L. Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1949), p. 187.
9. Quoted in M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1953), pp. 173–74. See also Coleridge on genius: “Hence there is in genius itself
an unconscious activity; nay, that is the genius in the man of genius” (ibid., p. 222).
246 Notes to Pages 91–94

10. See Washington Allston, Lectures on Art-Poems (1850; New York: Da Capo Press, 1972),
p. 80: “We shall therefore assume as a fact, the eternal and insuperable difference
between Art and Nature.”
11. The Statesman’s Manual, in The Portable Coleridge, ed. I. A. Richards (New York: Vi-
king, 1950), p. 393.
12. Emerson, Selected Writings, p. 7.
13. Quoted in Abrams, op. cit., p. 171.
14. Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, 1:714 (April 8, 1854).
15. Quoted in Abrams, op. cit., p. 171.
16. Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, 1:627 (Aug. 23, 1853).
17. See Rusk, op. cit., p. 143.
18. Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782), quoted in
John Conron, The American Landscape (New York, London, and Toronto: Oxford
University Press, 1974), p. 133.
19. Abrams, op. cit., p. 218.
20. Ibid., p. 219.
21. Quoted in ibid., pp. 219–20, from Herder’s Von Deutscher Art und Kunst (1773). As
Abrams points out (p. 371 n. 93), the full development of such ideas is to be found in
Herder’s Ideen zur einer Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–91). Accord-
ing to Harvard College Library records, Emerson borrowed Herder’s Outlines of His-
tory of Men (1800 ed.) on Feb. 1, 1829. The records of the Boston Athenaeum indicate
that he borrowed vol. 1 of Herder’s Outlines of a Philosophy of Man on May 3, 1831, and
returned it on May 6. On August 1, 1831, he borrowed vols. 1 and 2 and returned them
on August 26. See Stanley M. Vogel, German Literary Influences on the American
Transcendentalists (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), pp. 181, 177.
22. Quoted in Abrams, op. cit., p. 220.
23. Emerson, “Nature,” in Selected Writings, p. 16.
24. Vogel, op. cit., p. 88. Vogel notes: “By 1836 Emerson had read most of his fifty-five vol-
ume set of Goethe’s works printed at Stuttgart and Tübingen, and in spite of adverse
criticisms of Goethe, he conceded in his journal that every one of his own writings had
been taken from the whole of nature, and bore the name of Goethe” (p. 90, and n. 9).
25. Quoted in Rudolf Steiner, introduction to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Meta-
morphosis of Plants (Bio-Dynamic Farming and Gardening Association, 1974), p. 13.
26. Quoted in ibid., p. 11.
27. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Letters from Goethe, trans. M. von Herzfeld and C.
Melvil Sym (Edinburgh: at the University Press, 1957), p. 192.
28. Agnes Arber, “Goethe’s Botany,” Chronica Botanica 10, no. 2 (Summer 1946): 80–81.
29. Ibid., p. 81.
30. Ibid.
31. Thomas Cole, “Thoughts and Occurrences,” undated entry c. 1842, New York State
Library, Albany; microfilm, Archives of American Art. Quoted in Noble, Course of
Empire, p. 335, with some changes. See also, for a theory that touches on Goethe’s
Platonism in the Metamorphosis, Willy Hartner, “Goethe and the Natural Sciences,”
in Goethe: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Victor Lange (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1968), pp. 151–52. Hartner notes: “All the attempts which have been
made to derive Goethe’s ideas of the type which is the carrying idea of his natural
philosophy altogether from Plato’s idea have failed, and had to fail. . . . Goethe’s types
are immanent in nature, they are derived from and exist only within experience. But
it seems justifiable to assume that Plato’s doctrine of ideas stimulated Goethe and led
him to adapt the Platonic concept to his own way of thinking.”
 Notes to Pages 94–101 247

32. Quoted in Abrams, op. cit., pp. 207, 206.

33. Cole, “Thoughts and Occurrences,” c. 1842.
34. Ibid., entry dated July 22, 1838. Quoted in Noble, Course of Empire, pp. 266–67, with
some small changes.
35. See Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Praeger,
1969), p. 134.
36. Steiner, op. cit., p. 17.
37. To Frau von Stein, July 9, 1786, quoted in ibid., p. 13.
38. Henry David Thoreau, Selected Journals, ed. Carl Bode (New York: Signet Classics,
1967), p. 71 (Sept. 29, 1843).
39. Emerson, Modern Anthology, p. 131.
40. Vogel, op. cit., p. 85.
41. Ibid., p. 103.
42. Thoreau, Selected Journals, p. 180 (May 15, 1853).
43. Thomas Cole’s Poetry, ed. Marshall B. Tymn (York, Pa.: Liberty Cap Books, 1972), p.
133. Ms., New York State Library, Albany; microfilm, Archives of American Art.
44. “Written in Autumn” (Oct. 1837), Thomas Cole’s Poetry, p. 90.
45. Ibid., p. 127.
46. Ibid., p. 90 (last two lines of “Written in Autumn”).
47. See “Childhood,” in Catalogue of Pictures by Thomas Cole, A.N.A . . . The Voyage of
Life . . . exhibiting in the Rooms of the National Academy, Corner of Broadway and
Leonard Street, open from 9 am until 10 pm. Broadside, unpaged, in Cole papers; mi-
crofilm, Archives of American Art. See also Noble, Course of Empire, p. 287.
48. Peter Bermingham, Jasper F. Cropsey, 1823–1900: A Retrospective View of America’s
Painter of Autumn, exhibition catalogue (College Park: University of Maryland, 1968),
p. 45.
49. Ibid., p. 5.
50. Noble, Course of Empire, pp. 292–93.
51. Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, 2:1439 (March 8, 1859).
52. Ms., Feb. 26, 1843, New York State Library, Albany; microfilm, Archives of American
Art. Noble, Course of Empire, p. 342, changes this.
53. Noble, Course of Empire, p. 310.
54. Selected Journals, p. 166 (July 18, 1852).
55. Ibid., p. 180 (May 17, 1853).
56. Theodore Stebbins, The Life and Works of Martin Johnson Heade (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1975), p. 148.
57. Hawthorne’s Short Stories, ed. Newton Arvin (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), p. 184.
58. Ibid., pp. 207–8.
59. Selected Journals, pp. 220–21 (Oct. 23, 1855).
60. Asa Gray, Natural Science and Religion: Two Lectures Delivered to the Theological School
of Yale College (New York: Scribner’s, 1880), p. 12.
61. Emerson, Nature, in Selected Writings, p. 36.
62. Quoted in Tony Tanner, The Reign of Wonder (London: Cambridge University Press,
1965), p. 48.
63. Selected Journals, p. 105 (Jan. 7, 1851).
64. Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, 2:1439 (March 8, 1859).
65. Ibid., p. 1438 (March 7, 1859).
66. The Eagle’s Nest, in The Art Criticism of John Ruskin, p. 26.
67. Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, 2:1687 (Sept. 22, 1860).
68. Ibid., 1:246 (Aug. 19, 1851).
248 Notes to Pages 101–110

69. Ibid., p. 304 (Nov. 15, 1851).

70. Ibid., p. 351 (Feb. 17, 1852).
71. Ibid., pp. 194–95 (May 20, 1851).
72. Arber, op. cit., p. 77.
73. Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, 1:195 (May 20, 1851).
74. Ibid., 2:1694 (Oct. 13, 1860).
75. Ibid., pp. 1091–92 (Dec. 4, 1856).
76. Cropsey’s library, Hastings-on-Hudson.
77. Church’s library, Olana. Though Church knew Agassiz, interestingly, only Elizabeth
Agassiz’s Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence (1885) is presently at Olana.
78. Robert Hunt, The Poetry of Science (London: 1854), p. xiii.
79. Both Church and Cole gathered and saved flowers. A herbarium comprised mostly of
ferns, compiled by either Church or Mrs. Church, is in the collection at Olana. An-
other herbarium, also at Olana, includes on a single page “Flowers gathered by Thomas
Cole—artist—from a crevice in the upper part of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, from
Petrarch’s garden at Vaucluse, from Vaucluse, crocus from the Borghese grounds Rome,
from the Alps.” Another page gathered by Cole includes a “blue violet, last flower
found on the top of Mt. Etna, a flower from the Colisseum [sic] gathered in March,
Alpine moss, from the interior of the Temple of Segesta, Sicily, Alpine moss, orange
flower from the Benedictine Convent, Catania Italy.”
80. Notebook, The Detroit Institute of Arts; microfilm, Archives of American Art. In the
same notebook, Cole pressed an acanthus leaf and other plants.
81. An undated note from Ruskin to Cropsey at 2 Kensington Gate, Kensington (post-
mark illegible) reads: “. . . Wednesday at two o’clock if that hour is convenient to
you—Denmark hill is about an hours journey from Kensington, over Vauxhall bridge,
& by Camberwell.” Cropsey papers; microfilm, Archives of American Art.
82. Notebook, Cropsey papers; microfilm, Archives of American Art.
83. Humboldt, Cosmos, 1:24.
84. Ibid., p. 47.
85. Watson’s Weekly Art Journal, March 3, 1866, quoted in Gordon Hendricks, Albert
Bierstadt: Painter of the American West (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1973), p. 160.
86. Edward Lurie, Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1960), p. 307.
87. Dupree, op. cit., p. 53.
88. Ibid., p. 54.
89. Ibid., p. 135.
90. Ibid., p. 143.
91. Ibid., p. 145. See North American Review 62 (1846):465–506.
92. Dupree, op. cit., p. 206.
93. Letter of March 26, 1861, ibid., pp. 211–12.
94. Ibid., pp. 222–23. Dupree remarks here on Thoreau’s awareness of Gray’s work, not-
ing the passage from Gray on roots referred to above in Thoreau’s journal (May 20,
1851), but finds that Thoreau “read into it a symbolism which changed the matter-of-
fact scientific prose beyond recognition. . . . The discrepancy between these two ways
of looking at the same phenomenon is the measure of the great gap between tran-
scendentalism and Gray’s empiricism.”
95. Ibid., p. 226.
96. Ibid., p. 232.
97. Lurie, op. cit., pp. 50–51.
98. Ibid., p. 89.
 Notes to Pages 112–121 249

99. Ibid., pp. 51–52.

100. See Robert G. McIntyre, Martin Johnson Heade (New York: Pantheon Press, 1948), pp.
11–13, who says that Heade accompanied Fletcher to Brazil in 1863 and 1864. McIntyre
also notes (p. 13): “. . . Agassiz’ praise of Heade’s hummingbirds is proof of the scien-
tific worth of his paintings.” Because of a conflict in dates in late 1863, Stebbins (op.
cit., p. 85) doubts that Fletcher and Heade actually traveled together, but credits Fletcher
with suggesting that Heade go to Brazil.
101. Quoted in Linda Ferber, “William Trost Richards (1833–1905): American Landscape
and Marine Painter” (Ph.D. diss. written under the author’s direction, Columbia
University, 1978), p. 111.
102. Noble, After Icebergs, p. 6. Agassiz seems to have turned up during the initial part of
the voyage, but did not accompany Noble and Church all the way to the Arctic.
103. Letter of April 27, 1862, quoted in Hendricks, op. cit., pp. 108–9.
104. Agassiz to Bierstadt, quoted courtesy of Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum,
Joseph Downs Manuscript Collection, Winterthur, Delaware.
105. Ibid.
106. Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, 2:1127 (March 20, 1857).
107. Ibid., p. 1344 (Aug. 23, 1858).
108. See Dupree, op. cit., p. 225. See also Nathan Reingold, ed., Science in Nineteenth Cen-
tury America: A Documentary History (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), p. 181.
109. Dupree, op. cit., p. 151.
110. William James Stillman, The Autobiography of a Journalist, 2 vols. (Boston and New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 1901), 1:259–60.
111. Dupree, op. cit., p. 258. Gray had noted this in a footnote to his Botanical Memoirs,
published on April 25, 1859, several weeks before he spoke at the Cambridge Scientific
Club.
112. Stillman, op. cit., p. 261.
113. Once begun, the contest between Agassiz and Gray was short-lived. By 1864, despite
Agassiz’s rigorous popular lecturing and publications, many American scientists, and
even his own students, had begun to reject him. It took at least another decade for the
tide to shift substantially. The end of the “era of Agassiz,” however, roughly coincided
with the end of the great era of American landscape painting, punctuated by the Civil
War. The ideas and attitudes embodied in the paintings endured in the works of the
Hudson River artists and luminists of Church’s generation who continued to make
some occasional fine landscapes after this time. As Church’s library indicates, efforts
to reconcile Darwinism and religion reached well into the latter part of the nine-
teenth century. But the demise of Agassiz and the advent of Darwin signaled, as noth-
ing else could, the approaching demise of landscape painting as a major form of
spiritual expression in America.

CHAPTER 7 The Primal Vision: Expeditions

1. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, p. 389.
2. Ibid., pp. 370–71.
3. Cosmopolitan Art Journal (Sept. 1859):183.
4. George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Conditions of the North
American Indians (1844; New York: Dover, 1973), 1:4.
5. Robert Taft, Artists and Illustrators of the Old West, 1850–1900 (New York: Scribner’s,
1953), remains one of the best sources for this material. See especially, for the Kerns,
250 Notes to Pages 122–127

the notes on pp. 257–64. See also an excellent catalogue by Larry Curry, The American
West (New York: Viking Press and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1972).
6. E. G. Beckwith, “Report of Exploration for a Route for the Pacific Railroad, by Capt.
J. W. Gunnison, Topographical Engineers, near the 38th and 39th Parallels of North
Latitude, from the Mouth of the Kansas River, to the Sevier Lake, in the Great Basin,”
Reports of Explorations and Surveys to Ascertain the Most Practicable and Economic
Route for a Railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean (Washington, D.C.:
War Department, 1855), 2:127 (Appendix B, “Explanations of Maps and Illustrations”).
See also p. 126.
7. Heinrich Baldwin Möllhausen, Diary of a Journey from the Mississippi to the Coasts of
the Pacific, trans. Mrs. Percy Sinnett (1858; New York and London: Johnson Reprint
Co., 1969), 1:264–66.
8. See Taft, op. cit., p. 5. See also Howard Mumford Jones, O Strange New World (New
York: Viking, 1968), pp. 378–79.
9. See Nancy Dustin Wall Moure, “Five Eastern Artists Out West,” American Art Journal
5, no. 2 (Nov. 1973):15–16.
10. See Gordon Hendricks, “The First Three Western Journeys of Albert Bierstadt,” Art
Bulletin 46 (Sept. 1964):333–65. See also Elizabeth Lindquist-Cock, “Stereoscopic Pho-
tography and the Western Paintings of Albert Bierstadt,” Art Quarterly 33 (Winter
1970):361–78.
11. See William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in
the Winning of the American West (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), for a masterly
consideration of the big surveys as well as details of the earlier explorations. See also
National Parks and the American Landscape, exhibition catalogue (Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1972).
12. Thurman Wilkins, Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1966), pp. 59ff.
13. Moure, op. cit., p. 27.
14. Ibid., pp. 17, 20, 21.
15. Ibid., pp. 21–22.
16. Worthington Whittredge, The Autobiography of Worthington Whittredge, 1820–1910,
ed. John I. H. Baur, Brooklyn Museum Journal (1942):60.
17. See Era of Exploration: The Rise of Landscape Photography in the American West, 1860–
1885, exhibition catalogue, texts by Weston J. Naef, James N. Wood, and Therese Thau
Heyman (Albright-Knox Gallery and Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975), for a su-
perb collection of photography by all these photographers except Gardner. For
Gardner’s work, see Robert Sobieszek, Alex Gardner’s Photographs along the 35th Par-
allel (Rochester and New York: George Eastman House, 1971).
18. Quoted in Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1967), p. 73.
19. Alexis de Tocqueville, Journey to America, trans. George Lawrence and ed. J. P. Mayer
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1971), p. 354.
20. Whittredge, op. cit., p. 46.
21. Hendricks, op. cit., p. 337; from a letter written from the Rocky Mountains, dated July
10, 1859, printed in Crayon 6 (Sept. 1859):287.
22. Tocqueville, op. cit., p. 399.
23. Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery” (1835), in McCoubrey, American Art, 1700–
1960, p. 108.
24. Tocqueville, op. cit., p. 383.
25. Washington Irving, A Tour on the Prairies (1835; New York: Pantheon, 1967), p. 188.
 Notes to Pages 128–137 251

26. Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail (1849; New York: Signet, 1950), pp. 56, 206.
27. Whittredge, op. cit., p. 45.
28. James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer, in The Leatherstocking Saga, ed. Allan Nevins
(New York: Modern Library, 1966), p. 63.
29. Tocqueville, op. cit., p. 398.
30. Cole, op. cit., p. 104.
31. Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, 1:34 (entry of Dec. 15, 1838).
32. Möllhausen, op. cit., p. 278.
33. Ibid.
34. Irving, op. cit., p. 36.
35. Clarence King, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (1871; New York: W. W. Norton &
Co., 1935), p. 99.
36. Fitz Hugh Ludlow, The Heart of the Continent (1870; New York: AMS Press Reprint,
1971), p. 434. (Ludlow comments also here that “the other two vaguely divided orders
of gentlemen and sages were sightseeing . . . or hunting specimens of all kinds—
Agassizing, so to speak.”)
37. King, op. cit., p. 99.
38. Ludlow, op. cit., pp. 431–32.
39. Whittredge, op. cit., p. 56.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., p. 47.
42. Henry D. Thoreau, Walden (1854; New York: Mentor, 1942), pp. 91, 96.
43. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, in The Portable Walt Whitman, ed. Mark Van Doren
(New York: Viking Press, 1945), p. 314.
44. Walt Whitman, Specimen Days (1882; Boston: David R. Godine, 1971), p. 90.
45. Ibid., p. 92.
46. Ibid., p. 94.
47. Ibid., p. 91.
48. Ibid., p. 95.
49. Lewis, The American Adam, p. 51.
50. James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers, in The Leatherstocking Saga, p. 688.

CHAPTER 8 Man’s Traces: Axe, Train, Figure

1. Thomas Cole’s Poetry, p. 103.
2. Evidence Concerning Projected Railway Across the Sierra Nevada Mountains from Pa-
cific Tide Waters in California, and the Resources, Promises and Action of Companies
Organized to Construct the Same (Carson City: Nevada Legislature, 1865), p. 86.
3. See Thoreau, Walden, pp. 32–33, and Selected Journals, pp. 220–21.
4. See Marx, The Machine in the Garden, and Smith, Virgin Land.
5. The first painting of the Course of Empire series, The Savage State, also refers back to
Salvator, so that the earlier Expulsion may be seen as incorporating Garden and wil-
derness, Claude and Salvator, in preparation for their distinct separation in the series
that followed.
6. Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” in McCoubrey, American Art, 1700–1900, p. 102.
7. Quoted in Hans Huth, Nature and the American: Three Centuries of Changing Atti-
tudes (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957), p. 16.
8. Andrew Jackson Downing, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gar-
dening (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1967; facsimile edition of 1859 publication),
p. 18.
252 Notes to Pages 137–152

9. Tocqueville, Journey to America, pp. 372, 399.

10. Cooper, The Pioneers, in The Leatherstocking Saga, pp. 662–63.
11. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1967), pp. 44, 69.
12. Tocqueville, op. cit., p. 399.
13. Quoted in Miller, “Nature and the National Ego,” in Errand into the Wilderness, p.
205.
14. Thomas Cole’s Poetry, pp. 68, 106.
15. “The March of Time,” ibid., p. 165.
16. Ibid.
17. “Essay on American Scenery,” p. 100.
18. “The Lament of the Forest,” Thomas Cole’s Poetry, p. 109.
19. Noble, The Course of Empire, pp. 217–18.
20. Tocqueville, op. cit., p. 354.
21. Ibid., p. 399.
22. Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” in Selected Writings, p. 285.
23. Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, 1:89 (Sept. 5, 1841).
24. Ibid., p. 84 (Aug. 1, 1841).
25. Poem XLIII, in Poems by Emily Dickinson, ed. Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred
Leete Hampson (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1952), p. 22.
26. Marx, op. cit., p. 180.
27. Miller, op. cit., p. 208.
28. Quoted in Marx, op. cit., pp. 195, 160.
29. Quoted in Miller, The Life of the Mind in America, p. 305.
30. Ibid., p. 304.
31. Marx, op. cit., p. 238.
32. Emerson, Selected Writings, p. 612.
33. Quoted in Marx, op. cit., p. 263.
34. Quoted in ibid., p. 250.
35. Quoted in ibid., p. 13.
36. See Lloyd Goodrich, Thomas Eakins: His Life and Work (New York: Whitney Museum
of American Art, 1933), p. 21.
37. Kenneth Maddox, “Intruder into Eden: Iconographic Significance of the Train in
Nineteenth-Century American Landscape” (Ph.D. diss. in progress, Columbia Uni-
versity, written under the author’s direction).
38. Marx, op. cit., p. 222.
39. Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., “George Inness and the Hudson River School: The Lackawanna
Valley,” American Art Journal 2, no. 2 (Fall 1970):52.
40. Ibid., p. 57.
41. Maddox, op. cit.
42. See Cikovsky, op. cit., p. 50. Cikovsky publishes a photo of the site taken about four
years later, indicating that some, if not all, of the stumps were already present. But the
stump motif tends to be rare in Inness’s work. Most of his views escape the scars of
desecration, returning to a dreamy pastoral ideal and to the “time-ravaged” pictur-
esque tree.
43. Quoted in Life in America, exhibition catalogue (New York: The Metropolitan Mu-
seum of Art, 1939), p. 160.
44. Woodcut from drawing by Porte Crayon (D. H. Strother) in Harper’s New Monthly
Magazine 19 (1859):1, reproduced in Huth, Nature and the American, p. 85.
 Notes to Pages 152–169 253

45. See Hendricks, Albert Bierstadt, p. 205.

46. See Moure, “Five Eastern Artists Out West,” pp. 15ff.
47. Whitman, Specimen Days, p. 89.
48. Barbara Novak, “Landscape Permuted: From Painting to Photography,” Art-forum,
Oct. 1975, pp. 40–45; and see Era of Exploration.
49. See Marx, op. cit., p. 238, referring to Emerson’s attitude. I am quoting Marx here.
50. Wilhelm Worringer, Form in Gothic, ed. Herbert Read (New York: Schocken Books,
1972), p. 179.
51. Quoted in Quentin Anderson, The Imperial Self (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), p. 11.
52. See Brian O’Doherty, American Masters: The Voice and the Myth (New York: Random
House, 1973), pp. 159–60. In a study of Rothko, O’Doherty speculates convincingly on
the nature of the immobile figure: “Surely this figure represents mind—mind sepa-
rated from nature so that, in the epitome of the Romantic idea, it may be reabsorbed
and interfused with it.” Later, he makes a distinction between “the transcendental
watcher” and “the tragic spectator,” antagonistic to each other and yet forced to coin-
cide in what he feels is Rothko’s idea of the figure. The implication is that we become
the figure in Rothko’s work, without the interposition of a surrogate. Similarly,
O’Doherty traces the modernist sense of the medium—paint itself—to “the artist
representing himself painting at his easel before the view. . . . Toward the end of the
[nineteenth] century that figure—the artist—disappears into the medium, is replaced
by touch and color and process. The figure representing mind also disappears. Its
remnants of idealism join with the medium to fill the void caused by its departure,
and thus initiate the proper history of modernism, rehearsing Romanticism in terms
suitably transposed.”
53. North American Review 81 (1855):223.
54. Emerson: A Modern Anthology, p. 147.
55. Ibid., pp. 143–44.
56. Ibid., p. 117.
57. See below, p. 268.
58. Selected Journals, pp. 33, 34 (Aug. 13, 1838).
59. Democratic Vistas, in Portable Walt Whitman, p. 457.
60. Quoted in Stanley Bank, American Romanticism (New York: Capricorn Books, 1969),
p. 293. See also Hyatt H. Waggoner, American Poets from the Puritans to the Present
(New York: Dell, 1970), p. 5. Waggoner speaks of a dark strain which “was a sub-
merged minor note in nineteenth-century American poetry. Here and there we find
it just under the surface. Now and then it breaks into the open and becomes domi-
nant, as it does in a very special sort of way in Poe and Melville and in many of the
poems of Emily Dickinson. But to find it most powerfully and meaningfully ex-
pressed we must go outside the poetry, to the fiction—to Hawthorne, Melville, and
the late work of James. Earlier, in the verse of the eighteenth-century Enlighten-
ment, it was hardly present at all. But it was present when American poetry began,
with the Puritans.”
61. Herman Melville, Moby Dick (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), pp. 140–41.
62. Bank, op. cit., p. 14.
63. “Song of the Broad-Axe,” from Leaves of Grass, in Portable Walt Whitman, pp. 186–90.
64. Passage to India, in ibid., p. 343.
65. Democratic Vistas, in ibid., p. 460.
66. Preface to Leaves of Grass, in ibid., pp. 37–38.
67. Democratic Vistas, in ibid., p. 457.
254 Notes to Pages 173–181

CHAPTER 9 Arcady Revisited: Americans in Italy

1. William Wetmore Story, Roba di Roma, 2 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1896), 1:5.
2. Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends (2 vols., 1903; 2 vols. in 1, New
York: Da Capo Press, 1969), 2:4.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 1:27–28.
5. Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1959),
p. 41.
6. Ibid., p. 42.
7. Quoted in James, op. cit., 2:50.
8. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun (New York: Dell, 1960), p. 28.
9. De Rougemont, op. cit., p. 23.
10. James, op. cit., 2:209.
11. Ibid., pp. 209–10.
12. Henry James, Roderick Hudson (Middlesex, Eng.: Penguin, 1969), p. 225.
13. James, William Wetmore Story, 2:131.
14. Henry James, Stories of Writers and Artists, ed. F. O. Matthiessen (New York: New
Directions, n.d.), p. 21.
15. Ibid.
16. James, William Wetmore Story, 1:296.
17. Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” in McCoubrey, American Art, 1700–1960,
p. 108.
18. Noble, Course of Empire, pp. 153–54.
19. James Jackson Jarves, Art-Hints (New York: Harper & Bros., 1855), pp. 13–14.
20. Story, op. cit., 1:7.
21. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books (1858–59), vol.
10, The Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Boston & Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, 1888),
pp. 89–90.
22. A Handbook of Rome and Its Environs, Part II of The Handbook for Travellers in Cen-
tral Italy (London: John Murray, 1858), p. 243.
23. Story, op. cit., p. 5.
24. Hawthorne, Note-Books, p. 58.
25. James, William Wetmore Story, 2:134, quoting Roba di Roma.
26. George Stillman Hillard, Six Months in Italy, 2 vols. (Boston: Ticknor & Read, 1853),
1:204.
27. James, William Wetmore Story, 2:134.
28. Ibid., 1:347.
29. Quoted in Nathalia Wright, American Novelists in Italy (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1965), p. 46.
30. Helen Haseltine Plowden, William Stanley Haseltine (London: Frederick Muller, 1947),
p. 54.
31. Harriet Hosmer: Letters and Memories, ed. Cornelia Carr (New York: Moffat, Yard,
and Co., 1912), p. 40.
32. Ibid., p. 31.
33. Plowden, op. cit., p. 54.
34. George Wynne, Early Americans in Rome (Rome: Dapco, 1966), p. 65.
35. Quoted in ibid., p. 50.
36. The dates and addresses offered here were compiled from the following sources: Mme.
Ricss, “Résidences romaines des principaux écrivains anglais et américains,” type-
 Notes to Pages 182–187 255

script in Keats Library, Keats House, Rome; Murray’s Handbook of Rome (1858); James
E. Freeman, Gatherings from an Artist’s Portfolio in Rome (Boston, 1883); Plowden, op.
cit.; Wynne, op. cit.; guest register of the Caffè Greco from 1845 on; Clara Louise
Dentler, Famous Foreigners in Florence, 1400–1900 (Florence: Marzocco, 1964); Joshua
C. Taylor, William Page (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); Hosmer, op. cit.;
William Gerdts, The White Marmorean Flock, exhibition catalogue, Vassar Art Gal-
lery, Poughkeepsie, N.Y., April 4–20, 1972. This information is still very sparse and
sometimes contradictory. For example, Mme. Ricss lists 43 Via Bocca di Leone as the
nineteenth-century address of the Hotel d’Inghilterra (now no. 14). Joshua Taylor (p.
124) locates the Brownings and Pages in private apartments at no. 43. Hosmer (p. 48)
numbers the Brownings’ address as 42, and says they occupied the third floor. I am
indebted to Octavia Hughes for the information about Kensett’s address, and to Donald
Reynolds for allowing me to consult an unpublished ms., “Artistic Life in the Ameri-
can and English Colonies in Florence, 1825–61.”
37. Quoted in Wright, op. cit., p. 46.
38. Quoted in E. P. Richardson and Otto Wittman, Jr., Travelers in Arcadia (Detroit and
Toledo: Detroit Institute of Arts, Toledo Museum of Art, 1951), p. 13.
39. Susan A. Hutchinson, “Old Letters in the Avery Collection of Artist’s Letters in the
Brooklyn Museum,” Brooklyn Museum Quarterly 2 (July 1915):287. I am grateful to
Linda Ferber for this reference.
40. Ibid.
41. Hosmer, op. cit., p. 42.
42. Plowden, op. cit., p. 54.
43. Hosmer, op. cit., pp. 108–9.
44. Leonora Cranch Scott, The Life and Letters of Christopher Pearse Cranch (Boston and
New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), p. 105.
45. Noble, op. cit., p. 333.
46. James, William Wetmore Story, 1:171.
47. Ibid., p. 158.
48. Quoted in Scott, op. cit., p. 105.
49. Hawthorne, Note-Books, p. 170.
50. Elihu Vedder, The Digressions of V (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), p.
156.
51. James, William Wetmore Story, 2:225, 226.
52. Quoted in Richardson and Wittman, op. cit., pp. 28–29. Cole’s delight in the smallest
bits of nature can be seen in the two pages of a herbarium in Church’s library at
Olana; see above, p. 287 n. 79.
53. Quoted in Scott, op. cit., p. 120.
54. Hawthorne, Note-Books, p. 425.
55. Quoted in Wright, op. cit., p. 81.
56. See Van Wyck Brooks, The Dream of Arcadia (New York: Dutton, 1958), chap. 9, for a
fine account of Margaret Fuller in Italy. See also Joseph Jay Deiss, The Roman Years of
Margaret Fuller (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1969).
57. William Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United
States (1834; New York: Dover, 1969), vol .2, pt. 2, p. 364.
58. Quoted in James, William Wetmore Story, 1:103.
59. Ibid., pp. 107–8.
60. Ibid., p. 119.
61. Quoted in ibid.
62. Ibid.
256 Notes to Pages 187–201

63. Dentler, op. cit., p. 31.

64. Quoted in James, William Wetmore Story, 1:136.
65. Ibid., p. 157.
66. Wynne, op. cit., p. 105.
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid., p. 116. See also Brooks, op. cit., p. 111, who indicates that Horatio Greenough and
Jarves cared deeply about Italian independence.
69. Quoted in Wynne, op. cit., p. 124.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid., p. 125.
72. James, William Wetmore Story, 1:139.
73. Church to Osborn, Nov. 4, 1868, typescript, Church-Osborn correspondence, Olana.
74. Church to Osborn, Nov. 9, 1868, typescript, Church-Osborn correspondence, Olana.
75. Church to Osborn, Jan. 23/28, 1869, typescript, Church-Osborn correspondence, Olana.
76. Church to Heade, Oct. 9, 1868, Church-Heade correspondence, microfilm, Archives
of American Art.
77. Church to Heade, Nov. 16, 1868, Church-Heade correspondence, microfilm, Archives
of American Art.
78. Quoted in James, William Wetmore Story, 1:179.
79. Quoted in ibid., pp. 249, 253.
80. Quoted in ibid., pp. 314–15.
81. Hawthorne, Marble Faun, p. 152.
82. Quoted in Wright, op. cit., p. 53.
83. Hawthorne, Note-Books, pp. 456–57.
84. Hawthorne, Marble Faun, p. 161.
85. New York Mirror 15, no. 49 (June 2, 1838):390.
86. Hawthorne, Note-Books, p. 432.
87. See Autobiography of Worthington Whittredge, p. 42.
88. De Rougemont, op. cit., pp. 294–95.

CHAPTER 10 America and Europe: Influence and Affinity

1. Whittredge, Autobiography, p. 42.
2. Ibid., p. 40.
3. James, William Wetmore Story, 1:296.
4. Emerson, Modern Anthology, p. 59.
5. Richard Payne Knight, Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (London, 1805),
pp. 152–53.
6. Cole, journals, entry of July 29, 1829; ms., New York State Library, Albany; photostats,
New-York Historical Society; microfilm, Archives of American Art.
7. Ibid., entry of Aug. 24, 1841.
8. Durand, journal, entry of June 22, 1840, Asher B. Durand papers, New York Public
Library.
9. Ibid., July 3, 1840.
10. Quoted in John Durand, Asher B. Durand, p. 160.
11. Asher B. Durand papers, New York Public Library.
12. James Jackson Jarves, Art-Thoughts: The Experiences and Observations of an American
Amateur in Europe (New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1869), p. 182.
13. For an extended study of this problem, see Lois Engelson, “The Influence of Dutch
Landscape Painting on the American Landscape Tradition” (Master’s essay, Colum-
bia University, 1966, written under the author’s direction).
 Notes to Pages 202–211 257

14. Webster’s New World Dictionary, college ed. (Cleveland and New York: World Pub-
lishing Co., 1960), s.v. “influence” (2a).
15. Ibid., s.v. “affinity” (3).
16. See Harold E. Dickson (ed.), Observations on American Art: Selections from the Writ-
ings of John Neal (1793–1876), Pennsylvania State College Studies no. 12 (State College:
The Pennsylvania State College, 1943), p. 46.
17. See Barbara Novak, “Asher B. Durand and European Art,” Art Journal 21, no. 4 (Sum-
mer 1962:250–54.
18. William Sidney Mount, ms., Dec. 29, 1848, Suffolk Museum and Carriage House, Stony
Brook, L.I.
19. Ibid.
20. John I. H. Baur, “Trends in American Painting,” introduction to M. & M. Karolik Collec-
tion of American Paintings, 1815–1865, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1949), p. iv: “The main line of development towards impressionism
grew . . . directly out of the strict realist tradition and was for many years modified by it.
It was thus a slow evolution rather than an abrupt change in vision. It was also pre-
dominantly a native development, for it owed little to European influences.”
21. Robert L. Herbert, Barbizon Revisited (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1962), p. 30.
22. Asher B. Durand, “Letters,” Letter IV, Crayon 1 (Feb. 14, 1855):98.
23. See Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, pp. 167–69.
24. See Norma F. Broude, “The Macchiaioli: Academicism and Modernism in Nineteenth
Century Italian Painting” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1967).
25. Zandomeneghi’s art by 1878 had already been touched by Parisian painting. He ar-
rived in Paris in 1874 and was followed there by his friend, the Macchiaioli supporter
and critic Diego Martelli, in the year he painted Along the Seine. There are many
connections also between his paintings of the sixties and Homer. See Mia Cinotti,
Zandomeneghi (Milan: Bramante Editrice, Busto Arsizio, 1960).
26. Herbert, op. cit., pp. 17–18.
27. John Durand, Asher B. Durand, p. 151.
28. See Chapter V, p. 80.
29. See Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art (New York: Scribner’s, 1950), pp. 78ff, for a
consideration of parallels between Constable’s attitudes and those of Wordsworth.
See also Giuseppe Gatt, Constable (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), p. 12, who
quotes Constable’s 1819 letter to his wife: “Everything seems full of blossom of some
kind and at every step I take, and on whatever object I turn my eyes, that sublime
expression of the Scriptures, ‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ seems as if uttered
near me.” See also Lorenz Eitner, Neoclassicism and Romanticism, 1750–1850 (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 2:68.
30. There are many references in Constable’s letters to both Claude and the Dutch. See C.
R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable (London: Phaidon, 1951), pp. 81–83
(letter of Aug. 4, 1821, to John Fisher): “. . . There is some hope of the Academy’s
getting a Claude from Mr. Angerstein’s, the large and magnificent marine picture,
one of the most perfect in the world; should that be the case, though I can ill afford it,
I will make a copy of the same size. . . . The very doing it will almost bring me into
communion with Claude himself.” A subsequent letter of Sept. 20, 1821, indicates the
Claude did not come that year: “. . . it would have been madness for me to have meddled
with it this season. . . . The beautiful Ruysdael, ‘The Windmill’ which we admired, is at
the Gallery. I trust I shall be able to procure a memorandum of it. . . .”
31. See John Gage, Color in Turner: Poetry and Truth (New York: Praeger, 1969), pp. 189ff.
See also Fritz Novotny, Painting and Sculpture in Europe 1780 to 1880, The Pelican
258 Notes to Pages 211–214

History of Art (Baltimore: Penguin, 1960), p. 91, referring to Delacroix’s 1825 trip to
London with Bonington.
32. The Journal of Eugene Delacroix, ed. Hubert Wellington, trans. Lucy Norton (London:
Phaidon, 1951), p. 137 (entry of Sept. 29, 1850): “The two conceptions that Mme. Cavè
was describing to me, that of colour as colour and of light as light, must be reconciled
in one operation.”
33. Gage, op. cit., pp. 184–85.
34. Ibid., p. 185. Gage notes that Turner’s pictorial response to Goethe may have been a
criticism of his theories, but states, “I believe it was not a criticism of the basis of Goethe’s
account of the genesis of colours from light and darkness, by substituting their
Newtonian origin in light alone, but an attempt to restore the equality of light and
darkness as values in art and nature, which Turner felt Goethe had unduly neglected.”
35. Ibid., p. 189. “Whistler had, surprisingly perhaps, very little respect for Turner, as he
did not, he thought, meet either the simply natural or the decorative requirements of
landscape art.”
36. See James M. Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (London and New York:
William Heinemann, 1890), pp. 1–34, for Whistler’s account of the famous Whistler-
Ruskin case. See also, for a useful reprise, Hesketh Pearson, The Man Whistler (New
York: Harper & Bros., 1952), pp. 106ff.
37. See Huntington, Church, pp. 19, 45. Rhoma Phillips, in an unpublished paper on
Turner’s influence on American artists and in a Ph.D. dissertation in progress (Co-
lumbia University, written under the author’s direction), stresses the importance of
Turner’s influence through engravings. I am grateful to Ms. Phillips for emphasizing
this for me through her research.
38. Roger B. Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840–1900 (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 2.
39. Letter to H. Pickering, Nov. 23, 1827; quoted in Jared B. Flagg, The Life and Letters of
Washington Allston (1892; New York: Da Capo Press, 1969), pp. 203–4.
40. Quoted in Noble, Course of Empire, p. 121, from a letter of March 1, 1830. C. R. Leslie
had already written similarly to Allston, as early as August 18, 1823. See Flagg, op. cit.,
p. 177: “Turner, in all his last pictures, seems to have entirely lost sight of the ‘modesty
of nature.’ The coloring of his ‘Bay of Baiae,’ in the present Exhibition, would have
been less objectionable perhaps in Howard’s ‘Solar System’; but as applied to a real
scene, although splendid and harmonious, it is nevertheless a lie from beginning to
end.” This attitude, however, did not prevent Allston from suggesting that Cole ac-
quire the Liber Studiorum.
41. John Durand, op. cit., pp. 150, 151n.
42. See p. 86, above. Cropsey also owned copies of The Rivers of France from Drawings by
J. M. W. Turner, R. A. (London, 1837) and Turner and Girtin’s Picturesque Views, Sixty
Years Since (London, 1854); in Cropsey library, Hastings-on-Hudson.
43. Ruskin wrote to Hill on March 14 (1879?): “The copy of Turner is excellent, and you
had better now work from nature and your own mind only. . . . I am going to take you
at your kindly spoken word and keep this Turner copy a little while” (ms., private
collection; information courtesy of Joan Washburn). On March 26, 1879, Ruskin wrote
to Hill again: “I am obliged to you for your kind little present of the copy from Turner
which will be useful to me in my schools” (Drawings & Watercolors, John William Hill,
John Henry Hill, unpaged exhibition brochure, Nov. 3–27, 1976, Washburn Gallery,
New York).
44. Barbara Novak O’Doherty, “Thomas H. Hotchkiss: An American in Italy,” Art Quar-
terly 29, no. 1 (Spring 1966):6–7. See also Sanford Robinson Gifford, exhibition cata-
 Notes to Pages 214–216 259

logue, text by Nikolai Cikovsky, Jr. (The University of Texas Art Museum, 1970), pp.
14–16.
45. Linda Ferber, William Trost Richards: American Landscape and Marine Painter, 1833–
1905, exhibition catalogue (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1973), pp. 15, 33.
46. See Gage, op. cit., p. 121. J. J. E. Mayall, a young American photographer, was visited in
his London studio by Turner in 1847: “He wished me to copy my views of Niagara—
then a novelty in London—and enquired of me about the effect of the rainbow span-
ning the great falls. I was fortunate in having seized one of these fleeting shadows
when I was there, and I showed it to him. He wished to buy the plate. . . . He told me
he should like to see Niagara, as it was the greatest wonder in Nature; he never tired of
my description of it.” Turner’s interest in Niagara’s rainbow tallies nicely with Church’s
mastery of the rainbow, and with Tuckerman’s well-known anecdote about Ruskin
and Church’s Niagara. A typescript of a letter from Church to his friend William Osborn,
written in Rome on Nov. 30, 1868 (in the collection at Olana), reads in part: “I am not
only in demand to cure men but pictures also. Some time since Healy asked me to show
him how to paint a rainbow which he wished to introduce into a large picture of Lin-
coln, Grant, Sherman and Porter—a few days later a Mr. Welsch, a German-American
artist, begged me to show him how to paint a rainbow for a waterfall that he was paint-
ing and also a Mr. Richards came in for instructions in rainbows. I gave them all my
best prismatic touches and retired as I supposed with my best bow. . . .”
47. Jarves, The Art-Idea, p. 205.
48. Ibid., p. 191.
49. Quoted in Huntington, Church, p. 1.
50. See Arlene Jacobowitz, James Hamilton, 1819–1878: American Marine Painter, exhibi-
tion catalogue (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1966), p. 23, which stresses the early
influence of the engravings.
51. See Thurman Wilkins, Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains (Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, 1966), pp. 24, 37.
52. Quoted in Allen Staley, The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape (London: Oxford University
Press, 1973), p. 182.
53. Emerson, “Art,” in Selected Writings, p. 305.
54. Stein, op. cit., p. 102.
55. To approach the Ruskin problem is to approach a writer whose ideas are as change-
able as emotions—who presents us with a strange inversion of ideas and feelings:
constant feelings and changeable ideas. Francis G. Townsend, in his seminal Ruskinian
study Ruskin and the Landscape Feeling (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1951),
said it succinctly: “Modern Painters is so poorly organized that even an intelligent
reader finds it almost impossible to follow the argument. It contains so many pro-
nouncements on so many topics that it provides every adverse critic with ample am-
munition. It is so full of contradictions that it is superfluous to point them out . . .”
(p. 3). And, “It is not surprising that Modern Painters is one of the worst organized
books ever to earn the name of literature, nor that a careful reading of it by an intel-
ligent reader leads to confusion rather than enlightenment as to the author’s opin-
ions” (p. 1).
Why then should we even bother to consider Ruskin? Because the jumble of Mod-
ern Painters presumably managed to reach the painterly intelligences of American
artists, and affect them as no other critical enterprise ever had. Almost every biogra-
phy of an American nineteenth-century landscapist alludes somewhere to a catalytic
encounter with Modern Painters. Whittredge, op. cit., p. 55, says: “The study of nature
proved to be too strong meat for all the babes to digest. They never got beyond a
260 Notes to Page 216

literal transcript. Ruskin, in his Modern Painters, just out then and in every land-
scape painter’s hand, had told these tyros nothing could be too literal in the way of
studies, and many of them believed Ruskin.” We are frequently assured, in addition,
that the tone of the influential Crayon was pre-eminently Ruskinian, and this is backed
up by William Stillman’s comment (Autogiography of a Journalist, 1:222–23): “My
friends came to the conclusion that it would be a good and useful thing that I should
start an art journal. I had read with enthusiasm ‘Modern Painters,’ and absorbed the
views of Ruskin in large draughts. . . . The art-loving public was full of Ruskinian
enthusiasm, and what strength I had shown was in that vein. . . . I was an enthusiast,
fired with the idea of an apostolate of art, largely vicarious and due to Ruskin, who
was then my prophet, and whose religion, as mine, was nature.”
Recent studies, such as Roger B. Stein’s invaluable John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought
in America, 1840–1900, have gone so far as to place on Ruskin’s doorstep the responsi-
bility for certain key ideas that are central to the development of nineteenth-century
art in America. We have an obligation, therefore, to evaluate as best we can how the
artists could have benefited by reading Modern Painters, what sense they could have
made of Ruskin’s pontifical theorizing, what “tips” they could have gotten from reams
of practical advice, how Ruskin’s ideas related to, or affected, the development of
landscape painting in theory and practice in mid-century America.
Stein, in his brilliant study, has done more than any other scholar to amplify the
long-term suspicion that Ruskin did indeed have an important effect on American
mid-century art. But at the heart of Stein’s thesis is the idea, to my mind question-
able, that the dilemma of the real and the ideal was a “Ruskinian” one (see especially
p. 116). Stein suggests that this dilemma, along with an emphasis on God and nature,
was exported by Ruskin to America, where the seeds, planted in receptive soil, yielded
a peculiarly American fruit. In all fairness, Stein is moved to admit that “at times I
have inadvertently argued the case for my subject too strongly” (p. ix). He has also
noted that “the ideas of the best American landscape painters of the period—Durand,
Kensett and others—sprang from the American Wordsworthian tradition, quite in-
dependent of the Brotherhood. They read Ruskin later, and he corroborated and rein-
forced already existing ideas rather than showing them a new path” (p. 103).
Stein’s reference to corroboration and reinforcement is very apt. Ruskin’s popu-
larity in America stemmed not so much from what he offered that was new, as from
what he “corroborated and reinforced.” In many ways, America was a far more fertile
ground for Ruskinian ideas than England could ever be. As The Crayon pointed out
in its very first year of publication (vol. I (1855), p. 76): “Between Ruskin and most of
the English literary papers there is open hostility and fairness of judgment is quite
out of the question.”
No such hostility existed in America. Indeed, it could be said that in America
Ruskin found his most receptive and appreciative audience. This is not, however,
because he showed them anything new. But he may well have been in a position to
reveal them to themselves. The concern with the real as a vehicle for the ideal, the
reverence for nature as God, the respect for a scientism of observation, were all part
of a developing American landscape esthetic when Modern Painters arrived on the
scene. But Ruskin could verbalize for a new generation attitudes that had rarely re-
ceived such “word-painting.” He could, in fact, offer to the art world an intellectual
spokesman and mentor who could bring, with all the credentials of his European
origin, “the word” on how to paint nature. That word, laden with technical and prac-
tical observations, also emphasized the “conceptive” faculties of thought, prescribing
a blend of seeing and knowing that coincided beautifully with the American propen-
 Notes to Pages 216–224 261

sity for the conceptual, and quickly coalesced with the American feeling for what
Ruskin called “the Divine mind . . . visible in its full energy of operation on every
lowly bank and smouldering stone . . .” (Modern Painters I, p. 320).
56. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, p. 511.
57. Ruskin, Modern Painters I, p. 12.
58. Quoted in Staley, op. cit., p. 181.
59. Quoted in ibid.
60. Quoted in ibid., pp. 132, 131.
61. Quoted in ibid., p. 136. Further, Phillip Hamerton, the painter and critic, wrote: “. . .
our ardour was not really and fundamentally artistic, though we believed it to be so.
It came much more from a scientific motive than from any purely artistic feeling, and
was a part—though we were not ourselves aware of it—of that great scientific explo-
ration of the realms of nature which this age has carried so much farther than any of
its predecessors” (quoted in ibid., p. 174).
62. See The Düsseldorf Academy and the Americans, exhibition catalogue (Atlanta: The
High Museum of Art, 1972), especially the essay by Donelson F. Hoopes, for a good
consideration of the problem. There has not yet been a similar scholarly focus on the
parallels between the Americans and the Dresden group. See, for a preliminary study
of the Dresden problem, Suzanne Latt Epstein, “The Relationship of the American
Luminists to Caspar David Friedrich” (Master’s essay written under the author’s di-
rection, Columbia University, 1964).
63. Düsseldorf, p. 27.
64. Ibid. Achenbach seems to have discouraged formal study with him. See also Whittredge,
op. cit., p. 26.
65. John Wilmerding, Fitz Hugh Lane (New York: Praeger, 1971), p. 51, quotes a letter from
Lane’s friend Joseph L. Stevens: “Lane was frequently in Boston. . . . The coming of the
Dusseldorf Gallery to Boston was an event to fix itself in one’s memory for all time.
What talks of all these things Lane and I had in his studio and by my fireside!”
66. See Novotny, op. cit., p. 11 off, for a consideration of Biedermeier painting. On p. 117,
Novotny isolates the Danish art of Købke as Biedermeier.
67. Caspar David Friedrich, 1774–1840: Romantic Landscape Painting in Dresden, exhibi-
tion catalogue (London: Tate Gallery, 1972), p. 110.
68. Epstein, op. cit., pp. 5–6, notes that the Academy curriculum from 1754 on included
courses in draughtsmanship for handicraft apprentices.
69. Scandinavian artists more directly within the Friedrich-Dresden circle who warrant
comparison with the American landscapists would include the Norwegians Johann
Christian Claussen Dahl (1788–1857) and Thomas Fearnley (1802–42).
70. Quoted in Friedrich (Tate), pp. 14, 103.
71. Quoted in Karolik Collection, pp. 191–92.
72. Letter to person unknown, undated; ms., New York State Library, Albany; microfilm,
Archives of American Art.
73. Quoted in Wilmerding, op. cit., p. 79.
74. Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, ed., From the Classicists to the Impressionists: A Documentary
History of Art (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1966), 3:85.
75. Quoted in Friedrich (Tate), p. 105.
76. Noble, Course of Empire, p. 287. See also broadside for Voyage of Life, Cole papers,
New York State Library, Albany; microfilm, Archives of American Art.
77. Quoted in Friedrich (Tate), p. 106.
78. Noble, op. cit., p. 288.
79. Ibid., p. 289.
262 Notes to Pages 224–230

80. Quoted in Friedrich (Tate), p. 106.

81. Emerson, Modern Anthology, p. 153.
82. See Friedrich (Tate), which seems to me to have exaggerated this out of bounds. Though
Friedrich’s work was clearly more deliberately and overtly symbolic than that of the
Americans, the catalogue notes, by Helmut Börsch-Supan, carry the concept of
Friedrich’s symbolism to an extreme.
83. See especially Stanley Vogel, German Literary Influences on the American Transcen-
dentalists (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), pp. 172ff.
84. Vogel, p. 103, notes: “I side with those persons who believe that much in Emerson’s
thought and philosophy which may appear German is merely Yankee.”
85. Quoted in ibid.
86. The point should be made that Emerson’s comments on nature and God are verbal-
izations of ideas and feelings made manifest in the landscape paintings. Though some
amount of influence through essays and lectures can be cited, it is clearly Emerson’s
parallel sentiments that make him the spokesman for the painters, rather than any
direct cause-and-effect relationship. Emerson himself seems hardly to have been much
interested in American landscape paintings. A visit to his home in Concord indicates
that his taste ran to prints of Italian Renaissance paintings.
87. Emerson, Selected Writings, p. 6.
88. Eitner, op. cit., 2:48.
89. Quoted in Holt, op. cit., p. 90.
90. Quoted in Eitner, op. cit., 2:46, 47.
91. Quoted in ibid., p. 47.
92. Emerson, Modern Anthology, p. 135.
93. Ruskin, Modern Painters I, p. 21.
94. A key distinction between American luminist and European landscape is precisely
that glow—which yields up an almost palpable, shining light radiating from the
smooth picture surface.
95. Quoted in Eitner, op. cit., 2:47.
96. Emerson, Modern Anthology, p. 26.
97. Cole’s allegories and some of Cropsey’s early works are the most obvious American
examples. These, however, tended also to be more explicitly narrative than German
symbolism, and ultimately less intrinsically symbolic.
98. Quoted in Eitner, op. cit., 2:54: “The artist’s feeling is his law. Pure sensibility can
never be unnatural; it is always in harmony with nature.”
99. Ibid.
100. Ibid.
101. Ibid., p. 55.
102. Ibid., p. 54.
103. Wilhelm Worringer, Form in Gothic, ed. Herbert Read (New York: Schocken, 1964), p.
179.
104. Ibid., p. 180.
105. Ibid., p. 35.
106. Arthur Christy, The Orient in American Transcendentalism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1932), pp. 84–85.
107. Whicher, Freedom and Fate, p. 17: “Take a quantity of Kant; add unequal parts of
Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Jacobi, Schleiermacher, Fichte, Schelling, Oken, and a pinch
of Hegel; stir in, as Emerson did, a generous amount of Swedenborg; strain through
Mme. de Stael, Sampson Reed, Oegger, Coleridge, Carlyle, Wordsworth, Cousin, Jouffroy,
 Notes to Page 230 263

Constant; spill half and season with Plato—and you have something resembling the
indescribable brew called modern philosophy whose aroma Emerson began to detect
in his corner of the world in the 1820’s, and for which his Puritan-Unitarian-Realist
palate slowly but decisively acquired a taste.”
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Selected Bibliography

Additional sources may be found in the notes.

Contemporary Manuscripts
The most useful manuscript material can be found in the Archives of American Art, Wash-
ington, D.C. For this book, I utilized the microfilms in the New York office of the Archives.
I consulted especially:
The Thomas Cole papers. There are also photostatic copies in the collection of the New-
York Historical Society. Most of the originals are in the collection of the New York State
Library, Albany. Others are in The Detroit Institute of Arts.
Cropsey papers. Originals at Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.
The Church-Heade correspondence. Originals in Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.

I also consulted:
The Church letters from South America at the Henry Francis DuPont Winterthur Mu-
seum, Winterthur, Delaware.
Church’s South American diaries, letters, papers, and library at Olana.
Cropsey’s library at Hastings-on-Hudson.
The Asher B. Durand papers at the New York Public Library.
The John Durand papers at the New York Public Library.
The William Sidney Mount papers at the Suffolk Museum and Carriage House, Stony Brook,
Long Island. Microfilm in the New York Public Library.

Publications
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University Press, 1973.
Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953.
Allston, Washington. Lectures on Art—Poems. 1850. Reprint. New York: Da Capo Press, 1972.

265
266 Selected Bibliography

American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School. Exhibition catalogue. New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987.
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Arber, Agnes. “Goethe’s Botany.” Chronica Botanica 10, no. 2 (Summer 1946).
Avery, Kevin J. Church’s Great Picture: The Heart of the Andes. Exhibition catalogue. New
York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993.
Badt, Kurt. John Constable’s Clouds. Translated by Stanley Godman. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 195o.
Baigell, Matthew. Albert Bierstadt. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1981.
Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.
Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979.
———. The Puritan Origins of the American Self. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976.
Bermingham, Ann. Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition 1740–1860. Berke-
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Bermingham, Peter. Jasper F. Cropsey, 1823–1900: A Retrospective View of America’s Painter of
Autumn. Exhibition catalogue. College Park: University of Maryland, 1968.
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Crayon, The: A Journal Devoted to the Graphic Arts, and the Literature Related to Them. Vols.
1–8.1855–61.
Cropsey, Jasper F. Jasper F. Cropsey, Artist and Architect: Paintings Drawings, and Photo-
graphs from the Collections of the Newington-Cropsey Foundation and the New-York
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Angeles County Museum of Art, 1972.
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New York: W. W. Norton, 1969.
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———. The Origin of Species. Edited by J. W. Burrow. Middlesex, Eng.: Penguin, 1970.
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day Anchor, 1962.
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New York: Russell and Russell, 1961.
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Driscoll, John Paul, and Howat, John K. John Frederick Kensett: An American Master. Exhi-
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1985.
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Durand, John. The Life and Times of Asher B. Durand. New York: Scribner’s, 1894.
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Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1991.
Eiseley, Loren. Darwin’s Century. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1961.
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Emerson, Edward Waldo. The Early Years of the Saturday Club, 1855–1870. Boston and New
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Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Emerson: A Modern Anthology. Edited by Alfred Kazin and Daniel
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———. The Journals & Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by
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———. The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo
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———. The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by Ralph L. Rusk. 6 vols. New York:
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———. The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by Brooks Atkinson. New
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Era of Exploration: The Rise of Landscape Photography in the American West, 1860–1885. Ex-
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———. The Metamorphosis of Plants. Introduction by Rudolf Steiner. Bio-Dynamic Farm-
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———. The Life and Works of Martin Johnson Heade. New Haven and London: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1975.
———. The Lure of Italy, American Artists and The Italian Experience 1760–1914. With es-
says by William H. Gerdts, Erica E. Hirshler, Fred S. Licht, and William L. Vance.
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Harvard University Press, 1967.
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1951.
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——— , and Wallach, Alan, eds. Thomas Cole: Landscape into History. With essays by Chris-
tine Stansell and Sean Wilentz, J. Gray Sweeney, William H. Truettner, and Alan
Wallach. Exhibition catalogue. New Haven and Washington, D.C.: Yale University
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ven: Yale University Press, 1955.
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sity of Delaware Press, 1987.
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Heinemann, 1890.
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———. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1978.
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New York: Viking Press, 1945.
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by John I. H. Baur. Brooklyn Museum Journal (1942).
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homa Press, 1966.
Wilmerding, John. American Light: The Luminist Movement 1850–1875. With contributions
by Lisa F. Andrus, Linda S. Ferber, Albert Gelpi, David C. Huntington, Weston Naef,
Barbara Novak, Earl A. Powell, and Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. Exhibition catalogue.
Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1980.
———. Fitz Hugh Lane. New York: Praeger, 1971.
———. A History of American Marine Painting. Salem, Mass.: Peabody Museum of Salem,
1968.
———. Paintings by Fitz Hugh Lane. With contributions by Elizabeth Garrity Ellis, Franklin
Kelly, Earl A. Powell III, and Erik A. R. Ronnberg, Jr. Exhibition catalogue. Washing-
ton, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1988.
Wolf, Bryan Jay. Romantic Revision: Culture and Consciousness in Nineteenth Century Ameri-
can Painting and Literature. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Wölfflin, Heinrich. Principles of Art History. New York: Dover, 1932.
Worringer, Wilhelm. Form in Gothic. Edited by Herbert Read. New York: Schocken Books,
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This page intentionally left blank
Illustration Credits

Author’s Note: Scholarly discoveries have recently indicated that the name Fitz Henry Lane
is a more proper identification for the artist traditionally known as Fitz Hugh Lane. Since
the artist sometimes signed his paintings Fitz H. Lane, and many institutions presently
continue to use the earlier designation, I have decided for the sake of consistency to adopt
the name Fitz H. Lane.

color plates
1. Frederic Edwin Church, Twilight in the Wilderness, 1860. © The Cleveland
Museum of Art, Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund, 1965.233.

2. Thomas Cole, Expulsion, Moon and Firelight, ca. 1828. © Museo Thyssen-
Bornemisza, Madrid.

3. Albert Bierstadt, Rocky Mountains, “Lander’s Peak,” 1863. Courtesy of the Fogg Art
Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Bequest of Mrs. William Hayes Fogg,
1895.698. Photograph: Katya Kallsen.

4. Asher Brown Durand, Kindred Spirits, 1849. Courtesy Walton Family Foundation,
Bentonville, Ark.

5. Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Childhood, 1842. Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund,
Image © 2006 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Photograph: Bob Grove.

6. Frederic Edwin Church, Andes of Ecuador, 1855. Reynolda House Museum of

American Art, Winston-Salem, N.C.

7. Fitz H.Lane, Western Shore with Norman’s Woe, 1862. Cape Ann Historical
Association, Gloucester, Mass.

8. Fitz H. Lane, Gloucester Harbor at Sunset, ca. 1856–59. Private collection.

9. Fitz H. Lane, Schooners Before Approaching Storm, 1860. Private collection.

10. Martin Johnson Heade, Sunset on Long Beach, ca. 1867. Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston. Gift of Maxim Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American
Paintings, 1815–65, 47.1159. Photograph © 2006 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

275
276 Illustration Credits

11. Martin Johnson Heade, Study of Lealia purpurata, ca. 1865–75. St. Augustine
Historical Society, St. Augustine, Fla.

12. Sanford Robinson Gifford, Hunter Mountain, Twilight, 1866. Photograph © Terra
Foundation for American Art/Art Resource, N.Y.

13. George Inness, The Lackawanna Valley, ca.1856. Gift of Mrs. Huttleston Rogers,
Image © 2006 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

14. Martin Johnson Heade, The Stranded Boat, 1863. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
Gift of Maxim Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American
Paintings, 1815-65, 48.1026. Photograph © 2006 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

15. Thomas H. Hotchkiss, Theatre at Taormina, 1868. Private collection.

16. Thomas Cole, Dream of Arcadia, ca. 1838. Denver Art Museum Collection, Gift of
Mrs. Lindsey Gentry, 1954.

chapter 1
1.1 Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Arcadian State (2nd in series), 1836.
Collection of The New-York Historical Society, New York, acc. no. 1858.2. (Page 9)

chapter 2
2.1 Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Old Age, 1842. Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, Image
© 2006 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Page 17)

2.2 Albert Bierstadt, The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, 1863. The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1907 (07.123). Photograph, all rights reserved. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (Page 20)

2.3 Frederic Edwin Church, Heart of the Andes, 1859. The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, Bequest of Margaret E. Dows, 1909 (09.95). Photograph, all rights reserved.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (Page 20)

2.4 Fitz H. Lane, Brace’s Rock, Eastern Point, Gloucester, ca. 1864. John Wilmerding
Collection, Promised Gift, Image © 2006 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of
Art, Washington, D.C. (Page 26)

chapter 3
3.1 Frederic Edwin Church, Distant View of the Sangay Volcano, Ecuador, 1857.
Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Louis
P. Church, 1917-4-402. Photograph: Matt Flynn. (Page 31)

3.2 Frederic Edwin Church, Sketch for Cotopaxi, 1861. Private Collection. (Page 32)

3.3 Thomas Cole, American Lake Scene, 1844. Gift of Douglas F. Roby. Photograph ©
1986 The Detroit Institute of Arts. (Page 35)
 Illustration Credits 277

chapter 4
4.1 Albert Bierstadt, A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie, 1866. Brooklyn
Museum, Brooklyn, N.Y., Dick S. Ramsay Fund, Healy Purchase Fund B, Frank L.
Babbott Fund, A. Augustus Healy Fund, Ella C. Woodward Memorial Fund, Carll
H. de Silver Fund, Charles Stewart Smith Memorial Fund, Caroline A.L. Pratt
Fund, Frederick Loeser Fund, Augustus Graham School of Design Fund, Museum
Collection Fund, Special Subscription, and the John B. Woodward Memorial
Fund; Purchased with funds given by Daniel M. Kelly and Charles Simon; Bequest
of Mrs. William T. Brewster, Gift of Mrs. W. Woodward Phelps in memory of her
mother and father, Ella M. and John C. Southwick, Gift of Seymour Barnard,
Bequest of Laura L. Barnes, Gift of J.A.H. Bell, and Bequest of Mark Finley, by
exchange, 76.79. (Page 42)

4.2 Thomas Cole, Prospect of Mt. Etna, 1844. Lyman Allyn Art Museum, New London,
Conn. (Page 49)

4.3 William J. Stillman, Philosopher’s Camp in the Adirondacks, ca. 1857–58. Courtesy
Concord Free Public Library, Concord, Mass. (Page 58)

4.4 Frederic Edwin Church, Tree with Vines, Jamaica, West Indies, May 1865. Cooper-
Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Louis P.
Church, 1917-4-342-a. Photograph: Matt Flynn. (Page 62)

chapter 5
5.1 John Constable, Study of Clouds, ca. 1822. © Ashmolean Museum, University of
Oxford, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library. (Page 72)

5.2 Luke Howard, Light cirro-cumulus beneath cirrus, 1803–11. Science Museum,
London, U.K. RMS/Science Museum/SSPL. (Page 74)

5.3 Jasper Cropsey, Cloud Study, 1850. Newington Cropsey Foundation, Hastings-on-
Hudson, N.Y. (Page 76)

5.4 Thomas Cole, Untitled, atmospheric study with notations (formerly called Cloud
Studies), 1825. Founder Society Purchase, William H. Murphy Fund. Photograph
© 2006 The Detroit Institute of Arts. (Page 82)

5.5 Frederic Edwin Church, Landscape Sketch, Hudson Valley, June 30, 1866. The
Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Smithsonian Institution, New York. (Page 83)

chapter 6
6.1 Henry Inman, Mumble the Peg, 1842. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of
the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Bequest of Henry C. Carey (The Carey Collection),
acc. no. 1879.8.13. (Page 90)

6.2 Jasper Cropsey, Leaf Study, undated. Newington-Cropsey Foundation, Hastings-

on-Hudson, N.Y. (Page 106)
278 Illustration Credits

6.3 Martin Johnson Heade, Magnolia Flower, 1888. The Putnam Foundation, Timken
Museum of Art, San Diego, Calif. (Page 106)

6.4 Isaac Sprague, “Nymphaea.” Illustration in Genera florae Americae boreali-

orientalis illustrata by Asa Gray. Boston, 1848–49. Pl. 42. General Research
Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
(Page 111)

chapter 7
7.1 H. B. Möllhausen, The Grand Canyon of the Colorado. Illustration from Die Reisen
in die Felsengebirge Nord-Amerikas, 1861. Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka,
The Taft Collection. (Page 122)

7.2 Thomas Moran, The Chasm of the Colorado, 1873–74. Smithsonian American Art
Museum, Lent by the Department of the Interior Museum, Washington, D.C.
(Page 127)

7.3 Worthington Whittredge, On the Plains, Colorado, 1872. Collection of St.

Johnsbury Athenaeum, St. Johnsbury, Vt. (Page 131)

7.4 Albert Bierstadt, Yosemite Valley, Glacier Point Trail, ca. 1873. Yale University Art
Gallery, New Haven, Conn., Gift of Mrs. Vincenzo Ardenghi. (Page 134)

chapter 8
8.1 Thomas Cole, View on the Catskill—Early Autumn, 1836–37. The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, Gift in memory of Jonathan Sturges by his children, 1895
(95.13.3). Photograph, all rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York. (Page 141)

8.2 Thomas Cole, River in the Catskills, 1843. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest
of Martha C. Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings,
1815–65, 47.1201. Photograph © 2006 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. (Page 141)

8.3 Alexander Gardner, View Near Fort Harker, Kansas, 216 Miles West of Missouri
River; Across the Continent on the Kansas Pacific Railroad (Route of the 35th
Parallel), ca. 1867–68. George Eastman House, Rochester, N.Y. Museum Purchase,
GEH NEGS: 27095 14860. 70:0075:0019. (Page 144)

8.4 Asher Brown Durand, Progress, 1853. From The Westervelt-Warner Collection of
Gulf States Paper Corporation and on view in The Westervelt-Warner Museum of
Art, Tuscaloosa, Ala. (Page 150)

8.5 William Henry Jackson, Cañon of the Rio las Animas. Mammoth prints of
Colorado and Wyoming, 1875?–85? (P. 1077). Photography Collection, Miriam and
Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public
Library, New York, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. (Page 155)

8.6 Andrew J. Russell, Malloy’s Cut Near Sherman. Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. (Page 157)
 Illustration Credits 279

8.7 Caspar David Friedrich, Landscape at Sunrise, undated. Nationale Forschungs-

und Gedenkstätten der klassischen deutschen Literatur in Weimar, Germany.
(Page 159)

8.8 Fitz H. Lane, Owl’s Head, Penobscot Bay, Maine, 1862. Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston. Bequest of Martha C. Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of
American Paintings, 1815–65, 48.448. Photograph © 2006 Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston. (Page 159)

8.9 Caspar David Friedrich, Two Men Observing the Moon, 1819–20. Gemäldegalerie
Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Dresden, Germany.
Photograph: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, N.Y. (Page 160)

8.10 William Henry Jackson, View of the Sweetwater, the Twin Peaks, camp at middle
distance, 1870. Photographs, No. 87, Coll. 34. U.S. Geological Survey of the
Territories. The Academy of Natural Sciences, Ewell Sale Stewart Library,
Philadelphia. (Page 165)

chapter 9
9.1 John Rollin Tilton, The Campagna, 1862. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of
Mrs. Catharine A. Barstow, RES.10.18. Photograph © 2006 Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston. (Page 174)

chapter 10
10.1 Claude Lorrain, Landscape with Mill, 1648. Galleria Doria Pamphili, Rome, Italy.
Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY. (Page 197)

10.2 Aelbert Cuyp, River Landscape with Boats. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen
zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany, Inv. KdZ 2373. Photograph: Joerg P. Anders, Bildarchiv
Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, N.Y. (Page 201)

10.3 Fitz H. Lane, Entrance to Somes Sound from the Southwest Harbor, 1852. Private
collection. Photo courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass. (Page 202)

10.4 Gustave Courbet, The Source of the Loue (La Grotte de la Loue), 1864. Gift of
Charles L. Lindemann, Image © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C. (Page 205)

10.5 Asher Brown Durand, Study from Nature: Rocks and Trees in the Catskills, 1856.
Collection of The New-York Historical Society, New York, acc. no. 1907.20. (Page
206)

10.6 Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (Fontainebleau?), 1896–99. Lillie P. Bliss Collection.
(16.1934), The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital Image © The Museum
of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, N.Y. (Page 207)

10.7 Winslow Homer, Croquet Match, 1868–69. Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1999.72.
Photograph: Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago/Art Resource, N.Y.
(Page 209)
280 Illustration Credits

10.8 Federico Zandomeneghi, Honeymoon (Fishing on the Seine River), ca. 1878.
Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Florence, Italy. Photograph: Scala/Art Resource, N.Y.
(Page 210)

10.9 Joseph Mallord William Turner, Inverary Pier. Loch Fyne. Morning, 1811. Fine Arts
Museums of San Francisco, Legion of Honor, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic
Arts, 1963.30.30509. (Page 212)

10.10 John Brett, Massa, Bay of Naples, 1873. Indianapolis Museum of Art, James E.
Roberts Fund. (Page 217)

10.11 Sanford Robinson Gifford, A Home in the Wilderness (formerly called Mount
Hayes), 1866. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt
Fund; The Butkin Foundation; Dorothy Burnham Everett Memorial Collection
and various donors by exchange, 1970.162. (Page 217)

10.12 Fitz H. Lane, Study for Brace’s Rock, Eastern Point, Gloucester, 1863. Private
collection. (Page 219)

10.13 Caspar David Friedrich, Mist (Der Nebel), 1807. Österreichische Galerie Belvedere,
Vienna, Austria. (Page 220)

10.14 Christen Købke, A View from Dosseringen near the Sortedam Lake Looking Towards
Nørrebro (Udsigt fra Dosseringen ved Sortedamssøen mod Nørrebro), 1838. Statens
Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. (Page 221)

10.15 Thomas Eakins, The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake, 1873. The Cleveland
Museum of Art, The Hinman B. Hurlbut Collection, 1984.1927. (Page 222)

10.16 Caspar David Friedrich, The Cross in the Mountains, 1808. Gemäldegalerie Alte
Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Dresden, Germany. Photograph:
Erich Lessing/Art Resource, N.Y. (Page 225)

10.17 Frederic Edwin Church, Scene in the Blue Mountains, Jamaica, 1865. Olana State
Historic Site, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic
Preservation. Accession: OL.1981.69.a.b (Page 226)
Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate photographs and illustrations.

Abildgaard, Nikolai Abraham, 222–23 Allston, Washington, 73, 91–92, 212–13, 229,
Abrams, M. H., 92 258n. 40
abstract expressionism, 28 Along the Seine (Zandomeneghi), 210,
Achenbach, Andreas, 219 257n. 25
Adamic figures, 4, 6, 132, 133 Altdorfer, Albrecht, 161
Address Delivered on the Centennial The American Adam (Lewis), 4
Anniversary of the Birth of Alexander American Association of Naturalists and
von Humboldt (Agassiz), 58 Geologists, 51
Adirondack Club, 57 American Civil War, 188
affinity vs. influence, 202–5, 208–9, 211, American Harvesting (Cropsey), 163
216–20, 222, 226–27, 230–31 American Journal of Science and Arts, 49
After Icebergs with a Painter: A Summer American Lake Scene (Cole), 35
Voyage to Labrador and Around American Notes (Dickens), 151
Newfoundland (Noble), 242n. 111 American Painting in the Nineteenth
Agassiz, Louis Century (Novak), xxv
and botany, 108 The Andes of Ecuador (Church), 67
and Church, 59–60 Annalen der Physik, 73–74
and evolution, 109, 240–41n. 65 Apgar, Austin C., 103
and Gray, 110, 249n. 113 Arber, Agnes, 93–94, 102
on Heade, 249n. 100 archetypal plants, 93–94
influence in the artistic community, “The Argument for Organic Evolution
112–15 before The Origin of Species”
and Naturphilosophie, 110–12 (Lovejoy), 46
and the Saturday Club, 56–58 The Art of Coloring in Landscape Painting
age of the earth, 47, 50, 53–59, 138 (Oram), 81
Aids to Reflection (Coleridge), 92 Aspects of Nature, in Different Lands and
Alcott, Amos Bronson, 93 Different Climates (Humboldt), 59
alienation of audience, 160 Association of American Geologists, 52
allegorical iconography, 228, 231 astronomy, 43

281
282 Index

atmosphere. See sky and clouds Botany, a Classbook of Botany for Colleges,
autumn, 97 Academies (Wood), 104
Avery, Samuel P., 182 Botany for Ladies (Loudon), 103
axes, 135–43 Bradford, William, 124, 219
Brett, John, 216–18, 217
Badt, Kurt, 73, 244n. 16 The British Channel Seen from the
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 152 Dorsetshire Cliffs (Brett), 218
Bank, Stanley, 168 Brooking, Charles, 202, 211
Banti, Cristiano, 210 Brooks, James, 11–12
Barbizon painters Brown, George Loring, 181, 184–85, 190
and Constable, 210, 211–12 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 180–81, 187
and Durand, 206, 208 Browning, Robert, 180–81, 187
and Inness, 151 Brueghel, Pieter, 161
and plein-airism, 231 Bryan, Thomas J., 200
Barthes, Roland, xiii–xiv Bryant, William Cullen
Batchelder, James, 12–13 and Church, 68
Baur, John I. H., 204 and Cole, 5, 161
Beautiful Ferns (Cropsey), 103 and deforestation, 136
Beckwith, E. G., 121–22 Durand tribute to, 158
Beckwith Report, See Pacific Railroad and Italy, 176
Reports and poetic basis for landscape painting,
Beecher, H. W., 104 51
Benn, A. W., 46 portrait of, 12
Bermingham, Peter, 98 Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, 45
Bierstadt, Albert, 20, 42, 134 Building of Carthage (Turner), 212
and Agassiz, 112
Burke, Edmund, 29
and botany, 107
Byron, George Gordon, 180
and clouds, 85–87
and figures, 162–63
Cambridge Scientific Club, 114
and “general effect,” 21
cameras, 153, 223. See also photography
and geology, 44
German influences, 218, 219, 222 The Campagna (Tilton), 174
and photography, 154 Campbell, A. H., 123
and plein-airisme, 204 Candolle, Augustin-Pyramus de, 108
popularity of, 21–22 Cañon of the Rio las Animas (Jackson), 155
scale of works, 15–16, 25 Cape Horn, Oregon (Watkins), 156
and sky studies, 84 Cappelle, Jan van de, 200
and solitude, 132 Carbutt, John, 156
and stillness and silence, 143 Cardamum (Church), 105
and the sublime, 37 Carlyle, Thomas, 226
travels and expeditions, 120, 123–26, 130, Carson, Kit, 131–32
152 Carus, Carl Gustav, 75, 80, 86, 227
The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake Casilear, John William, 181
(Eakins), 222 catastrophism, 46–47. See also geology
Blechen, Karl, 75 Catesby, Mark, 91
Bloomfield, Robert, 77 Catlin, George, 120–21
Bodmer, Karl, 121 Catskills, 139–40, 192
Boehme, Jakob, 229 Central Pacific Railroad, 153
Boston Athenaeum, 200–201 Cézanne, Paul, 205–7, 207, 208
botany. See plants and botany Chambers, Robert, 45, 46, 54, 109
 Index 283

Chapman, J. G., 181 and Constable, 257n. 30

The Chasm of the Colorado (Moran), 127 and English influences, 211
Chevreul, Michel Eugène, 204 and figures, 161, 185
Childhood (Cole), 97–98, 224 and “general effect,” 21
Christ Healing the Sick (West), 16 and historical affinities, 203
Christianity influence of, 230–31
and garden themes, 9 and Italy, 183
original sin, 6 landscape formula, 126
and reverence for nature, 3–14 and luminism, 201
science/religion conflict, xxi regard for, 196
and the sublime, 32–33, 37–38, 87 scale of works, 23, 27
and the taming of lands, 142 and the sublime, 30
Tocqueville on, xvii–xix Climate of London (Howard), 73
and water symbolism, 36 clouds. See sky and clouds
Christy, Arthur, 229–30 Cloud Study (Cropsey), 76
Church, Frederic Edwin, 31, 32, 62, 83, 226 Cole, Thomas, 9, 17, 35, 49, 82, 141
and Agassiz, 112 and axes, 135
and the Andes, 242n. 111 and botany, 104, 105, 248n. 79
and botany, 104, 105, 107, 248n. 79 and Claude Lorrain, 197, 198–99
and Claude Lorrain, 197 and clouds, 77, 81, 83–84, 85
and clouds, 79, 81–83, 86, 87 and Creation, 41
and contemplation of nature, 167 cyclical paintings, 97–99 (see also The
and figures, 162–63 Course of Empire series; The Voyage
and “general effect,” 21 of Life series)
and geology, 44 and destruction of nature, 4–5, 135, 138–
and Humboldt, 59 39, 140
influence of scientific thought, 59–70 Durand tribute to, 158
and Italy, 189–90 and figures, 158, 161, 163
Jarves on, 22–23 finances, 16, 17
library, 104, 244n. 33 and Friedrich, 231
and plein-airism, 204 and geology, 47–48, 51–52
popularity of, 19 and German influences, 223–25, 229
and rainbows, 259n. 46 and Goethe, 246n. 31
on the Sangay volcano, 30–33 and history painting, 224–25
scale of works, 15, 24, 25 and Italy, 176–77, 180, 181, 184, 186, 192
and solitude, 132 and light, 36–37
and stillness and silence, 143 and motion art, 17–18
and the sublime, 30–34, 36–37 and organic metaphors, 94–95
travels and expeditions, 120, 121, 124, and the pastoral ideal, 136
126, 242n. 111 portrait of, 12
and Turner, 214–15, 231 and railroads, 147
Cikovsky, Nicolai, Jr., 150, 151, 252n. 42 on the role of the artist, 8
“Circles” (Emerson), 7 and Salvator, 251n. 5
Civil War (American), 161, 188 and the sublime, 34–38, 128, 143
Clarkson, L., 103 travels and expeditions, 125–26
classification systems, 91 and Turner, 258n. 40
Claude Lorrain, 197 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 91–92, 226
Claudian conventions, 196–99 Collin, Nicholas, 136
and clouds, 85 Colman, Samuel, 124, 126, 152
and Cole, 251n. 5 “Complaint of the Forest” (Cole), 138
284 Index

Comstock, J. L., 51 and botany, 103, 105

Conduct of Life (Emerson), 240–41n. 65 and clouds, 72, 75–79, 81, 84, 86
conservation ethic, 136–37 and deforestation, 138
Constable, John, 72 and figures, 163
and clouds, 71–75, 77 library, 103
correspondence, 257n. 29, 257n. 30 and railroads, 147
and English influences, 210–11 and seasonal metaphors, 98
and plein-airism, 231 and Turner, 213
sky sketches, 243n. 7 Cropsey, Lilly, 103
and the sublime, 257n. 29 Croquet Match (Homer), 209
“Constable’s Sky Sketches” (Hawes), 243n. 7 The Cross and the World (Cole), 9, 97
Consummation (Cole), 198, 212 The Cross in the Mountains (Friedrich), 225
contemplation of nature, 165–68. See also cult of nature, 183
transcendentalism Cuyp, Albert, 200, 201, 201
Contributions to the Natural History of the
United States (Agassiz), 56 Dahl, Johann Christian, 75, 244n. 16
Cooke, Thomas, xix Dana, Richard Henry, Jr., 56
Cooper, James Fenimore, 128, 137 Danforth, J. N., 10
Copenhagen Academy, 221, 222–23 Darwin, Charles. See also Darwinism;
Copley, John Singleton, 207 evolution
Cosmopolitan Art Journal, 120 and art scholarship, xi
Cosmos (Humboldt), 58–59, 60, 104, 126 and botany, 102–3, 108–9
Cotopaxi (Church), 32, 44, 63, 67 and Emerson, 55–56
Courbet, Gustave, 204–5, 205, 208–9, 218, and geology, 45, 54, 239n. 36
231 and Gray, 110, 113, 114
The Course of Empire series (Cole), 9, 9–10, and Humboldt, 58–59, 61, 64
16–17, 97, 136, 140–42, 198, 212, 251n. impact on philosophy, 48
5 and Lyell, 49, 109
Coxe, Tenche, 145 and Paley, 47
Cranch, Christopher P., 181, 183–84, 186 Ruskin on, 243n. 121
Cranch, John, 181 travels and expeditions, 64–65
Crawford, Thomas, 181, 188 Darwinism
The Crayon and Agassiz, 240–41n. 65
and clouds, 71–72, 77 and Church, 249n. 113
and geology in landscape painting, 52– and Emerson, 240–41n. 65
53 and faith, xxi
and the influence of nature, 10, 238n. 30 and figures in paintings, 161
and Ruskin, 259–61n. 55 and Homer, 209
and Stillman, 57–58 and religion, 45, 249n. 113
Creation Ruskin on, 69
and Agassiz, 56, 67 varied beliefs on, x
and artist-explorers, 130–34 “Darwin’s Influence upon Philosophy”
and artists’ responsibility, 148 (Dewey), 48
and Church, 65 De Kooning, Willem, 28
and contemplation of nature, 167 Delacroix, Eugène, 210, 211
and faith, art, and science, 41 Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western
and geology, 44, 50 Railroad, 150
Crèvecoeur, Hector St. Jean de, 92 Delaware Water Gap (Inness), 147
Cropsey, Jasper F., 76, 106 Dentler, Clare Louise, 187
on the artist’s role, 5 Desolation (Cole), 97
 Index 285

Dewey, John, 48, 94 Early Americans in Rome (Wynne), 187

The Dial, 50 The Early Members of the Saturday Club
Dickens, Charles, 151 (Emerson), 57
Dickinson, Emily, 28, 143, 253n. 60 Early Morning at Cold Spring (Durand),
Distant View of the Sangay Volcano 163
(Church), 31 Eastman, Seth, 121
Döllinger, Johann Joseph Ignaz von, 110 Eaton, Daniel Cady, 103
Doughty, Thomas, 163 Eckersberg, Christoffer Wilhelm, 222
Downing, A. J., 137 Eckhart, Meister, 34, 36, 37, 229–30
Dresden circle, 75, 219–20. See also Ecuador, 30
Friedrich, Caspar David Eden, 8–9. See also garden symbolism
Driving of the Golden Spike at Promontory Egloffstein, F. W. von, 121–22
Point (Russell), 153 Eiseley, Loren, 45, 47, 48
Dupré, Jules, 208 Eliade, Mircea, 43
Dupree, A. Hunter, 110, 248n. 94 Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba
Durand, Asher B., 206 (Claude Lorrain), 198
and Claude Lorrain, 198–99 Emerson, Edward Waldo, 56–57
and clouds, 77, 211 Emerson, Lidian, 56
and Cole, 140 Emerson, Ralph Waldo
and communal facets of nature, 12 and Agassiz, 112, 113
and Courbet, 205 and American qualities, 195–96
and Creation, 41 and Church, 59–60, 69
and English influences, 208, 209 and clouds, 71
and figures, 158, 161, 163 and contemplation of nature, 165–67
and Italy, 181 and Darwin, 55–56
and light, 36–37 and empiricism, 100
and plein-airism, 231 and English influences, 215–16
on religious meaning in art, 8, 10 and the ephemeral, 83
and Silliman, 52 and evolution, 240–41n. 65
Stein on, 259–61n. 55 and fixity of species, 96
subject choices, 205–6 and geology, 53, 240n. 63
and the sublime, 33 and German influences, 226–30
and Turner, 213 on God and nature, 3, 262n. 86
Dürer, Albrecht, 105 and Goethe, 226–27, 246n. 24
Düsseldorf, Germany, 218–20 and Gray, 110
Dutch painting and individualism, 161
and American landscape painting, 230– and industrialization, 146
31 influences, 262–63n. 107
and clouds, 85 and Italy, 180, 181
critics of, 25, 200 library, 58–59, 246n. 24
and English landscape painting, 211 and Lyell, 50
and luminism, 25, 27, 203 “new order,” 230
in private collections, 200 organic metaphors, 92–93
Reynolds on, 25, 200 Plato quote, xxvi
and Rousseau, 206 and religious symbolism, 6–7, 225–26
Dyce, William, 218 and revelation, 33–34
and the Saturday Club, 56–57
The Eagle’s Nest (Ruskin), 80 and stillness and silence, 142
Eagleton, Terry, xix–xx and the sublime, 7, 34, 37
Eakins, Thomas, 147, 222 and water symbolism, 36
286 Index

empiricism, 100, 110, 209, 211, 231, 248n. 94 foreground. See plants and botany
England, 197, 210–18 Forster, Thomas, 243n. 6
English Traits (Emerson), 146 Foucault, Michel, xv
Entrance to Somes Sound, from the Fox, Richard Wightman, xx
Southwest Harbor, Mount Desert France, 204–10, 230
(Lane), 201, 202 Franconia Notch, 128
Epstein, Suzanne Latt, 221 Freeman, James, 181
Ernest Carroll (Greenough), 186 Frémont, John C., 121
Errand into the Wilderness (Miller), 4 Friedrich, Caspar David, 159, 220, 225
“Essay on American Scenery” (Cole), 4–5, and Cole, 223–26
33 and contemplation of nature, 168
“An Essay on Natural Philosophy and Its and the Dresden circle, 219
Relationship to the Development of and English influences, 218
the New World” (Collin), 136 and figures, 158, 162
“Essay on the Modification of Clouds” and German philosophy, 226–30
(Howard), 73 and Lane, 231
Europe, 16, 119, 124, 262n. 94. See also and linearity, 222–23
specific countries and nature and art, 11
evangelical revivalism, 13, 32 and primitivism, 220–21
evolution, 48, 54–56, 240–41n. 65 frontier mythology, 26–27
expeditions Fuller, Margaret, 181, 186, 188
artists included in, 79, 123–27
and heroic themes, 119–20 Gallaudet, Thomas, 239n. 27
and Native Americans, 120–21 Garden Fables or Flowers of Speech
and railroad surveys, 121–23, 152 (Medhurst), 103
and the sublime, 127–34
Gardening for Children (Johns), 103
Tocqueville, 125–27
garden symbolism, 4–5, 8–9, 136, 251n. 5
Explorations: A Sequel to the Vestiges of the
Gardner, Alexander, 124, 144, 153
Natural History of Creation
Geikie, Cunningham, 67–68
(Chambers), 54, 109
“general effect,” 21, 44, 65, 108
expressionism, 28, 230
The Expression of Emotion in Man and Genesis, 130
Animals (Darwin), 59 Genesis and Geology (Gillispie), 46
Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (Cole), geology
136, 139, 251n. 5 and art scholarship, ix
and botany, 107
fall of man, 5–6 and Church, 59–70
Fattori, Giovanni, 210 and Creation, 41–43, 43–44
Faun after Praxiteles, 175 and Darwinism, 45–46
Fiedler, Leslie, 99 Emerson on, 240n. 63
Figuier, Louis, 68 and expeditions, 130
figures, 157, 158–69, 185, 253n. 52 geologic time, 47, 50, 53–59, 129–30, 138
film, 22 and Lyell, 239n. 36
First Lessons in Botany and Vegetable and pre-Darwinian science, 48–53
Physiology (Gray), 103 and religion, 68
Fisher, Alvan, 81 variations in theory, 46–48
Fiske, John, 68 Geology (Comstock), 51
fixity of species, 48, 91, 95–96, 108–9 Geometry and Faith, a Fragmentary
Fletcher, James Cooley, 112, 249n. 100 Supplement to the Ninth Bridgewater
Focillon, Henri, xxi Treatise (Hills), 55
 Index 287

Gerard, John, 101 Greene, Harvey B., 103

Germany, 197, 218–30 Green Field and Their Grasses (Pratt), 103
Gesamtorganismus (Crèvecoeur), 92 Greenough, Henry, 186
Gibson, John, 181 Greenough, Horatio, 181
Gifford, Sanford Robinson, 217 Guasconti, Giovanni, 99–100
and deforestation, 142 Guercino, 177
and English influences, 216–18 Guido, 177–78
and Italy, 189 Gunn, Giles, xii–xiii
and photography, 154 Gunnison, J. W., 121
and quietism, 36 Gunnison Pacific Railroad Survey, 121
travels and expeditions, 124, 131, 152
and Turner, 213 Haarlem Sea (van Goyen), 202
Gillispie, Charles Coulston, 45–48 Hamerton, Phillip, 261n. 61
Gilmor, Robert, Jr., 52, 200 Hamilton, James, 215
Gilpin, William, 30, 197 Handbook of Rome and Its Environs
Giorgione da Castelfranco, 161 (Murray), 178
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Harlan, Richard, 43
and Agassiz, 110 Harris, Amanda B., 103
and botany, 93, 102, 104, 108–9 Hart, James MacDougal, 218
and clouds, 73–75, 77, 79–80, 87 Haseltine, J. H., 181–82
and Cole, 246n. 31 Haseltine, William Stanley, 180–82, 189,
and Emerson, 226–27, 246n. 24 218–19
and English influences, 211 Hasenmueller, Christine, xxiii–xxiv, 234–
and fixity of species, 95–96 35n. 16
and German sciences, 66 Havell, Robert, Jr., 154
Hawes, Louis, 73, 243n. 7
and morphology, 96
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
and Turner, 258n. 34
and botany, 99
Gombrich, Ernst H., 177, 204
and contemplation of nature, 167
Gothick sublime, 30, 38, 78, 85
fictional writings, 253n. 60
The Gour de Conches (Courbet), 205
and Italy, 175, 178, 180, 184–85, 186, 191–
Goyen, Jan van, 25, 200, 202 93
The Grand Canyon of the Colorado and organic metaphors, 91
(Möllhausen), 122 and the Saturday Club, 56
Grand Style, 18, 23, 25, 60, 63 and technology, 146–47
Granite Cañon from the Water Tank Hayden, Ferdinand V., 123
(Russell), 156 Haying (Durand), 163
Graves, Morris, 147 Haying near New Haven (Church), 163
Gray, A. B., 123 Heade, Martin Johnson, 106
Gray, Asa and Agassiz, 112
and Agassiz, 113, 249n. 113 and botany, 105, 107
and botany, 101–2, 108–9, 109–10 and clouds, 85–87
and Darwin, 56, 108–9, 114 and Dutch influences, 201
on science and art, 100 and figures, 163, 164
and taxonomic systems, 91 and German influences, 219
and Thoreau, 248n. 94 and Italy, 190
Gray’s Lessons in Botany (Gray), 104 and quietism, 36
Gray’s School and Field Book of Botany for and religious influences, 99
Beginners and Young People (Gray), and scale of works, 25
104 travels and expeditions, 124, 249n. 100
288 Index

Heart of the Andes (Church), 20 and railroads, 149–51, 152

and botany, 107 and scale of paintings, 25
details of, 66–67 and seasons, 98
figures in, 162 and stillness and silence, 143
and operatic style, 32–33 and the sublime, 30
popularity of, 19 Humboldt, Alexander von
and religious themes, 64–65 and the Andes, 66–67
scale of, 24, 63 and Church, 60–64, 69, 104
Tuckerman on, 21 and Darwin, 64
Heath, Frank, 187 and Emerson, 58–59
Henry, Joseph, 78 and scientific observation, 107
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 92 and the sublime, 126
heroic themes, 119–20, 132, 133 travels and expeditions, 120, 121
Hill, John Henry, 213 Hunt, Robert, 104
Hillard, George Stillman, 178 Hunt, William Holman, 103, 213–14
Hills, Thomas, 55 Huntington, David C., 69, 212
Hinduism, 230 Huth, Hans, 137
“The History of Art as a Humanistic Hutton, James, 46
Discipline” (Panofsky), xxiv Huxley, T. H., 47, 54, 56
A History of British Forest-Trees (Selby), Hyatt, Alpheus, 112
103
history painting, 16–19, 21, 196, 224 icebergs, 242n. 111
Hitchcock, Edward, 45, 48, 55, 98 iconography, xv, 228, 233–34n. 13, 234–35n.
Hoar, Elizabeth, 54 16
Hobbema, Meindert, 200 iconology, xiv–xv, xxv, 234–35n. 16
Hoffman, Charles Fenno, 124
idealism
Holland, 202
and botany, 104–5, 110, 113, 114
Holly, Michael, xv
and Claudian convention, 197–98
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 57
and Constable, 211–12
A Home in the Wilderness (Gifford), 142,
German idealism, 230
216–18, 217
Homer, Winslow, 204, 209, 209–10 and luminism, 231
Honeymoon (Fishing on the Seine River) and realism, 69, 259–61n. 55
(Zandomeneghi), 210 and the sublime, 30
Hooker, Joseph, 109 The Ideas of God As Affected by Modern
Hopper, Edward, 73 Knowledge (Fiske), 68
Hosmer, Harriet, 179, 181, 182, 183 imperialism, xvii–xviii
Hotchkiss, Thomas, 181, 182, 213 impressionism, 67, 204, 207, 211–12, 257n.
Hours with the Bible of The Scriptures in 20
the Light of Modern Discovery and Indian Summer: Autumn Poems and
Knowledge (Geikie), 67–68 Sketches (Clarkson), 103
Howard, Luke, 73–75, 74, 84, 211, 243n. 7 industrialization, 144, 146–47
Hudson River school infinity, 80
and the Barbizon school, 231 “The Influence of the Fine Arts on the
and botany, 107 Moral Sensibilities” (Danforth), 10
and Claude Lorrain, 197, 200 influence vs. affinity, 206, 208–9, 211, 218–
and Courbet, 205 20, 222, 230–31
and Darwinism, 249n. 113 Inman, Henry, 89, 90
and figures, 162–63, 163 In Nature’s Wonderland (Doughty), 163
and geology, 50–51 Inness, George, 147, 149, 252n. 42
 Index 289

innocence, 128 and plein-airism, 204

Inspiration Point, 130 and the Pre-Raphaelites, 216
The International Cloud Atlas, 84 and quietism, 36
Introduction to Morphology (Goethe), 96 and scale of paintings, 25
Inverary Pier. Loch Fyne. Morning Stein on, 259–61n. 55
(Turner), 212 and the sublime, 34–35
Irving, Washington, 127, 129, 179, 182, 183 travels and expeditions, 123, 124
The Italian (Radcliffe), 29–30 Kern, Benjamin, 121
Italy, 173–93, 199 Kern, Edward, 121
Kern, Richard, 121
Jackson, William Henry, 124, 153–55, 155, Kindred Spirits (Durand), 12, 158
164–65, 165 King, Clarence, 123, 129–30
James, Henry Kirby, Billy, 137–38
on American qualities, 195 The Knickerbocker (Brooks), 11–12
fictional writing, 253n. 60 Knight, Richard Payne, 196
Italian residence, 181 Købke, Christen, 221
and Italy, 173, 175, 179, 182, 185, 187–90
on the Pre-Raphaelites, 215 Lackawanna Valley (Inness), 149, 150–51
James, Henry (father), 5–6 Lake George (Kensett), 25
Jameson, Anna Brownell, 180, 181 Lake Poets, 51
Jarves, James Jackson Lake Superior: Its Physical Character,
and Church, 214–15 Vegetation and Animals, Compared
and Creation, 41–42 with Those of Other and Similar
and Dutch art, 200 Regions (Agassiz), 58
and “general principle,” 65 Lambert, George, 211
and geology, 44 Landers, Frederick, 123
and Italy, 177 Landers Peak (Bierstadt), 162
and luminism, 24–26 Landscape, American Scenery: Time,
and scale of paintings, 19, 22–23 Afternoon, with a Southwest Haze
and science, 238n. 11 (Allston), 73
Jefferson, Thomas, 43, 78 Landscape at Sunrise (Friedrich), 158, 159
John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in Landscape Sketch, Hudson Valley (Church),
America (Stein), 259–61n. 55 83
Johns, C. A., 103 Landscape with Mill (Claude Lorrain), 197
The Journal of Researches into the Natural Landscape with Tree Trunks (Cole), 139
History and Geology of the Countries Lane, Fitz H., 26, 159, 202, 219
Visited during the Voyage of H.M.S. and clouds, 85, 87
Beagle round the World (Darwin), 59 and Dutch influences, 200–201, 202
Journey in Brazil (Agassiz), 58 and figures, 158, 163
Jussieu, Antoine Laurent de, 91 and Friedrich, 231
and German influences, 219, 222, 223–
Kant, Immanuel, 30, 110 24, 228
Kauffman, Theodor, 152 and quietism, 36
Kearney, Steven Watts, 121 and scale of works, 25
Keats, John, 180, 184 and solitude, 132
Kellogg, Miner, 181 Lawrence, D. H., 15, 16, 23
Kensett, John Frederick Leaf Study (Cropsey), 106
and Dutch influences, 201 Lears, T. J. Jackson, xx
and English influences, 208 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 132
and Italy, 180 Lega, Silvestro, 210
290 Index

Le Nain brothers, 161 and scale of paintings, 23–28

Leonardo da Vinci, 105 and solitude, 132
Leslie, C. R., 72, 77, 121 and stillness and silence, 143
Lessing, Carl, 219 and the sublime, 37
Letters and Social Aims (Emerson), 240– and water, 36
41n. 65 Lurie, Edward, 108
“Letters on Landscape Painting” (Durand), Lyell, Charles
8, 77 and American artists, 49–50
Lewis, Henry, 18, 22 and Darwin, 45, 49, 54, 64, 109, 239n. 36
Lewis, R. W. B., 4, 6, 132, 133 and geological time, 138
Liber Studiorum (Turner), 212–13, 215,
258n. 40 Maddox, Kenneth, 148, 151
The Life of a Tree, Being a History of the “Madonna of the Future” (James), 176
Phenomenon of Vegetation from the Magnolia Flower (Heade), 106
Seed to the Death of the Plant Malloy’s Cut Near Sherman (Russell), 157,
(Gardiner), 103 157
The Life of the Mind (Miller), 239n. 27 Mammoth Panorama of the Mississippi
light, 36–37, 67, 69, 198, 211, 231 River (Lewis), 18
Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) Manhood (Cole), 224
(Turner), 211 Manual of Botany of the Northern United
Light cirro-cumulus beneath cirrus States (Gray), 104
(Howard), 74 Martelli, Diego, 257n. 25
Linnaeus, Carolus (Carl von Linné), 91, 93, Marx, Leo, 4, 143, 145, 147, 151
101 Mason, Frederick, 188
The Literary World, 5, 51, 138 Massa Bay of Naples (Brett), 216, 217
Locke, John, 3
Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, 121
London Art Journal, 215
Mayall, J. J. E., 259n. 46
London National Gallery, 198–99
Mazzini, Giuseppe, 188
Long expedition, 120
McEntee, Jervis, 189
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 56, 57, 175,
Medhurst, Mrs., 103
180
Longinus, 30 meditation on nature, 165–67
Lovejoy, Arthur O., 45–46, 48 Melville, Herman, 99, 167–68, 180, 181,
Lowell, James Russell, 56, 186–87, 190–91 253n. 60
Lowell Institute, 109 The Metamorphosis of Plants (Goethe), 93,
Ludlow, Fitz Hugh, 112, 130, 152, 162 96
luminism Methods of Study in Natural History
and Claude Lorrain, 200 (Agassiz), 58
and clouds, 85 millenarianism, 4, 6
and Darwinism, 249n. 113 Miller, Alfred Jacob, 121
and deforestation, 140 Miller, David, 233–34n. 13
and Dutch influences, 201 Miller, Perry, 4, 43, 145–46, 239n. 27
and English influences, 218 Milton, John, 137
and European landscape, 262n. 94 Mist (Nebel) (Friedrich), 220
and figures, 157, 161, 162–64, 164–65 Mitchell, Marie, 182
and Friedrich, 231 Mitchell, W. J. T., xvii–xviii
and German influences, 228, 229, 231 Moby Dick (Melville), 167–68
and meditation on nature, 166–67 Modern Painters (Ruskin), 77, 79, 80–81,
and prose-poetry, 203 212, 259–61n. 55
and quietism, 227 Möllhausen, Heinrich B., 122, 122–23, 129
 Index 291

Monamy, Peter, 202 Nye, Russel, 43

Monet, Claude, 209 “Nymphaea” (Sprague), 111
Monk, Samuel H., 29
Moran, Thomas, 127 O’Doherty, Brian, 253n. 52
and Claudian formula, 126 Oken, Lorenz, 110
and photography, 154 Old Age (Cole), 224
and scale of works, 15 Omotepe Volcano, Nicaragua (Heade), 87
and solitude, 132 On the Plains, Colorado (Whittredge), 131
travels and expeditions, 124 Opening of the Wilderness (Rossiter), 154
and Turner, 215 operatic style, 26–27, 32
Morants Court in May (Brett), 218 Oram, William, 81
Morse, Samuel Finley Breese, 52, 180, 181 organicism, 45, 89–94, 94–95
Mount, William Sidney, 11, 204, 238n. 30 original sin, 6
Mount Aetna, 49 The Origin of Species (Darwin), xi, 45, 48,
Mount Hayes (Gifford), 216–18, 217 52–53, 64
Mount Tyndall, 129–30 Osborn, William, 66, 189
Mount Whitney (Bierstadt), 86 O’Sullivan, Timothy, 124
Mumble the Peg (Inman), 89, 90 “Outpourings from the Heart of an Art-
Munich, Germany, 190 Loving Friar” (Wackenroder), 11
Murray, John, 178 Owl’s Head, Penobscot Bay (Lane), 158, 159,
Muybridge, Eadward, 124, 153–54 164, 201
mysticism, 229–30 The Oxbow (Cole), 84, 139

Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Pacific Railroad, 169

Regions of America (Humboldt), 59 Pacific Railroad Reports, 79, 121, 123, 152
Nash, Roderick, 138 Paff, Michael, 200
National Geographic, 18 Page, William, 181
nationalism, 3–4, 6–7, 12–13, 33, 146, 192 Pah-Utah Indians, 121
Native Americans, 120–21, 142, 162 Paley, William, 47, 55, 109, 239n. 27
natural church, 129–30 Panofsky, Erwin, xiv, xv–xvi, xxiii–xxiv,
naturalism, 8, 30 xxv, 233–34n. 13, 234–35n. 16
natural selection, 68. See also Darwinism; “Panofsky, Iconography, and Semiotics”
evolution (Hasenmueller), 234–35n. 16
Natural Selection and Tropical Nature Panorama of the Lower Mississippi (Lewis),
(Wallace), 68 22
Natural Theology (Paley), 47, 239n. 27 panoramic style, 18–19, 25, 63, 236n. 5
Nature, 3, 6, 91, 227 Paradise, 4–6, 136, 193
Naturphilosophie, 110, 227 Paradise (Milton), 137
Neal, John, 203 Paris, France, 147, 190
Neer, Aert van der, 200 Paris International Exposition, 147
Neptunists, 46 Parkman, Francis, 127–28
New England Scenery (Church), 163 pastoralism, 136, 149, 252n. 42
New York Mirror, 192 Pastoral State (Cole), 136
The New York Review, 3 Peale, Charles Willson, 52
New York Tribune, 188 Peale, Titian Ramsay, 120
Niagara Falls, 49, 133, 259n. 46 Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, 112
Nine Letters on Landscape Paintings Pegwell Bay, Kent—a Recollection of
(Carus), 75 October 5, 1858 (Dyce), 218
Noble, Louis L., 65, 66, 112, 124, 177, 242n. 111 Peirce, Benjamin, 56
North American Review, 109 Personal Narrative (Humboldt), 64
292 Index

Philosopher’s Camp in the Adirondacks quietism, 36, 227

(Stillman), 58
Philosophia Botanica (Linnaeus), 101 Radcliffe, Ann, 29–30
Philosophical Journal (Tilloch), 73 railroads, 109, 143–57, 153. See also Pacific
Philosophy of Landscape Painting (Bryant), Railroad Reports
68 Railway Attacked by Indians (Kauffman),
photography, 153–57, 164 152
Pierre (Melville), 168 rainbows, 259n. 46
Pines and Rocks (Cézanne), 207 Rainy Season in the Tropics (Church), 162
The Pioneers (Cooper), 137 Ransom, Caroline, xix
plains, 133 “Rappacini’s Daughter” (Guasconti), 99–
plants and botany 100
artists’ familiarity with, 103–8 reading artwork, xxii, xxvi
and Goethe, 94–103 realism, 69, 200, 257n. 20, 259–61n. 55
and Gray, 108–9, 109–15 Reed, Luman, 140
and organicism, 89–94 “The Relation of the Real and the Ideal”
Plato, 246n. 31 (Schelling), 56–57
Platonism, 47, 54, 69, 94, 168 religion. See also Christianity
The Pleasure of the Text (Barthes), xiii–xiv and botany, 108
plein-airism, 204, 208–12, 231 and contemplation of nature, 165–66,
Plutonists, 46 167
Poe, Edgar Allan, 99, 167, 253n. 60 and evolution, 91, 113, 114, 249n. 113
poetry, 138–39, 203 and geology, 46–48, 67–68, 129–30
The Poetry of Science (Hunt), 104 Hinduism, 230
The Polar Sea (Friedrich), 219 and nature, 3–14, 129–30
politics and political science, xviii, 186–87, and the sciences, xxi
189 and settlement, xvii–xix
pop art, 148 and the sublime, 129
Pope, John, 124 symbolism, 225–26, 230
postmodernism, xix The Religion of Geology and Its Connected
Potter, Paulus, 200 Sciences (Hitchcock), 55
Poussin, Nicholas, 85, 161 Religious Lectures on the Peculiar Phenomena
Powell, John Wesley, 123 of the Four Seasons (Hitchcock), 98
Powers, Hiram, 181, 192 Researches About Atmospheric Phenomena
Pratt, Anne, 103 (Forster), 73
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 215–16, 216– Revelation, 6, 7, 33–34, 132
18, 259–61n. 55 Reynolds, Joshua
Pressed Flowers from the Holy Land and Dutch painters, 25, 200
(Greene), 103 and history painting, 21, 196
primal and primary meaning, 233–34n. 13 and the ideal, 105
primitivism, 27, 131–32, 199, 220–21 and Italy, 183
Principles of Geology (Lyell), 49, 50, 64, and Platonism, 223
239n. 36 Richards, William Trost, 112
The Principles of Moral and Political Riddle, David, 13
Philosophy (Paley), 55 Rinehart, William H., 181
prints, 148 River in the Catskills (Cole), 140, 141, 147
Prospect of Mt. Etna (Cole), 49 River Landscape with Boats (Cuyp), 201
Protestantism, 4, 33, 203 Rocks in New England (Heade), 201
provincialism, 195, 199 The Rocky Mountains (Bierstadt), 19, 20,
Puritans, 99 21–22
 Index 293

Rogers, Randolph, 181 Schooners Before Approaching Storm

Romanticism, 160, 253n. 52 (Lane), 85
Romantic Landscape with a Temple Schott, Arthur, 123
(Doughty), 163 Schubert, G. H. von, 224
Rome, Italy, 179–80, 184 science. See also evolution; geology
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 213–14 and art scholarship, ix
Rossetti, William Michael, 218 and evolution, 48, 54–56, 240–41n. 65
Rossiter, Thomas Pritchard, 154, 181 and exploration, 261n. 61
Rothko, Mark, 28, 253n. 52 and geology, 43–45
Rougemont, Denis de, 174, 175, 193 Jarves on, 238n. 11
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 3, 8 and nature, 41
Rousseau, Théodore, 206 pre-Darwinian, 48–53
Rusk, Ralph L., 240–41n. 65 and religion, xxi, 7, 46–48, 67–68, 91,
Ruskin, John 100–101, 113–14, 129–30, 249n. 113
and botany, 104–5 Ruskin on scientific truth, 80–81
and Brett, 218 scientism, 67, 84, 211
and Church, 69 and the study of nature, 14
and clouds, 76–77, 79–80, 84, 85–86 and Thoreau, 100–103
and Darwin, 243n. 121 travels and expeditions, 130
and Divine presence, 80–81 Scott, Samuel, 211
and Italy, 181 Seashore with Fisherman (Friedrich), 158
Modern Painters criticized, 259–61n. 55 seasons, 97
and science and art, 101 Section of Nyholm (Eckersberg), 222
and Turner, 213, 258n. 43 Selby, Prideaux John, 103
and Whistler, 212 semiotics, 234–35n. 16
Severn, Joseph, 180
Ruskin and the Landscape Feeling
Seymour, Samuel, 120
(Townsend), 259–61n. 55
Shade and Darkness (Turner), 211
Russell, Andrew J., 153, 156, 157, 157, 164
Shakespeare, William, 78
Ruysdael, Jacob van, 200
“The Shape of Clouds According to
Ruysdael, Salomon van, 200
Howard” (Goethe), 73–74
Ryder, Albert Pinkham, 215 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 77
Shrewsbury River, New Jersey (Kensett), 201
Salmon, Robert, 202 “Sicilian Scenery and Antiquities” (Cole),
Salvator, Rosa, 30, 85, 197, 251n. 5 51
Sangay volcano, 30–32, 31, 83 silence themes, 127, 128–29, 143. See also
Saturday Club, 56, 57 quietism
scale/size of paintings Silliman, Benjamin, 49–50, 51–52
and Bierstadt, 15–16, 25 Simpson, James H., 121
and figures, 156–57, 161, 163 size of paintings. See scale/size of paintings
Jarves on, 19, 22–23 sketches, 84, 152
and luminism, 23–28 Sketch of Cotopaxi (Church), 32
and majesty, 29 Skull Rock (Russell), 164
and panoramas, 236n. 5 sky and clouds, 72, 74, 82, 83
and stillness and silence, 143 and Constable, 71–75
Scandinavia, 197, 218–30 and Cropsey and Ruskin, 75–80
Scene in the Blue Mountains (Church), 226 and Dahl, 244n. 16
Schapiro, Meyer, 234–35n. 16 and Forster, 243n. 6
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm, 3, 56–57, 110, and Howard’s classifications, 73–75, 84,
227–28 243n. 6, 243n. 7
294 Index

sky and clouds (continued) and silence/solitude, 129, 143

science of, 80–84 and technology, 145, 154
types of clouds, 84–87 and Turner, 214
Smith, Henry Nash, 4 Sumner, Charles, 175
Smith, Russell, 49 Sunlight and Shadow: The Newbury
solitude themes, 127, 129, 132. See also Marshes (Heade), 86
quietism Sunrise Through Mist: Pigeon Cove,
“Sonnet XXV” (Tuckerman), 191 Gloucester (Lane), 202
sound, 128–29 Sunset on Long Beach (Heade), 86–87
The Source of the Loue (Courbet), 205 Sweden, 221
South America, 121, 124 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 54
The Southern Literary Messenger, 10 “synthetic intuition,” xxiii–xxiv
species, 48, 91–96, 108–9, 113
The Spectator, 13 taxonomic systems, 91
Sprague, Isaac, 103, 104, 109–10, 111 Taylor, Bayard, 64
Staley, Allen, 218 technology, 145, 146–47, 148, 154. See also
Stanley, John Mix, 121 railroads
Starrucca Viaduct (Cropsey), 147 teleology, 68–69
Stebbins, Theodore, 99 Thantopsis (Durand), 198–99
Stein, Roger B., 212, 216, 259–61n. 55 Theophrastus, 101
Stevens, Isaac I., 121 Theory of Colours (Goethe), 211
Stewart, William Drummond, 121 Thompson, Launt, 189
Stillman, William James, 57, 58, 113, 114, Thoreau, Henry David
259–61n. 55 and Agassiz, 113
stillness, 35–36, 128, 142–43, 147. See also and axes, 135
quietism
and botany, 100–104
A Storm in the Rocky Mountains
on clouds, 71
(Bierstadt), 42, 85, 107
on contemplation of nature, 166
Storm over Narragansett Bay (Heade), 85
distrust of science, 102
Story, William Wetmore, 173, 179–81, 186,
and empiricism, 248n. 94
188, 190
Stranded Boat (Heade), 164 and fixity of species, 96
Study for Brace’s Rock, Eastern Point, and Goethe, 93
Gloucester (Lane), 219 and Gray, 110
Study from Nature: Rocks and Trees in the and organic metaphors, 91–92
Catskills (Durand), 206 on science and art, 100–101
Study of Clouds (Constable), 72 and seasons, 99
stump symbolism, 139–40, 142–43, 252n. 42 and silence, 128
style, 233–34n. 13, 234–35n. 16 and stillness and solitude, 15, 132, 142–43
The Sublime (Monk), 29 and technology, 146–47
sublimity travels and expeditions, 134
and the American west, 127 and water symbolism, 36
changing concepts of, 29–38 weather measurements, 156
and Claude Lorrain, 197 “Thoughts and Occurrences” (Cole), 246n.
Emerson on, 7 31
and figures in paintings, 162 Tidball, J. B., 123
Gothick sublime, 30, 38, 78, 85 Tieck, Ludwig, 224
and Italy, 177 Tilton, John Rollin, 174, 181, 190
“natural sublime,” 237n. 2 time, 44, 97, 129–30, 138, 224
“old sublime,” 143 Times of Year (Friedrich), 224
 Index 295

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 13, 125–27, 137–38, and Italy, 183

142 and Moran, 126
“To the Honored Memory of Howard” and Niagara Falls, 259n. 46
(Goethe), 73–74 Ruskin on, 258n. 43
Townsend, Francis, 259–61n. 55 and scale of paintings, 23, 27
trains. See railroads and the sublime, 126
transcendentalism and Whistler, 258n. 35
and botany, 110 Tuveson, Ernest, 237n. 2
and contemplation of nature, 165–68 Twenty Lessons on British Mosses or First
and figures in paintings, 162 Steps to A Knowledge of that
and fixity of species, 96 Beautiful Tribe of Plants (Gardiner),
and German influences, 226–27, 229, 103
230 Twilight in the Wilderness (Church), 86
and industrialization, 146, 147 Twilight on Hunter Mountain (Gifford),
and luminism, 23–24 142
and quietism, 227 Two Artists in a Landscape (Havell), 154
and solitude, 132 Two Men Contemplating the Moon
vs. Gray’s empiricism, 248n. 94 (Friedrich), 158, 160
travels. See expeditions
The Travels and Researches of Alexander uniformitarianism, 46–47. See also geology
von Humboldt (Humboldt), 59 Union Pacific Railroad, 153
Trees of Northern United States (Apgar), The United States as a Missionary Field
103 (Batchelder), 12–13
Tree with Vines, Jamaica, West Indies Untitled, atmospheric study with notations
(Church), 62 (Cole), 82
Trumbull, John, 52
“Up Among the Clouds” (Cropsey), 72, 75–
“Truth of Skies” (Ruskin), 79
76
Tuckerman, Frederick, 191
Urpflanze, 93, 95–96
Tuckerman, H. T.
and Bierstadt, 19, 21–22
Val d’Aosta (Brett), 218
and “fresh themes,” 133–34
and “general effect,” 65–66 Vedder, Elihu, 185
and geology, 44 Velde, Adriaen van de, 25, 200–201
and Kensett, 216 Velde, Willem van de, the Younger, 202
and large landscapes, 23 Venice, Italy, 190
and Niagara Falls, 259n. 46 The Vestiges of the Natural History of
and plants in painting, 89–90 Creation (Chambers), 46, 54–56
and religious meaning in art, 10 View from Cozzen’s Hotel Near West Point
and the sublime, 32, 33, 34–35 (Kensett), 25
travels and expeditions, 119–20 A View from Dosseringen near the Sortedam
Turner, Frederick Jackson, 26–27 Lake Looking Towards Nørrebro
Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 212 (Købke), 221
and Allston, 258n. 40 View from the Trekroner (Eckersberg), 222
and Church, 231 View Near Fork Harker, Kansas (Gardner),
and clouds, 77, 80, 86 144
and Cole, 198 View of the Catskills (Cole), 140, 141
and “general effect,” 21 View of the Sweetwater (Jackson), 164–65,
and Goethe, 258n. 34 165
and influence on American artists, Virgin Land (Smith), 4
211–15 Vogel, Stanley M., 96, 226
296 Index

The Voyage of Life series (Cole), 17, 17, 97, Whittredge, Worthington, 131
224. See also specific works of the series and American qualities, 196, 231
Vulcanists, 46 and German influences, 218, 219
on influence and affinity, 203
Wackenroder, Wilhelm, 11 and Italy, 193
Wadsworth, Daniel, 52 and the plains, 133
Waggoner, Hyatt H., 253n. 60 travels and expeditions, 124, 125, 128,
Walden Pond, 36 131, 152
Walden (Thoreau), 132 wilderness symbolism, 9, 136
Wallace, Alfred Russell, 68 Wild Flowers (Harris), 103
Ward, Samuel Gray, 54, 56 William Wetmore Story and His Friends
Washington, George, 78 (James), 173
water, 35–36 Wood, Alphonse, 104
Watkins, C. E., 124, 153–54, 156 Wood’s Class Book of Botany (Eaton), 103
weather observations, 78, 245n. 39. See also Wordsworth, William, 3, 77, 211, 259–61n.
clouds 55
Weir, John Ferguson, 189 World Before the Deluge (Figuier), 68
Weir, R. W., 121 Worringer, Wilhelm, 37, 160, 229, 230
Wells, William, 45 Wright, Joseph, 85
Werner, Abraham, 46–47 Wyman, Jeffries, 58
West, Benjamin, 16 Wynne, George, 187
Westward the Monarch (Carbutt), 156
Wheeler, George M., 123 Yellowstone River, 133
Whicher, Stephen E., 50, 54–55, 230, 262– Yosemite Valley, 130, 133, 134
63n. 107 Yosemite Valley, Glacier Point Trail
Whipple, Lieutenant, 123 (Bierstadt), 134
Whistler, James Abbott McNeil, 190, 212, Young, J. J., 123
258n. 35 Youth’s Book of Natural Theology
White, Hayden, xiii (Gallaudet), 239n. 27
White, John, 91
Whitman, Walt, 15, 28, 132–33, 167, 168–69 Zandomeneghi, Federico, 210, 210, 257n. 25