Art History Today

Slides used in Romanticism Steps Westwards lecture.

1) Frederic Edwin Church, Twilight in the Wilderness, 1860, oil on canvas, 101.6 x 162.6 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art.

2) Asher Brown Durand, God’s Judgement on Gog, 1851-2, oil on canvas, 154.3 x 128.3 cm, Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia.

3) John Martin, Belshazzar’s Feast, 1821, oil on canvas, 95.3 x 120.6 cm, Yale Centre for British Art.

4) Washington Allston, sketch for Belshazzar’s Feast, 1817, oil on millboard, Detroit Institute of Arts.

5) Washington Allston, Portrait of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1814, oil on canvas, NPG, London.

6) Emanuel Leutze, Washington crossing the Delaware River, 1851, oil on canvas, 378.5 x 647.7 cm, Metropolitan Museum, New York.

7) Gutzon Borglum and family, Mount Rushmore, 1732-1865, Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, & Lincoln, Keystone, South Dakota.

8) John Vanderlyn, Ariadne Asleep on Naxos, 1809-14, oil on canvas, 174 x 221 cm, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia.

9) Asher Brand Durand, Kindred Spirits, 1849, oil on canvas, 116.8 x 91.4 cm, New York Public Library.

10) John Frederick Kensett, Lake George, Adirondack Mountains, 1869, oil on canvas, 112.1 x 168.6 cm, Metropolitan Museum, New York.

11) Frederick Edwin Church, Coast Scene, Mount Desert, 1862, oil on canvas, 86.7 x 121.9 cm, Wadsworth Athenaeum, Connecticut.

12) Frederic Edwin Church, Niagara Falls, 1857, oil on canvas, 107.95 x 228.27 cm, Corcoran Gallery, Washington.

13) Frederic Edwin Church, Niagara Falls from the American Side, 1867, oil on canvas, 257.5 x 227.3 cm, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.

14) Thomas Moran, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1893-1901, oil on canvas, 245.1 x 427.8 cm, Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC.

15) Thomas Moran, Sunset at Sea, 1906, oil on canvas, 76.7 x 102.1 cm, Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York.

16) Photograph of Thomas Cole.

17) Thomas Cole, Falls of Kaaterskill, 1826, oil on canvas, Warner Collection of Gulf States Paper Corporation, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

18) Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoake, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow), 1836, oil on canvas, 130.8 x 193 cm, Metropolitan Museum, New York.

19) George Caleb Bingham, Fur Traders Crossing the Missouri, 1845, 73.7 x 92.7 cm, Metropolitan Museum, New York, Morris K. Jessop Fund.

20) Thomas Cole, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, c. 1836, second in The Course of Empire series, oil on canvas, 99.7 x 160.6 cm, New York Historical Society.

21) Thomas Cole, The Consummation of Empire, 1836, third in The Course of Empire series, oil on canvas, 130.2 x 193 cm, New York Historical Society.

22) Thomas Cole, Desolation, fifth in The Course of Empire, 1836, oil on canvas, 99.7 x 161.3 cm, New York Historical Society.

23) Carleton Watkins, The Grizzly Giant with Galen Clark, albumen print, 1861.

24) Albert Bierstadt, Giant Redwood Trees of California, 1874, oil on canvas, 190.2 x 133.5 cm, Berkshires Museum.

25) Albert Bierstadt, The Great Trees, Mariposa Grove, 1876, oil on canvas, 150.5 x 300.1 cm, Private Collection.

26) Washington Whitteredge, The Old Hunting Ground, c. 1864, oil on canvas, Private Collection.

27) Albert Bierstadt, Looking Down Yosemite Valley, 1865, oil on canvas, 163.8 x 245.1 cm, Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama.

28) Albert Bierstadt, Storm in the Rocky Mountains-Mt Rosalie, 1866, oil on canvas, 210.8 x 361. 3 cm, Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York.

29) Thomas Cole, Daniel Boone and his Cabin on the Great Osage Lake, c. 1826, oil on canvas, 96.5 x 123.2 cm, Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Amherst, Mass.

30) George Caleb Bingham, Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap, 1851-52, oil on canvas, 92.7 x 127.6 cm, Washington University Gallery of Art, St Louis, Missouri.

31) Enrico Causici, Daniel Boone Struggling with the Indian, 1826-7, sandstone relief in the rotunda of the United States Capitol, Washington DC.

32) Emanuel Leutze, Westward The Course of Empire Takes Its Way, (Westward Ho!), 1861, fresco, mural in the United States Capitol Building.

33) Albert Bierstadt, Emigrants Crossing the Plains, 1867, oil on canvas, 170.2 x 259.1 cm, National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Centre, Oklahoma City.

34) Tompkins Harrison Matteson, The Last of the Race, 1847, oil on canvas, 101 x 127 cm, New York Historical Society, New York.

35) Charles Bird King, Young Omahaw, War Eagle, Little Missouri, and Pawnees, 1821, oil on canvas, 71.1 x 91.8 cm, Smithsonian Institution, Washington.

36) William Fisk, Portrait of George Caitlin, 1849, oil on canvas, Smithsonian, Washington D.C.

37) George Caitlin, Caitlin Painting the Portrait of Mah-to-toh-pa-Mandan, 1857-69, oil on cardboard, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

38) Albert Bierstadt, The Last of the Buffalo, c. 1889, oil on canvas, 180.9 x 302.9 cm, Corcoran Gallery, Washington D.C.

39) Edgar Samuel Paxson, Custer’s Last Stand, 1899, oil on canvas, Whitney Gallery of Art, New York.

40) Frederic Remington, Fight for the Waterhole, 1902, oil on canvas, 69 x 102 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

41) Winslow Homer, Adirondack Lake, 1892, watercolour on white wove paper, 30.1 x 53.5 cm, Harvard Museums, Boston, Mass.

42) Winslow Homer, The Fog Warning. 1885, oil on canvas, 76.83 x 123.19 cm, MFA, Boston.

43) Theodore Gericault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1818-19, Oil on canvas, 491 x 716 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Romanticism Steps Westward; The American Sublime & European Romantic Art. (6)

Coda: The Sublime’s Last Stand.

Like American portraiture, landscape had its own span before it was replaced by another- the genre of urban scenes containing the seeds of modern art. With industry blotting out the American landscape towards the end of the century, and the denizens of that big country the Indian and Cowboy disappearing into the mists of myth, there was less opportunity for painters of the American sublime. As Hughes says, artists like Bierstadt and his emulators were going the way of the buffalo which the artist painted in a late, elegiac nod to a variety of disappearing species like himself. Church suffered a decline in reputation too; the appeal of the “nationalist blockbuster landscape” (Hughes) had faded, and like Custer’s last stand, wagons were circled as the sublime prepared to go out fighting. The Wild West had become tourist theatre anyway with heroes like Buffalo Bill who re-staged the Battle of Little Big Horn where Custer and his comrades were wiped out in 1877 inspiring what Hughes calls the “last stand picture” painted by artists like Frederic Remington. With the American government officially closing the frontier in 1890, time was called on the American sublime which would have to lower its sights considerably if landscape were to survive in the modern American era. Perhaps the best example of this chastened, less grandiloquent painting of the natural world at the end of the nineteenth-century is Winslow Homer’s paintings. His images of stern, stoic men on lakes or the seas of the New England coast suggest an expression of Emersonian self-reliance in the wilds rather than the fatalism of romanticism’s heyday. Homer’s The Morning Fog (above)with its sailor in peril keeping his eyes on a ship on the horizon recalls Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa; and thus we have come full circle back to romantic images of man in a state of distress in nature, save that Homer’s images seem more existential, symbols of the plight of modern man. They also contain hints of modern man’s survival. He may be imperilled in these natural situations, but he may master nature rather than  be overwhelmed by its destructive power.

Romanticism Steps Westward; The American Sublime & European Romantic Art. (5)

American Visions & the Dark Side of the Landscape:

It is impossible to view American landscape painting without thinking of the political and cultural history and fortunes of the inhabitants of this vast land mass: the settlers, the pioneers, the immigrants, the architects of the American constitution, most of whom were in thrall to the concept of the manifest destiny that was defined as the belief that sellers were destined to expand across America, perhaps best personified in the figure of Daniel Boone. Undoubtedly, many would, and did, but the unfortunate result was that the American Indians ( or Native Americans as they are now called)were swept aside by the ruthless energy of the pioneers of the Wild West. A picture like George Caleb Bingham’s Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845) shows the commercial spirit in the wilds with two traders and a strange animal in a boat on a static expanse of water in mid America. This is an expression of the American frontier being opened up through endeavour and money; but the other side of the coin was the devastation wrought by the pioneers men, tradesmen and financiers on the indigenous population- the American Indians whose representation posed a problem to artists.[1] Dependent on the earth were the Indians whose first representation in art owed much to the European idea of the noble savage, best seen in Tompkins Harrison Matteson’s The Last of the Race (above), or Charles Bird King’s multiple portrait of Indian braves which could almost be seen as an autochthonous Mount Rushmore. But the most enthusiastic painter of American Indians was George Catlin, originally trained as a lawyer, but who eventually specialised in portraits of chiefs and braves, to excess. Not a great painter, more an initiator of a human production line of painted Indians, uncomfortably like a gallery of painted scalps, Caitlin reminds us of the indigenous population who lived in these breath-taking, beautiful landscapes, and how painting of the landscape was a form of appropriation of their experience and their lives. The notion of the American sublime fits uncomfortably with the Wild West because there were ecological and sociological consequences such as ripping up the land and displacing native populations who sometimes are included in sublime landscapes of Bierstadt and co, simply to lend some local colour to the scene.

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[1] On this, Hughes, American Visions, 175f.

Romanticism Steps Westward; The American Sublime & European Romantic Art. (4)

Scenic Tourism & the Big Country.

Perhaps we can get an idea of how the American sublime didn’t fit into the neat time frames of history by turning to the story of the great Sequoia trees of the Sierra Nevada, whose “phenomenal size” as Schama has said, “proclaimed a manifest destiny that had been primordially planted.”[1] With their immense size and their sense of the timeless, these natural patriarchs would have been viewed in terms of the sublime. Yet, the powerful, rhetorical language of the sublime symbolised in these trees eventually grew into the language of tourism. Though these gargantuan sentinels of the national parks were considered to be some of the oldest things living on earth against which the achievements of man paled into insignificance, they were also good for business: by 1855, parties of sightseers were taken to the Calveras Grove in California ushering in an era of lucrative scenic tourism. The big trees were also increasingly seen as embodying “national magnitude and spiritual redemption, “the first certified by Abraham Lincoln who granted them to the State of California in 1864 “for the benefit of the people, for their resort and recreation, to hold them inalienable for all time.”[2] In painting, it was the German born artist Albert Bierstadt who recognised their commercial potential, though Bierstadt’s star was already on the wane because critics damned him for meretricious, showy effects, though Schama detected other motivations behind Bierstadt’s representations of the sequoia gigantea. Born in Germany, Bierstadt came to America with his emigrant parents at the age of two, and grew up in the coastal town of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Artists like Bierstadt and Church (Cole’s pupil) made their names with spectacular paintings of American areas of outstanding natural beauty like the Rockies (above) and Niagara Falls. Such scenic tourism struck the late critic Robert Hughes as instrumental in promoting the philosophy of manifest destiny, perhaps best exemplified in Bierstadt’s 1867 Emigrants Crossing the Plains, based on his own experiences as a German emigrant passing through Nebraska.[3] Though marvellous and impressive, conveying the grandeur and dreamy magnificence, it is easy to see how the American landscape vista looks ahead to the age of mass consumerism and global tourism: the mountain picture anticipates the travel poster; while the picturesque torrent the ad for menthol cigarettes.

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[1] Ibid, 188.

[2] Quoted in ibid, 191.

[3] Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, (Harvill Press, London, 1997), American Visions, 194.

Romanticism Steps Westward; The American Sublime & European Romantic Art. (3)

 

American Landscape, the Picturesque& the Aesthetics of the Sublime.

 "What, you are stepping westward?"--"Yea."

--'Twould be a 'wildish' destiny,

If we, who thus together roam

In a strange Land, and far from home,

Were in this place the guests of Chance:

Yet who would stop, or fear to advance,

Though home or shelter he had none,

With such a sky to lead him on?[1]

Though Wordsworth was contemplating the pull of the sky on the emotions and mind of a traveller passing through the “strange land” of Scotland, his description is not irrelevant to a survey of American landscape since these picturesque tours of the British Isles certainly helped to shape the concept of the sublime in North America. If you didn’t know Kensett’s Lake George is in the Adriondacks (above), you could be forgiven for think it a scene of the Lake District picturesque. In fact, Kensett had just returned from a visit to the Lakes, hence the close resemblance. According to Tim Barringer, artists became aware of the “aesthetic qualities” of the American landscape when a number of English artists like Joshua Shaw brought the ideas behind the picturesque to the New World.[2] Shaw travelled with the endorsement of the head of the R.A. Benjamin West, and never looked back, becoming an American citizen. Around 1819 Shaw produced a series of aquatints entitled “Picturesque Views of American Scenery”; and in the proud words of a naturalised citizen proclaimed that his new country was resplendent with “Scenery, comprehending all the varieties of the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque in nature.” Shaw’s all-in-one formula suggests that these categories were shading into each other, that they were losing their distinctiveness, and so it proved. Part of the problem was that in Europe, the concepts of the picturesque and the sublime clearly had historical associations. For example there were implicit connections between mountains and the expansion of empire. What Simon Schama has called “vertical empires,” the linking of the ascent of mountains with the energy of globetrotting Englishmen was not compatible with the American frontier, though something of Ruskin’s Alpine realism comes through in the art of Thomas Moran, originally born in Bolton, Lancashire, though Ruskin insisted on extreme precision when representing geological formation.[3] There were no relations between history and the sublime in America, no gothic castles, no Roman ruins, and no scattered Greek temples like in Europe. And America considered itself too independent to import the European variety, especially as it possessed unimaginable vast areas ripe for survey and exploitation just as majestic as the Alps or parts of the British Isles. In a sense, the American landscape painter would have to start from scratch since America was a wilderness with history invisible, unless you counted the Indians who would soon be swept out of the American landscape altogether. But as Andrew Wilton says, the American poineersmen were reluctant to leave the land in a state of virginal, pure non-signification; the men of the frontier wanted to impose their will, their language and their culture on nature, rather than leave it as a sign of inscrutable timeless permanence. Nature had to be shaped to fit a new kind of history of the American people, but this would create problems for the romantic sublime and eventually contribute to its decline.

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[1] William Wordsworth, Memorials of a Tour in Scotland, 1803, VII: “Stepping Westwards.”

[2] Tim Barringer “The Course of Empires: Landscape and Identity in America and Britain, 1820-1880” in American Sublime, 39f.

[3] Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, 509.

Romanticism Steps Westward; The American Sublime & European Romantic Art (2).

The Sublime in the Age of Empires.

"There is the moral of all human tales;” “Tis but the same rehearsal of the past, First Freedom, and then Glory — when that fails, Wealth, vice, corruption, — barbarism at last. And History, with all her volumes vast, Hath but one page" - Lord Byron, Child Harold.

With the ageing and passing of great American historical personages Madison, Jefferson and Washington, portraiture would no longer be the ideal genre for the representation of the history of the nation. And other genres like the classical nude would be thought too un-American despite their triumphs at the Parisian Salon. That left landscape- and there was plenty of it. Eventually national identity in the form of sculpted portraits and landscapes would fuse in the form of grandiloquent monuments like Mount Rushmore, a synthesis of the folie de grandeur of the vision of ancient rulers and the new spirit of confidence personified in these founding fathers of the American nation, but until then landscape itself provided the vehicle for the history of America.[1] The artist who launched the American landscape movement was actually born in Bolton, Lancashire, in the heart of Blake’s “dark satanic mills.” Thomas Cole emigrated with his parents to Philadelphia in 1818, but he would move to New York where he would find a market for his landscapes and sketches. For all his proclamations about the sublime and the picturesque, Cole’s artistic beat was relatively narrow: he painted the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains, the later a tourist site from the 1820s for New Yorkers. Rather than siding with the merchants and entrepreneurs who would exploit such locations, Cole was on the side of the conservationists, the lovers of nature like Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists who would seek to preserve it from spoliation.[2] Like Emerson, Cole would grow to prefer the country over the city with the latter seen as a symbol of decadence within the cycle of civilisation which rises and falls. If there is a pictorial equivalent to Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, whose appearance (1776-88) might be correlated with the gaining of American independence, it is Cole’s staggering series of five pictures on the emergence of civilisation and its fall into barbarism, all elegantly communicated in the visual language of Claudian seaports, Rosa’s rocky terrains, and the classical sublime in general. Like Gibbon, it seems to have been the result of an apercu that Cole had in the ruins of Rome, though the artist had actually been meditating on it for several years previously. Another obvious source was Byron’s epic poem Child Harold lines from which Cole quoted in his newspaper advertisements for the painted cycle. It need hardly be stated that Cole’s The Course of Empire (above) is composed mostly of landscapes and raises the genre to its highest level in the history of American art.

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[1] On Mount Rushmore which owes much to Alexander the Great’s vision of a city in the form of a face, Schama, Landscape and Memory, 385f.

[2] Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature” in Selected Essays (Penguin, 1982), eg. 52: “ These facts may suggest the advantage which the country-life possesses, for a powerful mind, over the artificial and curtailed life of the cities. We know more from nature than we can at will communicate. Its light flows into the mind evermore, and we forget its presence.”

Romanticism Steps Westward; The American Sublime & European Romantic Art (1).

Stepping Westwards: The Sublime Crosses the Atlantic.

For the Americans, the first opportunity to get a taste of the style known as “apocalyptic sublime” was in 1833-4 when the Bristol artist Francis Danby exhibited his Opening of the Sixth Seal in New York. And in 1856, John Martin would show a triptych of his gigantic doom-laden pictures to the people of the Big Apple.[1] One year after Martin’s exhibition an outbreak of British paintings and watercolours would spread across the East Coast cities of America, and journals would appear in imitation of English periodicals like the Art Union and Art Journal. Up until the middle of the nineteenth-century traffic across the Atlantic had been only one-way; artists like Washington Allston, John Singleton Copley, and Benjamin West had come to Europe, and most of them enjoyed great success with the Royal Academy. Allston, a painter and poet from South Carolina, is often considered to be the true pioneer of American romantic art. After graduating from Harvard, Allston sailed to England in 1801; and in that year he was admitted to the Royal Academy when Benjamin West was its leader. Allston bridges the gap between English and American Romanticism because he was good friends with the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge (whose portrait he painted)) and Ralph Waldo Emerson whose ideas on nature and transcendentalism were clearly influenced by the Lake poets. Allston also provides the link between exponents of the “apocalyptic sublime” in England and its American variant because he gave Martin ideas for the painting that made him famous- Belshazzar’s Feast (above). A few oil sketches of this subject by Allston survive inspired by both West’s version and Rembrandt’s masterpiece in the National Gallery.[2] Allston’s academic figurative composition is in complete contrast to Martin’s, and it is easy to see why Martin chose to discard Allston’s ideas in favour of a more spectacular treatment which won him legions of fans.

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[1] Andrew Wilton, “The Sublime in the Old World and the New” in American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States 1820-1880, Andrew Wilton & Tim Barringer, (Tate, 2002).

[2] Morton D. Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime, 128-129.