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.
[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.
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