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.
[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.
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