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.