Text b. Manifest Destiny or Paradise Regained: Landscape Painting in the usa, 1825-1870

If American culture was still rooted in a European heritage, there was nevertheless a unique quality about the land, which was recognized and admired by Americans and Europeans alike. It was as responsible for the emerging national character of the Americans as the democratic sociopolitical system they had devised. Unlike Europe, the United States seemed to have unlimited land available to the common person.

A romance grew out of the land, out of Americans' relationship to it, and their accomplishments within it. There was romance, too, as Americans pushed further and further west.

Back east, Americans became nostalgic for a wilderness they knew they had lost to progress, as forests were cleared, factories rose, trestle bridges crossed rivers, and trains cut through the landscape. In the July 1845 issue of the Democratic Review, the term “manifest destiny” was coined. This advocated the white person’s right and duty to make use of the land as God’s intention, even if it meant the displacement of indigenous peoples. Progress must take place across the land if America’s future were to be fulfilled.

As a result authors and artists began creating romantic reminiscences about how it used to be before the Industrial Revolution, when a woodsman or a pioneer family could live in harmony with the wilderness, and know God through nature. People living in civilization lamented the loss of the wilderness, and wanted stories about it and pictures of it.

After about 1825, Americans wanted images of the land itself: its mountains, forests, and prairies; the lives and customs of the Native Americans who dwelt on it; the adventurous men and women who moved into and settled it. To some, the landscape became a metaphor for moral, religious, and poetic sentiments, and so it must be preserved. To others, it represented the American Dream because of the opportunities it offered, and so it must be utilized. Some saw the interminable forests as a biblical Eden, awaiting a new Adam and Eve – in the form of the American pioneers, who had the chance to regain grace in a land uncorrupted by the Industrial Revolution. Many more saw the land as there to be “improved” by the civilizing and christianizing influences of the white settlers. Soon, Americans became interested in the world beyond their own borders – the ancient lands of the Near East, the magnificent Andes in South America, and the polar wastes of the frozen North.

The patrons were often prosperous merchants, bankers, or factory owners, desiring scenes of natural splendor as an antidote to the crass and coarse business world. They wanted to see rural scenes reminiscent of the days spent on the farm, when life was slower and easier – somehow better. Armchair travelers enjoyed paintings of the exotic West, which they might never see themselves. To satisfy this demand, a large and talented corps of landscape artists arose to paint essentially naturalistic visions altered by Romantic sentiments. Landscape painting before 1825 had been sporadic, often quite good, but generally lacking a strong thematic focus. After 1825, it enjoyed a great flowering.

While Thomas Cole (1801-1848) has been called the founder of the American school of landscape painting, there were others who launched the movement before Cole appeared upon the scene. Alvan Fisher (1792-1863), for example, led the way in New England, painting landscapes soon after the end of the War of 1812. In Philadelphia, beginning in the early 1820s, Thomas Doughty (1793-1856) was the first to create romantic visions of landscape scenery. After early success, Doughty turned to painting fantasies like Fanciful Landscape, which proved too poetic for most of his patrons. To many of them, nature lost its reality as it dissolved into a lyrical idyll, and it lost its national identity with the inclusion of moldering medieval ruins of Old World castles and cathedrals. Such was not the type of landscape for which Americans yearned.

The first artist whose scenes of wilderness and descriptive views of well-known places struck a resounding chord among Americans was Thomas Cole. Cole's youth was spent in his native England amid mill towns of the Industrial Revolution. Many aspects of his life and art seem a reaction against that experience. He came to America with his parents in 1818, finding in the beautiful scenery around eastern Ohio and Pittsburgh a wonderful respite and inspiration bordering on religious devotion. By 1825, Cole had made his way back to New York City, and that autumn he journeyed up the Hudson River to the Catskill Mountains, where he encountered wildly exciting scenery. Cole was entirely self-taught, and for the most part he created his own new mode of vision for the representation of landscape.

What appealed to Americans in Cole's early pictures was the pristine, Eden like wilderness that offered the world-weary soul a natural sanctuary in which to find God. Through a system called Associationism, established by several late eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers, a person could, while not knowing God directly, arrive at some knowledge of him through the contemplation of his natural works. One could perceive the glory of God in a splendid sunrise, his majesty in a great mountain range, his gentleness in a little wildflower, or his wrath in the violence of a thunderstorm. Moreover, the Romantic spirit thrilled at the awesome spectacle of interminable forests, high cliffs, and raging storms. An often-used symbol was the gnarled old tree trunk, representing one of America's great natural antiquities – which Cole's patrons contrasted to the ruins of the manmade antiquities of Europe. The stump of a sawed-off tree trunk, however, was a symbol of human intervention, and the beginning of the end of the holy wilderness. Such meanings invested Cole's art with a religious and moral content, and their didactic quality increased as his career evolved. His most famous works are: Last of the Mohicans, a series of five pictures The Course of Empire, a series of four paintings The Voyage of Life, The Architect’s Dream.

Cole's successor as leader of the American school of landscape painting was Asher B. Durand (1796-1886). Durand's first career was as an engraver. In fact, by the early 1830s, he was the best engraver in America, executing not only banknotes and other types of commercial work, but also excellent fine-arts engravings. Two of his most successful prints were taken from John Trumbull's Signing of the Declaration of Independence (1822) and John Vanderlyn's Ariadne (1834). By 1834, Durand had begun to think of painting as a more challenging medium. His transition to painter was facilitated by Luman Reed's commission for a set of painted portraits of the first seven presidents of the United States. Reed, a successful grocery wholesaler, was one of the first of a new breed of merchant-patrons, who provided much-needed support for American painters as they began to form an American school independent of Europe. Ridding his collection of the spurious European Old Masters he had bought, Reed began buying only pictures by living American artists, especially Durand, William Sidney Mount, and Thomas Cole, for the art gallery he had incorporated into his fine new house – the first private art gallery in America.

Durand went to Europe in 1840-1 for the obligatory artist's pilgrimage. He generally disliked the experience, and came back unchanged by visions of ruins and moldering empires. Taking up landscape painting in a naturalistic style, but often with an engraver's linear precision, Durand rose quickly to the fore with works such as The Beeches. Trees – often the noble heroes of Durand's pictures – frame a path, along which a shepherd drives his flock of sheep into a golden diaphanous sunset that dissolves the gentle landscape beyond a river. A lovely scene that extols the beauties of nature, it is an ode to the simple, rural life.

American merchants found such scenes therapeutic after a hard day at the office. Here was a scene that was recognizably American, transported them back to the days of their youth, and restored the soul. Pictures such as The Beeches made Durand wealthy, and brought prestige among his fellow-artists. In the year he painted that picture, they elected him president of the National Academy of Design.

The trees, rocks, ferns, mosses, and lichens are painted by Durand with a fidelity that reveals the artist's love for them. This is not nature as the scientist analyzes it, but Nature viewed by a Romantic soul, who adores it, communicates with it, and becomes spiritually at one with it.

Glorification of nature and nationalistic pride were two key components of Durand's pictures, and when he painted a fantasy, he would base it on those ideologies. One of such paintings is his Progress, full of heightened optimism and nationalistic fervor. It's a visual hymn to Manifest Destiny, a positive nationalistic anthem to the future greatness of the nation.

Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), the only pupil Thomas Cole ever accepted for instruction, learned to study natural scenery from his master. Church, however, had more the observant eye of the scientist, and was less the moralizing fantasist than Cole. He began by painting American scenery in naturalistically rendered details. His facility in the detailed execution of natural forms is evident in New England Scenery, an early picture. All of nature seems to have been examined microscopically before being painted into the larger scheme of the composition. The result is an apparent sharpness of focus in the rendering of all natural detail, but in fact each detail plays a subordinate role to the grand plan of the total composition. Church's picture left no doubt that it depicted a specific place and a thoroughly American scene.

The essence of Church's art was established early: a presentation of both the microcosm and the macrocosm of the natural world, all set within some grand natural scheme. Meticulous detail within a broad panorama characterizes his greatest pictures. Niagara Falls (1857, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), for instance, bears scrutiny with a magnifying glass, but also captures the expansive phenomena of that natural wonder if viewed from a distance. Such a technique parallels the writings of the German scientist-explorer Baron Alexander von Humboldt, author of the celebrated book Kosmos (1845-62), which was translated and read throughout Europe and America. Addressing landscape painters, the author advocated that artists should know their subject specifically but also see it as part of a global geographic and climatic zone.

On each trip, Church made beautifully detailed, colorful sketches of the flora, the geological formations of the mountain ranges, and studies of cloud embankments. Once he was back in his New York City studio, he combined them into some of his most famous large paintings. The heroic painting Heart of the Andes established Frederic Church as the premier landscape painter in America. The viewer marvels at the wonders of nature and the detail in which they are represented – finding amid the foliage of the foreground such delightful surprises as butterflies, exotic birds, and bird nests. If Heart of the Andes represented the composite essence of landscape in the tropical zone, Twilight in the Wilderness and Icebergs were Church's consummate expressions of the North American and Arctic regions.

Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) was brought to America as an infant by his German parents, but returned to Düsseldorf as a young man to study at that famous Rhineland art center. After about a year in Italy, he established his studio in New York City. In 1859, Bierstadt made his first trip into the American West, traveling as far as the Rocky Mountains, most of the time with Colonel Frederick Lander's army exploration expedition. The trip was made on horseback, often under perilous circumstances, but all along the way Bierstadt made innumerable oil sketches of the prairies, rivers, valleys, mountains, native peoples, buffalo, and antelope. Such scenery – much of it unknown to white people – became the basis of Bierstadt's art and reputation.

In 1863, Bierstadt painted his most famous picture, which was a compilation of studies made on that first western sojourn – The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak. Perhaps following the example of Church's large canvases, or because he felt the vastness of his subject demanded it, Bierstadt painted this scene of a Native American encampment on a huge scale – 10 feet (3 m) across. This view of exotic aboriginals with all of their colorful costumes and customs seen amid a majestic mountain landscape thrilled Americans with its panoramic vision of a far-distant part of their land. Bierstadt was the first to bring them a visualization of its grandeur and romance. He was also praised for his anthropological description of the Native Americans.

Bierstadt's second western trip took place in 1863. This time, he went all the way to California and the Pacific Northwest. Many handsome canvases resulted from studies made along the way, particularly of Yosemite Valley and the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Never mind that he took artistic license in dramatizing the great peaks – Bierstadt painted with such naturalism that they seem as real as the blades of grass detailed in the foreground. Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California is typical of such pictures, which often established the enormous scale of great escarpments by the presence of a solitary Native American in a tiny canoe, by a bear or two, or, as here, by a herd of deer that has come to drink at the edge of the mirror like mountain lake.

Since the days of the '49 Gold Rush, Americans had been keenly interested in the West. As the nation began to expand west following the Civil War, Manifest Destiny became a reality. Bierstadt's Emigrants Crossing the Plains is a pictorial epic of the wagon trains moving westward. This is an ancient, pristine land, uninhabited by white people. Bleached bones (left foreground) suggest its inhospitable nature, but a golden sunset symbolizes hope and ultimate success. In the central middle ground is a tribal encampment. On their westward trek, the settlers constantly passed through such Native American territory. Easterners, for whom the artists painted, saw the “red men” differently from the settlers – back east the interest was anthropological. Many artists went west to record the aboriginals while they were still unchanged by the white settlers’ ways.