American Literature: Romanticism research assignment Student Research Submissions 2013 research post 2

Matthew Martin

3 May 2013

Beyond the Hudson: Popularity and Changes of Landscape Art

            From the years 1825 to 1860, the artists who comprised the Hudson River School (HRS) flourished by creating works of "religious, moral, and aesthetic themes" in the spectrum of landscape paintings (Cooper 15). In my first research post, I explored the impact of the Hudson River School artists on other areas of art, namely literature. I learned that the artists were most likely influenced by the writings of pertinent authors of the period such as Emerson, Thoreau, and James Fenimore Cooper (HRS artist Thomas Cole painted the illustrations of Cooper's seminal The Last of the Mohicans), thus showing a connection between the artists and their literary counterparts. While it was a worthwhile focus of research and filled with aesthetically pleasing landscapes, it proved to be as challenging to research as it was fulfilling. The Hudson River School of artists represented merely a small thread in the fabric of American art during the Romantic era. Prior to our midterm, the literary texts we discussed in class were closely tied to artists from the HRS (works by Irving, Thoreau and Cooper). Nature was a prominent feature in each author's narrative. As we continued to move forward in the era, I noticed nature becoming less and less prominent in each work. Nature became replaced by realism, societal progress and westward expansion. Disappearing in the texts were the picturesque landscapes Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand, and Frederic Edwin Church immortalized on canvas. The physical and moral landscape of America was changing. Authors were focusing on the human being in society and not in nature. Since our texts were changing, I was interested in why landscape painting was still such a popular form of expression in a time period that was experiencing great technological and industrial changes.

            Part of the reason landscape scenes remained popular is because of artists like Thomas Cole ushering in their appeal to a mass audience. Since nature inspired such scenes of artistic beauty, it was not long before the general public attempted to experience such inspiration for themselves. Tourists started to take advantage of resorts built in the area where Cole created some of his most memorable works. In his article, “The Parlor in the Wilderness . . . ,” Harvey K. Flad describes the growth in popularity of “nature focused” hotels and tourist resorts that began to be built in the Catskill mountains. To Flad, this was a double-edged sword. Nature was accessible to those who wished to observe it, but its majesty was diluted. One such resort was the Catskill Mountain House which offered accessibility to nature, while still offering comfortable resort amenities. "Following the lead of famous artists . . . lesser painters and poets flocked to the same places to be inspired with the gifts of nature . . . . By 1880, 70,000 visitors were making the trip each summer to Catskill Mountain resorts and boarding-houses to enjoy luxurious accommodations or a homelike atmosphere in a wilderness setting" (Flad 361). The beauty of nature was accessible to those who wished to make the trip to the resort, but its grandeur and frightening power was diminished because of modernity cutting into the wilderness. "The landscape [visitors] found, however, was not wilderness. Prospects from which to safely view the surrounding landscape were located, constructed, and often framed. Artists and writers sanctified many of the scenes; they were duly noted in guidebooks and on trail maps" (361).

            The popularity of resorts, plus the diminishing size of nature due to civilization expansion, may have made nature a staple of many artists' works, but the grandeur was fleeting as quickly as its size. Author Robert Chianese argues that "the persistent commercial exploitation and destruction of American land and its native inhabitants . . . led . . . painters to avoid the sublime. In the Hudson Valley, preservationist programs diminished the natural world to a fragile aesthetic commodity that had to be protected rather than feared" (437). Resorts and tourist destinations were slowly fueling the view of nature strictly as a system existing for our control instead of vice versa. As the landscape was disappearing to make way for a growing society, art was losing its ability to show nature as a terror and awe invoking entity. As Chianese states, "Elements of the natural world-- . . . the ocean, a bull or wolf--must threaten in order to evoke the sublime; a prairie cannot, because while vast, it does not instill terror, a horse cannot, nor anything we control or use...'Nature' must have agency and contend with us in a battle of wills" (437). Because the country was growing and able to control nature, Artists would still maintain nature as a prominent subject in years following the HRS and the ever-expanding American scope into the unknown that would more or less become tamed by the hands of man.

                 As the country experienced great changes (both positive and negative), the outlook of the landscape was changing in the eyes of the artists. The changes were reflected on their canvases. The years following the Civil War gave way to another movement of American landscape artists: Tonalism. Much like the movements of literature, it is difficult to place an exact date for the beginning of the Tonalist movement, but it operated between the years 1880 to 1920. Much like the art of the HRS, Tonalism focused on nature as a sublime, grand spectacle. "The term 'Tonalism' generally applies to landscape art, including painting, watercolor, pastel, and etching. Landscapes make up the vast majority of subjects painted in a tonal style, a style characterized by the use of a low-toned palette consisting mostly of cool colors--earthy greens, blues, mauve, violet, black--and a range of intervening grays, colors considered poetic and suggestive" (Cleveland xxi). Tonalism dealt with not only a physical landscape that was changing, but a societal one also. "The moody, often melancholy evocations summoned by Tonalist landscapes, in which autumnal, sunset, and nocturnal themes predominate, followed from the horrors of the Civil War, while the failures of Reconstruction, the anxieties of a boom-and-bust economy, and Darwinian doubts only added to the undertone of vague displacement that haunts these precincts of embodied memory" (xiii). The landscape scenes then became a mirror to the country's discouragement and former glory that was becoming difficult to see. As the country made its way into the 20th century the landscape painters, much like literary counterparts had done previously, made nature a Romantic subject. There was a yearning to return to retrieve what was becoming lost through technological and societal "progress." Rather than being viewed as the frightening unknown, nature was now a reality and something to gaze upon with a sense of nostalgia and obligation. As Maria Moss writes, "it is no coincidence that the sublime shows affinities with the notion of a frontier in America, formerly in a concrete, nature-oriented, now primarily in an imaginative sense" (390). The landscape was becoming a relic of a fast disappearing past--the sublime was now a Romantic notion in landscape art.

            While the HRS artists immortalized nature in its glory and terror, landscape painting retained its popularity into the twentieth century (though it waned when newer, cutting-edge artwork began dominating artistic circles) and represented much more than what was shown on the canvas. It reflected the diminishing size and understatement society had on nature itself, and with movements like Tonalism, showed a country that may have been expanding but was also reeling from its own losses and moral decay. Landscape painting had a life beyond the HRS, one that had surprising results and meaning. I found the research for this particular post smoother than my previous post, which I expect is the result of broadening my research question to explore different aspects of the landscape art movement rather than focusing on the works a particular group of artists.

Works Cited

Chianese, Robert. "Avoidance of the Sublime in Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Art: An Environmental Reading of Depicted Land." Amerikastudien/American Studies 43.3 (1998): 437-61. JSTOR. Web. 3 May 2013.

Cleveland, David A. A History of American Tonalism: 1880-1920. New York: Hudson Hills, 2010. Print.

Cooper, James F. Knights of the Brush: The Hudson River School and the Moral Landscape. New York: Hudson Hills, 1999. Print.

Flad, Harvey K. "The Parlor in the Wilderness: Domesticating An Iconic American Landscape." Geographical Review 99.3 (July, 2009): 356-76. Academic Search Complete. Web. 3 May 2013.

Moss, Maria. "Introduction: Two Centuries of the Sublime in American Landscape, Art, and Literature." Amerikastudien/American Studies 43.3 (1998): 389-90. JSTOR. Web. 3 May 2013.