Special History Study: 

Art and the American 

Conservation Movement 

by Robert L. McGrath 

Marsh--Billings--Rockefeller 

National Historical Park 

NORT HEA S T 

MUSEUM 

. SERVICES N ational Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior \iJ CEN TE R '<::,'ft' 
) 

.J 

Special History Study: 

Art and the American 

Conservation Movement 

by Robert L. McGrath 

SOR1HFA!'-

tvll ·~u ·t\ 1 ~U\Vlll.S 

tENTFR 

National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior 

Boston, 2001 
~~~~~~~~~ 

Table of Contents 

Table of Contents U 

List of Illustrations IlI 

fure~~ V 

Acknowledgments VI 

Executive Summary VII 

Introduction: The Role of Art Collecting in the Nineteenth Century I 

I. Description and Evaluation of the Art Collection 

The New York Collection 

The Woodstock Collection 

Comparison of the New York and Woodstock Collections 

The Roles of Frederick and Julia Billings in the 

Formation of the Collections 

II. Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting 

and the Environmental Movement 

14 

16 

21 

23 

John Ruskin and the "Mirror of Nature" 32 

The Origins of American Environmentalism 3 3 

Artists and the Environmental Movement 34 

Art, Language and the Invention of Yosemite Valley 

and Yellowstone National Park 3 7 

Art, Railroads and the National Park Movement 41 

Albert Bierstadt and the Victorian Imagination 43 

Art and the Adirondack Northwoods 45 

Art and the White Mountains: The Invention of Scenery 49 

The Art of Protest 5 2 

The Mountain of the Holy Cross: the Kingdom of God in America 5 5 

Art and the Landscape of Tourism 58 

Abbott Thayer and the Grand Monadnock 60 

Art and Acadia: the Last Stand of Monumentalism 65 

From Monumentalism to Environmentalism: 

The Everglades National Park 65 

Art Versus Nature: The Politics of Representation 

and Environmentalism 66 

The Billingses' Relationship to the Conservation Movement: 

Art and Literature 6 7 

III. Selected Works from the Art Collection: 

Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park 82 

IV. Bibliography 121 
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List of Illustrations 

Cover: Albert Bierstadt, Cathedral Rock, Yosemite, (1870), Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National 

Historical Park. 

Fig. l: Frederic Ronde!, A Hunting Party in tl1e Woods/In the Adirondac, N.Y. State (1856), 

The Adirondack Museum. 

Fig. 2: William James Stillman, The Philmopher's Camp in the Adirondacks ( 1858), 

Concord Free Public Library. 

Fig. 3: James David Smillie after John Frederick Kensett, Mount Washinp:ton from Sunsei HiU, 

North Conway (1851 ), Private Collection. 

Fig. 4: Sanford Robinson Gifford, Twilight on Hunter Mountain (1866), Terra Museum of 

American Art, Chicago. 

Fig. 5: Sanford Robinson Gifford, Scribner's Pasture (c. 1860), The Dayton Art Institute. 

Fig. 6: Charles Lewis Heyde, North Williston, Vermont (c. 1855-1865), Shelburne Museum of 

Art. 

Fig. 7: James Hope, Bird Mountain Castlewn, Vermont (c. 1860), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 

Fig. 8: William Henry Jackson, Holy Cross (c. 1930), Scotts Bluff National Monument. 

Fig. 9: William Henry Jackson, Photographing the Mountain of the Holy Cross (c. 1930), 

Scottsbluff National Monument. 

Fig. 10: William Hahn, Yosemite Valley from Glacier Point (1874), California Historical Society. 

Fig. 11: Abbott Handerson Thayer, Mount Monadnock (1909), Hood Museum of Art, 

Dartmouth College. 

Fig. 12: "The Cruelties of Fashion-Fine Feathers Make Fine Birds," from Frank Leslie's 

Illustrated Newspaper (November 10, 1883). 

Fig. 13: Barry Faulkner, Men of Monadnock (1950), Fleet Bank, Keene, New Hampshire. 

Fig. 14: "The Northern Pacific Jubilee: Driving the Golden Spike," from Harper's Weeldy 

(September 24, 1883 ). 

Fig. 15: "The Completion of the Northern Pacific Railway- Driving the Last Spike at the 

Point of Junction of the Eastern and Western Sections, Sixty Miles West of Helena, Sept. 8-

From a Sketch by Famy," in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (September 22, 1883). 

Art and the American Conservation Movement- Ill 
Fig. 16: John William Hill, High Bridge: Harlem River (c. 1848-1851), Hood Museum of Art, 

Dartmouth College. 

Fig. 17: Frederic A. Bridgman, On the Road to Biskra (1878), Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller 

National Historical Park. 

Fig. 18: Samuel Colman, Arab Caravanary (1879), Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National 

Historical Park. 

Back Cover: The Mansion as it appears today, Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical 

Park. 

IV - Art and the American Conservation Movement 
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Foreword 

Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National 

Historical Park is the only national park to 

tell the story of conservation history and the 

evolving nature of land stewardship in 

America. The Park was the boyhood home 

of George Perkins Marsh, author of Man and 

Nature (1864) and one of the first global 

environmental thinkers. In 1869 Frederick 

Billings, strongly influenced by Marsh, 

established a progressive country estate on 

the former Marsh farm. Billings's granddaughter, Mary French Rockefeller, and her 

husband, conservationist Laurence S. 

Rockefeller, made a gift of the 550-acre 

forest and their residence to establish the 

Park in 1992. The Park continues that tradition of land stewardship, and also preserves 

and interprets the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller 

Mansion and its extensive art collection 

illustrating the influence of art and artists 

on the 19th century conservationist 

movement. 

As a new national park we have been 

pleased to undertake this study. The 

landscape art collection, which is integral 

to the park property and the human histories 

of the estate's inhabitants, presents a unique 

opportunity to take a fresh look at the role 

of art in the development of the American 

conservation movement in its earliest years. 

Our interpretation of the park's history and 

significance is immeasurably enriched by the 

generous gift of these works of art, and by 

the insightful scholarship Prof. McGrath 

brings to this study. We are grateful to him, 

and to Nancy Waters and Gay Vietzke of 

the Northeast Museum Services Center, 

National Park Service, for bringing this 

handsome and informative Special History 

Study to fruition. 

Rolf Diamant, Superintendent 

Thomas Cole, Niagra Falls (c.1830), Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park. 

Art arid the American Conservation Movement- V 
Acknowledgments 

It is a ttuism of art historical inquiry 

that the discrete spheres of art and life were 

hygienically separated during the Gilded 

Age. Only in the modern period, according 

to the canonic account, were they 

reintegrated. While there is strong evidence 

to support this assertion, especially with 

regard to the figural arts, there is an equally 

compelling argument that nature and its 

representation were never more closely 

allied than during the nineteenth century. 

It is our contention that the art of landscape 

painting, in which the Woodstock mansion 

abounds, was instrumental in shaping the 

Billingses' perception of the world and in 

stimulating their conservation ethic. 

Hudson River School paintings of the primal 

American wilderness, together with French 

Barbizon images of benign agriculture and 

managed forestry, provided aesthetic models 

that were bodied forth in the mansion estate 

and the Mount Tom forest plantation. In 

addition, the organization of "parks," both 

national and urban, which were in turn the 

result of pictorial formulas for conferring 

value upon landscape, played a decisive role 

in the layout of the carriage roads and 

prospects created throughout the estate. In 

a word, art was central to the vision which 

Frederick and Julia Billings sought to embody 

in their Woodstock estate. 

Many individuals have assisted me 

in the preparation of this Special History 

Study for the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller 

National Historical Park, but none more so 

than the amiable Janet Houghton, Curator 

of Collections. Always accessible and willing 

to go the extra mile in exploring archives, 

looking at artworks and discoursing about 

an era into which she has special insight, 

Janet is an ideal custodian of artifacts and 

ideas. Nancy H. Waters, Senior Curator at 

the Northeast Museum Services Center in 

Boston, together with her able colleague 

Art and the American Conservation Movement- VI 

Gay E. Vietzke, served jointly as Project 

Managers, reading drafts, offering advice and 

soothing multiple anxieties. Paul Weinbaum, 

Lead Historian of the Boston Support Office, 

provided exasperatingly close readings of 

drafts, causing me to rethink and reformulate 

no end of conventional wisdom. All of the 

above were especially helpful in obliging me 

to reform my often hyperventilated, postmodern, academic rhetoric, a corrective for 

which I am most grateful. 

Barbara Reed, the eminently gifted 

librarian of Dartmouth's Sherman Art Library, 

provided bibliographic services above and 

beyond the siren call of duty while that most 

estimable institution, the Society for the 

Preservation of New England Antiquities, is 

recognized for a most useful collaboration. 

Finally, my beloved wife, Mary, indispensible 

companion and research assistant, deserves 

credit for countless hours spent in the archival 

trenches and for no end of stimulating 

discussions about the vagaries of the Gilded 

Age. Above all, she is to be commended for 

her calculated displays of interest and 

indifference to this project, sufficient always 

to engender my renewed intellectual 

exertions. 

Robert L. McGrath 

Attributed to Jean Anroine Theodore Gudin, 

Stormy Seascape (n.d.), Marsh-BillingsRockefeller National Historical Park. 
) 

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.J 

.) 

______ E_x_e_cutive Summary 

This Special History Study focuses 

on the nineteenth century art collection 

housed in the mansion of the Marsh-BillingsRockefeller National Historical Park in 

Woodstock, Vermont. It consists of an 

interpretive essay on the role of collecting in 

Victorian America as well as a catalogue of 

individual artworks acquired by Frederick 

and Julia Billings during their lifetimes. Also 

catalogued are the major nineteenth century 

landscape paintings collected by Laurance 

and Mary Rockefeller during the twentieth 

century, partially to honor the spirit of the 

Woodstock collection. The catalogue is 

confined to those oil paintings, which bear 

most directly on the park's primary theme: 

the development of the American 

conservation movement. 

In addition to the description and 

evaluation of the Woodstock collection, the 

study contains an interpretive essay 

concerning the no-longer-extant art 

collection in the Bitlingses' New York city 

home for which an 1890s inventory exists. 

The principal findings of the section are 

twofold: the New York collection was 

relatively conventional, conforming with the 

practices of the majority of wealthy collectors 

of the High Victorian period, while the 

Woodstock collection, with its central body 

of American landscape paintings, was more 

Robert Crannell Minor, 

Evening (c.1882), MarshBillings-Rockefeller 

National Historical Park. 

idiosyncratic, partially reflecting the 

Billingses' interest in rural ideals and 

conservation issues. Another important 

finding concerns the display of artworks in 

the Woodstock mansion. With the exception 

of Vermont's St. Johnsbury Athenaeum, no 

repository of nineteenth century American 

art retains its original configuration. While 

the Woodstock mansion and its collections 

have been substantially altered, especially 

during the 1950s, Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller 

retains to a high degree much of the "aura" 

of the high Victorian era. 

Part Two of the study addresses the 

influence of nineteenth century American 

landscape painting, photography and nature 

writing upon the environmental movement. 

The role of British philosopher John Ruskin 

in formulating a complex synthesis of art, 

religion and nature is explored, together with 

the influence of such artistic figures as Albert 

Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, Carleton Watkins 

and William Henry Jackson, in shaping the 

Romantic sensibility towards nature. The 

influence of "scenic monumentalism" is 

related to the formation of the western parks 

Yosemite and Yellowstone, while such diverse 

cultural constructs as the "picturesque" and 

the "sublime" are brought into varying 

relationship with rhe Adirondack 

northwoods of New York state, the White 

Anand the American Conservation Movement-VII 
Executive Summar)• 

Mountains of New Hampshire, the Catskills 

and the Colorado Rocky Mountains. The 

claim that images generate ideas about 

na tu re and determine the values that we 

place upon it (as well as the manner in which 

nature is perceived) is central to this 

discussion. This account also includes an 

analysis of the more direc t influence of 

several important cultural figures upon 

public policy with regard to specific 

geographical sites: among others, painters 

Abbott Thayer (Mount Monadnock) and 

Frederic Edwin Church (Acadia National 

Park), art b istorian Charles Eliot Norton 

(Ni;:ierirn f;:ills) and lrindscape architect 

Frederick Law Olmsted (Yosemite). 

Frederick Billings' responses to these diverse 

cultural. forces in the formation of the 

Woodstock estate provide a terminus for this 

essay. The role of culture in shaping his 

sensibilities is discussed, with the tentative 

conclusion that Barbizon paintings together 

with the landscape designs of Frederick Law 

Olmsted and Robert Morris Copeland 

provided the cultural vision for the estate, 

while the religious sanction of Horace 

Bushnell and utilitarian views of George 

Perkins Marsh accounted for its conception 

and use. 

For Frederick Billings, one of the age's 

foremost captains of industry, the 

connections between his business practices, 

the Victorian idea of conservation and the 

acquisition of art, were nearly seamless. The 

development of transcontinental railroads 

and the creation of national parks were 

sequential and inseparable. The parks were 

developed for tourists and the railroads 

became the means of access. Arr was the sign 

that closed the circle. 

Arthur Quartley, Boats Becalmed (1879), Marsh-BillingsRockefeller National Historical Park. 

VIII -Art and the American Conservation Movement 
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Introduction: The Role of Art Collecting 

in the Nineteenth_ Century --------

Art collecting, the world over, has been 

a compound of numerous motives including 

pride of possession and greed, desire for social 

prestige, rivalry with other collectors and, 

not infrequently, genuine love for the objects 

collected. The British art critic Anna 

Jameson, whom the young Julia Parmly met 

in London in 18541

, succinctly articulated 

the value of art for her Victorian readership: 

"Pictures are for use, for solace, for ornament, 

for parade-as invested wealth, as an 

appendage of rank. Some people love 

pictures as they love friends; some, as they 

love music; some, as they love money. And 

the collectors of pictures take rank 

accordingly."2 In addition to these qualities, 

Anglo-American art collecting during the 

Victorian age was driven by a set of moral, 

spiritual and therapeutic imperatives that 

were unique to the period. 3 To this list can 

further be appended the foundational 

premise of Victorian collecting: art should 

mirror life, but its content needs to be 

carefully edited to disallow disturbing or 

unpleasant intrusions. The extent to which 

Julia and Frederick Billings were familiar 

with, and responded to, these various 

aspirations and injunctions can be inferred 

from their education, their library, their 

friends, diary entries and, most importantly, 

the collection itself. 

By any reckoning art collecting in 

America between the end of the Civil War 

and the close of the century was more avidly 

pursued and more endowed with significance 

than at any time before or since. There has 

never been a period when art mattered more 

than between the Philadelphia Centennial 

Exhibition of 1876 and the Chicago 

Columbian Exposition of 1893, the rough 

parameters of the Billingses' careers as 

collectors.4 To be an artist, an art dealer, a 

critic or a collector was to engage in an 

activity invested with significant moral and 

social purpose. For the first time in American 

history art, together with the house in which 

it was displayed, became major signifiers of 

status and upward social mobility. ln the 

words of Harriet Spofford, an 

unreconstructed arbiter of Victorian 

sensibility, the study of the home and its 

furnishings 

is as important as the study of politics; 

for the private home is the foundation 

of the public state, subtle and 

unimagined influences molding the men 

who mold the state .... ] ust as there is 

no more certain means of gauging a 

man's social position than by discovering 

what manner of womankind belongs to 

him, so there is no better means of 

measuring his intellectual or artistic 

culture than by examining his library ... 

or the arrangements of his house.5 

Clarence Cook, another self-anointed 

adviser on domestic affairs, was even more 

emphatic about the role of art in the 

household. For Cook, the Parlor was "an 

important agent in the education of life .... 

It is no trifling matter, whether we hang poor 

pictures on our walls or good ones, whether 

we select a fine cast or a second-rate one. 

We might almost as well say it makes no 

difference whether the people we live with 

are first-rate or second-rate."6 

It is important to stress these distinctions 

between the Victorian age and more recent 

times when aesthetic considerations gained 

primacy over social and moral didacticism. 

One of the principal legacies of early 

Romanticism to the Gilded Age was the 

conviction that art was a prime agent of 

Art and the American Conservation Movement -1 
I ntrnduciion 

instruction and moral uplift. To this end, 

art was understood to be reflective rather 

than performative, the artist more a mediator 

than a creator. Realism, the construction of 

readable images grounded in the world of 

pe rceptions, constituted the probity of 

Victorian art. In collapsing the boundary 

between pictorial delineation and optical 

rt'.ality, the artist provi<led tangible evidence 

to the buyer of painstaking labor, "pride in 

the work ethic and money well-spent."7 

While not absent from the beliefs of 

earlier historical periods, the notion that art 

was purifying, redemptive and reflective of 

spiritual values took hold with unusual 

intensity during the nineteenth century. 

Invested with a sticky compound of Victorian 

sentimentality and Romantic exoticism, art 

projected a sanitized vision of social harmony 

while providing examples of individual and 

collective piety. These convictions were 

imparted to Victorian Americans most 

directly through the writings of British 

ph ilosophers Samuel Taylor Coleridge and 

John Ruskin.8 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the first to 

break with the tradition of English 

empiricism to argue that know ledge and 

understanding could be grasped intuitively 

through imaginative qualities that transcend 

botb logic and experience. An intimate of 

Wordsworth and a major influence on Ralph 

Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, 

Coleridge linked art to nature and religion 

th rough a complex fusion of aesthetics with 

spirituality. 9 Civilization was for Coleridge 

grounded in "cultivation, " and in the 

"harmonious development of those qualities 

and faculties that characterize our humanity." 

According to a recent historian, "culture had 

for Coleridge almost a literally agricultural 

meaning: a process of sowing, nurturing and 

gradual, successive harvesting."10 The young 

Frederick Billings was introduced to 

Coleridge's thought while a student at the 

University of Vermont. His friend and 

mentor, Reverend James Marsh (a cousin of 

2 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

George Perkins Marsh) taught a senior year 

course in philosophy which was centered 

around the writings of Coleridge, several of 

whose American editions Marsh had edited.

11 

[n this connection, it is surely no accident 

that Frederick's first art purchase was an 

engraved portrait of the famed English 

philosopher. 12 This portrait hung in the 

library uf the Wuu<lstuck mansion 

throughout Frederick Billings' lifetime, 

though in recent times it has been relegated 

to the attic. 

The role of John Ruskin in shaping the 

sensibilities of Frederick and Julia Billings is 

more problematic. On the one hand, almost 

no educated Victorian could escape the 

critical theories of Ruskin, arguably the most 

influential writer in western history on the 

nexus between art and morality; on the other, 

his major writings are absent from the Billings' 

Woodstock library. 13 Ruskin's influence, 

however attenuated, can be inferred from the 

character and quality of the art collection. 

The celebrated Ruskinian apothegm "Art, 

the Interpreter of Nature; Na ture, the 

Interpreter of God" could well be inscribed 

over the Billingses' art collection as well as 

most of the major collections of the era. A 

distinguishing characteristic of the Billingses' 

collection is the absence of "Old Master" 

paintings, either as originals or in didactic 

copies. 14 This apparently deliberate omission 

conforms with Ruskin's injunction- an 

injunction widely obse rved by many 

Victorians- to buy only the work of modern 

painters, especially landscapes. 15 Only 

towards the end of the century, with the 

emergence of collectors like Henry Clay 

Frick and Isabella Stewart Gardner, did "Old 

Masters" become the norm rather than the 

exception. 

ln the period between the Centennial 

and the Columbian Expositions, the art 

market underwent a dramatic change. Up 

until the mid-1870s the primary locale for 

the sale of artworks was the artist's studio or 

the exhibitions of such institutions as New 
) 

) 

York's National Academy of Design. From 

roughly 1825 until about 1875, the work of 

American artists was avidly collected. 

During the last quarter of the century, 

however, art dealers began increasingly to 

take over the operations of the market and 

to introduce a taste for European art. 

A notice in Harper's Weekly of 8 February, 

1879 makes clear that New Yorkers were 

beginning to rely on dealers for 

contemporary art: 

The galleries of the principal picture 

dealers of New York offer many 

attractions this winter to the lovers of 

art .... At Goupil's, Kohn's, Avery's, 

Schaus's ... the visitor will find quiet, 

well-lighted, pleasant galleries, filled with 

pictures by artists of world-wide fame; 

some by foreign masters, who, like 

European authors, find in the New World 

an appreciation as broad, as cultivated, 

and as liberal as that which they enjoy 

at home. 16 

The art collecting of Frederick and Julia 

Billings largely occurred during this shift and 

reflects practices both before and after the 

cultural watershed of the 1876 Centennial. 

As a general rule during the Billingses' 

lifetimes American landscapes were 

commissioned directly from the artists, while 

European paintings were acquired through 

dealers. On occasion the New York dealer 

Louis Lanthier, whose gallery was especially 

frequented by the Billingses, acted as agent 

for them at auctions of art collections. 

Allowing for a degree of hybridity and 

crossover, the Woodstock house might best 

be characterized as pre-Centennial and the 

New York collection as post-Centennial 

cultural constructions. Another way of 

conceptualizing this divide would be to 

reconfigure it as a dialogue between the 

country and the city. European art 

dominated the New York collection while 

American landscapes provide the principal 

Introduction 

theme of Woodstock. 

Like many art collections created before 

and, to a lesser extent, after the Civil War, 

the Billingses' holdings, especially those 

housed in Vermont, were dedicated as "a 

shrine to American nature." 17 Landscape 

paintings by Th.ornas Cole, Asher Durand, 

John Frederick Kensett and other luminaries 

of the Hudson River School formed the 

centerpiece of the collection. In contrast to 

and in conformity with emergent Victorian 

taste, the New York collection was largely 

composed of European paintings. To wealthy 

industrialists and others, the acquisition of 

paintings of the national landscape (i.e. the 

Northeast and the West) constituted a 

patriotic duty. ln emulation of English 

aristocrats who filled the walls of their estates 

with family portraits, Americans, as a function 

of identity formation (a shift from face to 

place) were drawn, faute de mieux, to 

topographic landscape images. "There is 

little that is exclusively American which can 

be used for art material," a Gilded Age critic 

asserted, "if we set aside our magnificent 

scenery."18 If, as for Frederick and Julia, these 

canvases served as a form of pictorial tourism, 

replications of places visited, either for work 

or pleasure, so much the better. 19 

For most collectors of the period paintings 

of the American landscape held, above all, 

associations with "the creative powers of the 

Almighty."20 Icons of a broadly formulated 

reverence for nature, these detailed, factual 

canvases functioned as devotional imagery, 

providing transparent access to God's 

purposes. Sacralized as it was progressively 

nationalized, i:he narrative of the American 

land was scripted in "The Great Book of 

Nature," one of the most pervasive fictions 

to which any nation has ever subscribed. 21 

Even the very act of looking at a landscape 

was considered virtuous, an uplifting mix of 

piety and patriotism. In an essay entitled 

"Scenery and the Mind," published in one of 

the most influential texts of the nineteenth 

century, the Reverend Elias Magoon averred 

Art and the American Conservation Movement - 3 
Introduction 

that "in viewing magnificent scenes, the soul, 

expanded and sublimed, is imbued with a 

spirit of divinity and appears, as it were, 

associated with the Deity himself."22 To 

which assertions, the mid,century critic 

James Jackson Jarves added the helpful 

reminder that nature was "the creation of the 

one God-his sensuous image and 

revelation, through the investigation of 

which by science or its representation by art, 

rnen's hearts are lifted toward him."23 

Simultaneously eliciting both patriotic 

and votive meanings, panoramic views of the 

Hudson River, the Adirondacks and the 

White Mountains, together with paintings of 

Yosemite, Yellowstone and the volcanoes of 

the Pacific Northwest, were understood to 

embody the unprecedented virtues of 

"Nature's Nation." 24 ln the view of the 

Reverend Magoon, "the diversified 

landscapes of our country exert no slight 

influence in creating our character as 

individuals and in confirming our destiny as 

a nation."25 If, for a collector like Frederick 

Billings, views of Yosemite Valley or Mount 

Hood intimated the political imperatives of 

"Manifest Destiny," they also could be 

assimilated under the rubric of religious 

painting. 26 Spiritual and political 

exceptionalism, the unique covenant that 

God had made with Americans, was 

rendered visible by these paintings of an 

unspoiled national Eden. The natural 

abundance of a Christian Democracy, as 

evidenced by images of the land, linked 

parlor gentility to public polity. The 

landscape, first sanctified on canvas, was 

projected onto the consciousness of the 

nation's lawmakers, eventuating in the world's 

first acts of nature conservation. 

As over and against claims on behalf of 

Victorian spirituality, recent neo,Marxist 

accounts of the meaning of landscape have 

set "the ritualized consumption of nature" 

alongside the urban promenade and the 

scenic tour as "social arenas for acting out 

the distinction between the polite and the 

4 -Art and the American Conservation Movement 

vulgar."27 The ability to appreciate 

landscape as an aesthetic commodity, 

according to Dona Brown, "emerged as a 

defining attribute of an urban midd\e,class 

market oriented public."28 Paralleling the 

rise of this urban taste for the landscape was, 

in Brown's view, a related devaluation of the 

landscape of use. 29 Without discrediting the 

role of landscape appreciation in the 

formation of both class and regional identity, 

it is difficult to assess the degree of complicity 

of the Billingses with such purported mental 

and economic transactions. Jo For Frederick 

and Julia, art appears to have stimulated, 

rather than repressed, their interest in the 

working landscape. At Woodstock 

aesthetics were never wholly and 

"hygienically separated from utilitarian 

ambitions" or the realm of production.31 In 

short, landscape art structured the 

perception and provided the vision of the 

natural environment that the Billingses 

desired to achieve at the estate and the forest 

plantation. 

Another challenging ethical question for 

the modern schola r is posed by 

environmental historian William Cronon, 

who claims that the Victorian habit of 

viewing and conceptualizing the landscape 

as "scenery" was a perverse form of 

anthropocentrism and sentimentality. In his 

critical formulation, landscape arr and the 

appreciation of nature that it served to 

engender- especially as it eventuated in 

national parks- should be viewed as another 

aspect of European colonialist practice.32 

While these post,modern positions are 

engaging, they cast little direct light upon 

the artistic culture of the nineteenth century. 

For the Victorian collector, images of the 

land also functioned as therapy. As simulacra 

for nature, landscape views were claimed to 

offer ministrations to urbanites made weary 

by the unavoidable stress and dislocations 

of modern life. A mid,century writer for 

New York's American Art Union expressed 

th is view with unusual bluntness: 
) 

) 

) 

_, 

...) 

To the inhabitants of cities ... a painted 

landscape is almost essential to preserve 

a healthy tone to che spirits, Iese they 

forget in the wilderness of bricks which 

surrounds them the pure delights of 

nature and a country life. Those who 

cannot afford a seat in the country to 

refresh their wearied spirits may at least 

have a country seat in their parlors; a bit 

of landscape with a green tree, a distant· 

hill, or low-roofed cottage- some of 

these simple objects which all men find 

so refreshing to their spirits after being 

long pent up in dismal streets and in the 

haunts of business. 33 

The painter Asher Durand also 

conveniently advocated the consoling 

pleasures of landscape painting for "our men 

of fortune." "To the rich merchant or 

capitalist," he intoned, 

on his return home, after completion of 

his daily task of drudgery- his dinner 

partaken, and himself disposed of in his 

favorite arm-chair- with one or more 

faithful landscapes before him, and 

making no greater effort than to look 

into the picture instead of on it ... many 

a fair vision of forgotten days will animate 

the canvas, pleasant reminiscences and 

grateful emotions will spring up at every 

step, and care and anxiety will retire far 

behind him. 34 

Landscape painting was understood to 

be especially soothing to those who, like 

Frederick Billings, suffered from 

"neurasthenia" (the Victorian equivalent of 

today's "chronic fatigue syndrome"), a 

nervous disorder specifically afflicting 

"Anglo-Saxon Americans ... especially 

those in the higher walks of life." 35 

Nervousness, according to this account-

"the master trait of the modern American"-

was both a disease and an emblem of 

refinement; its chief cause modern, industrial 

Introduction 

society with its restless energy and rapid 

forms of communication and transportation. 

In the empurpled rhetoric of Victorian 

therapy, art was understood to "no longer 

appeal to the imagination, to sentiment, or 

to the intellect. lt plays directly on the 

nerves, the chief possession or affliction of 

these restless, modern days." 36 Frederick 

Billings' purported mentor, George Perkins 

Marsh, devoted a sizable passage in Man and. 

Nature to "The Instability of American Life," 

pleading for "some abatement in the restless 

love of change which characterizes us, and 

makes us almost a nomade [sic] rather than a 

sedentary people."·n 

At a regional level, paintings of the New 

England countryside were felt to embody 

qualities of a democratic, rural utopia. Like 

the salubrious return to the sod, 

institutionalized by such activities as northern 

New England's "Old Home Week," images 

of the ancestral homestead and farmland were 

viewed as a resource for the nation's political 

health.38 For many Americans scenes of rural 

life, then as now, symbolized the traditional 

values under siege in the cities. In this 

connection the landscape of New England 

"was imagined as a kind of underground 

cultural aquifer that fed the nation's springs 

of political courage, personal independence 

and old-fashioned virtue."39 George Perkins 

Marsh gave voice to precisely this pictorial 

mode of the pastoral-picturesque when he 

described Vermont as "the unrivaled 

landscapes unfolded from our every hill, 

where lake, and island, and mountain and 

rock, and well-tilled fields, and evergreen 

wood, and purling brook, and cheerful home 

of man are presented at due distance and in 

fairest proportion."40 

In addition to images of the national and 

regional landscape, collectors (especially 

during the decades of the 1870s and 1880s) 

also avidly consumed paintings of the French 

countryside by the Barbizon masters. Corot, 

Diaz, Rousseau, Daubigny and Troyan, all 

prominently featured in the front Parlor of 

Arland the American Conservation Movement- 5 
Introduction 

the Billingses' Madison Avenue home, were 

considered the most advanced painters of 

their time. 41 Their works, according to 

auction records between 1876 and 1883, 

brought the highest prices alongside the 

canvases of such respected French Academics 

as Adolf Bouguereau, Jean-Leon Ger6me 

and Jean-Georges Vibert (all represented in 

the New York cullectiun).42 What, it rnighl 

be asked, linked these Old World images to 

the New World? How could paintings of 

French peasants in pastora l settings hold 

meaning for industrial capitalists and railroad 

barons?43 What diverse cultural processes 

inspired the genteel, urban gaze of Victorian 

Americans to fall favorably upon peasant 

laborers? At one level Barbizon painting, 

together with its American progeny, can be 

understood to offer post-Civil War 

Americans a respite from the dislocations of 

confl ic ted na tionhood and rap id 

industrialization. Unlike the panoramic 

spectacles of the primal American wilderness, 

the art of Barbizon provided an intimate 

retreat into the rural past, an escape from 

th e present, and a sense of permanence 

provided by contact with the soil. 44 Safe 

havens from the troubled present, the rural 

was invoked to counter the industrial. ln 

sympathetic acco rd with the verbal 

ruminations of George Perkins Marsh, 

Barbizon painting intimated redemption from 

the restless energy of the machine through a 

return to the land. In this world of the 

imagination, life is renewed and redeemed 

by manual labor and husbandry. In dimly lit 

forest interiors sheep graze peacefully, cattle 

follow gentle woodland paths and frugal 

peasants gather fallen branches.45 Nostalgic 

evocations of an agrarian past, to which many 

captains of industry like Frederick Billings 

hoped someday to return, t he pastoral 

inventions of Barbizon artists offered timeless 

reassurance in the face of modern 

uncerrainty.46 Perhaps above all, they offered 

the consolations of "invented traditions" in 

a period when rapid transformation was 

6 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

weakening or destroying social patterns. 47 

In the words of historian Laura Meixner, the 

public reception of Barbizon was 

a democratic conversation held among 

the many Americans who looked past 

their own borders to clarify their vision 

of themselves. In their plain view of 

Lhings [Barbizun painting] revealeJ the 

paradoxes inherent in France and 

America, fraternity and rivalry, ideology 

and utopia, tradition and transformation, 

adversarial politics and republican faith, 

nationhood and individuality. From_ the 

unresolved contradictions that bound 

French art to American society came the 

truths awakening ord inary American 

people to their own sense of cultural 

possibility. 48 

While it is not possible to assert the claim 

with certainty, the image of Barbizon, as both 

a place and an aesthetic ideal, appears to 

have played a significant role in shaping the 

sylvan/pastoral vision of Frederick and Julia 

Bil lings. The forest of Fontainbleau, a 

product of "wise forestry" and controlled 

silviculrure since the time of Louis XIV, may, 

for example, have served as a model for the 

Mount Tom plantation. Likewise Barbizon's 

mythic Fairy's Pond (Mare aux Fees), a 

pilgrimage site for all visitors, may also have 

provided the inspiration for The Pogue. The 

carriage roads and scenic outlooks on Mount 

Tom, created by Frederick Billings, 

seemingly echo the romantic itineraries 

crea t ed by C laude Francois Denecourt 

during the 1830s and 1840s in the woods of 

Fontainbleau.49 Even the model farm, with 

its herds of grazing sheep and cattle, provides 

a kind of reenactment of those idy lli c 

paintings by Corot, Rousseau and Daubigny 

which once decorated the walls of the New 

York home. 

To the extent that painted canvases 

replicate social practices and physical 

realities, the art of Barbizon was more 
) 

) 

) 

) 

actualized than any previous landscape in the 

history of art. In narrowing the gap between 

painted studies "direct from nature" and the 

finished, studio canvas, Barbizon artists 

helped to sunder the traditional boundaries 

between nature and art. Giving a greater 

voice to nature in the dialogue with art, they 

engendered a vision of unity that could be 

realized in the landforms themselves. The 

Woodstock estate, born out of the Billingses' 

cultural imagination, was a response not only 

to memory and a desire for spiritual renewal, 

but to an image structured by art. The 

harmonious integration of forest, farm, 

garden and home realized at Woodstock 

reprised the history of "domesticated 

woodlands" descended from Renaissance 

Europe. Whether conceptualized as a private 

aristocratic estate or as a quasi-public 

"Arcadia for the people," Woodstock, as the 

seat of ancestral virtue, was the product of 

centuries' old European land management 

and aesthetic vision.50 

Funher informed by the pragmatic-cumaeschetic views of George Perkins Marsh, the 

forest and fields of the Woodstock estate 

were to be the Billingses' "monument." In 

recognition of the role of Barbizon and its 

Renaissance antecedents in forming a nexus 

between nature and culture, three of the four 

paintings from the original Billings New York 

collection brought by Laurance Rockefeller 

to Woodstock in 1998 were views of the 

Forest of Font.ainbleau. The retrospective 

pastoral vision of Narcisse Diaz, Jules Dupre 

and Charles-Emile Jacques, these intimate 

cabinet paintings reinforced the broader 

meaning of the collection. Representations 

of the visionary ideal bodied forth in the 

actualized landscape of the Billings estate, 

these paintings served as models of benign 

forestry, agrarian plenitude and social 

harmony. 

While it is tempting to dwell upon past 

and present meanings imposed upon 

landscape paintings, we should not lose sight 

of the fact that Frederick and Julia were 

I ntroduccion 

eminent Victorians whose sensibilities were 

those of a privileged elite. Frederick's 

acquisition of a landscape from the celebrated 

painter Frederic Edwin Church, rhe artistic 

transaction for which we possess the fullest 

and most direct evidence, reveals that he was 

more interested in the mundane 

considerations of size and cost in adorning 

his home than any supposed content of 

the work. 

An unexpected genre of art, common to 

both the New York and Woodstock 

collections, was marine painting. How are 

we to account for the substantial number of 

seascapes (approximately 10% of the 

collections) occurring in the homes of an 

industrialist whose vision and wealth were 

derived from the continental model of 

American Empire? For most Americans of 

the period, the land rather than the sea made 

the strongest claims upon the national 

imagination; the Railroad, not the Clipper 

Ship, was the dominant symbol of American 

destiny. 51 Formless and shapeless, the ocean, 

with its stark horizontals of sea and sky, did 

not adhere to the aesthetics of "picturesque" 

form. Nor did America's maritime culture, 

embodying the pasr rather than the 

transcendent future, afford a strong 

counterbalance to the frontier thrust of 

national experience. Like fish out of water, 

the Billingses' images of the sea appear to the 

contemporary viewer oddly decontextualized. Arguably, their possession of a 

large number of marine paintings can be 

attributed to the period's conventions of 

collecting (most of the major collections of 

the period feature a sizable percentage of 

marines) or, alternatively, to Julia's nostalgia 

for the summers of her youth spent at the 

New Jersey seashore. 52 As many of the 

formative journeys of Frederick Billings' life 

were by sea, it is also likely that these 

experiences may have provided an incentive 

for the marine collection. Still another likely 

explanation lies in Ishmael's claim in Moby 

Dick that "meditation and water are wedded 

Art a.nd the American Conservation Movement- 7 
Introduction 

forever." For the Romantic imagination, the 

sea symbolized the idea of voyage or 

pilgrimage and the ships, which figure 

prominently in most of the Billingses' 

paintings, the human soul.53 As the 

Reverend Elias Magoon, a spokesman for the 

age, reminded his readers, many of whom 

were landlocked: "Next to mountains, the 

ucean ha:; the greatest affect upon the 

mind."54 

Another category of art common to most 

collections of the high Victorian era was 

narrative genre painting, European as well 

as American.ss Descriptive, moralistic, 

sentimental and literary depictions of 

everyday life were enormously popular during 

the Gilded Age and the Billingses' collection 

was illustrative of this. Victorians preferred 

works of art that could easily be translated 

into words- verbal paintings that described 

places, told stories, and accounted for 

events. According to a recent study of the 

period, 

these canvases narrated, discovered or 

contrived moments, cleansed of 

ambiguity and confusion. Unlike the 

ineffable Rembrandt portrait that 

demands imagination and risk and may 

change in content from day to day as 

variables in the interactive process 

change, these paintings offered little room 

for interpretation. Their statements, 

reflecting a world viewed in terms of 

categories rather than possibilities, were 

easily read and easily discussed.56 

Socially instructive, morally charged, and 

emotionally consoling, these works stressed 

the primacy of subject matter over formal 

invention. The Victorian definition of a good 

picture would have "excluded the spatial 

experiments, questions of perception or the 

reality of flux that increasingly intrigued 

innovative French artists of the 1860s and 

1870s. They expected artists to account for 

a reassuring or a romantic world, not to 

8 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

inquire about the independent possibilities 

of formal elements."57 In a word, they were 

"pictures" before they were "paintings." 

Conceived as narratives of faith and 

renewal, genre paintings spoke in the 

pictorial vernacular of the humble poor. 

Both in New York and Woodstock images of 

pious mothers (Meyer von Bremen), Norman 

and Breton peasams (Alexandre Antigna, 

Edward Moran) slumbering babies (Sophie 

Gengembre Anderson), protagonists of 

literature (John Whetten Ehninger) and 

Plymouth Pilgrims (George Henry 

Boughton) adorned the Parlors, Hallways, 

Libraries and Bedrooms. In the magisterial 

inventory of New York, Boston and 

Philadelphia's Gilded Age homes, Artistic 

Houses, genre paintings constituted about 

fifty percent of the documented collections.58 

In this regard, the Billingses fell slightly below 

the norm, though the works of the genre 

artists represented in their homes were 

among the most commonly collected. 

So-called "Orientalist" paintings were also 

avidly sought by collectors of the period, 

including the Billingses.59 After genre and 

landscape, depictions of the mystery and 

allure of the Middle East and North Africa 

were popular subjects, especially in France, 

England and the United States. While it is 

currently fashionable to subscribe to the 

argument that the vogue for these exotic 

canvases was a function of Imperialism, it is 

unlikely that they were so viewed by 

Americans.60 Rather, like images of Breton 

peasants atoil in the fields, paintings of prei nd us trial Bedouin reminded rootless, 

ahistorical Americans of the origins of the 

human race.61 In addition, scenes of Near 

Eastern folklife, unlike nationalist themes, 

were inherently aesthetic: "Boots, red shirts, 

log cabins, and slouch hats are not national,'' 

claimed a leading American Orientalist 

painter, "they are uncivilized, repelling, 

ugly."62 Like scenes of American Indian life, 

pictures of Arabs may have been inherently 

racist but imperialist ambitions towards 
) 

) 

) 

) 

) 

) 

.J 

..> 

North Africa and the Near East were not part 

of the American agenda during the period 

when th is imagery was most popular. 63 

Representations of Indians, conversely, were 

often imperialist, often nostalgic, and 

frequently racist by today's moral reckoning.64 In America Orientalist paintings most 

likely served as souvenirs of travel to Islamic lands, reminders of exotic places visited and 

sights seen. They also embodied, like 

Barbizon paintings, the visionary appeal of a 

pre-industrial society based on handicraft, 

barter, and primitive modes of travel. 

At the dedication of New York's 

Metropolitan Museum of Art in March of 

1880, an event of which Frederick and Julia 

were aware but did not attend,

65 trustee 

Joseph C. Choate welcomed visitors to the 

institution's "new" home in Central Park with 

a stirring oration: 

Think of it, ye millionaires of many 

markets- what glory may yet be yours, 

if you on

ly listen to our advice, to convert 

pork into porcelain, grain and produce 

into priceless pottery, the rude ores of 

commerce into sculptured marble, and 

railroad shares and mining stocks- things 

which perish without 

the using, and 

which in the next financial panic shall 

surely shrivel like parched scrolls- into 

the glorified canvas of the world's masters, 

that shall adorn these walls for centuries. 

The rage of Wall Street is to hunt the 

philosopher's stone, to convert all baser 

things into gold, which 

is but dross: but 

ours is the higher ambition to convert 

your useless gold into things of living 

beauty that shall be a joy to a whole 

people for a thousand years.66 

It was to people of the status and stature 

of Frederick and Julia Billings that these 

exhortations were addressed. For the nature 

and quality of their response, we must look 

to the collections of art housed in New York 

and Woodstock. 

Introduction 

Endnotes 

1 Mansion Box Al2: Memoirs of Julia Parmly 

Billings, 4. 

2 Anna Jameson, Companion to the Most Celebrated 

P1ivate Galleries of Art in London (London: Saunders 

& Otley, 1844), 383. 

l For a balanced view of the mentality and motives 

of Victorian collectors see W. G. Constable, Art 

Collecting in the United States: An Outline of a History 

(London: Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd., 1964 ). 

~ In his groundbreaking study of the era's foremost 

painter, Frederic Edwin Church, David C. 

Huntington observed: 

Few people today know the story of the role of 

the painted picture in national life during the 

years of Manifest Destiny. Yet it is one of the 

most interesting chapters of our artistic past. 

There have been few moments when it was better 

to be a young painter in this country ... . In that 

golden era of prosperity and cultural nationalism, 

painting in American finally evolved into an 

authentic movement with well-defined aims .... 

The artist was called upon to play a vital role in 

the national life; he could help to unify the 

citizens of all quarters of the land; he could inspire 

patriotism. And he was paid well for his services. 

(David C. Huntington, The Landscapes of Frederic 

Edwin Church: Vision of an American Era [New 

York: George Braziller, 1966), ix). 

5 Harriet Spofford, An Decoration Applied to 

Furniture (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1878), 12. 

6 Clarence Cook, The House Beautiful (New York: 

Scribner, Armstrong & Co., 1878), 49. Frederick 

Billings possessed the 188 l edition of Cook's book 

with an undated inscription on the first leaf in the 

hand of his sister-in-law, Nancy Swift Hitch Billings 

reading: "Frederick Billings with love from his 

Quaker sis

ter." 

7 Dianne Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian 

Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural 

Identity (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 

16. 

8 The best study 

of the influence of Coleridge and 

Ruskin on American Romantic.ism remains Roger 

B. Stein, Jolin Rusl<in and Aesthetic Thought in 

America, 1840-1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard 

Univ. Press, 1967). 

9 Coleridge is credited with having introduced the 

words "selfless" and "aesthetic" into the English 

language. Late in his career he repudiated the ideals 

of Romantic nature worship. In a letter to a friend 

Art and the American Conservation Movement' - 9 
Introduction 

he wrote scornfully, "the vague misty, rather than 

mystic, confusion of God with the World and the 

accompanying nature-worship" as "the trait in 

Wordsworth's poetic works that l most dislike as 

unhealthful and denounce as contagious." Collected 

Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie 

Griggs, Vol. 5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956-

1971), 95. 

10 Richard Holmes, Coleridge (New York: Oxford 

Univ. Press, 1982), 61. 

11 Jane C urtis, Will Curtis and Frank Lieberman, 

The World of George Perkins Marsh, America's First 

Conservationist and Environmentalist (Woodstock, 

Vt.: The Counrryman Press, 1982), 2 7. The authors 

somewhat overenthusiastically credit James Marsh 

with introducing Transcendentalist Philosophy to 

America. fora more balanced assessment of Marsh's 

role see Lcwb S. Feuer, "James Marsh and the Conservative Transcendentalist Philosophy," The New 

England Quarterly 31 (March, 1958), 3-31. 

12 This engraving, a copy of the famous portrait of 

Coleridge (1814, London, National Portrait Gallery) by the American Washington Allston, was 

purchased by subscription in 1853. 

11 lt is important to note that we don't have the 

inventory of the New York City library where the 

writings of Ruskin may have been represented. 

There arc, however, numerous 1:exts by Ralph Waldo 

Emerson in the Woodstock mansion and rhese can 

readily serve as a conduit for many of the inAuential ideas of both Coleridge and Ruskin. The choice 

of "Queen Anne" style for the architecture of the 

Woodstock Mansion ultimately reverts from Henry 

Hudson Holly to Charles Lock Eastlake to John 

Ruskin and his advocacy of the style. A similar 

genealogy can be constructed for the landscape designs of Robert Morris Copeland. 

14 While generally observing the Ruskinian inj unction against the "Old Masters," the Billingses subtly 

subverted it by the display of engravings representing Renaissance masters in their studios and copies 

of Raphael Madonnas. According to the extant 

Inventory of circa 1891, engraved portraits of the 

artists Philippe de Champaigne and Leonardo da Vinci 

hung in the library. Also paired engravings of 

Michaelangelo in His Studio and Raphael in His Stitdio 

hung in the Reception Room and an engraved ver-

{ 

sion of Raphael's Sistine Madonna was in Julia's room. 

Engravings of Raphael's Madonna delta Sedia and 

Madonna with Sleeping Jesus were located in Laura 

Billings' room. All of these nineteenth century engravings are currently in storage in the attic of the 

Mansion, having been removed from their previous 

locations during the present century. 

10 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

15 Macleod, 4-8, argues that the collecting of modern artists, together with the concomitant rejection 

of "Old Masters," was a way fo r Lhc emergent English and, by extension the American, middle classes 

to distinguish themselves from the aristocracy. 

16 John K. Howat, American Paradise: The World of 

the Hudson River School (New York: Harry N. 

Abrams, Inc., 1987), 70. 

17 William l losley, Cole: The Making of an American 

Legend (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 

1996), 173. The collection formed by Elizabech 

Colt, wife of l lartford, Connecticut gun manufacturer Samuel Colt, was willed in toto to the 

Wadsworth Athenaeum where only a small part is 

currently on public view. Like the Billingses' collections, the Colt collection began as a "shrine to 

American nature," and evolved during the 1870s 

and 1880s into a transatlantic dialogue between 

European and American pictures. As with the Billings collection, Elizabeth Colt's only purchase of an 

American work by an artist not living at the time 

was a Thomas Cole (Landscape with a Round Temple, 

c . 1832) which, like the Billingses' three Coles, was 

brokered by Frederic Edwin Church. 

18 George Hitchcock, "The Picturesque Quality of 

Holland," Scribner's Magazine, August 1887, 163. 

19 Hosley, 19 1, notes: "If there is an overarching 

theme to rhe art and architectural patronage of both 

Sam and Elizabelh IColtl, it is their determination 

to infuse their works with a sense of personal biography," an observalion that applies equally to 

Frederick and Julia's Woodstock collection. 

io Thomas Cole, "Essay on American Scenery," 

quoted in Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landsca/)e and Painting 1825-1875 (New York: 

Oxford Univ. Press, 1980), 10. Novak's book is an 

indispensable source for the study of nineteenth century American views of art and nature. 

21 The definitive text here is Novak, Nature and 

Culture, especially the Introduction : "The Nationalist Garden and the Holy Book." 

22 E. L. Magoon, "Scenery and the Mind," in T he 

Home Book of the Picturesque: Or American Scenery, 

Art and Literature (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1852), 

7. 

21 Novak, Nature and Culture, 8. 

H For an excellent essay on this theme see Joshua C. 

Taylor, "The Virtue of American Nature," in America 

as Art (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). 

15 Magoon, 3. 
) 

) 

.) 

...> 

26 A typical view 

is that expressed by William 

Gilpin, Territorial Governor of Colorado, in 1860: 

"To master the geographical portrait of our continent .. . is necessary to every American citizen ... as 

necessary as it is to understand the radical principles 

of the American government over it and of polit ical society ... . The American Republic is predestined to expand and fit itself to the continent" 

(Eleanor Jones Harvey, The Painted Sketch; American Impressions from Nature , 1830-1880, Exhibition 

Catalogue, Dallas Museum of Art [New York: Harry 

N. Abrams, 1998], 20). 

l7 [Samuel R. Wells], How to Beliave: A Pocket 

Manual of Republican Etiquette (New York: 1872), 

quoted in David Scobey, "Anatomy of the Promenade: the Politics of Bourgeois Sociability in Nineteenth-century New York," Social History 17:2 (May, 

1992). 214. 

26 Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional 

Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington D. 

C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, L995), 20. 

29 Cf. W. J. T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1994), 17. 

J() For a classic neo-Marxist account of landscape 

aesthetics in identity formation see Angela Miller, 

"Landscape Taste as an Indicator of Class Identity in 

Antebellum America," in Andrew Hemingway and 

William Vaughan, ed., Art in Bourgeois Societ.y, 

1790-1850 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 

1998), 340-361. Miller is accurate in stressing the 

role of landscape in the formation of northeastern 

cultural nationalism. The South never associated 

itself with "nature" ro rhe same extent as the North, 

which employed the idea of "nature" co its advanrage in the cultural wars preceding the beginning of 

actual hostilities. 

11 Angela Miller, "Landscape Taste," 347. iz See William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: 

Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W. 

W. Norton, 1995), 379- 408. 

JJ Sarah Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist; Art and 

Culture in Gilded Age America (New Haven: Yale 

Univ. Press, 1996), 147. 

34 Asher B. Durand, "Letters on Landscape Painting, 

IV," The Crayon l (14 February, 1855), 98. 

35 George M. Beard, Am.e1icanNervousness. Its Causes 

and Consequences ( 188.1 ), quoted in F. G. Gosling, 

Before Freud: Neurasthenia and tlie American Medical 

Community (Urbana, Ill.: Univ. of Illinois Press, 

1987). 12. 

36 Gosling, 15. 

Introduction 

17 George Perkins Marsh, Man and Natut·e (New 

York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1874 ), 328. This is 

the same passage in which Marsh expresses the opinion rhat "it requires a very generous spirit in a landholder to plant a wood on a farm he expects to sell. 

... But the very fact of having begun a plantation 

would attach the proprietor more strongly to the 

soil for which he had made such a sacrifice." 

38 See Dona Brown, 130

- 135 for the creation of 

"Old Home Week" by the state legislatures of Ver- mont and New Hampshire in order to encourage 

immigrants to return to their place of birth, if only 

for a vacation. Both states underwent drastic depopulation in the decades before and after the Civil 

War. 

w Dona Brown, 153. 

40 George Perkins Marsh, Address Delivered Before 

che Agricultural Society of Rutland Cottncy, September 

30, 1847, quoted in Mark Madison, Landscapes of 

Stewardship: The History of the Marsh-Billings Sire 

(Draft: January 28, 1998). "

1 The Barbizon School of painting flourished during the 1830s to the 1850s and was centered in the 

rural village of Barbizon in the forest of 

Fontainbleau near Paris. The popularity of this 

school of landscape and animal painters has been 

associated with the population flight at the rime 

from the country to the city, the rise of rural nostalgia, and the social insecurities aroused by the Revolution of 1848. The American response to the 

movement was essentially nostalgic and was most 

conspicuous among the elite of Boston and New 

York. 42 For an exhaustive study of the New York gallery 

system see Lois Marie Fink, American Art at the Nineteenth Century Paris Salons (New York: Cambridge 

Univ. Press, 1990), 276- 288. 

43 The most thorough analysis of this complex question is found in Laura L. Meixner, French Painting 

and the Critique of American Society, 1865- 1900 

(New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995). 

H For the best account of the consolations offered 

by Barbizon images see Robert L. Herbert, Barbizon 

Revisited (Boston: Museum of Fine Art, 1962), 64-

68. For American painters at Barbizon see Peter 

Bermingham, American Art in the Barbizon Mood 

(Washington D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 

1975). 

15 In Chapter 3 of Man and Nature, Marsh frequently 

refers to Barbizon and the Forest of Fontainbleau as 

a "stable commonwealth," possessing an enlightened 

ratio of woodlot to plowland. His preference for 

the cultivated over the wild, a sensibility shared, 

Art and the American Conservation Movement- 11 
Introduction 

for example, by Frederick Law Olmsted, is stated at 

rhe outset of Man and Nature, 2-3: "Only for the 

sense of landscape beauty did unaided narure make 

provision. Indeed, the very commonness of this 

source of refined enjoyment seems to have deprived 

it of half its value." 

46 The mid-century French critics Edmond and Jules 

de Goncourt articulated a somewhat less reassuring 

account ofBarbizon painting: "It is when nature is 

condemned to death ... that the human spirit hastens towards nature. From this sincere communion 

has come our masterpieces, the canvases of Troyon, 

Dupre, Rousseau, Francais, Diaz" (Ila Weiss, Poetic 

Landscape: The Art and Experience of Sanford R. 

Gifford [Newark, Univ. of Delaware Press, 1987], 

73). 

47 Cf. Eric Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition 

(New Yurk: CamlniJge Uuiv. Pre~~. 1983) Cur <111 

analysis of this condition. 

48 Meixner, 259. 

49 For Denencourt's invention of "picturesque-promenades" in the Forest of Fonrainbleau see the brilliant and moving work of Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 

1995), 553- 560. Schama somewhat 

overenthusiastically defines Denencourt as "The 

Man Who Invented Hiking," by which he means 

the man who invented the signed trail, the pre-defined itinerary of the romantic promneur. Leaving 

aside the medieval cult of pilgrimage (a pilgrim. is 

half a tourist and a tourist is half a pilgrim), the title 

of first obsessive "hiker" probably belongs as much 

to Alden Partridge of Norwich, Vermont as to any 

European, including Rousseau. As early as 1811, 

according to Laura and Guy Waterman, Partridge 

hiked 76 miles in a single day from Norwich to 

Crawford's in the White Mountains for purposes of 

health and recreation. Laura and Guy \Vatennan, 

Forest and Crag: A History of Hiking, Trail Blazing 

and Adventure in the Northeast Mountains (Boston: 

Appalachian Mountain Club, 1989), 30-31. 

5() For a stunningly brilliant account of the evolution of the idea of the American National Park from 

the arboreal fantasies of Renaissance Germany via 

the Forest of Fontainbleau see Sc ha ma, Chapters 2, 

.3 and 9. 

51 See Roger B. Stein, Seascape and the American 

Imagination (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1975) 

for an account of the role of marine painting in 

American culture. 

52 See the catalogue entry on Henry S. Chase's Dutch 

Pinl<ie Coming to Anchor for a partial insight into 

Frederick Billings' interest in marine painting. 

12 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

53 The relevant studies here are Lorenz Eitner, 'The 

Open Window and the Storm-tossed Boat: An Essay in the Iconography of Romanticism," A1"t Bulletin 37 (December, 1957), 279- 290, and George P. 

Landow, "Shipwrecked and Castaway on the Journey of Life: An Essay Towards a Modern iconography," Revue de litterature comparee 46 (OctoberDecem.ber 1972), 569-596. 

54 Magoon, 8. 

ss Genre painting is best described as the representation of everyday life "usually restricted to those 

made for their own sake rather than for religious, 

moral, or symbolic purpose." James Smith Pierce, 

F1·om Abacus co Zeus: A Handbook of Art History 

(Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1968), 

2.5. Victorian genre painting, however, is an exception, since its purpose is almost always moralistic. 

56 Arnold Lewis, James Turner and Steven 

McQuillin, The Opul.ent Interiors of che Gilded Age 

(New York: Dover Publications, 1987), 26. This 

publication, a repri11t with commentary of the encyclopedic Artistic Houses: Being a Series of Interior 

Views of a number of the Most Beautiful and Cel, 

ebrated Homes in the United States with A Description 

of the An Treasures contained therein, 2 Vols. (New 

York: D. Appleton and Company, 1883-1884), is 

an indispensable study of the collecting habits of 

the Victorians. 

57 • Lewis, Turner and McQuillin., 26. 

58 Lewis, Turner and McQuillin. 

59 "Orientalist" painting is defined as the representation of "subjects from the Near and Middle East, 

that is, from North Africa, Asia Minor and occasionally the Turkish-dominated parts of the Balkan 

Peninsula, all Islamic territories." Gerald M. 

Ackerman, American Orientalists (Paris: ACR Edition, 1994), 6. 

ro The locus classicu.s of the "Orientalist" argument 

is Edward W. Said's Orientctli.sm (New York: Random House, 1979 ). ln this ground breaking study, 

Said claims that all I iterary and pictorial treatments 

of non-Western subjects are either racist or imperialist, or both. Ackerman, 8-9, challenges Said's 

contention, claiming that the motives of Orientalist 

painters were so diverse as to render a blanket condemnation false and meaningless. 

61 See Fink, 196-213, for the meaning of folklife as 

a stage of Darwinian social evolution. 

6i Fink, 212. 
) 

) 

) 

) 

61 Ackerman, 8- 12, discusses meaningfully the distinctions between European and American 

Orientalists, drawing attention to the American preference for landscape over genre. 

64 Apart from the Peter Moran's On rhe Trail in 

Idaho in the Woodstock collection, Frederick also 

owned a George Catlin painting presumably representing Indians. His view of it was expressed quite 

explicitly in a diary entry: "The dreadful Catlin 

picture, glad to get rid of it-gave it to Annie." 

65 Frederick's diary entry for Tuesday, March 30 

reads: 

[In New York C ity] Bright cool day. Julia went 

out first time since coming down. At N. P. 

[Northern Pacific Railroad office] till 5:45 

except called on Gen.I Terry at Sturtevant 

not in- & to tailor & ordered some clothes. 

Metropolitan Museum of Art opened. Pres.t 

Hazen here. Long discussion of Grey of Sup. 

Ct. [Supreme Court] decision yesterday on Rail 

road lines- are affecting proposed telegraph 

contract & Oregon Co. contract. Livingsron 

called & Villard- appointed meeting tomor 

row 3- Another report in papers from Barney 

that Sect. Ind. Con. would not exempt N. P. 

from forfeiture- false. In evening Ehrick 

Rossiter & wife called- & H. H. Sawyer. 

Julia's diary for the same date reads: 

"Laura & I were out in a coupe & chose 2 dresses 

for her at Hearn's-Lucy called-Laura went 

to see the dentist. Henry Sawyer, Ehrick & Mary 

Rossiter called after dinner." 

66 Calvin Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces: 

The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New 

York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1970), 23- 24. 

Thomas Prichard Rossiter, Venice 

(1855 ), MarsJL, Billings-Rockefeller 

Nacional Historical Park. 

Introduction 

Art and the American Conservation Movement - 13 
Part l: Description and Evaluation of the Art Colleaion 

Part I: Description and Evaluation 

of the Art Collection 

The New York Collection 

Any full assessment of this collection 

is compromised by its dispersal during the 

1920s. While it has been possible to trace 

the subsequent provenance of at least e ight 

of the more than eighty paintings in the 1891 

inventory of the Madison Avenue house, it 

is difficult to evaluate the listed works on any 

basis Olher than appraised value. Fortunately, 

one of the three most highly assessed works 

of art from New York, Meyer von Bremen's 

The Pious Mother ($5,000) has been located 

in a private collection. A painting of only 

modest aesthetic or economic value by 

today's critical standards, The Pious Mother 

was, during the Victorian era, a work held in 

the highest estcem.67 According to a recent 

study of the art collections inventoried in the 

nineteenth century publication Artistic 

Houses, the most popular painters of the 

Gilded Age in order of importance were Diaz, 

Bouguereau, Detaille, Corot, Meissonier, 

Schreyer, Merle, Vibert, Fortuny, Madrazo 

and Meyer von Bremen.68 Of these eleven 

artists, five (Diaz, Bouguereau, Corot, Vibert 

and Meyer von Bremen) were represented in 

the Billingses' New York collection. Another 

Billings painting held today in a private 

collection, George Henry Boughton's Return 

of the Mayflower, was assessed at $3,000, and 

would do well to bring that figure in today's 

art market. At the time of the painting's 

acquisition, Boughton was ranked just 

beneath the above listed pantheon of artistic 

luminaries, though today he represents little 

more than a footnote in art history. In their 

analysis of the paintings in the "domestic 

museum" as documented by Artistic Houses, 

Lewis, Turner and McQuillin have 

determined that roughly fifty to sixty percent 

14 -Art and the American Conservation Movement 

of the paintings in these famous collections 

were genre scenes, thirty percent landscapes 

(u( which about twenty percent were 

American), ten percent Orientalist paintings, 

with the remainder historical and literary 

scenes.69 Also during the 1870s and 1880s 

srill-lifes had ceased to be popular and 

portraits were largely of family members, 

while the vogue for acquiring "Old Masters" 

did not occur with regularity until the 1890s 

when the Billingses were no longer active in 

tbe art market.70 

According to the 1891 inventory the 

Billingses' New York collection, while 

conforming to the canon of preferred artisLs, 

was weighted more heavily towards 

landscape than either genre or Orientalist 

paintings. Of the thirty oil paintings located 

in the Parlor, for example, fourteen were 

landscapes (of which five were American 

including Church's Evening in the Tropics), 

eleven were genre and five were 

"Orientalist." While the extant Orientalist 

paintings in Woodstock are of a chastened 

picturesque landscape variety, the existence 

of Jean-Leon Gerome's Turkish Interior and 

Frederick Arthur Bridgman's (a specialist in 

sensuous "Odalisques") Turkish Girl of 

Constantinople in the Parlor may have been 

larger, figural compositions. 

The Sitting Room, Smoking Room and 

Hall, the other privileged sites in the house 

for the display of art, exhibited roughly the 

same proportion of landscapes to genre and 

"Orientalism."71 What can be inferred from 

the inventory of the New York collection is 

that Frederick's and Julia's taste largely 

conformed with that of their social and 

economic peers. Despite a general preference 

for landscape over genre and "Orientalism," 

they collected the fashionable artists of the 
) 

) 

) 

.. .) 

moment. In short, there is no reason to 

believe that the Billingses' New York 

collection was anything but conventional. 

Driven by the market skills of New York's 

newly emergent art dealers, the collection 

featured those artists most heavily promoted 

by them. In other instances, however, the 

Billingses reverted to the older practice of 

dealing directly with artists. 

One episode-indeed, the most direct 

extant evidence- that casts considerable 

light upon Frederick Billings' aesthetic 

sensibility is contained in an exchange of 

letters with the painter Frederic Edwin 

Church. In negotiating the commission for 

Evening in the Tropics, the painter set forth 

the conditions of purchase according to the 

size of canvas: "Before commencing your 

picture I would like to have all the details 

fairly understood between us . ... A 3 foot 

canvas makes a capital size, and l should 

expect to do myself justice on such a one. 

At the same time a large canvas gives greater 

scope, allows of a richer c01nposition and 

more striking effects." Church listed his prices 

at $1,000 for a length of two feet, $2,000 for 

three feet, and $3,000 for four feet. In 

conclusion he noted: "It will give me pleasure 

to take off 25 per ct from the regular price."72 

In a letter of response written one week later 

Frederick advised: "l have heard from Mrs. 

Billings and I think our house will stand a 

picture of 4 feet-only don't make the frame 

very big. So the order is for a four feet 

picture. The more I can have of you the 

better."73 When the painting was delivered 

in February of 1881, Frederick noted in his 

diary: "Julia saw Church picture-& advised 

him [Church] I thought too much left for 

imagination." Historians have noted that 

Church was loosening his style at this 

moment, possibly in response to criticism of 

the detailed particularism of his earlier 

work. ~ As one critic noted of Evening in the 

Tropics (which the artist borrowed from 

Billings in January of 1882 to display i.n his 

New York studio): 

Part I: Description and Evaluation of the Art Collection 

Church has just finished another of his 

famous South American scenes. . .. He 

paints the palmetto and the fern with as 

much pains as Pallaijuolo of old outlined 

the threads of gold filigree .... But is Mr. 

Church abandoning these methods for 

broader ones? There is evidence of it 

certainly, in this, his latest work. It may 

be an indifference which is merely 

temporary .... We think the grandeur 

and magnificence of the scene has lost 

little or nothing. 75 

Apparently Frederick Billings, no longer 

in sympathy with evolving stylistic 

transformations, exhibited a preference for 

older American aesthetic traditions, which 

stressed the primacy of subject matter and a 

correspond ing distrust of art1st1c 

manipulation. The "painterly" aesthetic 

license that he see1ningly accorded to French 

Barbizon painters, he was unwilling to 

concede to the last great painter of the 

Hudson River School. This may also explain 

why he never acquired a landscape by George 

Inness, the most popular Barbizon-inspired 

American painter of the era. ln addition, 

Billings surely would have rejected Inness' 

radical claim that "a work of art does not 

appeal to the intellect. It does not appeal to 

the moral sense. Its aim is not to instruct, 

not edify, but to awaken an emotion."76 Still 

less would there have been any sympathy 

with Europe's emergent "Aesthetic 

Movement," and the conviction (as 

expressed by Whistler) that art was not "the 

handmaiden of religion, exponent of duty, 

servant of fact or pioneer of morality."77 

Nowhere in the discourse about the 

purchase of Evening in the Tropics is there any 

mention of subject matter, giving rise to 

suspicion of the claim that the painting held 

biographical meaning for Frederick Billings. 78 

As far as the evidence permits, 

considerations of decor and scale took 

precedence over theme. The fact that 

Church, six years later, completed a large 

Art and the American Conservation Movement - 15 
Pare I: Description and Evaluation of the Art Collection 

painting of nearly identical dimensions 

en.titled Morning in the Tropics (National 

Gallery of Art, Washington D. C.) suggests 

that tropics rather than tragedies, contrasts 

rather than catastrophies, were the artist's 

principal concern. The personal meanings 

that Frederick might have imposed upon the 

work remain unknown. 

Any final assessment of the Billingses' 

New York collection must acknowledge the 

fact that neither the Madison Avenue home 

nor its contents were included in the 

magisterial compendia compiled and 

pub! ished by Edward Strahan, under the 

nom~de~plume" Earl Shinn, during the 1880s. 

Neither the opulent publication Artistic 

Houses, nor Shinn's exhaustive catalogue of 

art collections entitled The Art Treasures of 

America: Being the Choicest Works of Art in 

the Public and Private Collections of North 

America (Philadelphia: G. Barrie, c. 1880) 

included the Billingses' house. 79 These 

inventories do, however, permit us to 

position the Billingses' holdings squarely 

within the parameters of Victorian collecting. 

In the words of a recent student of this 

seminal text: "Shin.n's study is a monument 

to the astonishing uniformity of American 

taste in the era after the Civil War, 

particularly to the devotion to French 

Academic and Barbizon painting."80 

One suggestive reference to Frederick 

Billings' interest in art-probably his closest 

brush with New York's cultural elite- is 

found in George William Sheldon's book 

Recent Ideals of American Art, published in 

1888. In this text the author lists Frederick, 

together with such luminaries as W. T. 

Walters, Charles A. Dana, Cornelius H. 

Vanderbilt, Henry G. Marquand, H. 0. 

Havermayer and John Taylor Johnston, as a 

subscriber to the American Art Association 

prizes for 1884. According co this account, 

Frederick donated a considerable sum of 

money for the purchase of American art as a 

means of supporting the national culture 

against the increasing hegemony of foreign, 

16- Art and the American Conservation Movement 

especially French, art.81 The passage by 

Congress in 1883 of a thirty percent duty on 

imported works of art- the "only country in 

the civilized world" to undertake this actionpresumab l y was intended to support 

American artists against foreigners, as yet 

another means of asserting the slogan "Buy 

American." In 1884 the patriotic press 

editorialized against the "demoralization of 

art," and the tendency to ''adore whatever is 

foreign." Decrying the "stupidly unpatriotic 

. . . purchases ... made in an ignorant and 

contemptible spiri.t" by American 

millionaires "eager to buy foreign trash 

because it is foreign," the press described, by 

way of the most egregious example, the 

gallery of William H. Vanderbilt as a 

"shoddy, show~shop of unlimited wealth."82 

Like many of their peers, Frederick's and 

Julia's efforts on behalf of American artists 

could not always be reconciled with their 

personal collecting habits, especially when 

it came to decorating the New York home. 

Fashion and respectability competed with 

cultural chauvinism in providing the motive 

force for the urban collection. Woodstock, 

in contrast, came to serve as the site of the 

Billingses' cultural nationalism. 

The Woodstock Collection 

The existence of an 1891 inventory of 

the paintings and engravings in the 

Woodstock mansion indicates that the 

current location of works of art departs 

significantly from their display over a century 

ago. The look and "feel" of the ensemble, 

however, preserves to a considerable degree 

the "aura" of the high Victorian ambiance. 

Based upon surv1vmg photographic 

evidence, the Rockefellers' decorator 

reinstalled artworks during the 1950s in 

broad conformity with the original 

dispositions. Multi-tiered groupings of 

paintings in the parlor, library and hallway, 

for example, correspond with their known 

or suspected locations, while the Reception 
'"\ 

) 

) 

Room, Dining Room and second story Hall 

have been completely re~hung. That stated, 

almost totally absent are the myriad of 

engravings that once consorted in 

promiscuous array with oil paintings upon 

the mansion's walls. Consigned to storage 

in the attic at some time during the 

twentieth century, graphic images no longer 

discourse with the meanings ascribed to the 

oil paintings. As such, it is difficult to discern 

fully how the collection worked during the 

lifetimes of Frederick and Julia. An attempt 

will be made , however, to reconstitute the 

collection on paper, restoring some of the 

original iconographic context to the whole. 

If credence can be placed in the verbal 

exhortations of Lyman Beecher's daughters 

Catherine and Harriet (a copy of whose 

influential book The American Woman's 

Home [1869) was formerly in the Mansion 

library), engravings, copiously d isplayed 

throughout the home, were though t to be 

especially efficacious in the education of 

children: 

Besides the chromos, which when well 

selected and of the best class, give the 

charm of color which belongs to 

expensive paintings, there are engravings 

which finely reproduce much of the real 

spirit and beauty of the celebrated 

pictures of the world. The educating 

influence of these works of art can hardly 

be overestimated. Surrounded by such 

suggestions of the beautiful, and such 

reminders of history and art, children are 

constantly trained to correctness of taste 

and refinement of thought, and 

stimulated-sometimes to efforts of 

artistic imitation, always to the eager and 

intelligent inquiry about the scenes, the 

places, the incidents represented.83 

The presence of numerous graphic 

images in almost every room and hallway of 

the Woodstock mansion, as over and against 

their near total absence (according to the 

Part 1: Description and Evaluation of the Art Collection 

1891 inventory) from the New York home, 

intimates something of the divergent roles 

art was intended to play in the respective 

residences. 

The difficulty of accurate historical 

reconstruction can be appreciated by the 

knowledge that the only American high 

Victorian collection in existence that has not 

been substantia ll y altered over time is the 

art gallery of Ve rmont's St. Johnsbury 

Athenaeum, Horace Fairbank's remarkable 

monument to civic paternalism. Frederic 

Edwin Church's Ohma, a New York State 

Historic Site, comes close, but the majority 

of the artworks there are by Church himself 

and the whole functions more as an artist's 

collection than a representative private 

collection of the era.84 Jay Gould's Lyndhur:st 

(Tarrytown, New York) and the E. B. Crocker 

Art Museum (Sacramento, Californ ia) 

preserve the look of period galleries, but 

both have been significantly transformed in 

terms of collections, display and furnishings. 

The Arnot Museum (Elmira, New York), 

George Washington Va nderbilt's Biltmore 

(Asheville, North Carolina), Isabella Stewart 

Gardner's Fenway Court (Boston, 

Massachusetts) and the Henry Clay Frick 

Gallery (New York) are substantially intact 

house museums with impressive "Old Master'' 

collections, but all belong to the aesthetic 

ethos of the turn of the century rather than 

the high Victorian era.85 

Positioned within its current material 

context, and despite the fact that it no longer 

appears in its exact nineteenth century 

configuration, the Woodstock collection 

represents a remarkably intact repository of 

Victorian visual culture. Both the objects in 

the collection and the manner in which they 

are displayed resonate with the evidence 

afforded by such compendia of Victoriana 

as the publication Artistic Houses. For all of 

the alterations to which the Woodstock 

mansion has been subjected over time, the 

building, its furnishings and artworks retain 

the "aura" of a high Victorian residence. It 

Art and the American Conservation Movemeni-17 
Part I: Description and Evaluation of the Art Collection 

is important to reiterate that nowhere else 

can a private collection of artworks of this 

character and quality be experienced in such 

a authentic material context. The 

Rockefeller additions to the Billingses' legacy 

honor, in large measure, the spirit of the 

Gilded Age without resort to pedantry or 

archaeology. 

A-:; wid1 the great urball arl cullecliu11-:; 

of the period, the Victorians exhibited an 

insatiable curiosity about the homes and 

possessions of the rural gentry. The Woodstock Mansion, however, was not listed in 

the lavishly documented 1886 publication, 

Artistic Country-Seats: Types of Recent 

American Villa and Cottage Architecture.86 

While there might be disagreement about 

how far one should live from New York City, 

there was little dispute about doing so. As 

bluntly stated by N. Parker Willis in The 

Home Book of the Pictuusque: "Industry, 

necessity or vice, could alone prefer a house 

in a 'block,' among disturbances and gutters, 

to a home unencroached upon amid fresh 

air and gardens. Taste, study and luxury ... 

are about removing to the country."87 

It is a common truth of Victorian studies 

that the "Home" was one of the period's most 

charged symbols, "a web of ideas, objects and 

images that was powerful partly because it 

seemed so basic, even mundane."88 The twin 

towers of Victorian domesticity, "Culture" 

and "Comfort," were accommodated within 

the "Heavenly Home," which served as a 

bulwark, among other things, against 

"national and soc ial disasters, moral and 

financial evlls."89 According to Katherine 

Grier, the Hallway and the Parlor were the 

most important spaces in the Victorian 

household and the domestic goal was to 

create "a comfortable theater for middle class 

self-presentation."90 This was achieved at 

Woodstock by "theatricalizing" the Hallway 

as a pictorial prologue to the "social 

geography" of the Parlor. In the discourse 

between these domestic galleries was 

installed the Billingses' "shrine to American 

18 - Art and the American Conservation Movemenr 

nature."91 

The Woodstock mansion, as over and 

against New York, contained a much larger 

ratio of landscapes to genre and Orientalist 

paintings. The Parlor, for example, exhibited 

sixteen landscapes, seven ge nre and six 

Orientalist works. Among the landscapes, 

all but possibly one92 were by American 

artbl-:;, i11dudi11g Biersladl, Gifford, Cule a11J 

Kensett. By way of comparison, landscapes 

comprised only half of the paintings 

displayed in the Parlor of the New York house 

and of this number only a third were by 

American artists. Moreover, in New York 

the presence (in terms of both scale and 

value) of fashionable French Academic and 

Barbizon painters far ove rshadowed the 

Americans. Only Frederic Edwin Church's 

Evening in the Tropics (valued at $3 ,000 as 

against the $5,000 valuation accorded to 

Gerome, Meyer von Bremen, and 

Bouguereau and $4,000 for the Dusseldorf 

master, Aschenbach) could be said to rival 

in scale, value and critical esteem the work 

of the European painters. A similar pattern 

emerges when the Hallways at New York and 

Woodstock-always important sites for the 

display of artworks- are compared. In New 

York the ratio of landscapes to genre and 

Orientalist paintings was ten to seven to 

three. At Woodstock there were six 

landscapes, one genre painting and no 

Orientalist works. In New York all of the 

paintings in the Hallway were European or 

Near Eastern views with the exception of a 

canvas by A lexander Wyant entitled 

Adirondack Scenery (presently unlocated); at 

Woodstock, the Hallway comained such 

canonic American scenes as Mount Hood by 

William Keith, Sunset in the Yosemite by 

William Bradford and Niagara by Thomas 

Cole. As the first paintings encountered, the 

large publicly-scaled canvases of the 

American West, together with the smaller 

view of Niagara Falls, enjoyed pride of place, 

and functioned as an introduction to the 

wider collection. According to publicist 
) 

) 

..) 

J 

Samuel Bowles, an author much respected 

by Billings, Yosemite Valley and Mount 

Hood represented the Alpha and the Omega 

of western landscape scenery. "It is hard 

indeed to imagine a more magnificent snow 

mountain," Bowles ejaculated. "Mount 

Hood offers more of natural beauty and 

wonder to interest and excite the traveler 

than any other single journey or scene which 

the Pacific Coast presents, except the Yo 

Semite Valley. That must, of course, stand 

first, unrivaled and unapproachable. But to 

this [Mount Hood] I give the second place."93 

In his study of nineteenth century 

material culture Kenneth Ames has argued 

that the front Hall in Victorian mansions was 

a site of "first impressions" (and often the 

cause of lasting impressions), encoding the 

meanings to be ascribed to the household as 

a whole. 94 As such the impact of this 

exceptional American landscape gallery 

upon a visitor to Woodstock would have 

been as dramatically staged and inscriptive 

of intended meaning at the time as it is today. 

Projecting large scale canvases of an 

American waterfal I (Niagara), a Valley 

(Yosemite) and a mountain (Mount Hood), 

the Hallway expressed the idea of Creation 

and its natural agents. Whether formed by 

gradual erosion or catastrophic uplift, the 

land could be assimilated to the divine 

through art and its impact on the human 

imagination. 

From this sampling, it is possible to 

conclude that the New York collection was, 

as already noted, largely conventional in 

terms of the collecting practices of New 

Yorkers, while the Woodstock collection was 

informed by an emphatic American 

inflection. This partially accords with the 

practices of other New England rural 

collectors like Robbins Battell of Norfolk, 

Connecticut, whose picture gallery 

contained "a veritable atlas of northeastern 

scenery, from Lake George and the Catskills 

to the White Mountains," to Horace 

Fairbanks of St. Johnsbury, Vermont who 

Part I: Description and Evaluation of the Art Collection 

built his collection around Albert Bierstadr's 

gigantic Domes of the Yosemite.95 In short, for 

Victorians there was a marked difference 

between the city and the country. Even the 

transfer of a handful of Barbizon landscapes 

from New York to Woodstock by the 

Rockefellers did not substantially alter the 

equation in the American-European pictorial 

dialogue. 

At this juncture, it is important to 

reiterate that the New York arr world was 

strongly divided, during the Billingses' careers 

as collectors during the late 1870s and 1880s, 

over the issue of patronage of European 

versus American works. 96 As art critic 

George W Sheldon sarcastically explained, 

New York patrons were "generally supposed 

to subscribe to the creed the first and front 

article of which is 'I believe in the 

transcendent excellence of Parisian Art."'97 

"Such sentiments," states Linda Skalet, "left 

the American artist with few customers for 

his work. The very rich were looking for ... 

the most popular European artists, and the 

not so rich . . . preferred a second or third 

rate or even a forged Corot, Meissonier, 

Schreyer, Fortuny, Daubigny or Dupre to the 

work of the best American artists of the 

day."98 Alongside a handful of like-minded 

patrons (Thomas B. Clarke, Henry T. 

Chapman, Samuel T. Shaw) Frederick and 

Julia bucked the tide of urban fashion, 

locating, however, the majority of their 

American paintings in Woodstock. 

The present grouping of marine paintings 

in the Reception Room (also known as the 

Prayer Room) does not reflect the original 

disposition of artworks at the time of 

Frederick and Julia.99 In lieu of the current 

maritime gallery, the room was hung 

exclusively with engravings, all presently 

exiled to storage. According to the 1891 

inventory, the thematic arrangement was 

paired or contrasted graphic images. Often 

unintended by the artists, but united by 

collectors, these "contrasts" were central to 

the Victorian habits of mind. Prominent in 

An and the American Conservation Movement - 19 
Part I: Description and Evaluation of the Art Collection 

the Reception Room, for example, were 

identically framed engravings of two wellknown nineteenth century French paintings: 

Michelangelo in His Studio and Raphael in I-lis 

Studio. 100 For the Victorians, images of the 

two supreme masters of the Renaissance 

symbolized the dichotomy between 

Romanticism and Classicism, imagination 

and intellect, and, curiously enough for 

Americans, Protestantism and 

Catholicism. 101 The historic figures of 

Michelangelo and Raphael were capable of 

denoting almost any dualism lodged in the 

Victorian imagination and, like all dyadic 

formulations (North/South , Man/Woman, 

Nature/Culture etc.) privileged the first over 

the second term. A second "contrast," again 

unintended by the artists, was provided by 

engraved copies of two of the most celebrated 

American landscapes of the nineteenth 

century: Albert Biersradt's The Roci<.y 

Mountains: Landers' Peal<. (1863, New York, 

The Metropolltan Museum of Art) and 

Frederic Edwin Church's The Heart of the 

Andes ( 1859, New York, The Metropolitan 

Museum of Art). Similar in size (c. 20" x 

30") and almost identically framed, the two 

prints were surely intended to reconvene the 

celebrated pairing of the two epically scaled 

six by ten foot canvases that were exhibited 

face to face at the 1864 New York 

Metropolitan Fair for the United States 

Sanitary Commission (a Civil War forerunner 

of the Red Cross). The fact that Julia was a 

member of the Executive Committee for the 

Commission underscores the significance of 

these images to the Billingses. t

0 2 For 

American critics of the time, as well as for 

most citizens, the juxtaposed views of South 

America and the American West delineated 

the two major axes of national experience, 

North/South and East/West. Ideas ranging 

from sectional rivalries to the Monroe 

Doctrine to Manifest Destiny were 

continuously associated with these views of 

an unspoiled New World Eden. 

Similar observations can be made with 

20 - Arc and the American Consernation Movement 

respect to the current disposition of objects 

in the Dining Room. In lieu of the 

Rockefeller display of ornamental china, the 

Billingses, according to the inventory, had 

installed a number of large steel engravings 

after paintings by the celebrated English artist 

Sir Edwin Landseer. One of the most popular 

and representative figures of the Victorian 

era, Lan<lseer (the Walter Scott of painting) 

specialized in animal pictures and views of 

the Scottish Highlands. In addition he was 

a favorite of John Ruskin, who praised 

Landseer's The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner 

(183 7, London, Victoria and Albert 

Museum) as "one of the most perfect poems 

or pictures ... which modern times have 

seen."10J The presence of an engraved copy 

of a self-portrait of the artist with his 

signature dogs (The Connoisseurs), together 

with an engraving of the French "animaliste" 

Rosa Bonheur (engagingly entitled Rosa 

Bonheur with a Steer after a painting by the 

Frenchman Edouard Dubufe), indicates that 

the Dining Room was designated as a pictorial 

sanctuary for animal art and artists. These 

identically framed images, deployed as 

pendants by the Billingses, pay homage to 

the best-known and most beloved animal 

painters of the nineteenth century. Male and 

female, English and French, the two artists 

were inextricably linked in the imagination 

of period as the creators of the most familiar 

household icons. 

As well as the portraits of animal artists, 

another famous pairing, this time solely of 

animal protagonists, was displayed in the 

Dining Room. Elegantly framed in identical 

settings, Sir Edwin Landseer's much admired 

portraits of cattle and deer, anthropomorphically rendered as nuclear families, 

hung as opposed visions of the domestic and 

the wild. While the image of Highland cattle 

might best be understood in relation to the 

presence of the Scotsman George Aitken as 

farm manager, the engravings of deer are less 

comprehensible since Frederick had little 

known interest in hunting. 104 Once again the 
) 

) 

) 

J 

.J 

Victorian delight in contrasts (domestic 

versus wild) doubtless played a role in the 

selection of images for the Dining Room, 

though the nutritional references (as well as 

the near total eclipse of Landseer's and Rosa 

Bonheur's reputations) have made the 

engravings less palatable to modern 

sensibilities. 105 

A recent and remarkable study of 

Victorian material culture by Kenneth L. 

Ames, entitled Death in the Dining Room, 

interrogates "the iconography of dining" as 

embodied in furn ishings and artworks of the 

period. 106 Noting that the Victorians were 

careful to provide each room of a house with 

a discrete function whose purpose was both 

"enabled and articulated by the furnishings," 

Ames argues that the "pre<l::irory imp1ilse" 

was the dominant theme of period Dining 

Rooms.107 Images of game, the hunt, and, ro 

a far lesser extent, domestic animals 

abounded on sideboards and in graphic 

images on the walls. "However else these 

[artifactsl may be interpreted," Ames 

concludes, 

the continuing rape of the landscape, the 

unthinking slaughter of creatures and 

extermination of species, and the short 

sighted consumption of nonrenewable 

resources, in short, the consistent 

elevation of economic and stereotypical 

masculine values above all others were 

all grounded in a predatory mentality. 

Second, this predatory mentality was 

incorporated into a social structure and 

a culture that allowed powerful people 

to prey, not only on the animal world, 

but on members of their own species. 

Men were still hunters, but their predatory 

activity rook place within the allegedly 

civilized world of business, industry and 

national cxpansion. w8 

While these allegations may be 

overstated with regard to Frederick Billings 

(the sideboard is ornamental rather than 

Parr I: Description and Evaluation of the Art Collection 

figurative), they do serve to contextualize 

the animal imagery of the Dining Room 

within the broader ethos of the historical 

period. Eschewing the masculine 

iconography of the hunr (still lifes of dead 

game) featured in many Dining Rooms of the 

period, the Billingses preferred the more 

benign and sentimental imagery of 

humanized, family oriented, animal life. 

Whatever the reason for the removal of 

the majority of the Landseer and Bonheur 

prints co the attic du ring the twentieth 

century, the substitution of the ornamental 

decor of china for images of herbivorous 

ungulates denotes a dramatic shift of 

sensibility. Hunting scenes engraved after 

Landseer paintings were also displayed in the 

Music Room ;rnd the California Room, 

providing further evidence of the popularity 

of the English painter, wh.o, for better and 

worse, was the most frequently represented 

artist in the Woodstock collection. 

Comparison of the New York 

and Woodstock Collections 

The major conclusion to be drawn from 

a comparison of the New York and 

Woodstock collections is the relative 

conventionality of both, the major differences 

being of degree rather than kind. The city 

collection was numerically, and no doubt 

aesthetically, dominated by European artists 

while Woodsrock possessed a more clearly 

defined American inflection. Of the thirtyrwo paintings in the Madison Avenue Parlor, 

for example, only nine were by Americans, 

and of these, Sophie Gengembre Anderson, 

Frank Waller and Frederick Arthur Bridgman 

were expatriate artists living mostly abroad 

and working in the academic Salon manner. 

At Woodstock the Hall and Parlor were 

given over largely to American landscapes, 

Frederick's and Julia's personal "shrine to 

American nature." 

The Billingses' major activity as collectors 

fell between 1870, when they first began 

An and the American Conservation Movement- 21 
Pan 1: Description and Evaluation of the Art Collection 

v1s1t111g New York galleries and artists' 

studios, and about 1891, the dare of the last 

entry in Julia's diary concerning the 

acquisition of art. As recent studies have 

demonstrated, the year 1866 was the high 

water mark for the national school in the art 

market. Prices paid for Hudson River School 

paintings, as manifestations of patriotism for 

the redeemed Unio11, read1eJ Llic:ir apogc:c: 

and began an almost immediate decline. 109 

An art critic, writing for Putnam's Magazine 

in 1869, noted: "Ten years back Mr. Durand's 

pictures were considered models of landscape 

an .... But younger artists, of the new school 

with which he had no sympathy, crowded him 

out of public favor. People grew tired of his 

everlasting moonlight scenes, his very green 

forests and meadows ... ". 110 A decade later 

the critic S. G. W Benjamin delivered the 

coup de grace: 

If there has been a fault in this school of 

American landscape art, it has been, 

perhaps, in endeavoring to get coo much 

in a picture, in trying to be too literal; so 

chat the great attention given to the 

details had excited wonder rather than 

stimulated the imagination, and had 

marred the impression of general effect 

which should be the chief idea in a work 

of art. 111 

Recalling Billings' reaction of 1881 to 

Church's Evening in tlte T-ropics, "I thought 

too much left for imagination," it is likely 

that Frederick was not in the vanguard of 

changing aesthetic attitudes. Rather, in art 

he seemed to prefer the older traditions of 

American realism, as expressed by such likem inded cultural figures as John Ruskin and 

Asher Durand who advocated letting "nature 

paint the better part of the picture."112 

The Billingses' careers as collectors 

spanned the great historical and cultural shift 

in sensibility that occurred during the decade 

of the 1870s. The modern art historian 

Patricia Hills has described this sea change 

22 -Art and t11e American Conservation Movement 

in the art world as a move 

from a moralizing, socially concerned 

ethos of the 1860s to the abstract and 

materialist amorality that characterized 

the pursuit of success and dominated the 

body politic in the late 1870s. Thus, the 

critically praised and popularly admired 

anecdotal genre painting of the Civil 

War and early Reconstruction era ... 

was replaced by art-for-art's-sake painting 

divorced from morality or didactic 

purpose. The new an, inspired by French 

painting, emphasized tonal values rather 

than moral values, loose, spontaneous, 

and impressionistic brushwork rather 

than meticulous attention to detail ... 

and cosmopolitan holiday subject matter 

rather than American regional subjects. 

ln short, the sophisticated tourist's 

detached curiosity ... of exotic nomads 

in the Middle East replaced the moralist's 

ideal of social justice and community.' 13 

If any meaningful generalization about 

the Billingses' collecting habits can be drawn 

from this definition, it is that the New York 

collection is best characterized by the latter 

half of Hills' equation, and Woodstock by 

the older values. ln point of fact, no such 

strict formulation is entirely satisfactory as 

the Billingses' cultural practices fall on both 

sides of the cultural divide and at times were 

both capricious and idiosyncratic. 

On the basis of existing evidence, 

however, it seems likely that the Woodstock 

collection, with its emphasis upon American 

landscapes, Landseer prints, humble genre, 

and a dusting of Orientalist fantasies, denoted 

personal and rural rather than metropolitan 

values. A world of make-believe, with only 

a few storm clouds on the horizon, the 

Woodstock coltection spoke in order of 

importance to religion, family, the American 

land, rural life in France and the Scottish 

Highlands, the romance of Italy, life at sea, 

the mystery of the Middle East, and the piety 

and nobility of the poor. The work of artist-
} 

j 

relatives like Thomas Pritchard Rossiter and 

mementos of places visited and books read 

completed the picture gallery. A virtual 

"memory palace" of their life and aspiration, 

the Woodstock collection provided a model 

of one family's world view. 114 Rising above 

these assorted images was the overarching 

theme of homage to nature, a nature restored 

pictorially to prelapsarian innocence and 

often sited in the American West. Beyond 

the mansion walls lay the actual moral and 

cultural landscape of the estate, inspired by 

the ideals of stewardship articulated by 

George Perkins Marsh, and materially shaped 

by painted images of an imagined world of 

possibility. 

One of the Billingses' oldest and most 

cherished acquaintances was the Hartford 

clergyman Horace Bushnell. A frequent 

visitor to Woodstock, Bushnell and Frederick 

had been instrumental in founding the 

University of California at Berkeley, the 

name of the site having been chosen by 

Billings. Among the several books by 

Bushnell in the Mansion library is Christian 

Nurture, one of the most influential texts of 

the Victorian era. 115 l n his argument, one of 

the strongest articulations of the emergent 

cult of domesticity, Bushnell called for the 

home to "become the church of childhood, 

the table and hearth a holy rite, and life an 

element of saving power." 116 Drawing 

heavily upon the architectural theories of 

John Ruskin, Bushnell professed that good 

homes made good people, insisting as never 

before upon the home as a site of salvation. 117 

ln the light of this domestic equation, 

reiterated by numerous writers of the era on 

the nexus between architecture and morality, 

it is tempting to interpret the Woodstock 

mansion, together with its furnishings and 

surroundings, as both literally and figuratively 

a "moral landscape." In this connection the 

spaces of the home, especially the Hall and 

the Parlor, can be viewed as the vestibule 

and nave of a domestic church, while the 

landscape paintings-"the shrine to 

Part I: Description and Evaluation of tlie Art Collection 

American nature''- can be understood as 

visual synecdoches for stained glass windows. 

Moving beyond the paradis artificiel of the 

mansion into the pastoral gardens of the 

estate, the bucolic landscape of the farm and 

ultimately to the forest plantation- the 

world of existential agency- one encounters 

the paysage moralise, the material realization 

of those painted vehicles of light in the 

Billingses' world of art. 

The Roles of Julia and Frederick Billings 

in the Formation of the Collections 

In her insightful analysis of the 

cultural practices of Victorians, Dianne 

Sachko Macleod has produced an anatomy 

of art collecting into which the Billingses fit 

with few apparent deviations. 118 Her findings 

are especially helpful in understanding the 

character and quality of the Billingses' 

collections and the respective roles of Julia 

and Frederick in their formation. Rejecting 

the conventional belief that the Victorian 

middle-class was essentially "philistine" in its 

attitudes towards art, Macleod has sought to 

understand their collecting habits as a 

function of emergent middle class identity 

formation. The preference for modern 

landscapes and a corresponding avoidance 

of "Old Masters," for example, reflects not 

only the mandates of John Ruskin, but a 

strategy for circumventing problems of 

"connoisseurship." Acquiring the work of 

living artists not only protected the buyer 

from forgeries and misattributions, but 

enabled dealers to issue certificates of 

authenric ity. 119 Similarly, a penchant for 

pictorial realism over aestheticism and 

narrative over "art for art's sake" is best 

understood as "another achievement of the 

progressive ideal." "Finish as an aesthetic 

element," writes Macleod, "signaled tangible 

evidence of painstaking labor, pride in the 

work ethic, and corroboration of money well 

spent."120 

Along related lines, the subordinate role 

Art and the American Conservation Movement - 23 
Pan 1: Description and Evaluation of the Art Collection 

of women to men in collecting during the 

Victorian period is explained by their 

economic status of having "little control over 

the ir personal incomes," and therefore 

"women did not conduct the financia l 

transactions recorded in artists' or dealers' 

account books." "It is men," Mcleod states, 

"who dominated the field," a conclusion that 

broadly characterizes the practices of the 

Billingses. 121 

This is not to suggest, however, that Julia 

lacked artistic culture. Initially, at least, she 

was exposed to both the New York and 

European art worlds well before Frederick. 122 

Julia's mother Anna Maria Parmly (nee Valk 

Smith) was a friend of the eminent British 

art historian Anna Jameson whom they visited 

in London during a trip to Europe in 1854-

1855. In her memoirs Julia, who was twenty 

at the time, referred to Mrs. Jameson as 

"blond and stout, a charming ta lker and a 

superior art critic."m Mother and daughter 

spent the winter of 1854 in Paris in lodgings 

in the Place Vendome in order to be near an 

older daughte r, Anna Ehrick, who had 

married the American painter Thomas 

Pritchard Rossiter. 124 Dividing their time 

between social events, attendance at the 

opera and a visit to Versailles, the fountains 

of which Julia described as "somewhat like 

those of the Saint Louis fa ir," Anna Maria 

arranged to have her daughters presented to 

the Empress Eugenie. 125 This occasion 

produced some consternation as Anna Ehrick 

did not have a suitable dress for the event. 

In her Memoirs Julia, playing the role of 

intercessor cum art critic, observed somewhat 

archly: "I begged it [a ballroom dress] for 

her. She could not have afforded it herself, 

as Rossiter, because of his aspirations for high 

art, was not earning much at portraiture in 

which he excelled." Anticipating the artist's 

future reputation, she opined, "He did 

nothing to give him lasting fame. He had 

talent but was not painsraking."126 

That spring Julia and her mother took 

the Grand Tour visiting art museums in 

24 - Art and the American Conservation Movemenl 

Dresden, Florence, Venice, and London. 

Julia's travel diary is full of conventional 

Victorian effusions about the works of art 

seen. At the famed Dresden Gallery 

we saw such scores of fine pictures, that 

I must content myself with marking in 

the catalogue those that most impressed 

us. 3 works of Ang[elica] Kaufmann 

charmed us and the [illegible] painting 

of Ribera, Spanish artist, we thought 

grandly treated. Raphael's Madonna del 

Sixte (Sistine Madonna) we returned to 

after seeing [illegible] rooms is l think a 

nobler conception than the Madfonna] 

della Seggiola (Florence, Palazzo Pitti). 

Leaving at 2 1/2 we came home, rested, 

then went to the porcelain store ... 

where we bought large and small busts 

of Schiller & Goethe- one of 

Beethoven. 127 

At the Kunsthistoriches Museum in 

Vienna, Julia gazed upon "Peter Rubens last 

work when he was 62 [sic] a wonderful work 

and so terribly natural it is painful to look 

at." She remarked upon a Rembrandt, a 

Velazquez portrait of Don Carlos and 

Holbein's Mary Queen of Scots (presumably 

the portrait of Jane Seymour) "which was 

dreadfully hard and stiff." 

In Florence they visited the Palazzo Pitti 

where Julia espec ially liked Guido Ren i's 

Cleopatra and, of necessity, Raphael's 

Madonna della Seggiola, the experience of 

which "I wish particu larly ever to 

remember."128 After two hours they drove 

to the Uffizi only to discover a phenomenon 

known to all visitors to Italy, the capriciously 

erratic hours of the famed museum. It had 

closed at noon and, much to Julia's chagrin, 

she saw "none of the masterpieces." Then it 

was on to Santa Croce where she admired 

the tombs of Dante, Canova, Alfieri, Galileo 

and Macchiavelli. This was followed by a 

trip to Santa Annunziata "where we saw the 

picture painted it is said by angels." 129 
) 

Completing the circuit, they stopped off at 

the Cathedral where "Mother was much 

impressed with the simple grandeur of the 

Duomo." 

That evening or the next day they visited 

the studio of famed American sculptor Hiram 

Powers (a native of Woodstock, Vermont), 

a required stop on the Grand Tour. 130 There 

they saw many busts of "statesmen and 

women of more or less note," and a 

personification of America, "a half-draped 

figure w[ith] one hand pointing upwards and 

uplifted face, a lovely figure but not 

expressive of half the grandeur of [Thomas] 

Crawford's."131 Next they visited the studio 

of largely forgotten American painter 

Thomas Buchanan Read (1822-1872) where 

they saw "exquisite oil paintings in 

miniature."132 

After her marriage to Frederick Billings 

in March of 1862, Julia's observations on art 

become increasingly conventional and 

abbreviated. Though there are frequent 

references in her diaries to the role of art in 

their lives, they seldom amount to more than 

a cursory judgment of whether a work is 

"pretty," "pleasing," or "disappointing." 133 

Occasionally there is a reference to price paid 

for a work of art, especially if it was thought 

to be bon marche. 134 Perhaps most 

characteristic of her attitude is a diary entry 

for May 28, 1886 where Julia writes, 

"F[rederick] at Lanthier's where l fear he was 

tempted to buy another picture. " 135 Even 

more telling is the fact that after Frederick's 

death in 1890 Julia made no significant art 

purchases, though she lived for another 

twenty-four years. 136 Despite Julia's seeming 

indifference to art, she and Frederick often 

attended gallery openings, exhibitions, and 

auctions together. Frederick, however, 

clearly took the lead in purchase decisions, 

though frequently only after seeking Julia's 

approval. m Even that most domestic of 

occupations, the hanging of pictures, seems 

to have been largely Frederick's domain. 

Frequent entries from Julia's diaries for June 

Part I: Description and Evaluation of the Art Collection 

and July 1886 indicate that Frederick "was 

very busy hanging pictures" at the 

refurbished Woodstock estate. 138 

Frederick Billings' diaries a re not 

especially helpful in positioning himself and 

Julia within the New York art scene. Apart 

from the spirited exchange of letters with 

Frederic Church over the purchase of the 

Thomas Cole paintings and the commission 

for Evening in the Tropics, there is little to 

indicate that he or Julia were especially active 

in the New York art world. A letter from 

painter Albert Bierstadt inviting Frederick 

and Julia to visit his studio (Frederick 

declined due to a cold) suggests a more than 

casual relationship with that favored artist. 1

}

9 

Otherwise a handful of letters concerning 

commissioned works of art, a notice from the 

sales agent of the National Academy of 

Design, and some diary entries dealing with 

bids for art auctions complete the picture of 

patrons whose interest in the acquisition of 

art seldom, if ever, rose above the norm for 

Vicrorian Americans. 140 

ln her instructive study of the practices 

of New York artists, dealers and collectors 

during the post-Civil War era, Anne tte 

Blaugrund has documented the complex 

system by which works of art were marketed 

and purchased. 141 Among the numerous 

venues in which artists and patrons were 

brought together were artists' studios (Tenth 

Street Studio Building), gentlemen's clubs 

(The Century Association, Union League 

Club) and art organizations (American Art 

Association, National Academy of Design). 

In addition there was the process of direct 

commission from artists as well as purchase 

from art dealers, auction houses and art fairs. 

Frederick's and Julia's diaries indicate that 

they availed themselves of all of these means 

for acquiring artworks, practices which align 

them with most collectors of the time. Only 

a few well-heeled patrons such as William T 

Walters of Baltimore or Isabella Stewart 

Gardner of Boston relied exclusively upon 

agents like Samuel P. Avery and Joseph 

Art and the American Conservation Movement- 25 
Part l: Description and Evaluation of the Art Collection 

Duveen to assemble their collections. After 

Frederick's death in 1890, dealers and agents 

increasingly took over the market, as "art 

was becoming big business. The number of 

artists, the increase in production, and the 

elevation of prices made it profitable for third 

party intercourse." 142 

Frederick's previously cited donation for 

the 1884 American Arr Association prizes 

probably constitutes his closest brush with 

New York's cultural elite. His long term 

membership in New York's Century 

Association, "the most unspeakably 

respectable club in the United States," 

indicates that he had access to the 

community of arts and letters, but his name 

is never mentioned as one of the club's 

leaders. 143 Frederick was also a member of 

the prestigious Uni.on League Club, the 

membership of which is credited with 

providing the impetus for the creation of New 

York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1870. 

Frederick, however, is not listed as one of 

the prime movers. 144 Julia, on the other 

hand, is listed as a member of the Executive 

Committee for the 1864 New York 

Metropolitan Fair for the United States 

Sahitary Commission, one of the most 

important art exhibitions of the Civil War 

era. As her diary for this year is no longer 

extant, it is not known what role she played 

in this important cultural event. Finally 

the re exists an invitation to an 1889 

Autumn Reception at the Metropolitan 

Museum of Art, but there is no evidence that 

Frederick or Julia were founders or prominent 

members of the organization that after 1870 

was to become the epicenter of New York's 

art world. 

Among the roughly two thousand 

American millionaires of the Gilded Age, 

Frederick and Julia, from today's perspective, 

seem clearly to have been in a position to 

assemble a significant art collection. This, 

however, is not what occurred. Alongside 

the famous New York collectors of the 

period- Robert L. Stuart, John Taylor 

26-Art and the American Conservation Movement 

Johnson, R. M. Olyphant, Robert Hoe and 

Marshall 0. Roberts- the Billingses were only 

modest players. Nor do their names figure 

among the clients of the most important New 

York dealers of the age: Samuel P. Avery, 

William Schaus, Charles M. Kurtz and 

Michael Knoedler. In all fairness to the 

Billingses, however, their tastes were no more 

or less conventional for the time than those 

of such luminaries as the Havermeyers, J. P. 

Morgan or William T. Walters, all of whom 

lived long enough to witness the shift in 

sensibility from European salon painting to 

the Impressionists. As Nathaniel Burt has 

astutely noted: "a whole generation of 

collectors [was) deluded into thinking that 

its taste represents an absolute and 

incontrovertible standard of what is best, 

most worthy and most important."145 Like 

most of their econo1nic peers, the Billingses 

depended upon art dealers, undertook direct 

commissions from artists and occasionally 

purchased works of art at auctions. Religion, 

the Northern Pacific Railroad, the 

refurbishing of the Marsh estate, the model 

farm and the Mount Tom plantation all took 

precedence over the visual arts which, at 

their most important, are best understood as 

pictorial glosses upon these more vital 

aspects of their lives. 
) 

) 

._,I 

Part I: Endnotes 

67 According to the Art Price lndex, International 

for 1996- 1997 (Madison, Ct.: Sound View Press, 

1997), paintings by Meyer von Bremen bring 

between $12,000 and $44,000 at auction while 

Frederic Edwin Church's Morning in the Tropics 

(Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Ct.), valued at 

$3,000 in the 1891 inven tory, would sell for 

between $700,000 and $1,200,000. Jean-Leon 

Gerome's Turkish Interior ($5,000 in the 1891 

inventory) would bring somewhere in the vicinity 

of $1,500,000. 

68 Lewis, Turner and McQuillin, 24. 69 The Billingses' 279 Madison Avenue home is 

not included though their neighbor Frederick F. 

Thompson, 283 Madison Avenue, is. Also included 

is the infamous home of Henry Villard at 451 

Madison Avenue, where "despite the atmosphere of 

fresh mortar and new varnish" there were no pictures 

as yet hung. See William C. Shopsin et al., The 

Villard Houses: Life Swry of a Landmark (New York: 

The Viking Press, 1980), 58, for an amusing account 

of Frederick Billings' visit to 451 Madison Avenue 

during the Northern Pacific crisis of 1883 to 1884. 

70 With the creation of metropolitan museums of 

art in New York and Boston in 1870, the desire for 

"Old Masters" began to increase and was fostered by 

dealers against the caveats of Ruskin for the likes of 

Gardner, Frick, Morgan, Havemeyer, Freer and 

Johnson. See Fink, 171 for an account of these 

emergent collectors. 

71 The disposition of art

works was as follows: 

Sitting Room: four landscape, three genre, one 

Orientalist; Smoking Room: eight landscape, one 

genre; and the Hallway: ten landscapes, seven genre 

scenes and three Orientalist pain

tings. 

72 Frederic Church to Frederick Billings (February H , 1880), Billings Family Archives. 

73 Frederick Bi1lings to Frederic Church 

(February 

20, 1880), Archives Olana State Historic Site. 

74 Franklin Kelly, Frederic Edwin Church and the 

National Landscape (Washington D. C.: Smithsonian 

Institution Press, 1988), 67. 

75 "Art Notes," New York Evening Mail and Express, 

January 4, 1882, quoted in Elizabeth M. Kornhauser, 

American Paintings Before 1945 in the Waasworth 

Athenaeum (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1996), 

Vol. l, 212

- 213. 

76 George Inness, "A Pain

ter on Painting," Harper's 

New Monthly Magazine 56 (February, 1878), 458-

459. 

Part I: Description and Evaluation of the Art Collection 

77 James McNeil! Whistler, The Ten O'Clocl' 

Lecture (London: Chattoand Windus, 1885), 10. 

78 Robin W. Winks, Frederick Billings: A Life (New 

York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991),152. In her entry 

for Morning in the Tropics Elizabeth 

M. Kornhauser, 

210-213, repeats Wink's assertion that the painting 

was intended as a reminder of Frederick and Laura 

Billings' journey up the Chagres River in 

1849. 

According to Kornhauser: 

The figure of a young woman at left in Church's 

painting, shown hold ing a fish ing line and 

encompassed by the ominous steamy yellow 

atmosphere, unquestionably symbolized 

Billings' sister Laura, thought to be the first 

woman to die in the gold rush. Church also 

included partially clad native boatmen, further 

documenting the memory Frederick Billings 

held of this tragic event. 

19 Though published after Frederick

's death, the 

publication forerunner of the Social Register does 

not mention the Billings family. Lyman Horace 

Weeks, ed., Prominent Families of New York : Being an 

Account in Biographical Form of Individuals and 

Families Distinguished as Representatives of the Social, 

Professional and Civic Life of New York City (New 

York: The Historical Company, 1897). It is 

particularly interesting that the Billings' New York 

house was not featured in the book Arrisric Houses, 

since the Philadelphia home of one of Frederick 

Billings' Woodstock neighbors and social 

contemporaries, Edward H. Williams ( 1824- 1899), 

was included in that book. Williams was a native 

of one of Woodstock's founding families and made 

his fortune in the Baldwin Locomotive Works. The Japanesque library in his Main Line home was 

featured in the book. 

0 George William Sheldon, Recent Ideals of 

American Art (1888; reprint, New York: Garland 

Publishing Inc., L977), 4. 

81 Sheldon, Recent Ideals, 34. According to 

Sheldon, the artworks purchased by the American 

Art Association were donated to the metropolitan 

museums of maj

or American cities. For the complex 

relationships between the National Academy of Art 

(which refused to exhibit the work of American 

artists living abroad) and the Society of American 

Artists, founded in 1878 for the purpose of 

exhibiting expatriate art, see Fink, 271- 289. 

02 Hartford, Connecticut Daily Times, 

January, 4, 

1884, quoted in Hosley, 182. 

83 Catherine 

E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher 

Stowe, The Am.erican Woman's Home or Principles of 

Domestic Science: Being a Guide to the Fonnation and 

Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful and 

Art and the American Conservation Movement - 2 7 
Pan l: Description and Evaluation of the Art Collection 

Christian Homes ( 1869; reprint, Hartford, Conn., 

Stowe-Day Foundation, 1975), 94. 

~ The recendy assembled Jasper Cropsey 

Foundation in the artist's old studio/home at Yonkers 

is an attempt to reconstitute de novo an artist's 

collection. 

85 Matthias Hollenback Arnot collected only 

"Old Master" and contemporary European salon 

painters, but no Americans, a clear reflection of the 

revised tum of the century mentality. See Kachel 

Sandinsky, A Collector's Vision (Elmira, New York: 

Arnot Art Museum, 1989). 

86 George William Sheldon, ed., Artistic Counr:rySeats: Types of Recent American Villa and Cottage 

Architecture (1886; reprint, New York: Da Capo 

Press, 1979). 

61 N. Parker Willis, "The Highland Terrace above 

West Point," in The Home Book of the Picturesque: Or 

American Scenery, Art and Literature (New York: G. 

P. Putnam, 1852), 105. 

~ Katherine C. Grier, Cultttre and Comfort: People , 

Parlors and Upholstery, 1850-1930 (Rochester, N. 

Y.: The Strong Museum, 1988), 3. This remarkable 

text is an indispensable study of Victorian domestic 

culture. 

m Julia McNair Wright, The Complete Home: J\n 

Encyclopaedia of Domestic Life and Affairs (1884), 

quoted in Grier, Culture and Comfort, 3. 

90 Grier, Culture and Comfort, 2. 

91 According to an interior decorator writing in 

1888, "the most popular view of the parlor is as a 

shrine into which is placed all that is most precious." 

Mary Gay Humphreys, "The Parlor," The Decorator 

and Furnisher (1888), quoted in Grier, Culture and 

Comfort, 83. 

92 The painting entitled Moonlight by the elusive 

L. Donizetti may be a European work, but the artist's 

name appears in none of che research indices. 

91 Samuel Bowles, Our New West. Records of Travel 

Between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean 

(Hartford, Conn.: Hartford Publishing Co., 1869), 

482. 

94 Kenneth L. Ames, Death in the Dining Room and 

Other Tales of Victorian Culture (Philadelphia, 

Temple Univ. Press, 1992), 12-28. 

9 5 For Robbins Battell's collection see Hosley, 

250, n. 62 and for Fairbanks see Patricia C. F. Mandel, 

"American Paintings at the Sr. Johnsbury Athenaeum in Vermont," Antiques, April 1980, 868-

879. 

28 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

96 The most thorough study of the collecting hab~ 

its of New Yorkers during the period is Linda 

Hcnefield Skalet, The Market for American Painting 

in New Yori<: 1870-1915 (Ph.D. Dissertation, Johns 

l lopkins Univ., 1980; Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International). 

91 George W. Sheldon, American Painters (New 

York: D. Appleton and Company, 1881), 10. 

98 Skaler, 3. 

99 During the nineteenth century marine paintings were displayed randomly throughout the man~ 

sion in proximity to landscapes, genre paintings and 

Orientalist images. To the question of why so many 

marine paintings are found in inland, seacoastless 

Vermont, the answer is provided, once again, by the 

Reverend Magoon, 27: "nearest allied to the mountains in their natuml effects is the influence of oceans 

on the national mind." 

100 The Michelangelo was engraved by Edmond 

Castan after the painting by Alexandre Cabanel, 

and the Raphael by Max Girardct after the painting 

by Charles Francois Jalabert. Both engravings are 

dated 1859. 

101 The author of this bizarre conceit in which 

Michelangelo is converted into an "evangelical" 

was the influential American critic James Jackson 

Jarves, ArtStuilies: The "Old Masters" of Italy: Painting (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1861 ), 432. By 

such means Protestant Americans could assimilate 

the work of Catholic Italians to the modern dispensation, much as Frederick Billings could tolerate 

the eminently Catholic Frenchman Alexandre 

Anrigna's Normandy Peasanis at a Shrine (c. 1860-

1870) which was prominently displayed, then as 

now, in the Hallway of the Woodstock Mansion. 

102 As Janet Houghton noted in the catalogue of 

the Woodstock collection, Julia Billings referred in 

her "lisrs" to the Smillie engraving after Bierstadt's 

painting as "Heart of the Rockies" rather than 

"Rocky Mountain Encampment," the title used in 

the engraving. At some level "Heart of the Rockies" 

and "Heart of the Andes" formed an ideological 

pairing in her mind. Janet R. I [oughton, MarshBillings Mansion Art Collection (April, 1997, unpublished typescript). 

10 1 Richard Ormond, Sir Edwin Lancheer (Philadelphia: Museum of Art, 1981),38. 

101 Katherine Grier (Culture and Comfort, 12) argues that the iconography of the hunt, "even though 

few of the men who headed dinner tables in these 

settings ever brought dinner home ro their families 

in such a manner," reflected a sense of the economic 

competence that "good masculine providers were 
) 

) 

j 

... J 

_, 

supposed to have." For a more polemical view see 

Kenneth L. Ames, "Murderous Propensities: Notes 

on Dining Iconography in the mid-Nineteenth Century," in Nancy H. Schless, Three Centuries: Two 

Continents (Watkins Glen, N. Y.: American Life 

Foundation, 1983). i t.ls Happily these engravings have been conserved 

and rehung in one of the third story bedrooms where 

they serve as reminders of the enormous psychologica I gulf between Victorians and Moderns. 106 Ames, Death in the Dining Room, Chapter 2. 101 Ames, Death in the Dining Room, 72. 108 Ames, Death in the Dining Room, 73. 109 The most recent study of chis phenomenon is 

Doreen Bolger Burke and Catherine Hoover 

Voorsanger, "The Hudson River School in Eclipse," 

in Howat, 71- 90. 

11o Burke and Voorsanger, 7 3. 1

11 Burke and Voorsanger, 7 3. 

11 i Asher B. Durand, "Letters on Landscape Painting" (Letter l, January 3, 1855) in Harold Spencer, 

ed., American Art: Readings from the Colonial Period 

to the Present (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 

1980), 91. 

m Patricia Hills, "Painting Race: Eastman 

Johnson's Pictures of Slaves, Ex-Slaves and Freedmen," in Teresa A. Carbone and Patricia Hills, 

Eastman Johnson: Painting America (New York: 

Rizzoli, 1999), 158. 114 For the role of the fine arcs in Victorian domestic culture see Katherine C. Grier, "The Deel ine of 

the Memory Palace: the Parlor after 1890," in Jessica H. Foy and Thomas J. Schlereth eds., American 

Home Life 1880-1930: A Social History of Spaces 

and Service (Knoxville: The Univ. of Tennessee 

Press, 1992), 49- 74. 

11 s Horace Bushnell, Christian Nurture (New York: 

Charles Scribner, 1869). Frederick and Julia were 

friends and avid readers of Horace Bushnell, a 

frequent visitor to Woodstock and an antiTranscendentalist. A "conservationist," by rhe 

definition of the period, Bushnell was also a friend 

of the railroad, but so was almost everyone else, 

including Emerson, with the striking exceptions of 

George Perkins Marsh and Henry David Thoreau. 

For this "unholy alliance" of commerce and 

conservation see R. J. Orsi, "Wilderness Saint and 

Robber Baron: John Muir and the Southern Pacific," 

The Pacific Historian 29 (1985), 136- 52. 

Part I: Description and Evaluation of the Art Collection 116 Bushnell, Christian Nurture, 12. 

117 For an excellent account of the Victorian home 

as Church see Colleen McDannell, "Parlor Piety: 

The Home as Sacred Space in Protestant America," 

in Foy and Schlereth, eds., American Home Life, 162 

189. 113 See Macleod. 

119 See Nathaniel Burt, Palaces for che People: 

A Social Hiscor;i of rite American Art Museum (Boston: 

Little, Brown and Co., 1977), 80- 85 for the problem 

of "Old Masters" in Gilded Age America and the 

practices of unscrupulous art dealers like "Old Pfaff" 

who single-handedly gave the practice of collecting 

them a bad name. 

110 Macleod, 16. 

121 Macleod, 

4, 29. Macleod further contends that 

"social convention prohibited women from being 

collectors .... Aesthetic theorists maintained that 

the female mind was incapable of comprehending 

ideas which did not relate to the personal realm." 

Even where women displayed an interest in 

collecting, "they were duty bound to leaving the 

bargaining and financial side of artistic consumption 

to their husbands and thus their names do not appear 

in artists diaries and dealer's account books." The 

major exception among New York's Victorian 

collectors was Catherine Lorillard Wolfe, the only 

woman listed among one hundred and six original 

contributors to the founding of the Metropolitan 

Museum of Art. Listed by one newspaper in 1876 as 

a "famous collector," she left her art at her dearh , 

"for the enjoyment and recreation of all ... and also 

with a view to the education and cultivation of the 

public taste for the fine arts," to the M.M.A., which 

refurbished a gallery in 1887 bearing her name. See 

Rebecca A. Rabinow, "Catherine Lorillard Wolfe: 

The First Woman Benefactor of the Metropolitan 

Museum of Art," Apollo (March, 1998), 48

- 55. 

122 The Pannly family, as the extensive research of 

Janet Houghton has revealed, was well connected 

to the New York art world. Julia's older sister Mary 

Montagu Parmly married Charles H. Ward, a 

prominent "patron of the arts." Mansion Box 31 

contains an invitation list to a "musical soiree" given 

by Mary Montagu Parmly Ward and her husband, 

dated December 21, 1865. Among invited guests 

were artists Frederick Church, Worthington 

Whittredge, John F. Kensett and Anton Wenzler. The 

gift of a "sketch" for Shrewsbury River from Kensett 

to "Miss Julia Pannly, May 30, 1856" has been cited 

in the catalogue as evidence of her early connections 

with artists. 

Art and the American Conservation Movement- 29 
Part 1: Description and Evaluation of the An Collection 

123 Mansion Box A 12: Memoirs of Julia Parmly 

Billings, 4. The estate library contains no fewer than 

eight volumes of the works of Anna Jameson, 

including A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, 

Memories, and Fancies (London: Longman, Brown, 

Green and Longmans, 1854) signed by Julia Parmly 

in London, 1855. 

124 Among the invited guests at the wedding of 

Anna Eh.rick Parmly and Thomas Pritchard Rossiter, 

which took place on October 15, 1851, were artists 

John Frederick Kensett and Louis Lang. 

125 Mansion Box A 12: Memoirs, 4. 

126 Mansion Box A 12: Memoirs, 10. 

127 Mansion Box A 12: Travel Diary of]ulia Parrnly 

(1855, unpaginated). 

128 For the Victorian worship of Raphael as the 

world's greatest painter see Marjorie B. Cohn, Francis 

Calley Gray and Art Collecting in America (Cambridge: 

Harvard Univ. Press, 1986). Cohn thoroughly 

explores the Victorian "cultural cliche" of collecting 

engravings of Raphael Madonnas, a practice from 

which Julia was far from immune, noting that 

Rafaellomania had been given royal sanction by no 

less a personage than Prince Albert. 

119 This is a reference to the now seldom viewed 

fresco of The Annunciation by an anonymous 

Tuscan painter that was a major tourist attraction 

during the Victorian era. Today art lovers visit 

Santissima Annunziata to view the famous frescoes 

in the narthex, but remain largely unaware of the 

shrine. 

130 According to Julia's account there was a sign 

posted outside "Il Powers" studio stating that he no 

longer received visitors, but as they were leaving he 

opened the door and invited them in. Julia noted 

that "he has a good deal of the 'Down East' manner." 

131 Mansion Box A 12: Travel Diary. Presumably 

Julia's reference to Crawford's sculpture is to the 

Armed America (1851) for the dome of the Capitol 

in Washington D. C. 

132 For a dashing view of Read's Florence Studio 

see Annette Blaugrund, The Tenth Street Studio 

Building: Artist-Entrepreneurs from the Hudson River 

School to the American ImpressionistS (Southampton: 

The Parrish Art Museum, 1997), fig. 13. Read, 

costumed as a Renaissance gentleman-painter, stands 

before a portrait of a Victorian belle. 

30 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

131 Mansion Box A 12: Diaries of Julia Parmly 

Billings: 3/6/1884, 3/8/1884, 5/10/1884 , 1/6/1886. 

134 Ibid. 10/5/1884: "He [Frederick] bought a 

pretty watercolor at L'lnthier's for $30 that had cost 

$200." 

135 Louis Lanthier was Frederick Billings' favorite 

New York art dealer. His name is frequently 

mentioned in both Frederick's and Julia's diaries. 

Owner of "The Old Curiosity Shop," he specialized 

in Oriental ceramics as well as paintings. The only 

published information on Lanthier states that "he 

was an authority on old pictures, porcelains, 

furniture, silverware, antique jewelry, armor, precious 

stones, and the dress and customs of different periods 

of history." Peter Hastings Falk, ed., Who Was Who 

in American Art: Compiled from the Original Thirtyfoiir Volumes of American Art Annual (New York: 

Sound View Press, 1985), 358. Lanthier's name does 

not appear in the Smithsonian Institution's Archives 

of American Art, the most comprehensive source for 

nineteenth century art and artists. Information about 

the New York art market at the time of the Billingses 

remains sketchy. The most important New York art 

dealer of the period, Samuel Putnam Avery, the 

agent for such celebrated collectors as John Taylor 

Johnscon and William H. Vi.mderbilt, does not list 

the Billingses among his clients. See Madeleine 

Fidell Beaufort, Herbert L. Kleinfield and Jeanne 

K. Welcher, The Diaries 1871-1882 of Sa~uel P. 

Avery, Art Dealer (New York: Arno Press, 1979). 

i % The only reference found in Julia's diary to a 

painting that held personal meaning occurred on 3/ 

7/1870 where she mentions that Frederick sent ro 

Woodstock from New York "my picture Fast Asleep." 

The painting, Sophie Gengembre Anderson's Fast 

Asleep, is still at Woodstock. A letter of condolence 

upon Frederick's death from painter Jasper Cropsey 

to Julia Billings (Mansion Box A31) indicates some 

continuing connection to the New York art 

community. 

137 See the exchange ofletters between Frederick 

Billings and Frederic Edwin Church concerning the 

commission for the "four feet picture" Evening in the 

Tropics, in which Julia's opinions are decisive. See 

also Julia's diary entries for 3/1/1884, 5/29/1885, 1/ 

6/1886 and 1/14/1886 where she repeatedly uses 

"we" to describe her and Frederick's responses to 

works of art. Nowhere in the diaries is there 

expressed a conflict of opinion about a work of art. 

Julia's diary entry for 1/15/1886 is suggestive: "Mary 

and 1 had a happy hour at Kurtz where she had two 

good pictures. I took her to L[anthier's] to see three 

bought by E 40, 120, 290 [$]." 
) 

) 

) 

.J 

138 Julia ParmLy Billings Diary for 1886: 6/5/1886: 

"E hung and changed pictures."; 7/2/1886: "F. hung 

pictures in the dining room"; 7/3/1886: "E hung 

more pictures in the d[ining room] and about"; 7 /6/ 

1886: "F. had F[rederick] C[hapman) on hand to 

hang pictures. Uphill work" (Chapman was a 

foreman at the Woodstock estate); 7/19/f886: "F. 

was very busy hanging our picture in the parlor"; 7 / 

16/1886: "F. was very busy hanging pictures." 

139 Mansion Box A 31. The letter concerns a 

painting by George l lemy Boughton ("one of his 

finest works never seen in this country before. If 

you would like a good specimen of his work-call 

and see it") rather than Bierstadt's own work. 

0 See Mansion Box A 31: Letters from Harry 

Chase , 3/12/1875, R. Swain Gifford (date?) 

concerning commissioned paintings. Letter from 

Rose Durfee, Sales Agent for the National Academy 

of Design, 5/6/1879, about works by Sanford 

Gifford. See Diaries of Julia Parmly Billings (Mansion 

Box A 12), entries for 3/1/1884: "Rand I went to 

the academy & bought the watercolor by Ed. Mornn 

"Coming into Port"-several less important. We 

Part l: Description and Evaluation of the Art Collection 

were there about 2-1/2 hrs." 1/14/ 1886: "After some 

writing F. & I went to Lanthier's and then I picked 

out some pictures at the Morgan sale for L[anthicr?] 

to bid on." 

141 See Blaugrund. 

142 Blaugrund, lOl. 

141 Quoted in Blaugrund, 85. Frederick is listed as 

an active member from 1869 to 1890 but is nowhere 

mentioned in the histories of the Association. See 

The Century Association, New York, The Century 

1847- 1946 (New York: The Century Association, 

1947). For a revealing document of this institution 

see Charles Yardley Turner's painting entitled 

A Saturday Evening ac the Century Association (The 

Century Association, 1894). Reproduced in 

Blaugrund, fig. 43. 

144 See Burt, 90-95 for the role of the Union 

League Club in the formation of the Metropolitan 

Museum of Art. 

145 Burt, 84. 

Charles Theodore Frere, 

Bab Hussinichaw (n.d.), 

Marsh-Billings Rockefeller 

National Historical Park. 

Art and the American Conservation Movement - 31 
Pare [I: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

Part II: Nineteenth Century 

American Landscape Painting 

and the Environmental Movement 

"I received from it Uohn Ruskin's Modem Painters} a stimulus to nature worship, 

to which I was already too much inclined which made ineffaceable 

the confusion in my mind between nature and art." 

-William James Stillman The Autobiography of a}ournalist1

'

10 

John Ruskin and the 

"Mirror Of Nature" 

As suggested by Stillman's youthful 

confession, the boundary between nature and 

art was not always clearly demarcated during 

the Victorian era. The founder of America's 

first art journal, Stillman was a landscape 

painter and belonged to the Association for 

the Advancement of Truth in Art, the 

American branch of the Pre-Raphaelite 

Brotherhood. 147 Like his British mentor John 

Ruskin, Stillman viewed art as the mirror of 

nature and its purpose "the earnest loving 

study of God's work." Another Victorian art 

critic, reviewing an exhibition of landscape 

paintings at Boston's venerable Athenaeum, 

fervently articulated Ruskin's moral view of 

·the educated appreciation of art: "It is certain 

from experience, that a familiar observation 

of the beautiful forms of nature and the 

imitations of expressions of them in works of 

art, has the effect of cherishing the 

benevolent affections, repressing evil passion, 

and improving the general tone of mora l 

feeling." 148 

Historian Roger Stein has claimed that 

Ruskin's fundamental importance to 

Americans was "his identification of the 

interest in art with morality and religion as 

well as with the love of nature, his ability to 

build a loose but convincing system where 

art, religion, and nature were inextricably 

3 2 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

intertwined."149 In 1855, art critic Clarence 

Cook reaffirmed America's response to 

Ruskin's doctrines: "We love his love of 

nature, we love his love of God. He carries 

us along with him by his enthusiasm." 150 At 

the close of the century, the Reverend Julius 

Ward reiterated Ruskin's vital role in shaping 

the appreciation of the natural world by 

teaching "what is transcendental in poetry 

and art. All our poets and students of nature 

are under the spell of this enthusiasm."151 A 

few years later, the eccentric Ralph Radcliffe 

Whitehead, one of Ruskin's most 

impressionable students at Oxford's Balliol 

College, founded an arts and crafts colony 

at Woodstock in New York's Catskill 

mountains. Based upon Ruskin's antimodernist aesthetic and social doctrines, the 

Woodstock colony sought to realize the 

master's utopian program in the forests and 

mountains of North America. 152 To this day 

Ruskin's Romantic vision of harmony 

between man and nature, whether 

acknowledged or not, continues to resonate 

within the American environmental 

movement. 153 

Ruskin's views are also intertwined with 

the emergence of the nation's first impulses 

to conserve nature. The canon of American 

nature writing, for example, is deeply 

infiltrated by Ruskinians. Thomas Starr 

King, Samuel Bowles, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, 

Clarence King, and John Muir, to cite but a 
) 

) 

) 

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Part II: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

few of the better known, were all professed 

followers of the British prophet. Many of the 

landscape artists, who in paint, photography 

and print made the first calls for the 

protection of nature, were also pilgrims 

traveling Ruskin's "New Path." 154 In 

recognition of their vital achievement in 

promoting appreciation for nature, there are 

today in the state and national parks and 

forests of the United States more topographic 

sites named after painters than in any other 

country in the world. Mount Thomas Cole 

and Church's Ledge in the Catskills, 

Champney Falls in the White Mountains of 

New Hampshire, Moran Point at Grand 

Canyon, Mount Moran in Grand Teton 

National Park and Mount Bierstadt in Rocky 

Mountain National Park are among the best 

known and celebrated natural monuments 

honoring artists and their role in shaping the 

nineteenth century's veneration of nature. 

Similar claims can be made for many of the 

Romantic nature writers, Thomas Starr King 

enjoying the unique distinction of having 

mountains named after him both in the 

White Mountains and the Sierra Nevada. 

Assuredly no other nation on earth has paid 

such high and enduring tribute to its cultural 

elite in the designation of scenery. 

A case in point is the renaming of Mount 

Thomas Cole in New York's Catskill 

mountains. In none of the early guidebooks 

to the historic region is there any mention of 

a mountain dedicated to the father of the 

Hudson River School. lt is only on the 

United States Geological Survey Map of 

1894 that Mount Thomas Cole (3975') 

appears next to Blackhead and Black Dome. 

Insofar as 1894 is the year in which the state 

legislation was passed creating the Catskill 

Forest Preserve, it is a near certainty that the 

redesignation of Black Mountain as Mount 

Thomas Cole was a tribute to the artist's role 

in promoting valt.1es leading to forest 

preservation of the region. 

The Origins of American 

Environmentalism 

Environmental historians are currently 

divided on the sources of the early 

movements to protect nature. The 

predominant view, first articulated by Samuel 

P. Hays in the 1950s and more recently 

reaffirmed by Philip Shabecoff, is that the 

initial impulse for environmental protection 

was a product of the urban elite. 155 As 

Shabecoff has claimed, the emotional, 

psychological and scientific imperatives for 

conservation arose from "the scholars, poets, 

philosophers, scientists, writers, painters, 

clerics, and even the politicians of the settled, 

increasingly urbanized East."156 Fortifying 

this view, for example, is the claim of a former 

governor of Wyoming that government 

policy was being shaped by "college 

professors and landscape gardeners," or the 

utterance of a turn-of-the-century Denver 

journalist who famously fumed: "Along 

comes a poet and suggests a national park in 

an area that ought to teem with 

inhabitants. "157 

In opposition to this elitist account, 

historians like Richard Judd have tended to 

stress regional populism and "common 

stewardship" as the principal determinants 

of the conservation movement. 158 In his 

partisan view, farmers and rural landowners, 

rather than urban poets and philosophers, 

first articulated the need for conservati.on and 

began to act upon it. lnterestingly enough, 

Frederick Billings could be understood to fall 

into either of these camps. As Attorney 

General of California, his defense of Rincon 

Point is best understood in relation to the 

precedent of the New England commons, 

while his advocacy of Yosemite is clearly 

connected to his associations with Thomas 

Starr King and Frederick Law Olmsted. 

Without taking sides in the debate on the 

origins of conservation, it is important to 

note that this debate is often framed in a 

reductive manner. The cultural habits of 

Art and the American Conservation Movement-33 
Pare II: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

humanity are far too complex and eccentric 

to label individuals solely as Utilitarians or 

Romantics, sportsmen or philosophers, 

farmers or tourists. 159 

In many ways the most insightful 

treatment of the origins of environmentalism 

is the work of Alfred Runte, who has devoted 

a number of studies to the subject. His recent 

publication Public Lands, Public Heritage: The 

National Forest Idea (1991) contains an 

especially sophisticated analysis of the role 

of aesthetics as "the second important 

cornerstone of American conservation." L60 

Citing the painters of the Hudson River 

Sc.hool, George Perkins M::irsh ancl the 

Appalachian Mountain Club as primary 

agents in the blurring of the distinction 

between forests as resource and beauty in the 

Victorian mind, he has produced an 

extremely nuanced context for the subject. 

Perhaps his most startling conclusion is that 

the nineteenth century's synthesis of the 

pragmatic and the aesthetic in the cause of 

forest conservation has since devolved into 

competing spheres of interest. 161 

In a canonic study of the historic origins 

of national parks, Runte has argued 

persuasively that they were first established 

to combat "cultural anxiety" about the 

perceived inadequacies of the new nation in 

the eyes of foreign visitors. 162 Citing a host 

of English critics engaged in cultural warfare 

with their lost colonies, Runte carefully 

documents the process whereby raw nature 

was transformed into monumental works of 

art. "Monumentalism," in his thoughtful 

formulation, emerged as the foundational 

premise of American conservation with 

"scenic preservation" as its primary goal. 

Yosemite, Yellowstone and Grand Canyon, 

according to Runte, were the foremost 

products of "scenic nationalism." "By and 

large," Runte asserts, "national parks were 

considered a visual experience; their 'purpose 

was not to preserve nature as an integral 

whole, but to seek out the most impressive 

waterfalls, canyons and mountain peaks of 

34 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

the West." 163 If America lacked museums 

stocked with artistic treasures, it possessed 

an abundance of natural aesthetic 

monuments to take their place and, in 

American eyes, to surpass the masterpieces 

of European art and architecture. 

Artists and the 

Environmental Movement 

The goal of this essay is not to essentialize 

artistic production, nor to make exaggerated 

claims on behalf of artists, but rather to focus 

upon their role in the creation of 

environmenrnl c.onsc.iousnP.ss. As n1srocliims 

of nineteenth century visual culture, painters 

and photographers had a vital stake in 

defining the nation's physical and moral 

geography. As shapers of the cultural 

definition of nature they, together with a host 

of writers, were instrumental in determining 

that specific geographic regions matching 

that definition became national parks and 

other publicly administered land such as 

forest preserves and state parks. Artists, 

however, like most Victorians, were 

constantly oscillating between the poles of 

utility and beauty when it suited their 

purposes, and, in the case of the Ruskinians, 

seldom possessed a very clear picture of the 

borders between nature and its 

representation. Myth, memory and allegory 

may have been part of their cultural 

apparatus, but so too was commodification, 

measurement and science. 16

" As 

photographer Ansel Adams has noted, the 

difference between Half Dome and a piece 

of rock is the artist's mediating presence. 165 

The critical insight that pictures actually 

generate ideas about nature belongs to the 

theoreticians of the Italian Renaissance.166 

The Venetian Lodovico Dolce, for example, 

observed the power of the image co displace 

reality when he described the landscape 

background of a Titian painting as so 

plausible that "reality itself is not so real. "167 

During the eighteenth century English 
) 

) 

.) 

...) 

Part 11: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

gentlemen customarily carried with them on 

pedestrian excursions into nature the 

"Claude Box ." 168 A smoked glass lens 

enclosed by wooden casing, the "Claude Box" 

allowed viewers to select and enframe those 

aspects of scenery which most closely 

approximated the landscape paintings of the 

seventeenth century Frenchman Claude 

Lorrain. Through this scopic process of 

composition, the so-called "picturesque" 

habit of perception, nature could be made 

to imitate art. 169 While Ruskin and his 

nineteenth century followers rejected the 

picturesque apprehension of nature, 

advocating instead the closest possible 

simulation of nature by art, they were fully 

conscious of the power of pictorial 

formulations to shape the values and 

perceptions that accrue to the phenomenal 

world. When Ruskin avowed that "the best 

image that the world can give of Paradise, is 

in the slope of the meadows, orchards and 

cornfields on the side of a great Alp, with its 

purple rocks and eternal snows above," he 

was giving voice to a vision of the land and 

its image, of place and its picture, that first 

entered the western imagination five 

hundred years earlier. When Frederick 

Billings' close friend Thomas Starr King died 

in March of 1864, his role in shaping the 

apprehension of American nature was 

commemorated by New York divine Henry 

Whitney Bellows. 170 "No one had really 

seen the Sierra Nevada, Mount Shasta, the 

Yo Semite Valley, or the coast of Oregon and 

the region of Mount Hood," Bellows 

exclaimed, "until his [Starr King's] fine eye 

saw and his cunning brain and hand depicted 

them." 171 Photographer William Henry 

Jackson made similar claims about the 

paintings of Thomas Moran and their impact 

on popular perceptions of the West: "The 

snowy Sierras, the lofty Tetons and the 

Yellowstone country or the Grand Canyon 

of the Colorado [are] incomparable 

panoramas which the world will long 

continue co see in terms of his 

compositions." 172 

Reification, the act of substituting an 

image for what it represents, was commonly 

practiced by John Ruskin and his American 

followers. Following the prophet's mimetic 

dictates, landscape art came often to lose, 

through the illusory capacity to deny its own 

making, the sense that it was made at all. 

More conveniently accessible than "reality," 

landscape an often came t0 displace its 

referent as a means of conceptualizing nature. 

The fact that the first federal legislation on 

behalf of scenic protection was conferred on 

mountainous landscapes, previously 

enshrined by paintings, prints and 

photographs, affirms the complex dialogue 

between culture and nature in the emergent 

practices of American conservation. 173 

Even the language we use to designate a 

tract of land, of whatever extent, is derived 

from the pictorial arts. The term "landscape," 

whether we acknowledge it or not, introduces 

"notions of value and form which relate not 

just to seeing the land, but to seeing it in a 

certain way- pictorially." 174 In his 

thoughtful study of Romantic American 

literature, Donald Ringe has carefully 

analyzed the structure of what he terms "the 

pictorial mode ... a style of writing that is 

dependent upon the art of the landscape 

painter." 175 "Wherever one turns in the 

literature of the [Romantic] period," Ringe 

writes, "one is likely to find a recurring strain 

of the pictorial, a stress on images of sight, 

and a deep concern with the need for close 

and accurate observation of the physical 

world in order to discern its meaning."176 The 

noun "overlook," to provide but one 

example, first entered the English language 

in 1861 through the writings of American 

art critic Louis Legrand Noble when 

describing a painting by Thomas Cole's pupil 

Frederic Edwin Church. 177 Since that time 

countless mountains, ledges, parks and 

country homes, including Thomas Cole's 

most beloved Catskill peak, have been 

named "Overlook." 

An and the American Conservation Movement -35 
Part I I: Nineteenth Century Ameiican Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

Any attempt to understand the 

relationship of art to environmentalism must 

of necessity define the terms "conservation" 

and "preservation" as held by the Victorians. 

Even a brief perusal of primary sources 

suggests that their meanings differed 

substantially from contemporary usage. The 

term conservation, understood in Gifford 

Pinchot's formulation as "wise use" of physical 

resources and as an alternative to strict 

preservation, was not introduced into the 

national discourse until the turn of the century 

when the first Director of the National Forest 

Service and John Muir began to sharpen their 

definition in the debate over Het.ch 

Hetchy. 178 Prior to that conflict, the concept 

of "preservation" was expansive enough to 

include every position on the environmental 

spectrum and to embrace most of today's 

competing views. When, for example, artists 

like George Catlin and Thomas Cole 

invoked the term "preservation," they 

generally meant preservation on canvas of 

scenic value. In their view the image would 

serve as a nostalgic reminder of that which 

was ineluctably destined to vanish, whether 

Indians, bison or forests. Catlin expressed 

this conviction with confessional poignancy 

in a famous mission statement: "Deeply 

impressed by the irresistible fate awaiting 

these poor people [Indians), I conceived a 

plan of making a pictorial history of those 

vanishing races." Comparing Indians to still 

life painting, he contended, "They are a 

basket of dead game, harassed, bleeding and 

dead .... Phoenix like they will arise from 

the stain of the painter's palette and live on 

canvas. My works will be a monument to a 

dying race and to myself." On another 

infamous occasion, Catlin's father gave voice 

to his son's ambition with chilling clarity: 

"Though my son mourns the dreadful destiny 

of the Indian tribes by small pox, this 

shocking calamity will greatly increase the 

value of his works."179 

Thomas Cole expressed related 

sentiments when he cast a malediction upon 

36 - Art and the Ame1ican Conservation Movement 

"dollar godded utilitarians" for cutting down 

the trees near his studio in Catskill, even 

before the varnish had dried on one of his 

forest scenes. 180 "The ravages of the axe are 

daily increasing," he lamented, "desecration 

by what is called improvement; which as yet 

generally destroys Nature's beauty without 

substituting that of Art." 181 The artist's task, 

he felt, was not only to document, but 

alchemically to "preserve" on canvas, wild 

nature doomed by expediency. According 

to his biographer Louis Legrand Noble, Cole 

contemplated writing a book on art, one of 

whose themes was "the wilderness passing 

away, and the necessity of s:wine :rnd 

perpetuating its features." 182 In his seminal 

history of the environmental movement 

Wilderness and the American Mind (1967) 

Roderick Nash understood this to mean that 

Cole was advocating the actual 

"preservation" of land.18·

3 In point of fact the 

painter was stating the conviction that 

pictures ("what nature denies/art supplies") 

were the only means of effectively preserving 

wild nature for posterity. Art, in short, was 

about arresting in paint that which was 

rapidly passing away before the juggernaut 

of progress. Reviewing in 184 7 two 

landscapes by Cole's Hudson River colleague 

Jasper Cropsey, a critic for The Literary World 

mandated the artist's privileged role: 

The axe of civilization is busy with our 

old forests, and artisan ingenuity is fast 

sweeping away the relics of our national 

infancy .... Where were once the wild 

and picturesque haunts of the 

Red Man, and where the wild deer 

roamed in freedom are becoming the 

abodes of commerce and the seats of 

manufactures .... Yankee enterprise has 

little sympathy with the picturesque, and 

it behooves our artists to rescue from its 

grasp the little that is left, before it is 

too late. 184 
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Part II: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

For many Victorians, as Stillman's 

account of reading Ruskin intimates, the 

painted image could be made to stand in for 

reality itself while serving as a rhetorical 

screen behind which wilderness might vanish 

altogether, leaving only its memory. 

Art, Language and the Invention of 

Yosemite Valley and Yellowstone 

National Park 

When Frederick Law Olmsted, one of the 

first commissioners of the newly created 

Yosemite "park," wrote an 1865 advisory 

report for the California Legislature, his idea 

of "preservation" was allied with that of 

artists and photographers. On the one hand, 

the report issued a warning against "natural 

scenes of an impressive character" becoming 

"private property" and "Niagarized" (overly 

commercialized). On the other, it affirmed 

the role of therapeutic contemplation of 

"scenes of beauty" as "favorable to the health 

and vigor of men," especially those "pressed 

by their business or household cares." Lack 

of scenic recreation, he asserted, can result 

in "mental disability ... paralysis, palsy, 

monomania, or insanity, but most frequently 

of mental and nervous excitability 

[neurasthenia] ... incapacitating the subject 

for the proper exercise of the intellectual or 

moral forces." In a familiar Victorian litany, 

he conceded that "the power of scenery to 

affect men is, in a large way proportionate 

to the degree of their civilization and the 

degree in which their taste has been 

cultivated." 185 In short, what needed 

preservation was scenic beauty as defined by 

the artistic culture, but not the raw matter 

of wilderness for its own sake. Never an 

advocate of uncultivated nature, Olmsted 

considered the inordinate love of the wild a 

"vulgar blunder." "Peaceful, pastoral 

beauty," in his view, constituted the highest 

aesthetic and the scenic probity of 

Yosemite. 186 Seeking to strengthen his 

position, Olmsted did not hesitate to enlist, 

as consultants on the future of the park, 

painters Vergil Williams and Thomas Hill, 

together with photographer Carleton 

Watkins. 187 ln Roderick Nash's succinct 

characterization of the motives of America's 

early preservationists: "A wilderness was the 

last thing they wanted." 188 

Almost every historic study of the 

creation of the Yosemite and Yellowstone 

"parks" acknowledges the critical role of 

landscape art in promoting the enabling 

Federal legislation. The impact of the 

imagery of Albert Biersradt and Carleton 

Watkins in shaping the values associated with 

Yosemite is set alongside the equally 

formative work of Thomas Moran and 

William Henry Jackson in the debates over 

the Yellowstone. 189 Painters and 

photographers, according to this argument, 

conspired to present legislators with 

sublimely Romantic images of place that 

resonated with their inherited cultural vision. 

With characteristic generosity, Jackson 

claimed that Moran's mountainous 

landscapes "did a work which no other 

agency could do and doubtless convinced 

every one who saw them that the regions 

where such wonders existed should be 

carefully preserved to the people forever." 190 

In the hyperventilated formulation of 

another environmental enthusiast: 

"Romanticism saved the West." 191 

ln the grand national project of scenic 

salvation the word, more than the image, was 

more constrained by the often perverse 

vagaries of "reality." Frustrated by the scale 

and "otherness" of the western landforms, 

writers were often reduced to the invocation 

of "picturesque" aesthetics to describe these 

diverse regions, while visual artists, less 

impaired by the imaginative defects of 

language, were able to adopt a more flexible 

strategy for valorizing natural scenery .. Where 

words faltered, where the limits of language 

had been reached, writers were thrown back 

on imported European formulas to describe 

the American wilderness. Confronted with 

An and the American Conservation Movement - 3 7 
Part 11: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

a vastness and enormity of scale that 

thwarted description, they were obliged to 

conceptualize such places as Yosemite and 

Yellowstone as "parks," designations that 

remain to this day. One early guidebook to 

the Yellowstone was mindful of the problem 

of nomenclature, warning travelers not to 

expect "beautifully aligned walks and 

roadways, carpet-like lawns, formal beds of 

flowers, and other features of the 

conventional city park ... and it does indeed 

seem, at first sight, as if the name was a little 

out of place when applied to such a 

region." 192 In striking contrast to the genteel, 

pastoral vision evoked by the term "park," 

artists were able to draw upon a more 

complex code of imagery for the 

representation of the American 

wildemess. 19J The sister arts, it would seem, 

were traveling by separate paths to the same 

destination, but where writers found gardens, 

painters and photographers envisaged 

sublime spectacles of mountains and 

cataracts. 

On their respective pilgrimages, words 

were neither as foot-loose nor as fancy-free 

as pictures. 194 Overwhelmed by the 

immensity of western spaces, writers struggled 

to convey dimensions, while artists, 

especially photographers like Watkins and 

Jackson, more easily overcame the inherent 

limitation of visual representation, 

temporality, by the creation of extensive 

suites of sequential imagery. 195 Vicariously 

experiencing the journey serially unfolded by 

photographs, the armchair tourist could 

undertake an unprecedented virtual 

pilgrimage to scenic places. Descending from 

mountain heights into the walled sanctuary 

of Yosemite Valley, or alternatively, 

traversing the vast spaces of the Yellowstone, 

the urban pilgrim could-especially with the 

assistance of a stereoscope for heightened 

three-dimensional viewing- relive the 

primal encounter of surveyors and explorers 

with "wilderness." 196 So compellingly 

persuasive was the photographic recreation 

38 -An and the American Conservation Movement 

of the western landscape for many Victorians 

that travel itself could be viewed as a 

dispensable nuisance. The Reverend H. J. 

Morton, upon first viewing photographs of 

Yosemite at Goupil's New York Gallery, was 

moved to observe that Watkins' 

photographic views . . . open before us 

the wonderful valley whose features far 

surpass the fancies of the most 

imaginative poet and eager romancer ... 

Without crossing the continent 

by the overland route in dread of scalping 

Indians and waterless plains; without 

braving rhe d:meers of rht- s~::i hy thtChangres and Panama route; nay without 

even the trouble of the 

brief land trip from San Francisco, we are 

able to step, as it were, from our study 

into the wonders of the wondrous valley, 

and gaze at our leisure on its amazing 

features. 197 

Not only were words surpassed, but 

reality itself was brought under scrutiny, if 

not outright surpassed, by the refined lens of 

"the mirror of nacure." No doubt Edward L. 

Wilson, editor of the art journal The 

Philadel/Jhia Photographer, had something like 

this in mind when, in reference to Watkins' 

Yosemite suite, he wrote: "It has been said 

that 'the pen is mightier than the sword,' but 

who shall nor say that in this instance, at least, 

the camera is mightier than the pen."198 

When contrasted with Bierstadt's and 

Watkins' operatic visions, verbal accounts of 

Yosemite, ranging from Lafayette Bunnell's 

description of the valley as presenting the 

"appearance of a well kept park" ( 1851) to 

John Muir's initial perception of it "dressed 

like an artificial landscape-garden" (1869), 

seem gentrified and defanged. 199 As 

Bierstadt's publicist, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, 

laconically observed on first viewing 

Yosemite: "Never were words so beggared 

for an abridged translation of any Scripture 

of Nature."200 Pressed for an apt comparison, 
) 

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Part 11: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and che Environmental Movement 

the travel writer Bayard Taylor resorted to 

describing the valley as classical sculpture: 

"a gallery of master-pieces, which I should 

not be afraid to place beside those of the 

Vatican and the Louvre. Types of beauty 

and grace I had already-the Apollo, the 

Antinous, the Faun, even the Gladiatorbut here were the Heraclidae, the Tttans."201 

Never at a loss for words in describing the 

blandishments of New Hampshire's White 

Mountains, Universalise minister Thomas 

Starr King also found the task of describing 

the Yosemite valley beyond him. "How can 

I express the awe and joy that were blended 

and continually struggling with each other," 

he rhetorically exclaimed, "during the half 

hour in the hot noon that we remained on 

the edge of the abyss where the grandeurs of 

the Yo-Semite were revealed co us." 

Overcoming his verbal inhibitions, Starr King 

expressed his inability to find a known 

cultural model: "Nowhere among the Alps, 

in no pass of the Andes . . . is there such 

stupendous rock scenery as the traveler now 

lifts his eyes to."202 Journalist Samuel Bowles, 

giving voice to the popular conceit, 

exclaimed: "THE YOSEMITE! As well 

interpret God in thirty-nine articles as portray 

it to you by word of mouth or pen. "203 

ln lifting his eyes and mind from the 

valley floor to the rocky heights, Starr King 

was employing an alternative mode of verbal 

description for mountain scenery, derived 

from the writings of John Ruskin. In the 

fourth volume of Modem Painters, devoted 

to the gloom and glory of the sublime, 

Ruskin defined mountains as works of sacred 

art. "Full of treasures of illuminated 

manuscript for the scholar, kindly in simple 

lessons for the worker," he intoned, "quiet in 

pale cloisters for the thinker, glorious in 

holiness for the worshipper," mountains are 

the "earth's natural cathedrals. "204 

Inadvertently legitimating the cultural value 

of the American landscape by dispensing 

with the need for storied association (the 

English-Romantic theory of the "picturesque" 

that privileged landscape associated with 

historic events, a doctrine inherently inimical 

to Britain's former colony), Ruskin 

empowered countless American nature 

writers, including St.arr King, Fitz Hugh 

Ludlow, Clarence King, John Muir, Horace 

Greeley and Samuel Bowles. 205 Once again 

transcending his temporarily suspended 

powers of verbal description, Bowles defined 

Yosemite's Cathedral Rocks and Cathedral 

Spires by invoking Ruskin's canonic 

paradigm: for him they replicated "the great 

impressiveness, the beauty and the fantastic 

form of Gothic architecture." In gazing upon 

the "mountain tabernacles," he contended, 

"it is easy to imagine ... that you are under 

the ruins of an old Gothic cathedral, to which 

those of Cologne and Milan are but baby 

houses."206 Approaching the limits of known 

rhetoric, Yosemite finally became for Bowles 

"the confrontal of God face to face, as in 

great danger, in solemn, sudden death. lt 

was Niagara magnified."207 In the end, these 

fashionably gothic effusions were as grounded 

in inherited European aesthetic conventions 

(and as frustrated by American realities) as 

the bucolic utterances of the pastoralists. 

Not ro be outdone by writers, artists too, 

in self-serving acts of deprecation, admitted 

to being overcome by their inability to 

capture on canvas that which stood before 

them in nature. Reflecting upon numerous 

attempts to depict the Yosemite valley, 

William Keith was compelled to admit that 

"art has its limitation and in imitating nature 

the artist is at the greatest disadvantage 

because he is trying to do the impossible. 11 206 

Despite his humble disclaimer, Keith, like 

most writers dilating upon Yosemite, did not 

refrain from attempting the "impossible" as 

long as there existed a market 

for it. 209 

A similar pattern emerges when the first 

calls for Yellowstone to become "a public 

park forever" are contrasted with the stem 

visual confections of the region by Thomas 

"Yellowstone" Moran. 210 Gazing into the 

Art and the American Conservation Movement - 39 
Part II: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movemeni 

chasm of the Yellowstone river, Gustavus C. 

Doane, a young lieutenant accompanying the 

Washburn expedition of 1870, declared, "the 

mind struggles and then falls back upon itself 

despairing in the effort to grasp by a single 

thought the idea of its immensity."lll One 

member of d1e party, N. P. Langford, later to 

become the first director of the park and 

afterwards known as "National Park" 

Langford, drew on the well-traveled 

cathedral metaphor, in his description of the 

rock formations above Tower Falls: "Some 

resemble towers, oth ers the spires of 

churches, and others still shoot up as lithe 

;;incl slernier ;;is the min::irets of ::i mosq11P-." In 

the end, however, "the solemn grandeur of 

the scene surpasses description. It must be 

seen to be felt." In privileging the visual over 

the verbal, Langford was simultaneously 

subverting his own wordy project: "You feel 

the absence of sound, the oppression of 

absolute silence."212 Moran, who was not on 

the expedition and thus was unencumbered 

by the imperatives of "reality," produced a 

body of sublime images based on Langford's 

tepid prose that far surpass in imaginative 

power their verbal source. 213 Moran's 

empurpled illustrations were employed by 

Langford and Jay Cooke of the Northern 

Pacific to lobby Congress on behalf of the 

Yellowstone and persuaded Ferdinand V. 

Hayden to enlist Moran as artist for the 1871 

expedition. 

Upon return from the 1871 expedition 

and loath to permit nature to be trumped by 

art, Hayden hastened to point out in his 

testimony before Congress that Yellowstone's 

"gothic columns" possessed "greater variety 

and more striking colors than ever adorned 

a work of human arr." "Decorations more 

beautiful than human art ever conceived," 

he cautioned, must be delivered from the fate 

that befell Niagara Falls. 214 No less a 

celebrity than General William "Tecumseh" 

Sherman, upon first viewing Thomas Moran's 

panoramic Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 

was equally dubious about the capacity of 

40 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

a rt or letters to express the inexpressible: 

"The painting by Moran is good," he avowed, 

"but painting and words are unequal to the 

subject."215 Despite the inability of art to 

rival nature, the assertion seemed only to 

hasten the naming the geysers of the Norris 

Basin "Artists' Paintpots" ("arranged with a 

precision so exact that it would delight the 

heart of the most methodical artist in 

Christendom") or the park, as a whole, the 

"Nation's Art Gallery."216 By invoking the 

museum metaphor for Yellowstone, writers 

became complicit with artists in the cultural 

project of converting the dynamic flux of 

nM11rP into srntk monuments of art. 

In 1872 when the Secretary of the 

Interior defined the aim of the impending 

Yellowstone Act "to preserve it as a public 

park or pleasuring ground," he too was 

engaging the limits of language to express 

landscape value.217 Even John Muir, whose 

verbal rhapsodies mounted to 

unprecedented heights at Yosemite (into 

whose "rnuunlain 111ansiuns NaLurt'. lnid 

taken pains to gather her choicest treasures 

to draw her lovers into close and confiding 

communion with her"), confessed to being 

stupefied by the spectacle of the 

Yellowstone.118 In his view, it belonged "to 

some other world," one that required "a 

coinage of new words ... to convey this 

varied and continual color, and give an 

intelligent conception of the commotion of 

waters." 219 Turning to the sister art, he 

reluctantly concluded, "all the earth 

hereabouts seems to be paint."220 

Confounded by Yellowstone's unfa1niliar 

spaces, colors and atmosphere, nature's 

foremost rhapsod ist was at a loss to 

characterize a place that was anything but 

park-like.m 

When the Northern Pacific sponsored 

painter Thomas Moran for rhe 1871 Hayden 

survey of the Yellowstone, he was described 

as "an artist of much genius, who desires to 

take sketches in the upper Yellowstone 

region, from which to paint some fine 
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Part 11: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

pictures on his return. That he will surpass 

Bierstadt's 'Yosemite,' we who know him best 

fully believe."222 Introducing the snake of 

commerce into the garden, competition 

between railroad lines translated into staged 

artistic rivalries. 223 Visual artists, typicall y 

more driven by market considerations, 

Social Darwinian critics, and the politics of 

patronage than were writers, were spurred 

to intense levels of competition in 

theatricalizing the landscape. 224 If the 

western parks are understood as America's 

"first massively endowed works of art," then 

invidious comparisons between them were 

inevitable and artists, to whom it fell to 

fashion a desirable image, were perforce 

impelled to pay homage to the parks (and 

to themselves) through ever climaxing 

pictorial exertions. When the boundaries 

of a scenic paradigm had been reached, new 

ones were found waiting in the wings.225 

Art, Railroads and the 

N ational Park Movement 

Historically the debate over the 

formation of the national parks has been 

framed by arguments, which have set utility 

against spirituality. 226 Suspicious of any 

claims that privilege art, many 

environmental historians have, predictably, 

invoked conspiracy theory, such as the 

collusion of banking and railroad interests, 

as a principal determinant in the rise of the 

preservationist movement. Initially the 

American Steamship Transit Line, and later 

the Southern Pacific railroad in Yosemite and 

the Northern Pacific in Yellowstone, are cited 

as chief agents in securing passage of the 

respective bills. In this account greed and 

self-interest, combined with cynical 

manipulation of artists to provide an 

aesthetic smoke screen for the railroad's real 

motives, brought about the legislation on 

behalf of America's scenic wonders. 227 What 

drops out of this account is an understanding 

that artists, by enlisting the theory of the 

sublime in the representation of these sites, 

were de facto designating them as possessing 

no resource value. Writers, in comparison, 

through over-reliance on the aesthetics of the 

"picturesque," were in fact equating 

Yosemite and the Yellowstone with an English 

garden, thereby lending weight to the claim 

that such places were fertile and 

exploitable. 228 Conscious of this linguistic 

dilemma, late-century supporters of the New 

York state legislation on behalf of the 

Adirondack and Catskill regions deliberately 

eschewed the term "park" in favor of "forest 

preserve" (the designation "park" has since 

been attached to both places). 229 The 

modern association of "amusement" or 

"theme" with the term "park" doubtless 

afforded the weight of contumely of a 1920s 

Denver journalist for Stephen Mather, first 

director of the Park Service: "He preached 

parks, pictured parks, planned parks, played 

parks on the clangorous cymbal and cooing 

lute until one is afraid not to go see parks. 

One dreads a parkless death."230 

Painters and photographers, in 

reconfiguring the chosen sites as sublime 

spectacle rather than picturesque park, 

incorporated into their selective vision the 

aesthetic theories of such philosophers as 

Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. 23 1 

Boundless waste, forlorn desolation, and the 

capacity to elicit "terror inspired by fear" is, 

in the famous formulation of Burke, "the 

ruling principle of the sublime." These 

qualities were drawn upon by Hayden in his 

testimony before Congress on the noneconomic value of the Yellowstone. Identical 

claims were made about the unsuitability of 

Yosemite for "public purposes" (i.e. mining 

and agriculture) by Senator John Conness 

of California in proposing his 1864 bill to 

Congress. At Yosemite, as at Yellowstone, 

the ideology of the sublime fortified the 

imperatives of scenic preservation. In 

grafting their vision of crags, precipices and 

cataracts onto environmental concerns, if 

only through the related processes of denial 

Art and the American Conservation Movement - 41 
Pan II: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmencal Movement 

and erasure of utility, artists were highly 

effective in persuading legislators to preserve 

scenery. 232 

From the inLtial stirrings, the idea of 

preservation entered into an entangling 

alliance with aesthetics and self-interest; the 

not-so-strange bedfellows, Art and 

Mammon, conspired in the formation of the 

early land ethic. As early as 1832 the painter 

George Catlin, an early proponent of the 

National Park idea, pleaded for "some great 

protecting policy of government" that 

preserved in their pristine beauty and 

wildness, in a m~gnifitent park ... tht> 

native Indian in his classic attire, 

galloping his wild horse ... amid the 

fleeting herds of elks and buffaloes . . . 

A nation's Park, containing man and 

beast, in all the wild and freshness of their 

nature's beauty.23·

1 

A graphic description of one of his own 

paintings, Catlin's advocacy is difficult to 

separate from his own practices of 

cornmodifying Indians in images and in 

ritualized performance of Wild West shows. 

In any event, Catlin's radical concept of a 

buffalo-grasslands with roving Indians on 

horseback-an image best represented by his 

own paintings-was ultimately rejected in 

favor of monumental scenery. Landscape, 

rather than man in the landscape, was the 

triumphalist vision bodied forth in Yosemite 

and Yellowstone. 

In his careful study of nineteenth century 

American tourism, John Sears has traced the 

trajectory of the emergent environmental 

movement from Niagara Falls in the 1820s 

to the Yellowstone Act of 1872. Exploring 

the sources of influence in rural cemeteries, 

landscape gardening, urban parks and the 

Adirondack northwoods of New York state, 

he foregrounds the pivotal role of Frederick 

Law Olmsted in the development of the idea 

of preservation. To cite but one critical arc 

of this evolution, The New York Times 

4 2 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

published in 1864, the year of the creation 

of Yosemite, an editorial supporting the 

construction of a railroad into the 

Adirondacks, claiming that it would 

transform the region into a "Central Park for 

the World."234 That same year, Northern 

Pacific publicist Samuel Bowles supported 

the view that Yosemite's public ownership 

should serve as a model for Niagara Falls and 

the Adirondacks.235 

The historic narrative of conservation 

takes on added meaning when a short article 

in the Woodstock [Vermont] Standard of June 

13, 1887 is brought into alignment with 

Olmflted's vision of scenic recreation. In 

describing the building of new carriage roads 

in Frederick Billings' Mount 'fom Forest 

Preserve, the journalist noted: 

The new road together with the old give 

Mr. Billings about five miles in length on 

his own grounds. They are broad, 

smooth, graveled, and winding about as 

rhey do in the old foresL [they] are 

romantic in the extreme. Still further 

extensions are in contemplation for next 

year, including a drive to the summit of 

Mount Tom. When these are completed 

the place will be to Woodstock what 

Central Park is to New York, or Mount 

Royal to Montreal: for Mr. Billings has 

always kept the gates wide open for 

the public to enjoy with him these 

beautiful drives. 236 

Billings' achieved vision of a quasi-public 

park is clearly related to Olmsted's plans for 

Yosemite which (like Central Park's circuit 

road) entailed a circular carriageway which 

would take in all the best views and allow 

for leisurely contemplation of the scenery.m 

The concept of a Grand Loop, as first realized 

at both Yosemite and Yellowstone, originates, 

according to historian Chris Magee, in the 

European "Grand Tour" of the eighteenth 

century and "subsequent American versions 

in the East. It offered efficient cultural 
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Part 11: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

edification and a mark of social status."l36 

From this refined perspective, a view of the 

Windsor County Fairground did not figure 

in Frederick Bil lings' or, for that matter, 

anyone else's image of a "park." As Sears 

has noted: 

Whatever influence Central Park actually 

had on the establishment of Yosemite as 

a park, Yosemite combined t11e functions 

of Central Park and Niagara Falls as 

symbols of America's cultural 

achievement. As a park it represented 

the commitment of a republican 

government to providing, in Olmsted's 

words, "reinvigorating recreation" 

among "the choicest natural scenes 

in the country," not just for the wealthy, 

but for all its citizens. 239 

Another link between Billings and 

Olmsted, apart from their connections to Las 

Mariposa::; and Yosemite, is their shared 

interest in "scientific farming" and the related 

activities of landscape design and agricultural 

gardening. 240 An important essay by Daniel 

Joseph Nadenicek has traced the influence 

of Ralph Waldo Emerson's "organic aesthetic" 

(as adapted from Coleridge) upon the career 

of Robert Morris Copeland, the designer of 

Billings' domestic landscape.241 Copeland, 

author of an 1859 book on country life, a 

copy of which Billings owned, laid out the 

sweeping pastoral vistas of the estate and 

infused Billings with his Emersonian vision 

of the indissoluble unity of utility and 

beauty.242 Copeland, along with Andrew 

Jackson Downing, was also an influence on 

Frederick Law Olmsted and his "picturesque" 

design of many of America's urban parks. 

Paradoxically the nineteenth century's 

magically conflated view of "wilderness" as 

both culture and commodity, poetry and 

property, stands in marked distinction to 

many of today's preservationist attitudes. 

The compatibility of natural religion and 

capitalism-in Simon Schama's memorable 

formulation "John Bunyan and Paul Bunyan 

lashed to the same steed"- was held in 

dynamic suspension by the philosophers of 

the Gilded Age. The Transcendentalist 

vision of nature as a site for cultivated 

Brahmin-contemplation marched hand in 

hand with the prospect of "unruly passions" 

aroused by the aesthetics of the sublime. At 

other times, the fluidity of these cultural 

constructs resulted in hybridity as the 

pastoral commingled incestuously with the 

sublime. It is not the least of many ironies of 

the period that the ideals of pastora lism 

trumped those of sublimity in the official 

nomenclature for the national "parks," while 

the pictorial sublime was more effectively 

enlisted to persuade government of the 

desirability of creating such places. Both 

categories, however, brought the western 

landscape (as well as the northeastern 

"wilderness") into conformity with pictorial 

conventions as culture annexed nature to the 

accepted protocols for seeing and knowing. 

Albert Bierstadt and 

the Victorian Imagination 

The influence of the paintings of Albert 

Bierstadt on Victorian perception is 

especially well documented and affords 

insight into the period's diverse habits of 

viewing the linkages between art and nature. 

An 1870 article in a Boston newspaper, for 

example, commented upon the role of one 

of the artist's most celebrated canvases in the 

promotion of landscape tourism: 

The landlord of the Glen House, White 

Mountains, has lately been beset with 

visitors in search of "The Emerald Pool" 

in the vicinity of that popular hotel. The 

notoriety given to that romantic and 

secluded locality by the exhibition of 

Bierstadt's beautiful painting at Childs & 

Co.'s gallery, has excited the curiosity of 

White Mountain tourists. 243 

Art and the American Conservation Movement-43 
Part II: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

This is but one of several known 

instances in which a painted image imparted 

celebrity to a topographic site. 

After laying claim to a good part of New 

Hampshire's White Mountains, Bierstadt also 

mined the American West, having, in the 

words of one 1869 critic, "copyrighted nearly 

all the principal mountains."244 A year earlier 

George Armstrong Custer, a heretofore 

unacknowledged art critic, had praised 

western nature's ability to imitate paintings. 

We are now in the Wichita Mountains 

... a high level plateau, with streams of 

clear water, and surrounded by a distant 

belt of forest trees. Tom [his brother] and 

I sat on our horses as the view spread 

before us, worthy the brush of a Church, 

a Bierstadt, the structure of the 

mountains reminding one of paintings of 

the Yosemite Valley, in the blending of 

colors- somber purple, deep blue, to 

rich crimson tinged with gold.245 

Unable or unwilling to look beyond the 

surface of representation to the "real world," 

Custer, like many Victorians, was firmly in 

the grasp of culture. 1n his first sighting of 

the Yosemite, Samuel Bowles' response was 

also freighted with the memory of the famed 

artist's paintings. "That which Bierstadt has 

chosen for his perpetuation on canvas, and 

which is thus familiar to eastern eyes ... is 

oppressive i.n its majesty, beautiful in form, 

angelic in its whiteness-the union of all that 

is great and pure and impressive."246 The 

art critic Edward Strahan, reviewing the fine 

arts section of the Philadelphia Centennial 

Exhibition, contended that Bierstadt's 

paintings were a quick substitute for travel, 

pointing out that his epic canvases "seemed 

to compete in dimensions with the original." 

The viewer could, in his estimation, "travel 

on the magical broomstick of one of 

[Bierstadt's] colossal brushes into the heart 

of the great West."247 

44 - Art and the American Con$ervation Movement 

Further obscuring, if not totally 

collapsing, the boundary between art and 

nature, the famous Beecher sisters even 

proposed Bierstadt as a cheap substitute for 

the view from the porch of a home. "A man 

building his house takes a plan to an 

architect," they cautioned. 

This plan includes, on the outside a 

number ... of "curlywurlies" and 

"whigmaliries" which make the house 

neither prettier nor more comfortab le and which take up a good 

deal of money. We would venture to 

say that we could buy the chroma of 

Bierstadt's "Sunset in Yosemite Valley" 

and four others like it for half the sum 

that we have sometimes seen laid out 

on a very ugly, narrow, awkward porch 

on the outside of a house.248 

In his 1864 report to Congress on the 

desirability of preserving Yosemite valley, the 

nation's leading landscape archiLecL 

Frederick Law Olmsted stated that 

it was during one of the darkest hours 

[of the Civil War] when the paintings of 

Bierstadt ... had given to the people of 

the Atlantic some idea of the sublimity 

of the Yosemite ... that consideration 

was first given to the danger that such 

scenes might become private property 

and through false taste, the caprice or 

requirements of some industrial 

speculation of their holders, their value 

to posterity be injured.249 

Not everyone, of course, was persuaded 

of the desirability of substituting a Bierstadt 

painting for the real thing. The geologist 

Clarence King, for example, was far from 

enthusiastic about the popular mania for the 

great painter's canvases. 
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Part II: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

It's all Bierstadt and Bierstadt and 

Bierstadt nowadays! What has he done 

but twist and skew and distort and 

discolor and belittle and be-pretty this 

whole doggonned country. Why, his 

mountains are too high and too slim; 

they'd blow over in one of our fall winds. 

l've herded colts two summers in 

Yosemite, and honest now, when I stood 

right up in front of his picture, I didn't 

know it." 

Affirming his ::illegi::mce to the central 

article of faith of the American PreRaphaelite Brotherhood, King remonstrated, 

"He hasn't what old Ruskin calls for."250 The 

New York arr critic James Jackson Jarves held 

similar views on the scale of Bierstadt's 

oversized canvases. 

Once seen [Bierstadt's paintings,] the 

return of the spectator who thinks or has 

the spiritual faculty, is not worth the cost. 

Yet they do address significantly the 

majority of Americans, who associate 

them with the vulgar ideas of 'big things' 

as business. In reality, they are bold 

and effective speculations in art on 

principles of trade; emotionless and 

soulless ... nature's best is left out.25 1 

One of Bierstadt's boldest and most 

effective "speculations in art" was the creation 

of a fictitious western mountain landscape 

that he christened Mount Corcoran in the 

hope of selling it to Washington 0. C. banker 

William Wilson Corcoran for his private art 

gallery. Unaware that the artist had 

exhibited the painting the previous year at 

the 1877 exhibition of the National 

Academy of Design as a generic Mountain 

Landscape, Corcoran purchased the canvas 

upon Bierstadt's assurance that it had been 

painted expressly for him with a "loving 

hand."252 John Wesley Powell, like Clarence 

King before him, was equally distrustful of 

the artist's geology. The Corcoran gallery 

curator's journal entry for 11 January, 1878 

noted: "Maj. Powell thinks Bierstadt's 

Mt. Corcoran not truthful in form of the 

mountain-too much of a precipice."253 

To some of Bierstadt's patrons the 

painted image could do more than stand in 

for reality; it could literally displace it, 

thereby allowing for the unimpeded 

exploitation of nature. The Massachusetts 

paper magnate Zenas Crane, for example, 

drew a sharp distinction between prophets 

and profits. At the same time that he owned 

one of Bierstadt's monumental canvases of 

California Redwoods, his company was busy 

converting the actual trees into pulp. In 

what Simon Schama has described as the 

"most remarkable case of unembarrassed 

cultural schizophrenia," Crane saw the 

redwoods "converted back into greenstuff, 

courtesy of the U. S. Mint."254 

Art and the 

Adirondack Northwoods 

While it is neither feasible nor advisable 

to draw definitive conclusions about the role 

of broader art movements in the creation of 

a nineteenth century landscape ethos, it is 

possible to cite specific instances in which 

artists and artworks contributed to 

environmental action and, on occasion, 

public policy. One of the earliest and more 

complex examples of the rdationship 

between landscape art and the emergent 

nineteenth century environmental 

movement lies in the formation of the 

Adirondack Club in the northwoods of New 

York state in 1858. During the month of 

August, the landscape painter William James 

Stillman invited a group of friends from 

Concord's famed Saturday Club to join him 

on an excursion to Follansbee Pond, a "lake 

on a stream that led nowhere," located in 

the heart of the Adirondack wilderness. 255 

Among the invited guests were three 

"magnates," Louis Agassiz, Ra lph Waldo 

Emerson, and James Russell Lowell, major 

Art and the American Conservation Movement - 45 
Part II: Nineceenth Cenwry American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

figures in the Transcendentalist movement. 

When asked to join the expedition Henry 

Wadsworth Longfellow, after learning that 

Emerson was going to take a gun, 

courteously declined with the cautionary, 

"Then somebody will be shot."256 

Stillman's account of the outing in which 

the Brahmins hunted, fished, swam and 

botanized reads more like an essay on the 

activities of a Boy Scout's summer camp than 

a serious enterprise in wilderness 

appreciation. The purpose of the Adirondack 

Club, as stated by Stillman, was "the 

recurrence of its members, for a short time 

each summer, to the undiluted intluence of 

the great mother, Nature."257 Although deer 

hunting was on the agenda (even Emerson 

tried his hand unsuccessfully at 

"jacklighting"), "contemplation" of nature 

was the preferred activity, causing the guides 

to dub the gathering "The Philosopher's 

Camp." The following year, the group 

formally organized with the purchase of 

22,500 acres at remute Ampersand Pund (in 

the vicinity of Saranac Lake) for $600. While 

it is possible to view the Club's purchase of 

wild land for purposes of retreat and 

recreation as the first act of the fledgling 

American environmental movement, this 

was in actuality a false dawn. 258 Camp Maple, 

as it was named by Lowell, was only occupied 

for two summers and after the outbreak of 

Fig. 1: Frederic Ronde I, 

A Hunting Party in the 

W!oods/ln the Adirondac, 

N. Y. State (1856), The 

Adirondack Museum. 

46 - Arr and the American Conservation Movement 

the Civil War reverted to the state for unpaid 

taxes. 259 As Stillman later confessed: "Our 

paradise was no Eden. The world that played 

bo-peep with us across the mountains came 

for us, then the play-spell was over; this 

summer dream, unique in the record of poesy, 

melted like a cloud-castle, and Emerson was 

one of the first to turn back to the sterner 

uses of time."u,o Similar fates of dissolution 

attended the nation's first hiking clubs at 

Williams College (1863) and Portland, 

Maine (1873) before the enduring formation 

of the Appalachian Mountain Club in 1876 

and the Sierra Club in 1892.261 

In addition to the Adirondack Club, 

there is evidence to indicate that a slightly 

earlier group of nature-loving Bostonians 

called "The Batkin's Club" preceded Stillman 

and his cohort into the woods. Though it is 

probable that this group was formed primarily 

for purposes of hunting, it is difficult to 

separate char activity, as with the Adirondack 

Club, frorn the wider appreciation of the 

wilderness. A painting in the collection of 

the Adirondack Museum entitled A Hunting 

Pany in the Woods/In the Adirondac, N. Y. 

State (Fig. 1) is signed and dated 1856 and 

features at the center of a group composition 

the figure of the artist, Frederic Rondel, 

seated on a stump next to his paintbox, 

brushes and palette. 262 A woodland table, 

laden with food and wine bottles, awaits the 
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Part 11: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting anA the Environmental Movement 

campers who variously play cards, examine 

rifles and fishing gear, or tend fires. Bringing 

the wilderness into consciousness, the Parisborn Rendel, the only figure engaged in 

thought rather than a physical activity, 

depicts himself in the pose of a painter before 

his easel. An act of self-glorification, in which 

the artist pictures himself as both creator and 

genius loci, the painting is strongly inflected 

by Parisian ideals concerning the primacy of 

art over life. 263 The canvas was exhibited at 

New York's National Academy of Design in 

1857 where it would have been seen by 

Stillman, who modeled his own group 

portrait The Philosopher's Camp in the 

Adirondacks (Fig. 2) (1858) after that of the 

Frenchman.264 With a characteristic shift of 

emphasis, however, Stillman displaces the 

centrality of the artist's persona with the 

upright figure of his hero, Emerson, who 

mediates between Agassiz at the left 

(dissecting a trout) and Lowell's party at the 

right (engaged in target practice with a rifle). 

"Emerson, recognizing himself as neither a 

marksman nor a scientist," Stillman observed 

in his description of the work, "choosing a 

position between the two groups, pilgrimstaff in hand, watches the marksmen, with a 

slight preference as between the two 

groups."26' Fully committed to neither the 

active nor the contemplative life, Emerson 

occupies the Transcendental axis between 

ideas and facts, serving as a figurative 

embodiment of the sovereign principle of 

Fig. 2: William James Stillman, 

The Philosopher's Camp in the 

Adirondlicl<s (1858), Concord 

Free Public Library. 

"sight." Substituting the philosopher for the 

artist as the demiurge of nature, Stillman 

marginalizes himself among the marksmen. 

In a magazine article written nearly forty years 

later, Stillman reminisced about the camp 

and the presence of Emerson, his "evangelist" 

and the one camper "whose genius was fittest 

to the temple in which we all worshipped, its 

high priest and oracle. "266 While Emerson 

carefully insisted that art "must be a 

complement to nature, strictly subsidiary" 

("gymnastics for the eye"), he also attributed 

to art the capacity to generate the "new eyes" 

requisite to the righteous perception of 

nature. "Go out to walk with a painter and 

you shall see for the first time," he advised, if 

you would become yourself a "transparent 

eyeball. "267 

In his role as high priest and oracle of the 

Club, Emerson composed an unsurpassedly 

mediocre poem on their adventures in the 

wilderness. Entitled The Adirondacs: A 

Journal Dedicated to my Fellow-Travelers in 

August, 1858, the poem narrates the voyage 

into the primeval forest of "ten men, ten 

guides, our company all told." 268 The 

members of the Saturday Club may be the 

"lords of the realm," but the guides are 

nature's noblemen and the clubmen must 

"bow to the stalwart churls in overalls: /They 

are the doctors of the wilderness, / And we 

the low-prized laymen." Above the 

woodsmen stands, however, our '"Gallant 

Artist,'/ Stillman, our guides' guide, and 

Art and the American Conservation Movement - 4 7 
Part 11: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

Commodore / Crusoe, Crusader, Pius 

Aeneas." In a later journal entry, Emerson 

noted that Stillman was his universal man. 

"He could hunt and fish and rule and row / 

and out-shoot each in his own bow I and paint 

and plan and execute, / till each blossom 

became fruit." 269 Self-effacingly, Stillman 

later designated himself as "the insect 

preserved in the amber of the poet's verse."270 

Registering a form ulaic wilderness 

complaint, Emerson noted that the bed and 

fa re were hard but not so much as the black 

fly and the mosquito who "painted our necks, 

hands, ankles with red bands." In adversity, 

however, resides salvation, "For who defends 

our leafy tabernacle / From bold intrusion of 

the traveling crowd, - / Who but the midge, 

mosquito and the fly." Despite the 

blandishments of the carefree Life of the 

camp, Emerson concluded with a predictable 

choice for culture over nature: "We praise 

the guide, we praise the forest life;/ But will 

we sacrifice our dear-bought Lore / Of books 

and (Jrt and trnined experiment, / Or count 

the Sioux a match for Agassiz? / 0 no, 

not we!" 271 

Emerson's naively hopeful belief in the 

prophylactic power of black flies to deter 

tou rists was totally demolished by the 

publication in 1869 of one of the most 

influential American guidebooks ever 

written. William H. H. Murray's Adventures 

in the Wilderness: or, Camp-Life in the 

Adirondacks Launched a rush of "Murray's 

Fools" to the region that made the FortyNiners and Pike's Peakers appear orderly by 

comparison.m Outfitted with an over-thehead net so that he "could laugh defiance at 

the mosquitoes and gnats," "Adirondack 

Murray," a Congregational minister of 

Boston's fashionable Park Street Church, 

authored a catechism for visiting the region, 

invoking the customary theological and 

health arguments, while offering the 

enticement of catching three trout 

simultaneously on a single h ook. In his 

guidebook the Reverend Murray also 

48-Art and the American Conservation Movement 

provided practical suggestions for both male 

and female tourists on methods of travel, 

proper attire and sporting equipment. Most 

important was his advocacy of what was 

defined as "muscular Christianity," the 

practice of which entailed both spiritual and 

physical exertion in the wilderness. 273 

Vigorous physical exercise, Murray advised, 

was the best antidote to moral weakness: 

"the creative skill and benevolence of God 

are brought about by ... an exhibition of 

physical power." Shifting the ideal of 

Christianity from the practice of self-denial 

and ascetic spirituality to manly participation 

in God's great out-of-doors, Murray was a 

major voice in the sacralization of the natural 

world. Subsequent defenders of the spiritual 

and therapeutic benefits of the wilderness, 

from Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir to 

Edward Abbey and David Brower, have 

consistently invoked the ideals, if not always 

the rheology, of the Reverend Murray as a 

means of personal salvation. 

Demonized by the press for his "unrelieable" reports, "Liar Murray" had the 

paradoxical effect of popularizing the 

Adirondacks as a "Central Park for the 

World" and simultaneously fostering its allure 

as an aristocratic hunting prese rve for 

wealthy New Yorkers. The foundation in 

1877 of the Bisby Club, later to become the 

prestigious Adirondack League Club, was 

formed, as John Reiger has demonstrated, to 

combat the egregious overfishing and 

overhunting required by hotels to feed 

"Murray's Fools."274 Moreover, as Philip 

Terrie has suggested in his study of the 

Adirondack Park, the rift between Lower-class 

tourists and wealthy sportsmen masked the 

real threat to the region, which was largescale logging (the ex istence of which, 

ironically, Murray had denied). 275 

As early as 1864 with the publication of 

Man and Nature, the arch-pragmatist George 

Perkins Marsh had written in defense of the 

formation of an Adirondack forest preserve 

on primarily aesthetic grounds. Invoking 
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Part 11: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmencal Movement 

the standard claim that it was land unsuitable 

for agricultural uses, he argued, "It has been 

often proposed that the State should declare 

the remaining forest the inalienable property 

of the commonwealth, but I believe the 

motive of the suggestion has originated rather 

in poetical than in economical views of the 

subject." The forest should remain in a 

"primitive condition," he advocated, "at 

once a museum for the instruction of the 

student, a garden for the recreation of the 

lover of nature, and an asylum" where tree 

and animal "may dwell and perpetuate their 

kind, in the enjoyment of such imperfect 

protection as the laws of a people jealous of 

restraint can afford them."276 Marsh's 

visionary "poetical" museum cum garden~ 

asylum, however, was not established for 

another thirty years and, as the subsequent 

history of the Adirondack Park affirms, 

mostly in a state of "imperfect protection." 

When William Stillman revisited 

Follansbee Pond in 1893 to recollect his 

memories of the "Philosopher's Camp," he 

found the forest in "ashes and ruins" and "the 

Procession of the Pines" had gone forever. 

The following year, a consortium of 

sportsmen's clubs, environmentalists, and 

utilitarians who were worried, among other 

things, about New York City's watershed, 

persuaded the state to enact legislation to 

create the Adirondack State Park "for the 

hi.gher uses of the great wilderness." As 

Roderick Nash has pointed out, "the 

rationale for wilderness preservation was 

gradually catching up with the ideology of 

appreciation." 277 Over a century later, 

however, it is still routine for environmental 

organizations like the Sierra Club, the 

Wilderness Society and the Natural 

Resources Defense Council to resort to 

utilitarian arguments to mask their actual 

intention, which, more often than not, 

is preservation of scenic beauty for its 

own sake.178 

Art and the White Mountains: 

The Invention of Scenery 

When the Boston Unitarian minister Thomas 

Starr King published his magisterial 

guidebook to the White Mountains of New 

Hampshire in 1859, the region was well on 

its way to becoming the foremost site for 

landscape tourism in America. 279 First 

brought into national prominence in the 

later 1820s by the paintings of Thomas Cole, 

the White Mountains became, as a 

consequence, the "wilderness" most 

accessible to the great urban centers of 

Boston and New York for purposes of cultural 

exploitation. 2

80 Here, as later in Yosemite 

and the Yellowstone, public perception of 

nature was first shaped by imported European 

aesthetics adapted to American rea lities. 

Alternately picturesque, then sublime, and 

once more picturesque, the region was 

persistently over time made to conform to 

aesthetic theory. 281 

A remarkable case study of the 

operations of culture upon nature, and 

specifically the impact of a famous landscape 

painting upon a given topographic site, is 

provided by the "discovery" of the Intervale 

at North Conway by painters Benjamin 

Champney and John Frederick Kensett in 

June of 1850. Recently returned from study 

in Europe, they happened upon the Mount 

Washington valley and proclaimed it to be 

the most beautiful place on earth, "even more 

picturesque than the Alps. "282 Expressing a 

characteristic lability of aesthetic categories, 

Champney stated in his memoirs, "We had 

seen grander, higher mounts in Switzerland, 

but not often so much beauty and artistic 

picturesqueness brought together in one 

valley."283 All that summer Kensett made 

sketches for a large panoramic canvas that 

was completed in his New York studio during 

the winter of 1851. When it was exhibited 

at New York's National Academy, The White 

Mountains-Mount Washington was at once 

acknowledged as the signature image of the 

Art and the American Conservation Movement - 49 
Part 11: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting artd the Environmental Movement 

region. Purchased by the American Art 

Union for engraving and distribution 

(Fig. 3) t o its over thirteen thousand 

members, the painting was reconfigured by 

Currier and Ives for a colored lithograph and 

received the widest possible d issemination 

for a work of art during the period. By the 

middle of the nineteen th century, The White 

Mountains- Mount Washington was the best 

known and most revered landscape image 

in America, hanging on t h e walls of 

thousands of homes. A New England scene 

with grand, national associations, it offered 

assurances to Americans that God was in his 

h e<wen and all w<1s right with th e world. 

Moreover the composition of the painting 

established a new model for th e 

representation of the American landscape . 

In lieu of Cole's paradigmatic vision of the 

White Mountains as primal wilderness, the 

view embraced by Stillwell and Emerson for 

the Adirondacks, Kensett employed a binary 

landscape formula in which a cultivated 

foreground and middle distance gradually 

yields to distant mountain sublimity. In 

conjoining the works of man and nature in 

harmonious unity, Ke nsett intimated that 

there was room for both poetry and property, 

thus envisaging a "middle landscape." The 

mediating "landscape of reconciliation," 

according to historian Leo Marx, became the 

dominant model of American nature after 

mid-century. 284 

Fig. 3: James David Smillie 

after John Frederick Kensett, 

Mount Wasliington from 

Sunset Hill, North Conway 

(1851 ), Private Collection. 

50 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

Writing in the art journal The Crayon, 

which he both founded and co-edited, 

William Stillwell recognized the cultural 

differences between h is beloved 

Adirondacks and the White Mountains. "To 

those who find their recreation in hunting 

or fishing," he wrote, the Adirondacks are 

"inviting in the extreme." For artistic 

purposes, however, "there is little in this 

district to compare with the White Mountain 

views . ... There is no Alpine sublimity, few 

precipices or bold elevations, but the roll of 

unbroken green ... the peaks heaving up 

one after the other, as near alike as may be 

without being alike."285 

In his memoirs, composed half a century 

after the public unveiling of Kensett's famous 

canvas, Champney wrote: "Thus the fine 

picture became wide ly known and 

interested artists and others in our mountain 

scenery. So much so that the next season 

many artists followed in our wake bringing 

friends and lovers of mountain scenery with 

them."286 In d tb prut:e:;:; Llte "SwiLztrlan<l 

of America" was transformed into the 

"American Barb izon" as North Conway 

became the nation's first artists' colony with 

"dozens of umbrellas dotted about under 

which sat artists from all sections of the 

country."287 Writing in 1856, the painter 

Thomas Addison Richards commented 

presciently upon the role of art in stimulating 
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Part II: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

tourism: "Conway valley is a delightful place 

for artistic study, and for summer residences; 

and within a few years past, it has been a 

favorite resort of American landscapists, and 

has grown to be a veritable 'watering place' 

in the great number of tourists who not only 

pass, but linger within its borders."2

&8 

The publication in J 859 of Thomas Starr 

King's highly prescriptive guidebook gave 

clerical imprimatur to the White Mountain 

landscape. In this text, in which he 

consciously compares a visit to the 

mountains with a visit to an art gallery, he 

directs the reader where to go, where to 

stand, what to see, and what to think. 

Establishing the proper "perspective" from 

which to view the mountains, he taught his 

public how to read moral allegories into the 

landscape and how to translate that into 

cultural practice. "The effect of White 

Mountain journeys," he instructed, "should 

be seen in our homes, in a purer delight in 

art, and an intelligent patronage of it."289 

The proper reverential attitude towards 

nature will lead, in his Ruskinian view, to a 

corollary love of art, and thus the land will 

be "lifted into landscape." This miraculous 

transubstantiation is attained, however, only 

by the perceiving eye of an informed viewer, 

the eye being "the chief physical sign of the 

royalty of man on the globe."290 At the heart 

of Starr King's landscape liturgy lies the 

Intervale at North Conway which he 

canonized as "a natural lesson in landscape 

composition, a little quotation from 

Arcadia."291 Prefacing his guidebook with 

Ruskin's claim that "the best image which 

the world can give of Paradise is the slope of 

the meadows ... on the sides of a great Alp," 

he urged pilgrims not to 

spend their tirne and money ... in the 

study of the gastronomy of Coos County 

in New Hampshire, or to criticize the 

comparative upholstery of the largest 

houses, but to be introduced to the 

richest feasts of loveliness and grandeur 

. . . and ro be refreshed by the 

draperies of verdure, shadow, cloud, and 

color, that are hung by the Creator 

around and above the hills. 292 

Starr King was not alone in his tendency 

to blur the mutable boundaries between art, 

artifice and nature. Benjamin Willey-a 

descendent of the ill-starred family that 

perished in the fabled 1826 landslide, which 

fed a generation of Romantics on White 

Mountain "gloom and doom"- rendered a 

similar judgment. "One who visits the 

Conway meadows sees the original of half 

the pictures that have been shown in our art 

rooms the last two years. All our landscape 

painters must try their hand at this perfect 

gem of New England scenery."293 A few years 

later, the inveterate traveler Bayard Taylor 

was more specific about which landforms 

imitated which artists: 

We had entered artist-land, and even 

when the forests narrowed our prospect, 

we only saw the picturesque .... Much 

of rhe [White Mountain] landscape 

consists of remembrances of New York 

studios. Every foreground was made up 

of sketches by Shattuck, Coleman and 

the younger painters; every background 

was a complete picture by Kensett. 294 

In his excited imagination, Luminist 

horizons were yielding to Barbizon-inspircd 

foregrounds. 295 Further transforming nature 

into art, he dilated on the prospect of Mount 

Chocorua from the lntervale: "I watched 

the shifting quadruple peaks of Chocorua 

with a peculiar personal interest. Gradually 

they assumed the familiar position .... yes, 

there is my Chocorua! And really, at this 

distance, he towers not more grandly in the 

afternoon light than on those four feet of 

canvas, in my room at home, 'where it is 

always afternoon."'296 Indeed, so durable was 

the belief in the shaping influence of culrure 

upon nature that, even during the last decade 

Art and the American Conservation Movement - 51 
Part II: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

of the nineteenth century, the Reverend 

Julius Ward could assure his readers that his 

guidebook to the White Mountains was 

"written in illustration of the modern 

interpretation of Nature which has been 

taught us by Emerson and Wordsworth and 

Ruskin." Such understanding, he averred, 

expresses "the enrichment that exists 

between the mountains and ourselves, when 

they are approached through the 

sympathetic imagination of what is 

transcendental in poetry and art. All of our 

poets and students of nature are under the 

spell of this enthusiasm."297 

The nineteenth century's attraction to 

the White Mountains, and to the lntervale 

at North Conway in particular, produced 

near fatal consequences, for without the 

protection of federal or state legislation the 

"little quotation from Arcadia" was 

transformed over time into a commercial 

inferno. The vantage from which Kensett 

made his sketches of the lntervale is today 

occupie<l by a sprawling motel with a nearby 

alpine slide, while the once pastoral middle 

distance is framed by an array of commercial 

outlets ranging from Ralph Lauren to Donna 

Karan. The tourists who formerly arrived to 

contemplate the beauties of the landscape 

from the piazzas of grand hotels (now 

destroyed) presently arrive in droves to shop 

at Dansk and Eddie Bauer. Where once the 

fashionable were driven in carriages to view 

the legendary scenery near Artists' Brook and 

Champney Falls, or to gaze upon the 

Cathedral Ledges from Artists' Bluff, tourists 

now spend upwards of an hour in snarling 

traffic jams in order to traverse the village of 

North Conway. In the final reckoning, the 

nineteenth century's commodification of 

regional tourism by the canvases and books 

of Kensett, Champney and Starr King cannot 

be disassociated from the present commercial 

disfiguration of the region-though few, if 

any, who visit North Conway today have ever 

heard of these members of the Victorian 

cultural elite. Likewise the diverse practices 

52 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

of Olmsted, Bierstadt, Starr King and 

Watkins cannot be divorced from the 

contemporary problems that beset Yosemite. 

For better and worse, it is precisely because 

Yosemite and the lntervale conformed so 

fully to the aesthetic mandates of the 

picturesque and the sublime, that one was 

"preserved" and the other "lost"; though in 

high season, it was difficult to determine 

(until recently) which place featured the 

greater automotive gridlock. 

In 1860, the Reverend Thomas Starr 

King, in a dramatic reversal, switched his 

authorial a llegiances from the White 

Mountains of New Hampshire to the Sierras 

of California. After viewing the Yosemite 

from Inspiration Point, he wrote to a friend, 

"Poor White Mountain Notch," referring to 

the region's most famous anthropomorphic 

symbol, The Old Man of the Mountains, "its 

nose is broken." "If you can find any copies 

of King's book on the New Hampshire ant~ 

hills," he implored, "l advise you, as a friend 

tu the author, to buy up the remaining 

edition and make a bonfire in the park."298 

Though impossible to calibrate precisely, the 

mountain minister's dismissive remarks on the 

Great Stone Face and the implied migration 

of divinity to the American West were both 

consequential and catastrophic. 

The Art of Protest 

If landscape art and nature writing could 

be enlisted to "preserve" scenery (Yosemite 

and Yellowstone) or, inadvertently, to 

"destroy" it (North Conway), they could also 

be employed to protest depredations against 

nature. In this project, painting was often 

less instrumental than letters. For many of 

the reasons that have been adduced, 

representation of the American landscape 

was celebratory, the reduplication of the 

work of the "visible hand of God" being the 

ordained work of painters. At the outbreak 

of the Civil War, however, photographers 

turned their attention to documenting the 
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Part 11: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

unpalatable processes of the destruction of 

both humans and nature, inflecting for the 

moment the painter's vision of American 

experience. 

Matthew Brady's photographs of Civil 

War battlefields, for example, had a 

discernible influence upon the art of painting 

in the instance of Sanford Robinson Gifford's 

1866 painting Twilight on Hunter Mountain 

(Fig. 4). This stark and depressing image of 

ruin is a meditation upon the nation's fall from 

Innocence and constitutes one of the most 

disturbing works of the nineteenth 

century. 299 In the midst of a clearing, whose 

field of stumps bear a resemblance to fallen 

soldiers, a diminutive figure, his back turned 

to the spectator, gazes westward towards a 

distant mountain and a setting sun. A 

modest homestead stands nearby, located 

within a shallow depression that replicates 

in reverse the shape of the mountain. 

Deliberately manipulating the visual 

metaphors of harvest, death and ruin, 

Gifford depicts a natural paradise despoiled 

by man and history. For perhaps the first 

time in American art, the field of tree stumps 

cannot be understood to denote progress, and 

a mood of desecration is felr.3°0 

Like most important landscape paintings 

of the era, Gifford's work was intended for a 

stratified audience and intended to be read 

on both a literal and a symbolic level. Since 

the location of the scene is near the village 

of Catskill, Gifford intended to reference for 

an informed viewer the rural studio of 

Fig. 4: Sanford Robinson 

Gifford, Twilight on Hunter 

Mountain ( 1866), Terra 

Museum of American Art, 

Chicago. 

Thomas Cole, the father of the American 

landscape tradition and the painter who first 

protested "the ravages of the axe." On 

another level, Catskill was the center of the 

region's leather-tanning industry. Gifford, the 

grandson of a tanner, knew that the area's 

great stands of hemlock had been drastically 

reduced for the tannin in the bark. A painful 

reminder of the loss of the once virgin forest, 

a solitary giant hemlock at the center of the 

composition stands guardian over the field 

of stumps. Purchased, and possibly 

commissioned, by the New York merchant 

James Pinchot, a close friend of the artist, 

Twilight on Hunter Mountain passed into the 

collection of America's leading forestry 

family. James Pinchot, "the Father of 

American Forestry," served as vice president 

of the American Forestry Association, 

founded in 1875, and named his eldest son 

after the artist. Gifford Pinchot, in turn, 

became America's most influential forester 

and the first Director of the United States 

Forest Service. 

A second painting by Gifford, entitled 

Scribne1·'s Field, Catskills (Fig. 5), also 

discourses .with ideas of life, death and the 

desecration of nature. A solitary figure, 

accompanied by a dog, advances towards the 

spectator through a field punctuated by 

ravaged, man-made stumps. No vista of a 

distant mountain provides visual escape from 

this strikingly morbid scene of desolation. 

Painted at the height of the Civil War by an 

artist who had served at the batdefront with 

Art and the American Conservation Movement- 53 
Part 11: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

Fig. 5: Sanford Robinson Gifford, Scribner's Pasture (c. 1860), The Dayton Art Institute. 

New York's Seventh Regiment, the canvas 

is almost certainly a pictorial rumination 

upon the consequences of human conflict. 

lt is also a reflection upon the price of 

progress. Silas Scribner ran a boarding house 

located near the top of the famed Kaaterskill 

Falls, site of the tales of Washington Irving 

and several early canvases by Thomas Cole. 

Gifford, together with several other Hudson 

River artists, often frequented Scribner's 

boarding house due to its proximity to South 

Lake and the famous overlook from 

Kaaterskill Clove. 101 Scribner also ran a 

sawmill and created a dam on Lake Creek, 

which flooded South Lake and killed 

numerous trees. Logs taken from Scribner's 

field were used to build the luxurious Catskill 

Mountain House and to construct an 

Fig. 6: Charles Lewis 

l lcyde, North Williston, 

Vermont (c. 1855-1865), 

Shelburne Museum of Art. 

54 -Art and the American Conservation Movement 

observa tion platform over Kaaterskill Falls. 

It was doubtless these commercial logging 

activities that Gifford was documenting in 

his muted canvas of the stumpage and slash 

deforming Scribner's field. ln this abrupt 

departure from "picturesque" norms for 

landscape, Gifford was surely once again 

lamenting "the ravages of the axe." 

The difficulty of interpreting nineteenth 

century art, however, is demonstrated by 

comparing Gifford's stark painting with 

contemporaneous images of landscapes 

punctuated by stumpage. North Williston, 

Vermont (c. 1860) by Charles Lewis Heyde 

and Bird Mountain, Castleton, Vermont (c. 

1870) by James Hope (Figs. 6-7) are views 

by native Vermont painters thac celebrate, 

rather than condemn, the practices of logging 
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Pare ll: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

to support advanced technology. Both 

landscapes, featuring conspicuous fields of 

stumps, are best understood as icons of 

progress rather than paintings of protest. The 

stumps are clearly meant to denote the trees 

felled to fuel the engines of progress. The 

dialogue, inscribed within these works by 

Gifford, Heyde and Hope, between natives 

and cosmopolitans- in this instance New 

Yorkers and Vermonters-continues to 

animate discussions over land use in the late 

twentieth century. Perhaps the ultimate 

irony documented by this nineteenth century 

pictorial discourse is that neither of the 

Vermont railroads is today extant and 

Scribner's Boarding House was "bulldozed 

into oblivion, except for a part of its 

foundations, in order to make room for a 

parking lot for the New York State 

Conservation Department. "302 

The Mountain of the Holy Cross: 

The Kingdom of God in America 

Another celebrated instance in which 

Romantic landscape images served to 

promote the veneration and preservation of 

scenery lies in the "discovery" and 

documentation of Colorado's Mountain of 

the Holy Cross in 1873 by photographer 

William Henry Jackson. First sighted by 

journalist Samuel Bowles from the summit 

of Gray's Peak some forty miles distant, the 

Fig. 7: James Hope, Bird Mountain 

Castleton, Vermont (c. 1860), 

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 

Mountain of the Holy Cross was designated 

as "His sign, His seal, His promise there- a 

beacon upon the very center and hight [sic] 

of the Continent to all its people and all its 

generations."303 Further claiming that "no 

Swiss mountain view carries such majestic 

sweep of distance, such sublime combination 

of hight [sic], breadth and depth; such 

uplifting into the presence of God,'' he 

compared the scenery to the "three or four 

great natural wonders of the world-with 

Niagara Falls from the Tower, with the 

Yosemite Valley from Inspiration Point." 304 

Attracted by Bowles' account, Ferdinand 

Vandiveer Hayden undertook his seventh 

U.S. Geological Survey to the Colorado 

Rockies in the company of Jackson and 

others with the purpose, among other things, 

of finding the mysterious and elusive 

mountain. Jackson's narrative of the search 

for the "Cross of Snow" constitutes one of 

the great artistic adventure stories of the 

American West, together with those of 

Catlin, Bochner and Alfred Jacob Miller.305 

Burdened with over one hundred pounds of 

photographic equipment, Jackson and his 

companions were obliged to climb to over 

13,000 feet on neighboring Notch Mountain 

in order to gain an unimpeded view of the 

fabled cross. The resultant glass plate 

photograph, when published in the fall of 

1873, galvanized the public imagination, 

resulting in a social and cultural impact 

Art and the American Conservation Movement - 55 
Part 11: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

comparable to the view of the earth from 

the moon in recent times. Arguably the most 

important photograph of the nineteenth 

century, Jackson's image stimulated enormous 

interest in the Rocky Mountain West; God 

had left his signature in the landscape and it 

was in the heart of the Continent. 

ln this charged atmosphere William 

Gilpin, former governor of the Colorado 

Territory, published Mission of the North 

American People, a text which located the 

"zodiac of nations" along the fortieth degree 

of latitude and situated Denver and the 

Rocky Mountains as the "focal point of 

impregnable power in the topographical 

configuration of the continent."306 Attracted 

by Jackson's photograph and Gilpin's 

rhetoric, painter Thomas Moran joined the 

Hayden survey of 1874 in order to visit the 

site with a view to a monumental painting 

that would be ready for exhibit in the 1876 

Philadelphia Centennial art exhibition. The 

resultant 8' x 6' canvas, toge ther with 

}acbuu's legendary pholograpb., were 

exhibited together in Philadelphia, creating 

a cultural aura fo r the mountain and 

promoting political statehood for Colorado. 

Moran's painting, unlike Jackson's 

photograph, is composed from a lower 

elevation, the spectator separated from the 

distant, lofty mountain by a stream and 

waterfall. Intended to symbolize holy water 

emerging from the cross, the stream also 

denotes, in the insightful analysis of Linda 

Hults, the idea of pilgrim's progress in the 

American West. 307 Contemporaneous art 

cnttcs readily understood Mo ran's 

iconography of suffering and redemption, 

passion and pilgrimage, even recognizing in 

the snowdrift to the right of the cross "a prone 

figure with hands outstretched and imploring 

to the symbol of salvation."308 Transfigured 

by the brush of Moran from a geological 

fonnation into a devotional image, Mountain 

of the Holy Cross inspired scores of pilgrims 

a'nd invalids to seek miraculous cures from 

the waters of the sacred mountain. 

56 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

Reviewing the Centennial exhibition at 

which Mountain of the Holy Cross was a major 

attraction, the Reverend Philip Sandhurst 

observed that it 

teaches that Christ ian nations keep 

in the front rank in the progressive 

march of mankind ... .Should we not be 

thankful that Art h as exercised her 

highest powers in the endeavor to place 

the Saviour and H is passion 

properly before us? .. . Why should not 

He speak to us from the glowering 

canvases and breathing marble as well 

as from the domains of nature and 

revelation ?

309 

The icon of the Cross of Snow continued 

to resonate throughout the later nineteenth 

century and into the early decades of the 

presen t one. In 1879 Henry Wadsworth 

Longfe llow composed an elegiac poem in 

memory of his deceased wife based upon the 

celebril y u( LI tt! iu1agt!. IL tt!aU iu parl: 

There is a mountain in the distant West 

That, sundefying, in its deep ravines 

Displays a cross of snow upon its side. 

Such is the cross I wear upon my breast 

These eighteen years, through all the 

changing scenes 

And season, changeless since the day 

she died.310 

In 1901 Vice President Theodore 

Roosevelt visited the Cripple Creek gold 

district of Colorado, viewing in the central 

octagon of a local mansion a large fresco of 

the Mountain of the Holy Cross out of which 

poured a cascade of real water into an 

aquarium filled with mountain trout. 311 

Overwhelmed by the spectacle, Roosevelt 

reportedly exclaimed to the owner, "I say, 

Maurice [Finn], this is phenomenal. You 

deserve a Congressional medal for your 

ingenu ity." 312 The discrete bounda ry 

between art and nature, always fluid during 
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Part II: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and tlie Environmental Movement 

the Romantic period in America, was here 

sundered in a remarkably operatic display of 

illusion and reality. 

During the early decades of the twentieth 

century, William Henry Jackson continued 

to re-circulate the photographic image of the 

Mountain of the Holy Cross as a quasi-religious 

icon and in 1905 President Theodore 

Roosevelt, perhaps recalling his visit ro 

Cripple Creek, established the Holy Cross 

National Forest. m In the 1930s, Jackson 

abandoned photography altogether for 

painting and began to depict the memory 

rather than the actuality of the West. Under 

the aegis of Franklin Roosevelt's Works 

Progress Administration, he was 

commissioned to make oil paintings of scenic 

vistas in the National Parks, and in 1936 to 

produce a set of four murals for the 

Department of Lhe Interior museum. 

Commemorating the great Federal surveys 

of the 1870s: Wheeler at Zuni, Powell at 

Grand Canyon, King in the Sierra Nevada 

and Hayden at Yellowsrone, the murals 

depict the "process by which the government 

presided over the discovery and classification 

of the national resources and then 

determined their best use, regulating and 

watching over the exploitation of nature to 

guarantee that the best interests of the nation 

as a whole were being met."314 Two paintings 

of the period, currently in the Scottsbluff 

National Monument Collection of Jackson 

memorabilia, represent the artist's 

recollection of the "discovery" of the 

Mountain of the Holy Cross. Holy Cross 

(Fig. 8) depicts Jackson's arduous climb of 

Notch Mountain and the momentary parting 

of the clouds to reveal the sacred sign. 

Photographing the Mountain of the Holy Cross 

(Fig. 9) represents the following morning 

when the skies cleared to reveal the snowy 

cross and Jackson was able to record the 

image permanently on a monumental glass 

plate negative. This act of homage to the 

artistic self, the painter honoring the 

photographer, closes the circle of 

representation, the western landscape 

Fig. 8: William Henry Jackson, 

Holy Cross (c. 1930), Scottsbluff 

National Monument. 

Art and the American Conservation Movement - 5 7 
Part 11: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

Fig. 9: William Henry 

Jackson, Photographing 

the Mountain of the 

Holy Cross (c. 1930), 

Scottsbluff National 

Monument. 

passing from actuality into myth. As 

Jackson's sympathetic biographer Peter Hales 

has astutely written: 

The living Jackson and the mythic 

Jackson steadil y diverged .... The old 

man was in danger of disappearing into 

his own image, as his nineteenth-century 

landscapes of memory and 

experience disappeared under the 

i1npastoed paintings of the new myths, 

myths reclaiming the West once again 

as a place of escape- but now an escape 

into fantasy rather than possibility. 315 

In 1928 the Denver Post began to 

promote annual pilgrimages t o Notch 

Mountain for the faithful to view "the most 

magnificent and holiest natural shrine in the 

world."316 The Mount Holy Cross Pilgrim 

Association lobbied so effectively that on 

May 11, 1929 President Herbert Hoover 

signed a proclamation making Mountain of 

the Holy Cross a National Monument. 

Reports of the miraculous healing powers 

derived from the sight of the Snow Cross or 

from the holy waters of Cross Creek 

continued until World War II when the 

monument was declared "off limits" due to 

the proximity of an army base. In 1950 

President Truman signed a bill dissolving the 

58 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

National Monument, the site reverting to the 

renamed White River National Forest. 317 

Though the reason offered for the dissolution 

of the monument was the decline in 

visitations and the erosion of one of the arms 

of the Cross, the real motivation is to be 

found in the modern world's secular view of 

narnre. The ambivalence of the government 

in involving itself with numinous landscapes 

was manifested initially by Congress' refusal 

to purchase Moran's Mountain of the Holy 

Cross ( Grnnd Canyon of the Yellowstone and 

Chasm of the Colorado had been previously 

acquired for the Senate building) and by the 

1945 renaming of the Holy Cross National 

Forest as the White River National Forest. 

Art and the 

Landscape of Tourism 

One of the most intriguing landscape 

paintings of the later nineteenth century is 

William Hahn's Yosemite Valley from Glacier 

Point (Fig. 10). Painted in 1874, Hahn's 

image of tourists surveying the scenery is one 

of the earliest to privilege the activities of 

tourism over the spectacle of nature. Hahn, 

a native of Germany, had met William Keith 

in Drtsseldorf and was invited to visit the 

American painter in San Francisco. Trained 

in the European tradition of figure and 

animal painting, Hahn immediately applied 
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Part II: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

his talents to the western landscape. Unlike 

his countryman Hermann Herzog, who 

painted a pristine view of the identical site 

in the same year, Hahn focused upon the 

human protagonists rather than untenanted 

nature. 31 8 Positioned in the center of the 

composition is a fashionable couple and their 

daughter. As the woman scans the view with 

a pair of binoculars, her husband points out 

the salient features of the landscape. 

Converting the siLe into "sight," the 

magnified gaze of the female tourist converts 

the spectacle of nature into a form of theater. 

The pleasure of looking (scopophilia) at 

scenery is elided in this canvas with the 

socially sanctioned practice of viewing a 

perform a nee. 319 

Secondary groupings of tourists, perched 

on the ledge, gaze inro space while bored 

guides, who have seen the view many times, 

doze in the shade provided by their horses. 

The presence of a guide carrying a large sack 

and a bottle of wine indicates that a picnic is 

about to be served. Emphatically 

highlighted, a number of discarded bottles 

and other detritus, located in the left 

foreground of the canvas, suggests the 

German born artist's concern. for the 

continued well-being of the site. While it is 

possible to interpret this vignette as a 

reassurance "to the contemporary viewer 

that Glacier Point was a frequently visited 

attraction ::ind one where tourists were 

provided with the necessary comforts,"320 it 

is more likely a condemnation of the careless 

and wasteful practices of Americans. As 

such Yosemite Valley from Glacier Point may 

well be the earliest recorded remonstration 

against littering. While it is tempting to read 

this canvas as a secularizing discourse on 

tourism, geology and pollution- a 

desacralization of numinous nature-it is 

known thaL the central panel was 

accompanied by pendants (currently in 

private collections) representing the ascent 

towards, and the descent from Glacier Point. 

As originally configured and exhibited, the 

painting would have appeared as a triptych, 

a structure associated with Renaissance 

altarpieces and symbolic of spirituality. Of 

America's many "sacred places" Yosemite 

Valley, in the eyes and mind of the painter, 

was the most "sacred," and any pollution of 

the touristic overlooks was a form of sacrilege. 

Almost exactly contemporaneous with 

Hahn's painting of the Yosemite are Frank 

Jay Haynes' landscape photographs of the 

Yellowstone. Commissioned by Northern 

Fig. 10: William Hahn, 

Yosemite Valley from Glacier 

Point (1874), California 

Historical Society. 

Art and the American Conservation Movement - 59 
Pare 11: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

Pacific's President Frederick Billings through 

his imaginative agent Charles S. Fee, Haynes' 

photographs radically transformed the public 

perception of the Yellowstone National 

Park. 321 Since he was instructed by the 

Northern Pacific to appeal to potential 

tourists and to "show up our Country to the 

best advantage," Haynes set out to counter 

the sublime imagery of William Henry 

Jackson and Thomas Moran. 322 Where 

Jackson and Moran represented fearful 

abysses and savage wastes, the iconography 

of inexpedient sublimity, Haynes sought to 

project the domain of the tourist and to 

depict "an irresistible genteel sportsmen's 

paradise."323 As official photographer and 

"superintendent of art" for the Yellowstone 

Park Improvement Company, the dummy 

corporation fronting for Billings, Villard and 

other Northern Pacific officers, Haynes' 

charge was to reconcile the machine with the 

garden.324 His carefully edited photographs 

of "Wonderland" project a paradise of 

hu111eutizt:J m1Lurt: in w!tid1 μlienotllt:Hal 

Fig. 11: Abbott Handerson 

Thayer, Mount Monadnock 

(1909), Hood Museum of 

Art, Dartmouth College. 

60 -Art and the American Conservation Movement 

forms are subordinated to touristic activities. 

"Here was a natural environment," writes 

Peter Hales of Jackson's return to Yellowstone 

in 1892 and his encounter with rival 

photographer Haynes, that now "served as 

an amusement park, a presage of the new 

wave of public entertainment spaces that 

would devolve from the Midway at the 

World's Columbian Exhibition a year 

larer."325 

Abbot Thayer and 

the Grand Monadnock 

Given the many variables-cultural, 

political and economic- that shaped 

America's early environmentalism, it is 

diffi.cult to calibrate the precise influence of 

any given artist on public policy. Clearly 

Albert Bierstaclt and Thomas Moran were 

central figures in creating the cultural 

definition of nature that eventuated in 

nineteenth century scenic preservation. The 

writings of Thomas Starr King anJ Nathaniel 
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Part 11: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

Langford were similarly influential. While 

the works of less celebrated artists such as 

Sanford Gifford, William Hahn and William 

Henry Jackson may also be understood to 

have had some form of limited impact on 

the environmental movement, the art and 

advocacy of turn-of-the-century painter 

Abbott Handerson Thayer can be linked to 

direct and enduring preservationist action. 

Thayer, a dedicated admirer of Emerson, 

moved his studio from New York to the base 

of New Hampshire's Mount Monadnock at 

the beginning of the twentieth centnry.326 He 

began painting the mountain (Fig. 11 ), which 

he referred to as "my old shrine," in a body 

of images that today constitute, along with 

some ethereal canvases of angelic, bewinged 

women, his principal artistic legacy. One of 

his students later wrote about his devotion 

to the mountain: 

Thayer shaped his life and that of his 

family on Emerson, Audubon and 

Monadnock. [It] was their totem, their 

fetish, the object of their adoration. They 

surrendered themselves to the 

sorcery of its primitive being. Gerald and 

his father prowled its peaks and 

precipices, its naked spine, and knew 

well the mysteries of the mouncain brook 

and its groves of spruce and 

hemlockY 7 

During the first part of the nineteenth 

century Monadnock had served as a "Beacon 

of Freedom" for Daniel Webster and a 

mystical retreat for Henry David Thoreau, 

who camped often on its summit. In 1845 

Emerson, with his characteristic aversion to 

"k"s, wrote a long poem entitled Monadnoc 

from Afar in which he described the 

mountain as 

To far eyes, an aerial isle 

Unploughed, which finer spirits pile 

Which morn and crimson evening painL 

For bard, for lover, and for saint 

An eyemark and the country's core, 

Inspirer, prophet evermore; 

Pillar which God aloft had set 

So that men might it not forget. 

Citing the usual mountain therapies, 

he enjoins: 

Man in these crags a fastness find 

To fight pollution of the mind; 

In the wide thaw and ooze of wrong, 

Adhere like this foundation strong, 

The ins;mity of towns to stem 

With simpleness for stratagem.328 

Acting out the mandates of Emerson's 

poem, Thayer, in whom "the passions for 

painting and for the world of nature were 

equally strong ... and were inseparable from 

his eminence as an artist," required his family 

to live winters in an unheated house and to 

sleep outdoors in all seasons in open leantos.329 His work as an active conservationist 

began around 1900 when he became incited 

by the killing of birds whose feathers were 

being used to trim women's hats (Fig. 12). 

Realizing that such species as terns and egrets 

were threatened with extinction, he sought 

to raise funds from wealthy clients to hire 

wardens to protect bird colonies in coastal 

Massachusetts. He eventually succeeded in 

hiring thirty-four wardens to patrol 

Newburyport's Plum lsland Bird Sanctuary 

against commercial plume hunters. 

After settling in New Hampshire Thayer, 

in a statement that has a familiar ring, 

designated the aesthetic "a stern necessity," 

and defined Monadnock as "an emanation 

of the Almighty and a money-maker." 

Unlike Catlin, be did not feel that the 

disappearance of the object of his affections 

would increase the value of its reproduction. 

When, around the turn of the century, his 

unimpaired view of the mountain was 

threatened by commercial development, he 

reacted swiftly to make certain that "no 

deterioration of its virginity occurred."330 

An and the American Conservation Movement - 61 
Part 11: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and che F.m1ironmental Movement 

In an irate letter to the proposed developers, 

he summoned the full powers of Victorian 

invective: 

It cannot be necessary to tell any grown 

person that it is in the beginnings that 

doom or save. The usual luxury loving 

class has followed to Dublin the 

worshippers that first came, until all 

the place's attributes which attracted 

those first comers-the atmosphere of 

peasantry amidst primitive nature, etc., 

one by one gave way, and now our 

mountain tarn gleams al night with a 

belt of city lights and roars by day with 

stinking motors. Your roads-especially 

a motor road-stab dead the primitive 

power of a mountain's height to save its 

realm from vulgar uses .... The one 

meaning of Jesus Christ is that nothing 

62 -Art and the American Conservation Movement 

Fig. 12: "The Cruelties 

of Fashion-Fine Feathers 

Make Fine Birds," from Frank 

Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper 

(November 10, 1883). 

belongs to any one who cannot 

make the highest use of it. 

Warming to the task, he continued: "You 

presume to doom all the worshippers who 

arc accustomed to feed their souls by gazing 

at Monadnock from afar, to know that they 

are gazing at private and occupied grounds." 

In anticipation of a strategy used later by 

David Brower of rhe Sierra Club against Glen 

Canyon Dam, he stated: "As rightfully might 

you write your names across the face of the 

Birth of Venus or the Sistine Madonna, 

because you bought it for $200,000, as you 

write with your road across the upreared face 

of that until-now shrine of many pilgrims."JJI 

In 1904 Thayer formed the Monadnock 

Forestry Association, which petitioned the 

state of New Hampshire to take either by 

purchase or eminent domain the land on and 
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around the mountain. Drawing upon the 

momentum provided by the Federal Weeks 

Act of 1911, which was in the process of 

creating the first National Forests east of the 

Mississippi, Thayer was eventually able to 

enlist the assistance of the newly formed 

Society for the Protection of New Hampshire 

Forests to block development and ultimately 

to acquire all of the land rights for 

preservation of the summit of the mountain. 

In the words of Barry Faulkner, another 

painter~devotee of the moun tain, "Thayer 

fought successfully to defend his mountain 

against commercial vandals and through his 

efforts much of Monadnock is now a state 

preserve."312 "Monadnock is very truly a 

memorial to Abbot Thayer," wrote Philip 

Ayres, the first forester for the Society for 

the Protection of New Hampshire Forests.333 

Today Mount Monadnock is maintained 

by a consortium of the Society and the New 

Hampshire State Park Service and, according 

to rough statistics, is the second most 

frequently climbed mountain in the world 

after Japan's Mount Fuji. 334 Unofficially 

designated by the state as a memoria l to 

Abbott Thayer, Mount Monadnock (upon 

whose summit the artist's ashes were 

scattered) is perhaps the clearest example of 

the transformation of culture into nature. 

Ironically what seemed co Emerson and 

Thoreau to be most free of our culture, turned 

out in the end to be its product. 

A moving tribute to Thayer and his 

mountain is Barry Faulkner's monumental 

mural found today in the lobby of Keene, 

Fig. 13: B<my Faulkner, 

Men of Monadnock 

( l950), Fleet Bank, 

Keene, New Hampshire. 

New Hampshire's Fleet Bank (Fig. 13 ). 

Commissioned in 1950 by the modern 

Medici of Keene's National Bank (since 

absorbed into the contemporary armada of 

Fleet Banks) from Thayer's favorite pupil, 

the mural and the mountain are inextricably 

linked to the history of the community and 

its signature landmark. At the center of the 

composition is depicted the enthroned 

Christ-like figure of the painter Abbott 

Thayer. Flanked by Thoreau, whose mother 

was born in Keene, in an active pose and 

Emerson in meditation, The Men of 

Mona.dnock are celebrated for their creative 

role in elucidating the meaning of 

Monaclnock for America. Composed so as 

to project the Emersonian conviction that 

every artist is a god because he reenacts the 

creation, the cultural trinity of Emerson, 

Thayer and Thoreau are positioned as 

demiurges on the slopes of New England's 

most beloved moncesacro. 

For Emerson the mountain held an 

indeterminate mystical allure as evidenced 

by one of his last poems entitled Monadnoc 

From Afar. 

Dark flower of Cheshire garden, 

Red evening du ly dyes 

Thy somber head with rosy hues 

To fix far-gazing eyes. 

Well the Planter knew how strongly 

Works thy form on human thought; 

I muse what secret purpose had he 

To draw all fancies to this spot.128 

An and the American Conservaiion Movement - 63 
Pan 11: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

Thoreau, for whom the mountain held 

scientific as well as metaphoric significance, 

ironically resented the legions of "scenery 

hounds" he and Emerson had inspired to 

undertake pilgrimages through their lectures 

and writings. In a familiar litany, he intoned: 

"They who simply climb to the peak of 

Monadnock have seen but little of the 

mountain. I came nor to look off from it, 

but to look at it." In a journal entry, he 

commented on the spiritual meaning of the 

mountain: 

The value of the mountains in the 

horizon- would that not be a good 

theme for a lecture? The text for a 

discourse on real values, and permanent, 

a sermon on the mount. They are 

stepping stones to heaven ... by which 

to mount when we would commence our 

pilgrimage to heaven, by which we 

gradually take our departure from earth 

from the time when our youthful eyes first 

rested on then.1, from this bare actual 

earth, which has so little of the hue of 

heaven. They make it easier to die and 

easier to live.335 

Abbott Thayer, the dominant figure in 

the composition, is shown seated before his 

easel-the time-honored pose of the artistcreator in his studio-engaged in bringing 

the landscape into consciousness through the 

action of his mind and brush. The easel-born 

canvas, however, is turned away from the 

viewer in order to privilege the notional 

mountain over its representation and nature 

over culture. In the final analysis, the 

dialectic is reversed and reconfigured, turned 

back upon itself, as mural art is accorded 

primacy over easel painting. Born out of 

the artistic imagination, the reified mountain 

landscape unites the poet, scientist and 

painter in a sacred environmental trinity. 

Historical anachronism is dissolved in the 

timeless collusion of mind and spirit, which 

unifies these figures in their respective acts 

64 -Art and the American Conservation Movement 

of homage to the Grand Monadnock. 

Loosely modeled after Raphael's fresco of 

Parnassus (1509-1511) in the Vatican's 

Stanza della Segnatura, Faulkner's astringent, 

sparsely populated mural, like its illustrious 

Renaissance ancestor, is both conceptually 

and visually connected to the physical 

landscape and meant to be understood in 

relation to it. Mount Monadnock presides 

over the town of Keene, New Hampshire (its 

prominent silhouette is discernible from 

numerous vantages including the upper 

stories of the bank) much as the Mons 

Vaticanus (one of Rome's seven hills) was 

brought by Raphael into visible alignment 

through a direct window-vista with the 

master's depiction of the muses' and poets' 

paradise. Much as Apollo, the central figure 

in Raphael's composition, was believed to 

have left Greece and taken up residence on 

the Mons Vaticanus during the reign of Pope 

Julius II, the ashes of Abbott Thayer, whose 

own pose closely approximates that of the 

Greek deity, were known to have been 

scattered upon Mount Monadnock. 336 

Appropriately enough, the pose for Emerson 

was derived by Faulkner, a long time fellow 

of the American Academy at Rome, from 

Raphael's figure of the Muse Calliope while 

the upright figure of Thoreau, pilgrim's staff 

in hand, is distantly related to the depiction 

of the pilgrim-father persona of Emerson in 

Stillman's Philosopher's Camp (Fig. 2). 

Perhaps Mark Twain, who summered 

briefly at the foot of Mount Monadnock in 

1905, best articulated the meaning of this 

spare New England Parnassus (and 

prospectively the meaning of Faulkner's 

mural) in a letter to a friend: "The New 

Hampshire highlands was a good place .... 

Any place that is good for an artist in paint 

is good for an artist in morals and ink. . . . 

Paint, literature, science, statesmanship, 

history, professorship, law, morals-these are 

all represented here."m 
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Art And Acadia: 

The Last Stand 

of Monumentalism 

A recent study of the designation of 

Acadia National Park in 1919 as the first 

national park east of the Mississippi, argues 

that it was the last place preserved primarily 

on the basis of nineteenth cenrury landscape 

aesthetics.338 According to Pamela Belanger, 

the landscape paintings of Mount Desert 

Island by Thomas Cole and , most 

significantly, Frederic Church's panoramic 

images of the 1860s were responsible for the 

fame of the island as "one of America's great 

scenic places." In her analysis of the cultural 

practices that privileged this coastal refuge, 

Belanger writes: "The enshrinemen t of 

Mount Desert as one of the nation's most 

exclusive 'sacred places' was, in its initial 

stages, a product of the cultural work of 

landscape painters who were also 'enshrined' 

for their genius in representing the place."339 

Like the national association of Bierstadt 

with the Yosemite, Moran with Yellowstone, 

and Thayer with Monadnock, the fame and 

"genius" of the artist were transmuted 

magically into the fame and "genius" of the 

place. Last but not least among America's 

"sacred places," Acadia National Park was 

primarily the product of scenic 

"monumentalism." As with the expansion 

of Yosemite, the formation of Grand Teton 

Park and the establishment of Frederick and 

Julia Billings' Woodstock estate as a National 

Historical Park, the process also depended 

upon the philanthropy of a member of the 

Rockefeller dynasty.340 

From Monurnentalism 

to Environmentalism: 

The Everglades National Park 

According to the great historian of the 

National Parks Alfred Runte, the shift from 

"monumentalism" to "environmentalism," 

otherwise stated as a turn from painting to 

biology or from a museum to a sanctuary, 

occurred during the Congressional debates 

over the Everglades in the 1930s. "The major 

preoccupation to be overcome," in his view, 

"was the belief that scenery must in all cases 

be defined as landscape." 141 The author of 

the 1932 brief on behalf of the Everglades, 

appropriately enough, was Frederick Law 

Olmsted, Jr. (son of the great landscape 

architect), who admitted that "the quality 

of the scenery is to the casual observer 

somewhat confused and monotonous," but 

hastened fo ::iclrl rh::ir rht> "sht>e:r he:a11 ry of 

the great flocks of birds . . . the thousands 

upon thousands of ibis and herons flocking 

in at sunset" affords a spectacle "no less 

memorable than the impressions derived from 

the great mountain and canyon parks of the 

West."3" 2 Among the many obstacles to be 

overcome was the Romantic association of 

swamps with sin, death and decay and the 

belief that lowlands denote "the most base 

and grovelling affections of the natural 

mind."343 

Without challenging Runre's ecological 

perspective, it is also possible to view this 

transformation of sensibility as one from the 

spectacles of Bierstadt and Moran to the 

sensuous Everglade paintings of Martin 

Johnson Heade and Louis Mignot.344 One 

of the more prophetic art movements of the 

later nineteenth century was the "Tropical 

Renaissance," initiated by painter Frederic 

Edwin Church, which began to privilege the 

light, atmosphere and verdancy of southern 

climes over the phenomenal scenery of the 

northeastern landscape and the American 

Wesc.345 

The discrete understanding that nature 

is more often the product, rather than the 

source of culture, makes it possib le to 

appreciate the discovery of aesthetic value, 

for example, in the desert Southwest. 

Without the legitimating vision created by 

Paul Cezanne-to cite but one vital agent 

in the shaping of the modern sensibility-it 

is doubtful that such places as Arches or 

Art and the American Conservation Movement- 65 
Part II: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

Canyonlands National Parks would have 

fallen under the protection of the Federal 

government. The ability to find beauty in 

an arid, rocky landscape, whose structure and 

coloration is the antithesis of a verdant park, 

depends to a degree, as nearly certain as it is 

difficult to calibrate, upon the Frenchman's 

radically new vision. Once again, it was a 

cultural figure- in this instance the American 

art historian John C. Van Dyke-who made 

the first call for the preservation of landscape 

of the Desert Southwest. In bis radically 

innovative book The Desert, first published 

in 1901, Van Dyke insisted that "the deserts 

should never be reclaimed. They are the 

breathing spaces of the West and should be 

preserved forever." 346 Citing the extraordinary qualities of light and atmosphere 

found in the region, Van Dyke, whu earlier 

had edited a book on modern French 

painting, reinvoked the aesthetic of the 

sublime for "the great clements" 

encountered in the "sand wrapped desert."347 

"The great struggle of the modern 

landscapist," he wrote as if describing a 

canvas by Cezanne, "is to get on with the 

least possible form and to suggest everything 

by tones of color, shades of light, drifts of air. 

... The landscape that is simplest in form 

and the finest in color is by all odds the most 

beautiful."34

8 ln addition to advocating 

desert preserves, Van Dyck was among the 

first Americans to intimate the community 

of all sentient creatures. "Will the human 

never learn," he lamented, "that he is not 

different from the things that creep?"34

9 

Opening the public's eyes to the possibilities 

of beauty where it had not previously been 

perceived, artists and writers, as the 

"antennae of the race," have persistenrly 

shaped, for better and worse, the nation's 

ideals of scenery and landscape value. Only 

in recent years has a serious attack begun to 

be mounted against the Victorian alliance 

between art and nature. 350 

66 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

Art Versus Nature: 

The Politics of Representation 

and Environmentalism 

Against the traditional account of the 

utllity of art needs to be set the 

environmental musings of anthropologist 

Paul Shepard, whose polemical writings assert 

that modern man has been "corrupted by the 

conventions of nature esthetics."351 In his 

view, the "retreat from being in nature is the 

effect of all landscape arts-crave!, gardening, 

landscape painting, nature writing-in which 

we step back far enough to appreciate the 

esthetic wholeness of landscape." The effect 

of this "esthetic <lisr::incing," Shep;ircl 

contends, is that "wilderness becomes a 

series of scenes before which spectators pass 

as they would the galleries of a museum or a 

kind of scenery for souvenir photographs that 

we describe to ourselves in a language 

invented by art critics."352 One vital 

consequence of the abstraccion of nature as 

art, Shepard further argues, "is thac masses 

of people consider ... art and nature as 

indulgences of the wealthy ... and 

environmental angst as elitisr."353 

Today, anyone visiting one of the great 

National Parks would be hard pressed to 

disagree with Shepard or to concur with 

Albert Camus' claim that "only art has never 

harmed mankind." Nineteenth century 

American landscape painters from Thomas 

Cole to Frederic Church, for example, were 

content to turn a blind eye to the sordid 

realities of Niagara Falls in their rush to 

exploit the scenic potential of that 

transcendent icon of the nation's landscape 

virtue. By any reckoning, their resplendent 

views of primal nature clearly served as a 

"rhetorical screen" placed before the harsh 

actualities of commercial and industrial 

exploitation. By providing a consoling 

image that all was right with the world, in 

depicting the ideal rather than the real, their 

images became complicit with commercial 

transgression and industrial depredation. By 
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Part II: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

way of further irony, it was visiting English 

clergymen in the 1830s who made the first 

calls for scenic preservation of the site. 

"Niagara docs not belong to Canada or 

America," they asserted. Rather "such spots 

should be deemed the property of civilized 

mankind."354 It was, however, an artist and 

an art historian who deserve credit for 

launching in 1879 the campaign to "save" 

Niagara Falls. Frederick Law Olmsted, the 

landscape architect, and Charles Eliot 

Norton, America's first historian of art and a 

founding member of the Adirondack Club, 

joined forces to raise monies under the rubric 

of "Esthetic Conservation" to lobby the New 

York State Assembly.355 Their joint efforrs 

were crowned with success in 1885 with the 

creation of the Niagara Falls Reservation, 

which in the words of environmental 

historian Alfred Runte "ranks with Central 

Park, Yosemite, and Yellowstone as a 

prese rvation triumph of the ninetecnthcentury. "356 

Along related lines, landscape 

photography has also been enlisted both for 

and against the conservation movement. A 

case in point of the uses and abuses of the 

medium are William Henry Jackson's 

photographs of Yellowstone and the 

Mountain of the Holy Cross, which were 

invoked on behalf of the enabling legislation. 

The fact that Jackson's Mountain of the Holy 

Cross was substantially manipulated in the 

process of development in order to 

"improve" the right arm of the cross should 

be considered in relation to a famously 

retouched photograph of Hetch Hetchy 

Valley created by engineers for the city of 

San Francisco. An idyllic lake scene 

reflecting with mirror-like precision the cliffs 

and waterfalls above, the confected image 

of Hetch Hetchy enabled Secretary of the 

lnterior James Garfield to predict that the 

valley floor, after flooding, would change 

"from a meadow to a beautiful lake."357 In 

actuality, the reservoir, as recently 

documented by the Sierra C lub, is "a region 

of desolation. Nothing permanent can grow 

in it." 358 Today silt, stumps and stains 

disfigure the once scenic valley.m In this 

regard it is tempting to quote Paul Shepard 

once again, who claims that "landscape 

photographs, being surrealistic, empty the 

subject of inrricale context. In time they 

add layers of temporal distance, leaving a 

cold crust of esthetics, like growing crystals, 

making the subjects increasingly abstract, 

subjecting real events to the drifting, 

decadent attention of the galleri'es coterie and 

connoisseurs. "360 

To this harsh critique, it is imperative to 

respond rhat art, like all human institutions, 

has capacity for both good and evil. 

Landscape painting and photography have 

been enlisted both to preserve and to degrade 

nature. Perhaps there are better media for 

conceptualizing the human relationship to 

nature- film and television spring to mindbut so far none has emerged to rival the 

enduring consolations offered by the visual 

arts. Until the operations of culture are 

better understood, the Victorian vision of the 

complex nexus between art and nature will 

continue to shape the geography of the 

American imagination and the ways in which 

we know and use the world. 361 

The Billingses' Relationship to 

the Conservation Movement: 

Art and Literature 

At this juncture it is important to note 

that almost nowhere do Frederick or Julia 

Billings give voice in their diaries or elsewhere 

to the pantheistic Transcendentalism that 

drove one aspect of the early American 

environmental movement. Of all his public 

and private utterances on conservation, only 

Frederick's malediction with regard to the 

exploitation of the Yellowstone that "God 

would not forgive those who destroyed his 

greatest creations" smacks of the rhetoric of 

a Starr King or a Muir. 362 Frederick's and 

Julia's life-long spiritual mentor, the 

Art and the American Conservation Movement - 67 
Part II: Nineteench Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

Fig. 14: "The Nonhern 

Pacific J11bilee: Dri ving 

the Golden Spike," 

from Harper's Weekly 

(September 24, J 883 ). 

Reverend Horace Bushnell, was a strident 

anti-TranscendentalisL who in a moment of 

weakness once referred rn the Mariposa 

Grove as "the park of the Lord," but 

otherwise generally avuided :-;uch effu:-;iut1:-; 

about the sp iritua l-in-nature.363 Rather, 

Bushnell condemned Emerson for "watching 

the play of his own reflective egoism," opting, 

instead of nature worship, fo r science and 

technology as "the certain handmaidens of 

Christianity."36·

1 Characteristically a miracle 

for Bushnell was "no suspension or violation 

of the laws of nature." NaLUre, in his view, 

sanctioned its wise use, an idea reiterated by 

a journalist of the Saint Paul Daily Globe (Fig. 

14) commenting upon the driving of the Last 

Spike: "The construction of the Northern 

Pacific was a modern miracle. Unlike 

ancient miracles, it was performed in 

compliance with the laws of nature, not 

against them."365 

Jn his thoughtful account of Frederick 

Billings as conservationist, Robin Winks has 

drawn the broad outlines of his subject's 

involvement with the nineteenth century 

environmental movcment.J66 Careful to 

position Frederick squarely within the "wiseuse" camp of natural resources (as opposed 

to the radical minority of strict 

preservationists), Winks takes the position 

that Frederick was an enlightened 

conservationist by the standards of the age. 

The desire for the Romantic apotheosis, the 

68 - Art and tlie American Conservation Movement 

quest to reestablish contact with the lost 

sources of the spiritu~l, however, was not the 

driving force of Billings' environmental 

activ ism. Rather, his in teresLs were 

preduminantly pragmatic and e thical. 

Along related lines, George Perkins 

Marsh, purportedly an inspirational force in 

the development of Frederick Billings' land 

ethic, nowhere in Man and Nature alludes to 

the supernaturn I. To the contrary, in his 

preface he states that his book is addressed 

to "the genera l intelligence of educated, 

observing and thinking men." His purpose 

is "to make practical suggestions [rather] than 

to indulge in theoretical speculations, 

properly suited to a different class from that 

to which those for whom l write belong."l67 

Charles Sprague Sargent, editor of Gai·den 

and Forest, doubtless spoke for both Marsh 

and Billings when he wrote: "The morive 

power in this the nineteenth century is 

money-the love of money or the 

anticipation of money. Then le[ us consider 

tree-planting in its true light ... the light of 

money-making."3<•S 

Another o f Frederick Billings' 

inte llectual mentors, James Marsh, president 

of the University of Vermont, was a lso 

assertively anri-Emersonian and, despite his 

admiration for Coleridge and Ruskin, insisted 

upon a strict separation o( God and nature. 

In light of this intellectual and spiritual legacy, 

i( is hardly surprising that Frederick and Julia 
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Part 11: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

remained staun ch Congregationalists 

throughout rheir lives. Attendance at 

church, respect for biblical revelation and 

the orthodox ministry-positions that were 

systematically challenged by Transcendentalists-remained central to their belief 

system. ln short it is unlikely that either 

Frederick or ] ul ia viewed nature as 

commensurate with divinity in more than a 

conventional manner. 

Along related lines, Frederick's primary 

devotion to the farm and Mount Tom-the 

moral landscape that Rob in Winks has 

persuasively designated his real 

"monument"-adheres co th e utilitarian 

norms of the age. The "Picturesque" habit 

of perception, expressecl by the essays on 

landscape in The Home Book of the 

Picturesque, stressed the primacy of culture 

over nature. According to this theory, raw 

nature was inferior to cultivation, and the 

domesticated landscape was subordinate to 

painting in which the artist could project a 

more unified view than found in nature. Art, 

according ro this definition, was performative 

rather rhan reflective. John Ruskin's radical 

ach ievement was ro overturn this equation, 

privileging nature over culture. ln his scheme 

the artist was reduced to a passive receptor 

a nd arr to "man's lowly imitation of the 

creative powers of the Almighty." 369 In this 

ongoing debate, Frederick Billings never 

doubted the primacy of culture over nature. 

For him Yosemite, Yellowstone and Mount 

Tom were sites for the exercise of "wise use" 

as well as the human imagination. 

As well as anything, Frederick's address 

delivered at rhe driving of the Last Spike 

ce remony in Septembe r 1883, to 

commemorate the completion of the 

Northern Pacific railroad, expressed his 

fundamental outlook. For more than forty 

years the corporation "like the children of 

Israel were wandering in the wilderness before 

reaching the Promised Land," he intoned. "A 

region of cif'!;nl:nion .. . h~lnne~rl to the 

wildest of Indians and the North Pole." But 

now "with magnificent wheat fields, with 

cattle on a thousand hills, with mines in its 

mountains and ravines, with an astounding 

wealth of timber" and a furure that will see 

"prosperous comm.unities, with schools ::md 

churches and a high civilization" in which 

"no more Custers are to be killed," a new 

route is opened to the "World's Commerce." 

ln concluding, he exhorted the assembled 

to "praise God from whom all blessings 

fl.ow."370 If divinity is to be found, it lies, in 

Frederick's view, in the control of nature 

rather than in the raw matter of creation. 

An illustration in Frank Leslie's Illustrated 

Newspaper for September 22, 1883 (Fig. 15 ), 

depicting the driving of the Last Spike, will 

serve to conclude these observations on the 

relationship of art to the complex sensibilities 

of Frederick and Julia Billings. Based on 

Fig. 15: "The Completion of 

the Northern Pacific Railwl"lyDri ving the Last Spike at the Point of 

Junction of the Eastern and Western 

Sections, Sixi:y Miles West of 

Helena, Sept. 8-From a Sketch by 

Famy," in Frank Leslie's Illustrated 

Newspaper (September 22, 1883 ). 

A rt and the American Conservation Movement - 69 
Part II: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

sketches made by Henry Famy, official artist 

for the "Villard expedition," the composition 

summarizes the triumphalist vision of 

progress. At the center of the scene a figure, 

raising a sledgehammer, i.s about to strike a 

blow at the Last Spike. Gathered on either 

side of the track are dignitaries, including 

Julia and Frederick, and a group of Crow 

Indians, assembled for purposes of 

symbolizing the passage from savagery to 

civilization. In the immediate foreground 

an Indian chieftain, reclining upon a wooden 

platform in the time-honored pose of a 

classical deity, bears witness to the end of 

an era. 

In the last dec<1de of his life, Frederick 

Billings returned to Vermont to devote his 

energies to conservation, forest management 

and scientific farming. At Woodstock his 

last years were spent creating an ideal estate, 

embodying, among other influences, the 

collective vision of Frederick Law Olmsted, 

George Perkins Marsh and Romantic 

landscape painting. 

Part II: Endnotes 

146 The reference is to the years 1848-1849 when 

Stillman first read Modem Painters. William J. 

Stillman, The Autobiography of a}oumalist (Bosron: 

Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1901), Vol. 1, 116. 

147 The definitive study of American PreRaphaelitism is Linda S. Fel'ber and William H. 

Gerdts, The New Path: Ruskin and the American PreRaphaelites (New York: Schocken Books Inc., 1985). 

i

4

s Alexander Hill Everett, "Exhibition of Pictures 

at the Athenaeum Gallery," Norrh American Review, 

October, 1830, 309. 

119 Stein, John Ruskin, 41. 

15° Ferber and Gerdts, 15. 

151 Rev. Julius H. Ward, The White Mountains: 

A Guide to t11eir lnterpretation (New York: D. 

Appleton & Co., 1890), 4. In his Preface to the text 

Ward informs the reader that the book "is written in 

illustration of the modem interpretation of Nature 

which has been taught us by Emerson and 

70 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

Wordsworth and Ruskin, and in an attempt to 

express the enrichment of human life that exists 

between the mountains and ourselves, when they 

are approached through the sympathetic 

imagination." 

152 For an expansive study of Ruskin's influence 

on Whitehead and the founding of the Woodstock 

Colony see Alf Evers, The Catskills: From Wilderness 

to Woodstock (New York: Doubleday & Co., l 972), 

600- 645. Evers' analysis of the operations of 

culture upon nature is the most exhaustive and 

sophisticated text written to date on the influence 

of specific American artists upon the perception 

and exploitation of specific American sites. 

153 The Appalachian Mountain Club, the 

Adirondack Mountain Club and the Siena Club, 

to mention only some of the better known 

environmental organizations, were all founded by 

Ruskinians. Ruskin himself, in his cantankerous 

later years, bluntly asserted his nation's influence 

(by which he meant his personal influence) on 

Americans: "this dying England taught the 

Americans all they have of speech, or thought, 

hitherto. What thoughts they have not learned from 

England are foolish thoughts; what words they have 

not learned from England, unseemly words." John 

Ruskin, Fors Clavigera: Letter 4 2 (June, 187 4), quoted 

in Marc Simpson, '"A Big Anglo-Saxon Total': 

American and British Painting, 1670- 1890," in 

America: The New Work! in 19th-Century Painting 

(Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1999), 210. 

154 The New Path was the title of the journal of the 

American "Association for the Advancement of 

Truth in Art." 

155 Cf. Samuel P Hays, Comervation and the Gospel 

of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 

1890- 19 20 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 

1959) and Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: 

The American Environmental Movement (New York: 

Hill & Wang, 1993). 

1

; 6 Shabecoff, 46. 

157 Robert G. Athearn, The Mythic West in 

Twentieth-Century America (Lawrence: Univ. of 

Kansas Press, 1986), 198. 

156 Richard W. Judd, Common Lands, Common 

Peo/)le: The 01igins of Conservation in Nortl1ern Neiv 

England (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997). 

159 A case in point is the extremely provocative 

work of John F. Reiger, whose American Sportsmen 

and the Origins of Conservation (Norman: Univ. of 

Oklahoma Press) was first published in 1975. 

Thoroughly researched and often insightful, it is a 

classic of reductivist environmental history. Guilty 
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Pan 11: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and tlie Emfironmental Movement 

of the hisroriographic crime that he set our to 

demolish, namely "judging the past with the 

assumptions of the present," Reiger's text is driven 

by the desire to repudiate the modernist critique of 

hunting by essentializing the achievements of the 

past. His restricted, partisan view is perhaps best 

expressed by the untenable assertion: "Regardless 

of which of the three ma in areas of early conservation 

we pick-wildlife, timberlands or national parkssporrsmen led the way." Pitting manly hunters, who 

participate in the processes of nature, against effete 

Romantics who are merely "voyeuristic," Reiger 

creates a specious divide that fits more readily 

twentieth, rather than nineteenth centwy stereotypes. 

Despite his otherwise excellent account of the 

formation of New York's Adirondack Park, he 

displays no awareness, for example, of the formative 

role of the Adirondack Club whose Brahmin 

membership was composed of scientists (Agassiz). 

artists (Stillman), philosophers (Emerson) and poets 

(Lowell). All were successful hunters with the 

exception of Emerson who tried his hand at 

"jacklighting" but whose night vision was so poor, 

he couldn't locate the rarget. Blithely unaware of 

Reiger's stem distinctions, the Adirondack Club, 

like most environmental groups, was more 

concerned with class and social compatibility than 

avocation . It is perhaps symptomatic of Reiger's 

tendency to gee things backwards that the cover 

illusuation for his book, a reproduction of A. E Tait's 

mid-century painting A Good Time Coming 

(Adirondack Museum), is reversed. Needless to 

state, there is no consideration in Reiger's narrative 

of the active and strident role of hunting clubs in 

opposing the addition of Jackson Hole National 

Monument to Grand Teton National Park in 1950. 

160 Alfred Runte, Public Lands, Public 1-Ierir.age: The 

National Forest Idea (Cody: Buffalo Bill Historical 

Center, 1991 ). 

161 Runte, Public Lands, 44-45. A recent example 

in which the Hudson River School was enlisted to 

"save" the environment was the 1960s batde over 

Storm King Mountain and Consolidated Edison's 

plans to build a large pumping station on the 

Hudson. An environmental group called The 

Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference filed suit 

against the Federal Power Commission claiming, 

incer alia, that the station would impinge upon the 

classic v iew of the Hudson canonized by painters 

from Cole to Church. This is essentially the view 

represented in the Billings' painting Hudson 

Highlands- West Point (1873) by Harry Davis. See 

Shabecoff, 103 for an account of the Storm King 

controversy. 

162 Alfred Runtc, National Parks: The American 

Experience (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1979), 

11- 32. 

163 Runte, National Parks, 81. 

16q ln this regard we would do well to bear in mine.I 

Nancy Anderson's thoughtful caveat: 

Looking at nineteenth-century paintings with 

twentieth-century eyes carries unavoidable 

risk, for the modem viewer is privy to history's 

judgment which his nineteemh-century 

counterpart (both artist and viewer) was 

charting a new course on untrodden land. 

Thus many nineteenth-century landscape 

images, whether photographs, drawings, or 

illustrations, document practices modern 

viewers would characterize as exploitative, 

destructive, and appallingly shortsighted. As 

modern viewers, however, we must set aside 

our own concerns (particularly environmental 

concerns) and recall that following the Civil 

War, when capiral and labor were freed from 

destructive conflict and redirected towards 

what was viewed as constructive growth, the 

American West functioned as both an iconic 

symbol of national identity and a resource to 

be used in transforming tbe nation from a 

wilderness republic into an industrial power 

(Nancy K. Anderson, '"The Kiss of Enterprise': 

The Western Landscape as Symbol and Resource," in William H. 11-uettner, ed., The West 

m America: Reinter/Jreting Images o.f the Frontier, 

1820-1920 [Washington D. C.: Smithsonian 

Institution Press, 1991], 239-240). 

165 Ansel Adams, On Our National Pa1·ks (Boston: 

Little, Brown, 1992), 113. 

166 See Ernst Gombrich's seminal essay, "The 

Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of 

Landscape," in his Norm and Form: Studies in the Art 

of the Renaissance (London, Phaidon, 1966), 107-

118. 

167 Christopher 1-1. Wood, AlbrechtAlcdorfer and the 

Origins of Landscape (London, Reaktion Books, 

1993), 27. 

165 For an excellent account of the picturesque 

habit of perception see John Barrell, The Idea of 

Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840 

(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1972), 1-62. 

169 In addition to Ernst Gombrich, the influential 

landscape historian John Brinckerhoff Jackson has 

also argued that the taste for natural landscape 

developed after and from the taste for painted 

landscapes. See John Brinckerhoff Jackson, "The 

Meaning of landscape," K ulturgeographie 88 ( 1965), 

4 7- 50. Beyond these pioneer essays there has been 

no systematic study of this cultural-historical process. 

A rt and che American Conservation Movement - 71 
Part 11: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

170 Founder of the U. S. Sanitary Commission, 

Bellows was introduced to Billings by Starr King, 

who described Frederick as "the man I love more 

than any other in California." Winks, 131. 

171 Henry W. Bellows, In Memory of Thomas Starr 

King (San Francisco: F. Eastman, printer, 1864), 37. 

171 William H. Jackson, "With Moran in the 

Yellowstone: A Story of Exploration, Photography 

and Art," Appalachia 21 ( 1936), 149. 

173 The French Post-Structuralist thinker Jean 

Baudrill<;1rd argues that twentieth century America 

is the first "Age of Simulation," claiming that "signs 

of the real" are now understood as "the real itself." 

Reality, in his formulation, is no longer discernible 

as such but is stylized and marketed through images 

which now control behavior in an unmediated, 

closed manner. Many of his arguments would apply 

equally to the Victorian age. Jean Baudrillard, 

America (New York: Verso, 1988). 

174 Barrell, 1. 

m Donald A. Ringe, The Pictorial Mode: Space & 

Time in the Art of Bryan!, Irving & Cooper (Lexington: 

Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1971). 

176 Ringe, l. 

177 Louis Legrand Noble, A Voyage co the Arctic Seas 

in Search of Icebergs with Church the Artist (New York: 

Appleton & Co., 1861), 57. The Oxford English 

Dictionary credits this text with the first printed use 

of the noun "overlook." 

178 Hays notes that the term "conservation" was first 

used in government reports in 1889- 1890. While 

Gifford Pinchot ls often cited as "the father of 

conservation.," a term which he claimed to have 

derived from the British "conservancies" in India, 

George Perkins Marsh in the preface to the 1874 

edition of Man and Nature, xi, refers to the work of 

the Frenchman Elisee Redus who has "occupied 

himself with the conservative and restorative, rather 

than with the destructive, effects of human industry." 

Among John Reiger's many useful findings (see 

Reiger, 85) is an 1884 editorial by George Bird 

Grinnell in Forest and Stream in which he urged: 

"Protection and conservation now, prompt, 

adequate- this is what the Adirondack forests 

demand, not restoration years hence, after the 

damage from Lmregulated lumbering shall have been 

wrought and ruin has followed." 

179 Brian W. Dippie, Cadin and His Contemporaries: 

The Politics of Patronage (Lincoln, Univ. of Nebraska 

Press, 1990), 330. 

72 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

180 Thomas Cole, "Essay on American Scenery," in 

John W. McCoubrey, ed., American Art 1700- 1860: 

Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: 

Prentice-Hall, 1965), 37. 

181 McCoubrey, 102. 

181 Louis Legrand Noble, The Life and Works of 

Thomas Cole ( 1853), ed. Elliot S. Vesell (Cambridge, 

Harvard Univ. Press, 1964 ), 299. 

183 Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American 

Mind (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1967), lOl. 

184 Perry Miller, "Nature and the National Ego," in 

his Errand into the Wilderness (New York: Harper & 

Row, 1964), 205- 206. 

185 All quotations taken from Frederick Law 

Olmsted, "The Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa 

Big Trees" (1865). Reprinted in Roderick Nash, 

ed., The American Environment: Readings in the History 

of Conservation (Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 

1976), 19- 24. 

186 Alfred Runte, National Parks, 30. 

187 Janice T. Dreisbach, Direct from Nature: The Oil 

Sketches of Thomas Hilt (Sacramento, Calif.: Crocker 

Art Museum, 1997), 17. 

188 Nash, \'Vilaemess, 111. 

189 For Yosemite the best summary of the role of 

culture in preserving nature is Alfred Runte, 

Yosemite: The Embauled Wilderness (Lincoln: Univ. 

of Nebraska Press, 1990), 5- 44; for Yellowstone see 

Peter B. Hales, William Henry Jackson and the 

Transformation of the American Landscape 

(Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1988), 95-l40. 

190 William H. Jackson, "With Moran," 157. 

191 Hans Huth, Nature and the American: Three 

Centuries of Changing Attitudes (Berkeley: Univ. of 

California Press, 1957), 105. 

192 Hiram Martin Chittenden, The Yellowstone 

National Park (Cincinnati: Stewart & Kidd 

Company, L911 ), 246. 

193 For an excellent anal.ysis of the problem of 

language in narrating the "otherness" of the American 

West, see Anne Farrar Hyde, An American Vision: 

Far Western Landscape and National Culture, 1820-

1920 (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1990). 

194 The professional travel writer Bayard Taylor 

expressed a vested interest in the problem of verbal 

descriptions of nature. Reflecting upon the view of 

Niagara Fat ls he wrote: 
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Part II: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

As for people saying "it cannot be described," 

that is folly. It can be described just as much as 

anything else. But those who endeavor to be 

sublime are often simply highfalutin: when a 

man says, "I am overpowered," he is not in a fit 

state to write; but he who looks calmly upon it, 

measures its features, analyses the impression 

which it creates, and writes with the 

conscientious endeavor to represent what he 

has seen, can give as good a description of 

Niagara as he could of a crab-tree in blossom, 

and a much better one than it would be possible 

for him ro make of the woman whom he loves. 

l read last Winter, in one of the papers, a most 

admirable description of the falling of the 

water, entitled, "Niagara, but Not Described!" 

The writer knew all the time he was describing 

it. (Bayard Taylor, At Home and Abroad: 

A Sketch-Book of Life, Scenery and Men (New 

York: G. P. Putnam & Sons, 1871], 396) 

195 For Watkins' photographic recreation of a 

descent into the Yosemite Valley, see Peter E. 

Palmquist, Carleton E. Watkins: Phorographer of the 

American West (Albuquerque: Univ. ofNew Mexico 

Press, 1983 ). 

196 David Robenson provides a provocative 

account of the photographic project: "Yet here is 

the central paradox .... From the 1860s to the present 

black and white photography has more 

convincingly and imaginatively than any other 

medium transformed Yosemite into art. It has won 

not only the race for the public's purse, but also the 

race for the critic's acclaim" (David Robertson, West 

of Eden: A History of the Art and Literature of Yosemite 

[Yosemite Narural History Association and 

Wilderness Press, 1984], 53). 

197 Palmquist, 19. 

198 Palmquist, 20. 

199 For representative quotes from Bunnell to Muir 

see Runte, Yosemite, 5, 12, 37. An alternative 

narrative tradition, comparing Yosemite with gothic 

cathedrals, is found in Thomas Starr King, Samuel 

Bowles and Clarence King. For the most impassioned 

verbal descriptions of Yosemite see Fitz Hugh 

Ludlow, The Hean of the Continent: A Record of 

Travel Across the Plains and in Oregon, with an 

Examination of the Mormon Principle (New York: 

Hurd and Houghton, 1870), 424- 435. Ludlow's 

excited comparisons of Yosemite with the Garden 

of Eden and the Heavenly Jerusalem are selfadmittedly derived as much from Watkins' and 

Bierstadt's images as from the place itself. 

200 Ludlow, 426. 

201 Bayard Taylor, 1 76. 

202 Thomas Starr King, A Vacation Among the 

Sierras: Yosemite in 1860, ed. John A. Hussey (San 

Francisco: Book Club of California, 1962), 43. 

201 Samuel Bowles, Across the Continent: A Summer's 

Journey co the Rocky Mountains, the Mormons and the 

Pacific States, uiithSpeakerColfax (Springfield, Mass.: 

Samuel Bowles and Co., 1865 ), 223- 224. 

20~ John Ruskin, Modem Painters (London: Dent, 

1847), Vol. 4, 432. 

105 Nineteenth century English and American 

writers often used the terms "beautiful," 

"picturesque" and "sublime" indiscriminately and 

· capriciously. In theory the terms were defined as 

follows. Tbe Beautiful: cultivated nature reflecting 

man's civilizing influence; The Picturesque: nature 

associated with historic man through ruins and other 

historic signs; The Sublime: wild and uncultivated 

nature, wilderness. 

206 Bowles, Across the Continent, 226- 227. 

107 Bowles, Across the Continent, 223. 

208 Robertson, 31. 

209 A few writers did not succumb Lo che 

convention of "indescribability." In his 1882 

guidebook to the Yellowstone, William Wallace 

Wylie, Yellowswne National Park, ur, Tlte Great 

American Wonderland (K:msasCity: Ramsey, Millet 

and Hudson, 1882), title page, asserted, "those who 

cannot visit the Park will find the Book an excellent 

substitute." 

210 See Nathaniel P. Langford, "The Wonders of 

the Yellowsrone," Sc.Tibner's Monthly 1- 2 (May-June, 

1871), 1-17. 

l t I William H. Truettner, National Parks and lhe 

American Landscape (Washington D. C.: Smithsonian 

Institution Press, 1972), 13. 

212 Langford, 8-9, 12. 

m For Moran's illustrations (the originals of which 

are in the Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma), 

see Anne R. Morand, Splendors of the American West: 

Thomas Moran's Art of the Grand Canyon and 

Yellowstone (Birmingham Museum of Art: 1990), figs. 

2- 3, 23- 24 . 

rn Runte, National Parks, 40, 45. 

115 William H.Jackson, "With Moran," 156. 

21 6 Chris). Magoc, Yellowstone: The Creation and 

Selling of an American Landscape, 1870- 1903 

(Albuquerque: The Univ. of New Mexico Press, 

1999), 96. 

Art and tlie American Conservation Movement - 73 
Part 11 : Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and die Environmental Movement 

zi 7 Sec Hales, 312, n. 23 for the relevant 

documentation of rhc Yellows tone Act. 

n~ John Muir, The Mo1mcains of California (New 

York: The Century Co., 1894 ), 3. 

219 John Muir, Our National Parks (Boston: 

Houghton Mifflin, 1901 ), 49. 

m Muir, Our National Parks, 50. As !are as the 

second decade of the twentieth century Secretary of 

the lnrerior Franklin Lane, in a nod co Ruskin, 

instructed National Park Service Oirecwr Stephen 

Mather to consider for park status only landscape~ 

char qualified as "world archit eciure." Lane's 

description of Zion was "Yosemite painted in oils." 

For the famous "Lane Letter," establishing policy for 

the N<1tional Park Service, sec Richard West Sellars, 

Preserving Narure in the National Parks: A History (New 

Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1997), 57-62. 

m Magoc, I 02, argues that the "feigned 

inexpressibility" of writers confronted with the 

Yellowstone "was merely a rhetorical device that 

served invariably as the preamble to a shower of 

details." "Who can describe the indescribable?" 

asked Olin D. Wheeler of 1 he Northern Pacific in 

1894 before taking up lhe challenge. 

m Joni Louise Kinsey, Thomas Moran and the 

Surveying of the American West (Washington D. C.: 

Smithsonian ln:stitution Press, 1992), 70. 

m In prc~ing Hayden to make a recommendation 

in his preliminary report on the Yellowstone, the 

Northern Pacific advocated that "Congress pass a 

bill reserving the Great Geyser Basin as a public 

park forever-just <15 it ha~ reserved the far inferior 

wonder the Yosemite Valley and big rrees." An 

ed irorinl in the Bost0n I Lera.Id for February 4, 1904 

invoked both the Adirondacks and the Yellowstone 

in arguing for the creation of a White Mountain 

Forest Preserve: "The White I lills are ... a national 

pride and treasure, as truly as is the Yellowstone Park, 

and for pu1poscs of practical and pecuniary national 

interest their protection is as properly and as urgently 

a national dury as is 1 he similar treatment of any of 

our forest preserves" (Paul E. Bruns, A Ne\v 

l lampshire Everlasting and Unfallen [Concord, N. H.: 

Soc. for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, 

19691. 4). 

m As a general rule reading is thought to be a 

private activity, while painting and sculpture tend 

towards the public. The exceptiom are poetry and 

photography, which can be both public and private. 

In his 1870 book Arc Thoughts (New York: Hurd 

and Hough ton), 306, art critic Jam es Jackson J arves 

devoted H paragraph to "The Effect of Competitive 

Art" in which he outlined the differing financ ial 

incentives facing writers and artists. Fear of losing 

a competitive edge was much greater for artists than 

74-Art and the American Conservation Movement 

writers, in his judgment. For an interesting account 

of 1 he impact of Social Darwinism on the American 

arr market, sec Saul E. Za lesch, "Competition and 

Conflict in the New York Art World, 1874-1879," 

Wimerchur Portfolio 29 (Summer 1994), 103-120. 

m According to Alfred Runtc, National Parks, 

210-212, "scc111c nationalism," as exhibited in the 

great parks of the West, was mvokcd against the 

formation of such "inferior" eastern preserves as the 

Great Smokies, Shenandoah and Everglades 

Naciomil Parks. 

116 The only major historian of the National Parks 

and rhe National Forests who gives an important 

role to culture, rather than tO greed, envy or fear, is 

Alfred Runte. In his view, patriotism at the height 

of the Civil War was decisive in rhe adoption of the 

Yosemire bill. The English, presumed supporters of 

the Confederacy, had denied the possibility of rhe 

existence of the "big tree~," and rhcir preservation 

became imperat ivc a~ well as that of the Valley 

who~c unity was understood lO be metaphoric of 

the nation. Runce, Yosemite, 20. 

m For the "unholy alliance" hetween preservation 

and capitalism in Yosemite see John F. Sears, Sacred 

Places: American TourL~tALtraccions m the Nineteenth 

Century (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), 130, 

n. 11 on the role of Israel Ward Raymond of the 

Central American Steamship Transit Company. 

Also see Orsi for the role of John Muir and the 

South em Pacific in the genesis of Yosemite National 

Park. For the purported role of the Northern Pacific 

in promoting Yellowstone National Park see Howard 

Bossen, "A Ta ll Tale Retold: The Influence of the 

Photographs of William Henry Jackson on rhe 

Passage of the Yellowsloue Park Act of 1872," Studies 

in VisuaLCommuniccaion 8 (Winter, 1982), 98-109. 

Characteristically Alfred Runte views the alliance 

between mi l roads, artists and the national parks as 

"pragmaric" rather than "unholy," and finds no 

evidence of dissimulation or malfeasance. In his 

ana lysis the Northern Pacific Railroad was a 

beneficent "catalyst for the national park idea." 

Alfred Runte, Trains of Discovery: Western Railroads 

and tlte National Parks (Flagstaff: Northland Press, 

1984 ), 34. Nariona l P<irk Service historian Richard 

Sellars, in a recent study, takes a more balanced 

view, claiming that the early twentieth century Park 

Service principle of "fucade management" was based 

on aesthetic principles, but insists that Yellowstone 

was primarily the result of Northern Pacific "railroad 

pressure" to secure a monopoly on scenic tourism. 

For a highly nuanced account of National Park 

history sec Sellars, L2-13. 

218 Among modern histo rians of western 

exploration, William H. Goctzman comes closest 

to the ideas expressed in th is essay. ln his great survey 

Exploracion and Empire: Tlte Explorer and the Scientist 
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Part ll: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

in che Winning of the American West (New York: 

History Book Club, 1993 ), 199-200, he states: 

It is the thesis of this book that explorers, as 

they go out into the unknown, are 

"programmed" by the knowledge, values and 

objectives of the civilized centers from which 

they depart .... Similarly, in large measure, the 

artists who accompany them also see what they 

are trained to :;cc and in the way they are trained 

to see it. The new sights and subjects offered by 

the West were represented in tenns of the artistic 

conventions dominant in the civilized culture 

of the day .... The work o( the artist in the 

American West in the nineteenth centmy was 

primarily an extension of the vision of Poussin, 

Claude Lorrain, the Barbizon School. ... Thus 

for the cultural hisrorian, things-in rhis case, 

paintings and drawings-represent an 

additional source of evidence for conclusions 

derived from a study of the wrirten accounts of 

adventure and discovery in the unknown West. 

Goetzmann further recogniz.ed that in the visual 

account of the West, the Sublime replaced the 

Pastoral. Citing the influence of Ruskin on Clarence 

King, he failed to recognize, however, that most 

writers in attempting to describe the National Park 

remained firmly grounded in Pastoral conventions. 

m Evers, 584, claims that the designation "park" 

appeared "frivolous" to upstate and rural citizens of 

New York. 

m Athearn, 199. 

m A thoroughly intelligible discussion of the 

aesthetic of the Picturesque and the Sublime in 

Anglo-American thought is found in KeiLh Thomas, 

Man and the Natural World: A Hiswry of the Modern 

Sensibility (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983 ). For 

a revisionist approach see Peter De Bolla, The 

Discourse of tl1e Sublime: Readings in History, Aestl1etics 

and the Subject (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989). 

m Once "preserved" by legislative action, narure 

as codified by didactic guidebooks was converted 

into scenery. The Northern Pacific Railroad, for 

example, given its interest in rhe Yellowsr.one, 

projected a somewhat mixed message in its officially 

sponsored guidebooks. The 1883 The Yellowstone 

National Park (Chicago: Rand, McNally and 

Company, 1883), 6, promoted the region as a garden 

paradise: "The broad and fertile valley of the 

Yellowstone unfolds as a panorama its charming 

features of farmstead and of woodclad islands." The 

1884 guidebook, however, views the park as an 

American Europe, inviting associations with 

pyramids, Rhine castles and England's Dover Cliffs. 

Charles S. Fee, Alice's Adventures in the New 

Wonderland (Chicago: Poole Brothers, 1884), 10. 

For an excellent survey of Yellowstone guidebooks 

see Raymond W Rast, "Vistas, Visions, and Visitors: 

Creating the Myth of Yellowstone National Park, 

1872- 1915," Journal of the West 37 (April, 1998), 

80- 89. 

m Catlin's Letten on North American Indians 

excerpted in Nash, 9. 

m The editorial of 9 August, 1864 reads in pan: 

"Within an easy day's ride of our great city, as steam 

teaches us to measure distance is a great tract of 

country fitted to make a Central Park for the world." 

Philip G. Terrie, Forever Wild: Environmental 

Aesthetics and the Adirondack Forest Preserve 

(Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1985), 92- 93. 

7.JS Samuel Bowles, Across the Continent, 231. 

n6 For a fuller discussion of the Mount Tom 

project see H. Elioc Foulds, Katharine Lacy and 

Lauren G. Meier, Land Use History far Marsh-Billings 

National Historical Park (Boston: National Park 

Service, 1994), 59-63. 

137 Another factor that should not be discounted 

in Billings' largesse is the Victorian doctrine of 

noblesse oblige. If, as Robin Winks maintains (see 

Winks, 300), Mount Tom (the reference is 

specifically to the system of carriage roads) was to 

be Billings' "monument," it was therefore 

conceptualized, like Central Park, as a work of an. 

In conformity with rhe practices of such New York 

City art colleccors as John Taylor Johnston and 

William H. Vanderbilt, who periodically opened 

their private galleries to the public, Billings was 

sharing his most prized artistic treasure with the 

Woodstock community for purposes of instruction 

and delectation. 

218 Magoc, 220, n. 61. 

IJ9 Sears, 133. 

24° For the connections between Olmsted and 

Billings see Winks, 156-157, 281- 282. 

24 1 Daniel Joseph Naclenicek, "Civilization by 

Design: Emerson and Landscape Architecture," 

Nineteenth Century Studies 10 (1996), 33-47. 

242 See Sears, 119-121 for an excellent analysis of 

the Victorian view of parks as urban escape and 

instruments of social control and reform. For a 

photographic documentation of the physical 

desuetude into which many of Olmsted's parks have 

currently fallen see Phyllis Lambert, Viewing 

Olmsted: Photographs by Robert Burley, Lee Friedlander 

arul Geoffrey James (Montreal: Canadian Centre for 

Architecture, 1997). 

Art and the American Conservation Movement - 7 5 
Part II: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

241 Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, Albert 

BierstadL: An arul Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills 

Press, 1990), 189. 

H4 Brian W. Dippie, "The Visual West," in Clyde 

A. Milner, Carol A. O'Conner and Martha A. 

Sandweiss, ed., The Oxford Hisun-y of the American 

West (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, l 994 ), 689. 

215 Dippie, "Visual West," 690. 

246 Samuel Bowles, Our New West, 480. 

247 Edward Strahan, The Masterpieces of the 

International Exhibition 1876: The AH Gallery 

(Philadelphia: Gebbie & Barrie, 1876), 39. 

243 Beecher and Stowe, 84-85. 

249 J. Gray Sweeney, "An 'Indomitable Explorati ve 

Enrerpritie': Inventing National Parks," in Pamela ). 

Belanger, Inventing Acadia: Artists and Tourists at 

Mount Desert (Hanover: The Univ. Press of New 

England, 1999), 135. 

rn> Clarence King, Mountaineering in the Sierra 

Nevada ( 1872; reprint, Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska 

Press, I 970), 210. King's fictive artist, Hank G. SmiLh, "The Pacific Slope Bonheur" {named after 

rhe French painter Rosa Bonheur), is his mouthpiece 

and alter ego in this amusing account. King, a 

devoted Ruskinian, always maintained a discrete 

separation between art and nature. Commenting in 

the Overland Monthly (October, 1870) on another 

American natural icon, he wrote, "There is no greater 

proof of the infinite power of Niagara than to gaze 

upon its glorious front and utterly forgeL that we 

have just seen Blondin, in spangled Lights, cook an 

omelette between heaven and earth" (Linda C. 

Hults, "Thomas Moran's Shoshone Falls: A Western 

Niagara," Smithsonian Studies in American Art 3:1 

[1989]. 96). 

rn )arves, A11 Thoughts, 299. 

m Anderson and Ferber, 55- 57. 

151 Anderson and Ferber, 56. 

i 54 Sc ha ma, 207. 

155 This account of the Adirondack C lub is taken 

from Stillman, Autobiowaphy, Vol. 1, 117-292. 

l56 Stillman, Auwbiogra/Jhy, Vol. l, 240. 

m William J. Stillm::in, "The Philosopher's Camp: 

Emerson, Agassiz, Lowell and Others in the 

Adirondacks," The Century Magazine 46 (1893), 

598. 

7 6 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

258 lt is not clear if the Adirondack Club served as 

a precedent for the founding of San Francisco's 

Bohemian Club and their spiritual retreat, Bohemian 

Grove. Landscape painters William Keith and 

Thomas Hill were among the founding members of 

the Bohemian Club, which has never been very 

"bohemian" nor especially interested in 

conservarion. For the Bohemian Club see William 

G. Dumhoff, The Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats: 

A Study in Ruling Class Cohesiveness (New York: 

Harper & Row, 1974 ). More recently, Claire Perry, 

Pacific Arcadia: lmages of California, 1600-1915 

(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), 122-126, 

has attempted w forge a direct link between the 

Adirondack Club and the Bohemian Club. Her 

arguments, while not conclusive, are persuasive. 

259 The best account of this abortive conservation 

effort is Paul F. Jamieson, "Emerson in the 

Adirondacks," New York History 39 (July, 1958), 

215- 237. Sec a lso Terrie, 59- 64. 

2<••

1 Stillman, "Philosopher's Camp," 605. 

u;i Sec Waterman, 183- 198 for the formation of 

the first outdoor dubs. 

l 6l See Patricia C. E Mandel, Fair Wilderness: 

American Paintings in the Collection of the Adirondack 

Museum (Blue Mountain Lake, N. Y.: The 

Adirondack Museum, 1990), 101- 102 for a 

discussion of this enigmaric work. 

26J Rondel's unusual work, dated 1856, appears 

influenced, in certain respects, by Gustave Courbet's 

infamous Tile Painter's Studio of 1854- 55. Unlike 

Courbet's representation of the act of representation, 

Rondel's work celebrates 1:he artist as "manly" 

adventurer, an American trope described by Henry 

Tuckerman as early as 1866. For Courbet's The 

Painter's Studio see Michael Fried, Courbet's Realism 

(Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1980), l48-l89. 

For "Adventure as an element of American artistlife," see Henry T. Tuckerman, "Albert Bierstadt," 

Galaxy I (August 15, 1866), 679. 

264 For Stillman's painting see Novak, Nature and 

Culture, 65 and fig. 33. 

165 Stillman, Autobiography, Vol. 1, 280- 281. 

lM Stillman, "Philosopher's Camp," 599. 

Ut1 For Emerson's "Thoughts on Art," see The Dial, 

1 (January, 1841),367-378. On the role of sight as 

the "noblest of the facu lties" see Abigail SolomonGodeau, "Photography and Industrialization: John 

Ruskin and the Moral Dimensions of Photography," 

Exposure 21 (1983), 10-14. The influence of 

Ruskin, the eye-driven "prophet of sight," on 

American Transcendentalists and other thinkers, is 

almost impossible to overstate. Emerson, Starr King, 
) 

) 

) 

) 

) 

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Part II: Nineteenth CenLu1·y American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

Marsh and Bushnell all give primacy to the role of 

sight in perception. In one of his rare flights of fancy 

Marsh (Man and Nature, 10) uncharacteristically 

wrote: "To the natural philosopher, the descriptive 

poet, the painter, the sculptor and indeed every 

earnest observer, the power most important to 

cultivate is that of seeing what is before him. Sight 

is a faculty, seeing an art." lt is important to note 

that Bushnell and Marsh, both read and admired by 

Billings, were fervently anti-Transcendentalist. As 

Marsh (Christian Examiner 68 [1862), 57-58) 

contemptuously observed, "it is a poor Divinity 

which rests its claims to godhead on the instincts of 

the beaver or the sagacity of the ant." Bushnell's 

attack on natural theology is found in his Nature 

and the Su/)ematural (New York: Scribner, Armstrong 

& Co., 1872), 505-509. The motto of Man and 

Nature is taken from Bushnell's Semum on the Power 

of an Endless Life. 

263 "The Adirondacs" is published in Poems by 

Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin 

and Company, 1883), 159-170. 

269 Ida G. Everson, "William]. Stillman, Emerson's 

'Gallant Artist," The New England Quanerly 31 

(March, 1958), 36. 

170 Stillman, "Philosopher's Camp," 600. 

n i "The Adirondacs," in Poems by Ralph Waldo 

Emerson, 169. 

m William H. I-I. Mucray, Adventures in the 

Wi/.derness: orCamp~Life in the Adirondacks (Boston: 

Fields, Osgood & Co., 1869). For an amusing 

account of the Murray "Rush" see William Chapman 

White, Adirondack Country (New York: Knopf, 

1967), 112-117. 

m For an enlightening account of the origins of 

the cult of"muscular Christianity" see David Strauss, 

"Towards a Consumer Culture: 'Adirondack Murray' 

and the Wilderness Vacation," American Quarterly 

39 (Summer, 1987), 2 70-286. The concept was 

the invention of English clergymen and entered 

American thought through the writings of the 

influential Bosron minister Thomas Wentworth 

Higginson. 

274 Reiger, 56- 5 7. According to Reiger, the 

Blooming Grove Park Association, founded in 

Pennsylvania in 1871, was the earliest "deer park," 

modeled on the royal hunting preserve of 

Fontainbleau. Writing in 1876, "Adirondack" 

Murray lamented the results of his book on the 

Adirondacks in an essay in the sportsman's magazine 

RodandGun, 9 (October 7, 1876), "The trout are 

entirely gone, or practically so, and the deer are 

going as fast as stupid greed can destroy them" 

(Reiger, 38). 

m Terrie, 92-98. 

Z76 Marsh, Man and Nature, 235. 

277 Nash, Wilderness, 121. 

276 The publication in 1960 by the Sierra Club of 

This is the American Earth, with photographs by Ansel 

Adams and text by Nancy Newhall- the first of the 

Club's great "coffee-cable" books- was surely a 

watershed in the modern environmenta l 

movement's advocacy of preservation of scenic 

beauty for its own sake. Adams' "visualized" images 

of the perfect "Place, with a capital P," for all of 

their technical and compositional brilliance, are 

products of the most impressive artifice, making him, 

throughout his reign, the greatest living artist of the 

nineteenth century. It can be argued that great good 

and great harm for the environment have resulted 

from his photographs. 

279 Thomas Starr King, The White Hills: Their 

Legends, Landscape and Poetry (Boston: Crosby, 

Nichols, Lee & Co., 1859). The best studies of the 

impact of this text on landscape tourism arc Scars, 

72-86 and Brown, 41- 74. Writing as historians, 

neither of these scholars acknowledges th.e role of 

painters in "inventing" the landscape. 

280 For the growing body of literature on the role 

of landscape painting in shaping the perception of 

the region see Donald D. Keyes et al., The White 

Mountains: Place and Perceptions (Hanover, N. l l.: 

Univ. Press of New England, 1980), especially 

Robert L. McGrath, "The Real and the Ideal: 

Popular Images of the White Mountains," 59-70; 

and Robert L. McGrath and Barbara). MacAdam, 

'A Sweet Foretaste of Heaven': Artists in the White 

Mountains, 1830-1890 (Hanover, N. H.: Univ. Press 

of New England, 1988). 

zt1 1 ln her groundbreaking study of nineteenth 

century American landscape painting Barbara 

Novak has documented the fluid, mutable and often 

conflicted boundaries between the picturesque and 

the sublime. The primitive and the pastoral, 

according ro Novak, often overlapped in the 

popular consciousness as well as in the art of the 

landscape paimers. See Novak, Nature and Culture, 

3-17. 

282 Benjamin Champney, Sixty Years' Memories of 

ArtandAn.ists (Woburn, Mass.: Wallace & Andrews, 

1900), 102. 

281 Champney, 103. 

264 The seminal study here is Leo Marx, The 

Machine in 1he Garden: Technology and the Pastoral 

Ideal in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 

1964). 

Art and the American Conservation Movement - 77 
Part JI: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting a11d the Environmental MovemenL 

1.ss William J. Stillman, "Sketchings," The Crayon 

2 (December 5, 1855), 360. As if anticipating a 

change in landscape aesthetic, Stillman qualified 

his view in what almost amounts to an Impressionist 

Manifesto: 

The advantages to be found here [Adirondacks] 

by the artist are not of the pictorial kind so 

much as the impressional. The silence, the 

dreaminess, and the very want of forcible 

character in the landscape, have a lulling, 

harmonizing effect on the mind, and though 

the first sight is unsatisfactory, and though any 

particular view may be so, there is something in 

our memory of th.e Adirondack country more 

grand, more poetic, to me than those found in 

any other country. 

28'' Champney, 103. 

287 Champney, 160. 

188 Thomas Addison Richards, "The Summer Life 

of the Artist," An Journal 18 (1856), 371-372. ln 

her thoughtful study of White Mountain landscaperourism Barbara MacAdam has demonstrated the 

incestuous relationship between art production, art 

journalism and the rise of h otels, railroads and the 

developing logistics of tourism. See Barbara J. 

MacAdam, "'A Proper Distance from the Hills': 

Nineteenth-Century Landscape Painting in North 

Conway," in McGrath and MacAdam, 'A Sweet 

Foretaste of Heaven,' 21-38. 

16~ Starr King, White Hills, 72. 

290 Starr King, White Hi!l.s, 57. 

m Starr King, White Hills, 158. 

191 St;:m King, White Hills, 3. 

191 Benjamin G. Willey, Incidents in White 

Mountain History (Boston: Nathaniel Noyes, 1856), 

86. 

m Bayard Taylor, 344-345. 

m Aaron Draper Shattuck married Samuel 

Coleman's (or Colman) sister Marian. Both arc 

associated with the American Barbizon mode while 

Kensett is generally associated with the older 

Luministschool of art. 

?

96 Bayard Taylor, 345. 

m Ward,4. 

198 Starr King, A Vacation, xviii. 

299 Gifford's reference is less to Brady than to his 

disciple Timothy O'Sullivan, whose A Harvest of 

Death, Gettysburg, July 1863 clearly influenced the 

78 -Art and the American Conservation Movement 

painter at the time. See Naomi Rosenblum, A World 

History of Photography (New York: Abbeville Press, 

1984 ), fig. 209. I wish to thank Janet Houghton for 

calling my attention Lo a recent essay by Nancy P. 

PiLtman, "James Wallace Pinchot (1831-1908): 

One Man's Evolution toward Conserv:ition in the 

Nineteenth Century," Yale F&ES Centennial News, 

Fa! I 1999, 4-7. In her stimulating and informative 

account, Pittman credits art collecting, especially 

the acquisition of Sanford Gifford's Twilight at 

Hunter Mountain, with shaping the elder Pinchot's 

emergent conservation ethic. Pittman goes so far as 

to suggest that Gifford's painting was a morbid 

reminder of the Pinchoc fam ily's early practices of 

forest clear-cutting in the Delaware Valley. Pittman 

further intimares, in conformity with one of the 

central premises of this swdy, chat James Pinchot's 

observation of French silviculture was a major 

determinant of his vision of the role of nature in an 

industria Ii zed society. 

.ioo For the traditional inte rpretation of the 

meaning of tree-stumps see Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., 

"The Ravages of rhe Axe: The Meaning of the Tree 

Stump in Nineteenth-Century American Art," Art 

Bulletin 61 (December, 1979), 6l 1- 626. These 

observations were made originally in Robert L. 

McGrath, "The Tree and the Stump: Hieroglyphics 

of the Sacred Forest," Journal of Forestry 89 (August, 

1991), 17-23. 

Joi According co his friend, the painter 

Worthington Whittredge, il was Gifford who 

discovered Scribner's: 

Many years ago [Gifford! hunted up a little 

house in Kaaterskill Clove, in which lived a 

family of plain country folk, and, as the place 

was secluded and there were no boarders, he 

liked it and managed to obtain quarters there. 

This house, scarcely large enough to hold the 

family, was, neverrheless, for many summers the 

abiding place of a congregation of artists. The 

beds were few and it may truly be said that the 

best were the cheapest, for the most expensive 

were composed of straw, while the cheapest 

were of feathers. As may well be imagined the 

table at this house was not very good. Gifford 

was no gourmet, but he had a commendable 

ambition to improve the cooking of the 

Catskills. To this end, he urged the immigration 

of some of the wives and sisters of those present, 

whose culinary gifts he was acquainted with. 

In due time they appeared upon the scene and, 

by their adroit direction, new dishes were served 

and the coffee was improved. But this 

experiment proved fatal in the end. Boarders 

came in flocks from the city, and Scribner's 

Boarding House had to be ab:indoned by the 

artists and new quarters found further on 
1 

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Part 11: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

(Kenneth Myers, The Catskills: Painters, Writers, 

and Tourists in the Mountains, 1820-1895 

[Hanover: Univ. Press of New Eng land, 

1987], 86). 

302 Evers, 490. 

301 Samuel Bowles, The Switzerland of America: A 

Summer Vacation in the Parks and Mountains of 

Colorado (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1869), 96. 

104 Bowles, Switzerland, 95. 

3

os For a stirring account of the "discovery" of the 

Cross see Clare~ce S. Jackson, Quest of the Snowy 

Cross (Denver: Univ. of Denver Press, 1952). 

306 Linda C. Hults, "Pilgrim's Progress in the West: 

Moran's The Mountain of the Holy Cross," American 

Art 5 (Winter/Spring, 1991), 75. This accords 

roughly with the 1865 Report on the Northern Pacific 

Railroad (Boston: j. H. Eastburn's Press), 4, which 

locates the "zodiac of empires" along the 42nd 

parallel: 

the isothermal temperate zone of the Nonhern 

Hemisphere, along which civilization makes 

the circuit of the globe. Along this belt ... we 

discover the chief centers of intelligence and 

power, and the greatest intensity of energy and 

progress. Along this axis ... civilization has 

traveled as by an inevitable instinct since the 

nation's dawn. 

A second pamphlet issued by Jay Cooke on behalf 

of the Northern Pacific, to which Frederick Billings' 

name is prominently affixed, states that the proposed 

route "abounds in magnificent scenery and ... if the 

Road is built ... it will settle up so rapidly, and the 

whites will be in such force, that the Jndians will be 

driven out of the Big Horn and Wind River Valleys 

and mountains which ... fare] teeming with gold 

and silver" (The Northern Pacific Land Grant and the 

Future Business of the Road [Philadelphia: Jay Cooke 

& Co., 1870]. 8) . 

io1 Hui rs, "Pilgrim's Progress," 70- 85. 

3

"° Newark Daily Advertiser (187 5), quoted in 

Nancy K. Anderson, Thomas Moran (New Haven: 

Yale Univ. Press, 1988), 107. 

109 Kinsey, 152. 

310 Henry Wadsworth Longellow, The Poetical 

Works of Henry Wadsworth Longellow (Boston: 

Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1883), Vol. 2, 151. 

rn See Mathias S. Fisch, "Mount of the Holy 

Cross," The American West: Magazine of Western 

Hiscory 16 (March/April, 1979), 32-58 for a lively 

account of the twentieth century history of the site. 

11 2 Sandra Dallas, Gaslights and Gingerbread 

(Denver, Sage Books, 1965 ), 149. 

H J The McMurtry Manufacturing Company of 

Denver, Colorado ("Paint and Varnish Makers") 

produced countless inexpensive paintings of the Mt. 

of the Holy Cross (#100) in the early twentieth century 

by "our special artist AL. Browning," claiming that 

"Our paints are used exclusively in the making of 

these pictures." 

114 Hales, 292 and fig. 190. 

11 5 Hales, 297-298. 

JJ 6 Fisch, 58. 

117 See Report from the Committee on Public Lands to 

Accompany HR 7339, May 8, 1950. United States 

Congress Seri.al volume 11380, House Report 2019 

and Serial volume 11370, Senate Report 2145. 

118 For a reproduction of Herzog's Mirror Lake, 

Yosemite (Birmingham, Alabama Museum of Art, c. 

1874- 1875) see Nancy Dustin Wall Moure, 

California Art: 450 Years of Painting & Other Media 

(Los Angeles: Dustin Publications, 1998), fig. 3- 7. 

119 For an interrogation of feminine scopophilia 

in art see the provocative essay of Griselda Pollock, 

"The Gaze and the Look: Women with BinocularsA Question of Difference,'' in Richard Kenda ll and 

Griselda Pollock, ed., Dealing wi1h Degas: 

Representations of Women and the Politics of Vision 

(London: Pandora Press, 199 l ), 106- 130. 

120 Perry, 130. 

321 The best account of Haynes' promotional 

activities on behalf of rhe Northern Pacific is in 

Magoc, 22-52 and figs. 4-21. 

122 Magoc, 2 7. 

323 Magoc, 45. 

124 For the machinations of the Yellowstone 

Improvement Company see Winks, 288- 289. 

JZ5 Hales, 194. 

J 26 The principal literature is Nelson C. White, 

Abbott H. Thayer: Painter and Naturalist (Hartford: 

Connecticut Printers, 1951 ), Ross Anderson, Abbot 

Handerson Thayer (Syracuse: Everson Museum, 

1982) and, most recently, Alexander Nemcrov, 

"Vanishing Americans: Abbott Thayer, Theodore 

Roosevelt, and the Attraction of Camouflage," 

American Art 11(Summer,1997), 51- 81. 

327 Barry Faulkner, Sketches from an Artist's Life 

(Dublin, N. H.: William I. Bauhan, 1973), 23- 24. 

An and rlie American Conservation Movement - 79 
Part 11: Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmental Movement 

32b The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. 

Robert E. Spiller (Cambridge: I larvard Univ. Press, 

1971), Vol. 9, "Monadnoc," 58-70. 

329 Faulkner, 28. 

330 Letter to Mrs. William Amory and Rev. George 

F. Weld, quoted in Nemerov, 67. 

311 Letter to Mrs. William Amory and Rev. George 

E Weld, quoted in Ross Anderson, 108. 

111 Faulkner, 24. 

JH Elliott S. Allison, "Abbott H. Thayer of 

Monadnock, "New Hampshire Profiles 24 ( 1975), 36. 

lH Mount Fuji, which has recently succumbed to 

the road building mania, is fast losing its status to 

Monadnock. 

315 Barbara Ball BL1ff, "The Dublin Colony," in A 

Circle of Friends: Art Colonies of Cornish and Dublin 

(Durham, N. H.: Univ. Art Galleries, 1985), l l. 

1>6 For an analysis of Raphael's Parnassus and its 

relationship to the Mons Vaticanus see Roger Jones 

and Nicholas Penny, Raphael (New Haven: Yale 

Univ. Press, 1983), 68-69. 

m Buff, 29. 

JIH Belanger, sec especially 109- 126. 

3i

9 Belanger, 126. 

340 John D. Rockefeller, Jr. donated substantial 

properties to the MounL Desert Island Preserve which 

was designated a Nationa 1 Park by Congress in 1919. 

Like Frederick Billings at Woodstock, John D. 

Rockefeller, Jr. had designed an extensive network 

of carriage roads throughout the park. For 

Rockefeller's many conservation efforts see Nancy 

Newhall, A Contribution to the Heritage of Every 

American: The Conservation Activities of John D. 

Rockefeller, Jr. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957). 

341 Run.te, National Parks, 133. 

342 Runte, National Parks, 134. 

HJ Rev. A bi el Silver, Lectures on the Symbolic 

Character of the Sacred Scriptures ( 1863 ), quoted in 

James Collins Moore, "The Storm and the Harvest: 

The Image of Nature in Mid-Nineteenth Cenrury 

American Landscape Painting" (Ph. 0. diss., Indiana 

Univ., 1974), 143. The seminal study here on the 

symbolism of the swamp is David C. Miller, Dark 

Eden: The Swamp in Nineteenth-Century American 

Culture (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 

1-19. 

80 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

H; For sunset, bird-filled, Everglade paintings, any 

one of which accords with Olmsted's rhetoric, see 

Gary R. Libby, Celebrating Florida: Works of Art from 

the Vickers Collection (Gainesville: Univ. Press of 

Florida, 1995), figs. 33, 55, 57, 59, 71, 75. 

HS On this subject see Katherine Manthorne, 

Tropical Renaissance: North American Artists Exploring 

Latin America (Washington D. C.: Smithsonian 

Institution Press, 1989). 

346 John C. Van Dyke, The Desert: Further Studies in 

Natural Appearances (New York: Charles Scribner's 

Sons, 1901), 230. 

347 See Van Dyke, Tlie Desert, 232: "In sublimirythe superlative degree of beauty-what land can 

equal the desert with its wide plains, its grim 

mountains, and its expanding canopy of sky?" For 

turn-of-the-cenlllry attitudes towards hench 

"modernity" see John C. Van Dyke, Modern French 

Masters: The Art Experience in Late NineteenthCentury America (New York: Century Co., 1896). 

~ Van Dyke, The Desert, 56. 

J49 Van Dyke, The Desert, 108. 

150 Professor Van Dyke, it should be acknowledgcJ, 

struggled persistently to dismantle the Ruskinian 

equation of art and nature, authoring separate 

volumes on Art for Art's Sake (New York: Charles 

Sons, 1893) and Nature for its Own Sake (New York: 

Charles Scribner's Sons, 1912). 

3

; 1 Paul Shepard, Coming Home to the Pleiswcene 

(Washington D. C.: Island Press, 1998), 145. 

151 Shepard, 138. 

JH Shepard, 141. 

354 Runre, National Parks, 6. 

155 See Kermit Vanderbilt, Charles Eliot Norean: 

Apostle of Culrure in a Democracy (Cambridge: 

Harvard Univ. Press, 1959), 188-190 and Alfred 

Runte, "How Niagara Falls Was Saved: The 

Beginnings of Esthetic Conservation in the United 

Scates," The Conservationist 26 (April-May, 1972), 

32-35. 

156 Runre, National Parks, 57. 

m The retouched photograph was used in a 

pamphlet published by the San Francisco Board of 

Supervisors, On the Proposed Use of a Portion of the 

Hetch Hetchy ... (San Francisco: Rincon Publishing 

Co., 1912). It is reproduced in Holway R. Jones, 

John Muir and the Sierra Club: The Batde for Yosemite 

(SanFrancisco:SierraClub, 1965), ll2. 
) 

) 

) 

) 

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Part 11: NineteenUi Century American Landscape Painting and the Environmenral Movement 

358 See Ho! way Jones, 112-113 for a phoco essay 

on the devastating condition of the Hetch Hetchy 

reservoir. 

359 National Park Service historian Richard Sellars 

argues persuasively that Herch Hetchy was "doomed" 

precisely because it was genuine wilderness rather 

than managed Park Service land. Sellars, 16-17. 

300 Shepard, 141. 

361 This conceit is derived from Guy Davenport, 

The Geography of the Imagination (San Francisco: 

North Point Press, 1981), 3-15. In his useful 

formulation, "geography is the wife of history as 

space is the wife of time." 

162 Winks, 286. 

363 Winks, 276. The quote reads in full: "That 

man could cut down such grand creations of the 

Lord surpasses all contempt." 

364 Bushnell,NatureandtheSupematural, 70, 19. 

365 Saint Paul, Minnesota Daily Globe (September 

lO, 1883). 

366 Winks, 274-311. 

367 Marsh, Man and Nature, vi. 

368 Sherry H. Olson, The Depletion Myth: A History 

of Railroad Use of Timber (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. 

Press, 1971), 36. 

369 Asher B. Durand, "Letters on Landscape 

Painting," in Spencer, 94. 

3?0 ln her diary for 1883 Julia noted that ar the 

close of the ceremony "an Englishman who was a 

guest of the excursion spoke to me of my husband's 

speech and said he was glad there was one speaker 

who recognized the providence of God in the 

building of this great Road." Billings Family 

Archives, Diary of Julia Billings, 1883, 31. 

Art and the American Conservation Movement- 81 
Selected Works from the Art Collection 

Marsh .. Billings .. Rockefeller National Historical Park 

Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), Cathedral Rocks, 

Yosemite , o.c., 24" x 18', 1870. 

Among the half-dozen most important 

works in the collection, Cathedral Rocks was 

painted in 1870, seven years after the artist's 

initial visit to Yosemite Valley. It was 

probably executed in the artist's studio at 

Malkasten, his grand estate at Irvington-onHudson, and based on sketches made during 

the seven-week visit to Yosemite in 1863.371 

1870 was also the year in which Fitz Hugh 

Ludlow published The Heart of the Continent, 

a lurid account of his overland travels with 

Bierstadt to California and Oregon:372 In this 

text Ludlow informs us how he and Bierstadt 

had come first to encounter the Yosemite in 

a manner that replicates Frederick Billings' 

own experience: 

82 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

We were going into the vale whose giant 

domes and battlements had months 

before thrown their photographic shadow 

through Watkins's camera across the 

mysterious wide Continent, causing 

exclamations of awe at Goupil's window, 

and ecstasy in Dr. Holmes' study. At 

Goupil's counter and in Starr King's 

drawing-room we had gazed on them by 

the hour .... Now we were going to test 

her reported largess for ourselves.373 

In 1865, following his return from the 

West, Bierstadt had exhibited a large 

painting (6' x 8') at the National Academy 

of Design in New York, entitled Looking 

Down Yosemite Valley, California (Birmingham 

Museum of Art, Alabama) which astonished 

Eastern audiences.374 Among the several 

topographic features included in this 

panoramic view were the Cathedral Rocks. 

Subsequently over the next decade Bierstadt 

narrowed his vision, producing at least three 

discrete views of the celebrated rock 

formation. 375 Of these the Billingses' painting 

is the earliest and the only one that is not a 

winter scene. Employing a dramatic and 

theatrically focused shaft of light to 

illuminate the face of the rocks, Bierstadt 

invoked one of his signature pictorial 

metaphors of light as divine illumination. 

Framed by a turbulent sky above and a 

darkened foreground, the cathedral rocks 

appear miraculously suspended above the 

earth. Ludlow, in describing the walls of 

Yosemite, employed an equivalent verbal 

rhetoric: 
J 

) 

We are at the end of the stupendous 

series of Yo-Semite effects; eight hundred 

feet above us, could we climb up there, 

we should find the silent causes of power 

... climb forever and there is still an 

Inaccessible .... Ye who cannot go to 

the Highest, lo, the Highest comes down 

to you. 376 

Cathedral Rocks, Yosemite is most probably 

the painting remarked upon by Julia in her 

diary entry for October 30, 1870, written in 

Woodstock, "He [FBJ brought from N.Y. a 

fine landscape by Bierstadt." 

Albert Biersradt (1830-1902), Cliff House and 

Bay of San Francisco, o.c., 17-1/Z" x 29-1/Z", n.d. 

Probably painced in 1871 or 1872, during 

his second trip to San Francisco, this unusual 

canvas is unique in Bierstadt's oeuvre as the 

only known representation of a famous hotel. 

Albeit marginalized by the quintessential 

painter of wilderness, the blandishments of 

civilization are here contrasted with the 

stormy violence of sea and sky. Perched on 

the edge of the Pacific Ocean overlooking 

Seal Rocks, the Cliff House was a fashionable 

gathering place for the San Francisco elite.377 

The Billingses also stayed at the hotel for 

several months after their marriage in 1862. 

During the spring of 1872, while awaiting 

for winter snows to melt in order to access 

the High Sierras, Bierstadt sketched in and 

around San Francisco Bay. Among a series 

of marine paintings made at this time were 

Part 111: Selected Works from the Collection 

views of the Farallons Islands, Seal Rock and 

presumably Cliff House and Bay of San 

Francisco. 378 In each of these works Bierstadt 

addressed the difficult painterly problem of 

rendering translucent, emerald-green waves. 

The composition employed for the Billingses' 

painting is a reprise of one of the artist's 

earliest canvases, The Marina Piccola, Capri 

(Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo) of 

1859. 379 

For purposes of understanding and 

interpretation, this view of the extreme 

western edge of the continent requires to be 

seen in relation to a number of Hudson River 

school paintings of the famed Catskill 

Mountain House, from the middle decades 

of the nineteenth century. Painted by such 

figures as Cole, Gifford and Kensett, the 

Catskill Mountain House was the earliest 

great resort hotel in America catering to the 

devotees of landscape tourism. 380 Perched 

high above the Hudson River Valley, the 

Catskill Mountain House, like the later Cliff 

House, afforded panoramic views of the 

"primal American wilderness." If the 

imperatives of Manifest Destiny and 

American Exceptionalism can be understood 

to have been born in and around New York 

City and the Hudson River, the realization 

of these ideological imperatives can be 

symbolized by the Cliff House, the 

architectural embodiment of the westering 

mandate. 381 Assuredly these associations 

were not lost upon Frederick Billings, one of 

the principal architects of the transcontinental railroad system. 

Art and the American Conservation Movement - 83 
Parr 111: Selected Works from the Collection 

Albert Bierstadc (1830-1902), The Matterhorn, 

o.c., 40"x 28", n.d. 

A Rockefeller acquisition, this view of 

the Matterhorn, the dominant scenic feature 

of the valley of Zermart in Switzerland, is of 

uncertain elate. Bierstadt painted at least 

three other versions of the Matterhorn, 

examples being found at the Metropolitan 

Museum of Art in New York, the Dallas 

Museum of Art and the Joslyn Art Museum 

in Omaha, Nebraska. 382 Stylistically this 

painting belongs co the artist's mid~career, 

with Hendricks proposing a date of 1878 for 

the Metropolitan view, the image most 

closely related to the Mansion's in style and 

composition. 383 Bierstadt firsc visited 

Switzerland in July of 1856, hiking in the 

company of Hudson River School colleagues 

Sanford Gifford, Worthington Whittredge 

and others through the Bernese Oberland 

over the Saint Gotthard Pass imo Italy. It is 

not known whether he visited Zermatt on 

that occasion. ln a ny event Biersrndt 

continued to paint reminiscences of Swiss 

scenery throughout his career. 

84- Art and the American Conservation Mowment 

The Matterhorn was considered, then as 

now, one of the most "sublime" mountains 

in the world. It entered into the 

consciousness of Anglo-Ameri.cans through 

the writings of Edward Whymper, whose first 

ascent of the mountain occurred in 1865. 

His account Scrambles Amongst che Alps in 

the Years 1860-1869, a classic of climbing 

literature, was published in 1871 and 

describes the tragic accident, which befell 

several members of the party who died on 

the descent from the summit. More has been 

written about this incident than any other 

climbing event, including th e conquest of 

Mount Everest.. The tragedy is usually 

associated with the end of the golden age of 

mountaineering. An epic of courage, 

resourcefulness and perseverance, Scrambles 

Amongst the Alps fully embodied the era's 

belief in Anglo~Saxon industriousness and 

racial superiority. As a German~American, 

Albert Bierstadt doubtless did not subscribe 

to these pervasive views, the mountain more 

likely signifying for him a sublime form rather 

than a racial narrative. 

Albert Biersradt (1830-1902), Scenery in 

1he Grand Tetons, o.c., 29" x 43" , n. d. 

This beautiful painting is surely 

incorrectly identified as a view of the Grand 

Tetons. Rather it is directly related to a series 

of views of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and 

Lake Tahoe executed in the late 1860s.384 

As the precise topographic site of the 

painting cannot be determined, it is more 
) 

) 

J 

J 

than likely that it is an amalgam of California 

scenery, a common compositional strategy 

wid1 Bierstadt. An oil sketch at the Buffalo 

Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, 

also incorrectly labeled The Grand Tetons 

according to Gordon Hendricks, might have 

served as a preliminary study for this 

Rockefeller acquisition, which clearly 

adheres to the spirit of the Billings 

Collecrion.385 Though Bierstadt did visit 

Yellowstone Park in 1881, a date 

considerably later than Scenery in the Grand 

Tetons, to paint the geysers he did not go via 

Jackson Hole and the Tetons. In this 

connection Gordon Hendricks wryly 

observes: "In spite of a number of Bierstadt 

paintings which dealers have given Grand 

Teton titles, the artist did not visit the Tetons 

on this, the only trip during which he 

approached the area. "386 

William Bradford (1832-1892), Sunset i11 

the Yosemite Valley, 29" x 4 7" , 1881. 

Bradford painted this sunset view of 

Yosemite Valley in 1881, perhaps hoping to 

benefit from the fame and success of his 

friend and mentor Albert Bierstadt, who 

sixteen years earlier had shocked the New 

York art world with the submission of an 

enormous canvas entitled Looking Down 

Yosemite Valley (Birmingham Museum of Art, 

Birmingham, Alabama) at the annual 

exhibition of the National Academy of 

Design.387 This celebrated painting, which 

was given pride of place in the galle-ry, was 

met with an outpollting of critical opinion, 

Partl l l: Selected Works from clie Collection 

both for and against Biersradt's grandiloquent 

invocation of the aesthetic o( rhe sublime. 188 

Con-temporaneous reception ranged from 

praise for the accuracy of the depiction ("we 

have been brought face to face with Nature's 

living rock") to assertions of deceit ("this 

acre-and-a,half of slovenly and monstrous 

stage-scenery"). Like Bierstadt before him, 

Bradford made copious use of the recently 

invented cadmium pigments, especially 

orange and yellow, to animate his blazing 

sunset at the western end of the valley. So 

pronounced was the vogue for cadmium 

pigments at the time that one critic was 

moved to pronounce that American 

landscape painting had become infected by 

"an epidemic of virulent sunsets. "l89 

Despite his reliance upon Bierstadt's 

pictorial operatics, Bradford's turbulent view 

of the Yosemite at twilight departs subtly 

from its illustrious predecessor. From a low 

foreground vantage our eye is led up the 

winding Merced river toward a flaming 

sunset at the horizon. Enframed by El 

Capitan on the right and Cathedral Rocks 

on the left, the view is pred ictably 

conventional, yet grounded more perceptibly 

in actuality than the more flamboyant work 

of Bradford's mentor.390 Writing for a San 

Francisco newspaper, che satirist Ambrose 

Bierce delivered a heated polemic on the 

subject of Bierstadt's imitators: 

It is with grim satisfaction that we record 

the destruction by fire of Bierstadt's 

celebrated picture of Yosemite Valley. 

The painting has been a prolific parent 

of ten thousand abominations. We have 

had Yosemite in oils, in watercolor, in 

crayon, in chalk and charcoal until in our 

very dreams we imagine ourselves falling 

from the summit of El Capitan or 

descending in spray from the Bridal Veil 

cataract. Besides that picture has incited 

more unpleasant people to visit 

California than all our conspiring hotel 

keepers could compel to return. 391 

Art and the American Conservation Movement - 85 
Part Ill: Selected Works from Lhe Collection 

Between 1875 and l 880 Bradford visited 

the Yosemite on severa l occasions, as 

reported in San Francisco newspapers. N2 

Despite his clear reliance upon Bierstadt's 

theatrical precedent, critics recognized that 

Bradford was less given to flights of fancy: 

The Yosemite of Mr. Bradford is quite 

another region from that of Bierstadt. 

One feels no inclination to dream in 

looking at these reproductions, for 

reproductions they arc in the fullest sense 

of the word. Undoubtedly the wonderful 

valley is painted as the artist saw it, and 

if he looked at it without the spectacles 

of imagination, or even without strong 

emotion, and simply busied himself with 

rendering actual rocks, trees, and 

sunsets. 393 

Close comparison with Bierstadt's 

composition broadly confirms t his 

evaluation; the famous rock formations in 

Bradford's painting arc more in conformity 

with Watkins' photographic views from the 

same vantage than Bie rstadt's "vast 

machinery of advertisement and puffery."394 

Bradford's well-known use of photography, 

perhaps as a consequence of his friendship 

with Watkins, as an a ide-memoir in 

composition may partially account for his 

pronounced topographic fidelity to 

the site.

395 

86- An and the American Conservation Movement 

Alfred Thompson Bricher (1837- 1908), 

Golden October, o.c., J.J-1/l" x 19-1/2", 1870. 

Thought of today, if at all, as somewhat 

less than a major talent, Alfred Thompson 

Bricher might best be described as an amiable 

eclectic. His numerous views of the New 

England coastline a re composed and 

executed in the classic Luminist mode and 

are generally reliant upon the work of John 

Frederick Kensett. 396 Contrasting coastal 

headlands with glassy expanses of water, he 

produced emphatically lateral compositions 

"given focal order by the rnolten sun."397 

Bricher's New England landscapes, however, 

appear to be the work of an entirely different 

artist. Vertical in orientation and atmospheric in treatment, t hey reprise the 

compositions and coloration of Sanford 

Gifford, another leading member of the 

second generation of Hudson River School 

artists. 398 Like Gifford, Brichcr employs a 

solitary enframing birch tree contrasted with 

a distant hillside, illumined by a hazy sun 

located in the central vortex of the picture. 

In her insightful study of Sanford Gifford, Ila 

Weiss has defined chis atmospheric style as 

"aerial Luminism" and contrasted it with the 

better-known movement of classic 

Luminism. 399 
) 

) 

) 

.J 

Unique among American painters of the 

Hudson River School, Bricher was capable 

of practicing both modes of Luminism 

alternately in his seascapes and landscapes. 

John William Casilear (1811-1893), The 

Gathering Storm, o.c., 6-3/4" x 9-3/4'', n.d. 

One of the few landscapes in the 

collection that represents the domesticated 

landscape as opposed to the "wilderness," this 

smaU oil reflects the influence of the French 

Barbizon painters who came into vogue 

during the 1870s and radically transformed 

the character of American art. Though 

attributed to John William Casilear, this 

painting is not consistenr with his known 

style. On the basis of published works of art 

and the few surviving critical accounts, 

Casilear was a paradigmatic painter of the 

second genera tion of the Hudson River 

School, his canvases generally falling under 

the rubric of Luminism. 400 The contemporaneous writer Henry Tuckerman 

described Casilear's style in terms redolent 

of his master, Asher Durand or his close 

friend John F Kensett. According to the 

dean of American critics, Casilear's canvases 

are finished with great care, and the 

subjects chosen with fastidious taste; the 

habit of dealing strictly with form, gives 

a curious correctness to the details of his 

work; there is nothing dashing, daring, 

Part III: Selected Works from the Collection 

or off-hand; all is correct, delicate, and 

indicative of a sincere feeling for 

truth, both executive and moral; not so 

much a passion for beauty as a love of 

elegance, is manifest; the precise, the 

firm, and the graceful traits of artistic 

skill, belong to Casilear. 

40' 

By way of marked contrast to this critical 

account, The Gathering Stolm is loosely 

painted with a thick impasto of pigment, a 

technique derived from the practices of French Barbizon artists. The general 

informality of the scene, which depicts a few 

sheep among boulders in a meadow with a 

stormy sky, also adheres to the Barbizon 

program of cultivated pastoralism rather than 

focusing upon the broad, panoramic vistas 

preferred by the Hudson River School 

artists. 402 Instead of composing a detailed 

view of the panoramic grandeur of the 

landscape, French Barbizon painters and 

their American followers sought to capture 

intimate details of nawre and the transitory 

effects of weather and light. As Bolger and 

Voorsanger have observed: "Working mainly 

out-of-doors and using vigorous, unblended 

strokes, they created a rough-textured 

painting surface usually associated with 

sketches and studies, and, through their 

masterly handling of thick pigments and h eavy brushwork, minimized pictorial 

depth."40J This definition of the French 

aesthetic perfectly accords with the style and 

subject of The Gathering Storm, a work which 

affords evidence of the appearance of the 

new movement in America. 

According to Robert Herbert, one of the 

principal interpreters of Barbizon ideology, 

these images of the French and American 

countryside signified a rejection of the city 

and industrialization together with a nostalgic 

desire to return to the soil. In addition, the 

consoling vision of peasant life was 

understood as denoting permanence and 

stability, attitudes not lost on Frederick 

Billings. 

404 

Art and the American Conservation Movement - 87 
Part l11: Selected Works from 1.he Collection 

The American pictorial genre of anirnallandscape405, to which The Gathering Storm 

belongs, however, possessed little of the 

soc io-religious resonance of the French 

movement. Informed by the revolutions of 

1830 and 1848 and the sempitern al 

oppression of the European peasantry, French 

Barbizon painting carried with it a political 

charge that held li ttle meaning fo r 

Americans.406 Rather American "parlorpastorals" were largely understood as a form 

of "paint ed poetry," the evocation of an 

emotion or a mood rather than a statement 

of revolutionary outrage.407 

Among American painters of the animallanclscape who worked in the Barbizon mode, 

Robert Crannell Minor's (1839-1904) 

canvases bear a strong resemblance to The 

Gathering Storm, providing grounds for a 

possible reattribution. 408 

Harry Chase ( 1853-1889), Dutch Pinl<ie Coming tO 

Anchor, o.c., 13-1/2" x 23-1/2", c. 1875. 

The acquisition of this beautiful marine 

painting affords a modicum of insight into 

Frederick Billings' collecting mentality. The 

survival of a lengthy letter from the artist in 

Munich, dated March 12, 1875, indicates 

that a canvas was commissioned by Billings 

directly from Chase, a native of Woodstock 

who worked mainly abroad as a specialist in 

maritime subjects. 409 Unfortunately, the 

letter is concerned mostly with financial 

arrangements and does not provide 

information as regards the possible meanings 

the work held for the Billingses. A reasonable 

supposition is that loyalty to a locally born 

88 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

artist, rather than a deep affection for the 

sea, supplied th e motivation for the 

commission. 

The facture of Dutch Pinkie Coming co 

Anchor, the signature "loaded-brush" of the 

Munich school, implies that Chase was 

trained in that city's academy. According to 

a curiously conflicted statement in an 

American publication of the period, 

Mr. Chase is better known in Europe than 

in America. The atmosphere of all Mr. 

Chase's pictures is sa lty and natural to 

the ocean. The artist is a natural born 

lover of the ocean in her 

stormy moods and a more trutnful 

interpre ter in the present day and 

generation of the sea in its grandest 

effects is not to be found ln any country 

than the young America.410 

A studio artist who spent time before the 

mast, Chase was singled out by another 

publication of the era: "A number of artists 

desert the land altogether and make the 

heaving deck their summer studio. Harry 

Chase in h is yacht Bonnie has coasted our 

sho res in search of artistic booty."411 
) 

l 

) 

) 

Thom<is C':ole ( 1801-1848), C:itarlel and Wate1fall, 

o.c., 7-3/4" x 10-3/4", c. 1838 and Tower by 

Moonlight, o.c., 9-1/2" x 13-3/4", c. 1838. 

These two small oil sketches were 

acquired by the Billingses in 1879 from the 

estate of Thomas Cole, who had died in 

1848. Three letters in the archives at Olana 

indicate that the painter Frederic Edwin 

Church acted as the executor for the sale, 

which also included the larger, finished 

Niagara. Probably painted in 1838, after 

Cole had left New York City to take up 

residence in Catskill, the two studio sketches 

were studies for commissions that were never 

fully realized. Citadel and Waterfall is loosely 

related to a painting in a private collection, 

Castle on Mountaintop ivith Cataract, while 

Tower by Moonlight never eventuated in a 

finished canvas. Ellwood Parry relates Tower 

by Moonlight to a sketch in another private 

collection (Study for Genevieve), both of 

which were preparatory to a major work 

based on a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge 

entitled "Introduction to the Tail of the Dark 

Part I I I: Sdected Works from the Collection 

Ladie."412 Inspired by the fashionable 

gothicism of early Romanticism, these 

pseudo-medieval images reflect Cole's 

ambition to represent a "higher landscape," 

a cultivated world of the imagination.413 

Though Cole executed numerous oil 

sketches, both in plein-air and in the studio, 

he never placed them on exhibition or 

intended them for sale.414 By the time the 

Billingses acquired them through the 

mediation of Church, the oil sketch had 

become a marketable commodity and was 

avidly collected, displayed and frequently 

preferred to a finished canvas.415 

Though Thomas Cole's once formidable 

reputation as the greatest American 

landscape painter had significantly declined 

by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, 

it is likely that the Billingses acquired these 

paintings due to their respect for the opinions 

of Frederic Church who advocated their 

purchase. 

Thomas Cole (1801-1848), Niagara Falls, 

oil on panel, 19" x 24-1/4", c. 1830. 

In historical terms, this small canvas is 

arguably the most important painting in the 

collection. Not only is it the oldest landscape 

acquired by the Billingses, a view of a 

quintessential American site, it is 

aesthetically among the most pleasing.416 

Painted in London during Cole's first visit to 

Europe, it is closely related to an almost 

Art and the American Conservation Movement - 89 
Part III: Selected Works from the Collection 

identically scaled painting (Distant View of 

Niagara Falls, 1830) in the Art Institute of 

Chicago. 417 Both landscapes were based on 

a drawing in Cole's sketchbook (Detroit 

Institute of Arts) made during a visit to the 

Falls in May of 1829 prior to his departure 

for Europe. In his sketchbook Cole noted: 

"Arrived at Niagara- on the American side. 

I anticipated much but the grandeur of the 

falls far exceed anything I had been told 

about them. 1 think the subject a sublime 

one, but I may fail in the representation as 

others have done before me."418 The better 

documented Chicago painting, containing 

Indians in the immediate foreground amidst 

blazing autumn foliage, was copied as the 

engraved frontispiece for John Howard 

Hinton's The History and Topography of the 

United States (London, 1832), the first 

important European illustrated text dealing 

with American scenery.419 Engraved and 

published separately as well as reproduced 

on pink Staffordshire pottery, Distant View 

of Niagara Falls was the most widely 

disseminated image of the famous American 

icon during the early Romantic period. 

In a long letter (1 March, 1830) to one 

of his New York patrons, Cole mentions his 

attempt to exhibit Niagara Falls: 

In the hope of keeping up my funds, I 

have painted several pictures, one which 

is the Falls of Niagara; and the artists and 

others who have seen it in my room 

expressed themselves highly pleased with 

it. I sent it to the Gallery of the British 

Institution, which has just opened for 

Exhibition. Imagine the mortification of 

finding it, as well as another picture of 

mine, hung so that it cannot be seen. I 

have been told that is what a stranger 

must expect at that place. 420 

Purchased by the Billingses from the 

estate of Thomas Cole in 1879, Niagara Falls 

was shown in the 1848 New York Memorial 

Exhibition in commemoration of the artist's 

premature death. A sequence of letters from 

90 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

the painter Frederic Church, the executor of 

Cole's estate, to Frederick Billings indicates 

that the painting was carefully restored by 

Mr. Oliver of New York who had "it in his 

hands a long time" so that "all the cracks 

have disappeared- the picture looks brighter, 

clearer and most charming in color."421 

Importantly, these letters indicate that the 

Cole purchases were a joint venture on the 

part of Frederick and Julia. 

The importance of this painting lies 

especially in its invocation of the aesthetics 

of the "sublime." On the eve of his departure 

for Europe Cole avowed to his patron 

Gilmore: "I cannot think of going to Europe 

without having seen Niagara. I wish to take 

a last, lingering look at our wild scenery. I 

shall endeavour to impress its features so 

strongly on my mind that, in the midst of the 

fine scenery of other countries, their grand 

and beautiful peculiarities shall not be 

erased."422 Painted at a time when the Falls 

were already undergoing significant 

transformation, the landscape affords a 

narrative of historical recovery. A vision of 

natural pre-history, it is a stark image of the 

primal American wilderness. The stormtossed clouds, bold juxtapositions of light and 

dark and, most conspicuously, the blasted 

stumps and dead tree in the left foreground 

are conventional early Romantic signifiers for 

the gothic "sublime," the cultural conceit that 

nature can be threatening as well as beautiful, 

terrifying as well as uplifting. By 1879, the 

time of the acquisition of Niagara Falls by the 

Billingses, the sublime was no longer a potent 

aesthetic or philosophical force, existing 

more as an historical curiosity than a 

psychological reality. The awareness of the 

simultaneous degradation of the actual, as 

opposed to the virtual, Niagara Falls by 

industry and tourism, a process that had 

begun prior to Cole's visit but fell to its nadir 

in the late nineteenth century, was 

instrumental in the creation of the first 

National Parks.423 
) 

) 

) 

... J 

Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823-1900), High Bridge, . 

New York, o.c., 11-3/4''x 23-3/4", 1879. 

U nlike many captains of industry, 

Frederick Billings did not collect paintings 

of the railroad in the landscape- the socalled triumphalist image of the machine in 

the garden. Nor did he cominission canvases 

representing the displacement of Indians by 

the iron horse, as did several other railroad 

magnates. For that matter there is ve1y little 

evidence in the collection of works of art 

celebrating the triumph of industrial 

technology over nature.424 Rather he 

preferred painted visions of primal 

wilderness, agrarian harmony, and preindustrial innocence.

425 It should come as 

no surprise, therefore, that the canvas was 

acquired by Laurance Rockefeller during the 

1950s and not by Frederick Billings. 

Cropsey's High Bridge, New York, an 

image of the famous stone aqueduct across 

the Harlem River connecting the Bronx to 

Morningside Heights, is one of only three 

canvases in the collection that makes any 

direct allusion to the contemporaneous world 

of industry and urban life. The first bridge 

linking Manhattan to the mainland, High 

Bridge brought water to the city from upland 

reservoirs and was under construction 

between 1837 and 1842. Nelsons' Guide to 

Lake George and Lake Champlain, published 

in 1858, describes the bridge as spanning the 

whole width of the valley and the river 

at a point where the latter is 620 feet 

wide, and the former a quarter of a mile. 

Eight arches, each with a span of 80 feet, 

compose this structure; and the 

elevation of the arches gives 100 feet 

Part Ill: Selected Works from the Collection 

clear of the river from their lower side. 

The material employed throughout the 

whole of this imposing object is granite. 

The water is led over th is bridge, which 

is 1450 feet in extent, in iron pipes; and 

over all is a pathway, which 

though wide enough for carriages, is 

available to pedestrians only. The bridge 

is well worthy of a visit from all who 

desire to obtain a proper idea of the 

enterprise of the inhabitants of 

New York. lt cost 900,000 dollars.

426 

Jasper Cropsey, one of the leading artists 

of the second generation of the Hudson River 

School, made a minor specialty out of 

painting aqued ucts, viaducts and railroad 

bridges for industrialists. In these paintings 

he invariably "assimilated" these man-made 

artifacts into the aesthetic mode of the 

landscape picturesque, making them appear 

compatible with the natural world. In his 

best-known painting, The Starrucca Viaduct, 

a view of the famous bridge on the route of 

the New York and Erie Railroad, he so 

thoroughly idealized the scene as to make 

this "Eighth Wonder of the World" part and 

parcel of the landscape itself. In another 

connection his views of graceful viaducts 

evoked assoc iations with another favorite 

theme of New York painters, the engineering 

feats of the ancient Romans.127 It has been 

noted with regard to Cropsey's paintings that 

he sought to produce "an echo of Italy in 

the American landscape .... Valley and hills, 

the long line of the railroad viaduct ... 

recalled the landscape and aqueducts about 

Tivoli."428 

High Bridge, New York, like most of his 

major canvases, stages the scene in the fall 

of the year. The most strident colorist among 

the artists of the Hudson River School, 

Cropsey employed blazing autumn foliage as 

a signifier for the nationalist content of the 

wo rk. The equation of American 

engineering with the aqueducts of ancient 

Rome is another of the artist's signature 

Art and the American Conservation Movement - 91 
Pare TTI: Selected Works from tlie Collecrion 

strategies for assimilating the products of 

modern technology to the world of culture. 

Responding to Ralph Waldo Emerson's 

radical mandate to the artist to reattach 

"things to nature and the whole- reattaching 

even artificial things, and violations nature, 

to nature, by a deeper insight," Cropsey 

strove to achieve a landscape of 

reconciliation. 429 

While High Bridge was frequently 

photographed and painted during the later 

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, 

most especially by the American 

Impressionist Ernest Lawson (1873-1939) 

and the early twentieth century realist George 

Luks (1866-1933), Cropsey's is among th e 

earliest images of the bridge. 430 The 

Smithsonian Institution's National Museum 

of American Arr survey of paintings lists a 

view of High Bridge in the New York 

Historical Society, dated 1877, by the little 

known artist Paul Dixon. A large watercolor 

of High Bridge (Fig. 16), recently acquired 

by the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth, 

is presumably the earliest extant image of the 

structure. Painted in 1848 by John William 

Hill (1812-1872), an English-born advocate 

of John Ruskin's doctrine of "truth to nature,'' 

the structure of the High Bridge affords a 

modernist antidote to the agricultural 

activities depicted in the foreground of the 

image.4J 1 

Fig. 16: John William Hill, High Bridge: Hcfflem 

River (c. 1848-1851), Hood Museum of Art, 

Dartmouth College. 

92 - A1·t and the American Conservation Movement 

William Parsons Winchester Dana (1833-1927), 

Brittany Beach, o.c., 15-1/2" x 28-1/2", c. l865-

L870. 

Currently relegated to the status of a 

footnote in the history of American art, during 

the Victorian era Dana was one of the more 

celebrated artists exhibiting at the National 

Academy of Design. Henry Tuckerman 

described him in 1867 as "an accomplished 

member of the modern French school," by 

which he meant that he was an early graduate 

of Paris' Ecole des Beaux-Arts.432 

Brittany Beach, a twilight scene of 

peasants gathering seaweed on a placid 

coastal shore, is painted in the meticulously 

finished, realist style of the French salon as 

seen, for example, in Charles Theodore 

Frere's Sunset Scene on the Nile. "His [Dana's] 

method and manner, his coloring and ideas 

of art," averred Tuckerman, "are remarkably 

loyal to the French school." In this 

connection, Dana was in the vanguard of 

American artists studying in France, having 

gone first to Paris in 1857. Sometime after 

that date he began painting coastal scenes 

in Brittany, leading Tuckerrnan to observe 

in 1867: "His original tendency was for 

marine landscapes, and in these, where the 

scene is the coast of France, he has been 

frequently successful." 

As perhaps the first American artist to 

depict Breton life, Dana anticipated the 

formation of the Pont-Aven art colony 

during the 1860s to which scores of 

Americans ultimately belonged. 433 Scenes 

of French peasant life, like Orientalist images 

of Near Eastern fellahin, offered assurance 

to industrialists like Frederick Billings of 

humanity's sempiternal bond with the soil. 

"Neither artists nor viewers seemed to tire," 
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) 

) 

) 

) 

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according to Lois Fink, "of the drudgery or 

pleasures of the French peasantry. 

Convenient, accessible, accustomed to 

having artists track through their fields and 

even their homes, French peasants of the 

nineteenth century became most popular of 

all subjects for French and American Salon 

painters."4J 4 Unlike the majority of New 

York's Gilded Age collectors, however, 

Billings acted upon the nostalgic vision of 

pastoral harmony embedded in these 

canvases. At some deep level, the 

Woodstock model farm can be understood 

as an attempt to actualize the timeless ideals 

projected by such paintings as Brittany Beach. 

Harry H. Davis (fl. 1853-1884), Hudson 

Highlands-West Point, o.c., 22" x 36", 1873. 

One of only four paintings in the 

collection that represent views upon or near 

the Hudson river, this panoramic canvas may 

well have embod ied significant, even 

conflicted, associations for the Billingses. The 

artist employed a formulaic highland view 

from the north, looking south towards Storm 

King Mountain and the group of buildings 

of the U. S. Military Academy at West Point. 

A storm-darkened sky and a muted palette 

afford an aura of Romantic atmosphere for 

the scene. Similar in topography and 

composition to numerous Hudson River 

School paintings of the mid- to la te 

nineteenth century, Hudson Highlands-West 

Point recalled for informed New Yorkers a 

landscape inscribed with deep cultural 

meanings.435 Self-servingly styled as "Nature's 

Part 1I1: Selected Works from the Collecticm 

great Academy of American landscape art," 

the region was the epicenter for 

Knickerbocker cultural imperialism. 436 As 

both a devout New Englander and a 

sometimes-reluctant resident of New York 

City, Frederick Billings found himself at the 

center of an intense rivalry between the two 

regions in a contest for cultural primacy.437 

For the Billingses the meaning of this 

specific landscape was probably twofold, 

carrying in the first instance a public and, in 

the second, a more private connotation. For 

most viewers of the period the Hudson 

Highlands above West Point embodied a 

nationalist historic narrative. It was, for 

example, the site of the capture of the British 

spy, Major An.dre, during the Revolutionary 

War. Andre, wearing civilian clothes and 

carrying Benedict Arnold's plan for the 

betrayal of West Point to the English, was 

apprehended by patriots and later hanged 

for spying.438 The power of landscape images 

to elicit historic, moral and social narratives 

was well understood during the period as the 

theory of associationism and was grounded 

in the claim that aesthetic pleasure 

proceeded not from the inherent qualities of 

images but from the ideas attached to 

rhem.

439 The capacity of the Romantics to 

derive a "higher landscape" from the raw 

facts of nature was, as in. this instance, one 

of the more developed imaginative skills of 

the era.

440 

A second, more private meaning for the 

image possibly lay in its connection to the 

family of]ulia Billings. The palatial, Italianate 

villa of Thomas P. Rossiter, the husband of 

Julia's prematurely deceased sister Anna, was 

l.ocated near the site of the painting.441 That 

the Billingses continued their relationship 

with Rossiter is suggested by the fact that 

Anna's and Thomas' son Ehrick Kensett 

Rossiter, an architect, was commissioned to 

design the carriage house at the Woodstock 

estate. The Hudson Highlands, near 

Irvington-on-Hudson-a genial and 

cultivated neighborhood"- was also the 

Art and the American Conservation Movement-93 
Parr 1II: Selected Works from the Collection 

home of Frederick's forme r business partner 

John C. Fremont and his wife Jesse Benton 

as well as of the financier Jay Gould and the 

painter Albert Bierstadt. 

Another element of later Hudson River 

landscapes such as Hudson Highlands was the 

development of a sequential spatial structure 

"whose function was to delineate America's 

progressive triumph over nature." 

Characterized by "smooth spatial transitions 

between foreground, middle ground and 

distance, framing repousrnirs, and aerial 

perspective," this formula represented 

wilderness yielding to cultivation. 442 By 

contrast, contemporaneous New England 

compositions painted, for example, in the 

White Mountains of New Hampshire, 

generally reversed the scheme, depicting a 

domesticated foreground gradually yielding 

to a distant view of wilderness. 443 The 

purport of these works was to stress a 

condominium of man with nature rather than 

the invocation of the nationalist rhetoric of 

paintings of primal wildemess. 

Asher Durand (1796- 1886), Autumn Landscape, 

o.c., 11 -1/2" x 16-1/4", c. 1847. 

This painting, depicting a Conestoga 

wagon and a solitary walker moving toward 

an auturnnal sunset, is related to a number 

of works on a similar westering theme 

executed around mid-century. 444 Of these 

the most celebrated is Frederic Edwin 

Church's New England Scenery of 1851 

94 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

(George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum, 

Springfield, Massachusetts).445 The historian 

Angela Miller has written: "The westward 

moving Conestoga wagon .. . evoked the 

literal fulfillment in the present of the 

original Puritan migration which had given 

rise to a new epoch in history."446 According 

co this account, these images of migration 

denoted New England's pivotal role in the 

formation of the broader national culture. 

A competing view is advocated by William 

Truettner, who interprets these scenes as 

elegies, which focus nostalgically on the New 

England landscape as a "denial of the 

expansionist impulse that had already sent 

wagon trains to Oregon and California."447 

Another possible reading of the image, which 

may account for its relevance to the career 

and sensibilities of Frederick Billings, relates 

to the beginning of the decline of New 

England on the national scene. A spate of 

twiligh t imagery painted at the height of the 

Romantic period most often signified the 

passing or extirpation of a culture, whether 

it be northeast wilderness, rural farmers or 

nomadic Indians. Such paintings-sunset 

elegies, as it were-may have recalled for 

Billings the imperative to rescore New 

England's cultural and agricultural life. 
) 

) 

) 

) 

.) 

..) 

John Whetten Ehninger (1827-1889), Wedding 

Procession, Miles Sr.andish, o.c., 17-1/2" x 24-1/2", 

1861. 

This small canvas should more correctly 

be entitled The Wedding Procession of Priscilla 

and John Alden. Based on the popular 1858 

poem of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The 

Courtship of Miles Standish, Ehninger's 

painting represents the conclusion of the 

poem where Miles Standish is reconciled with 

the bridal couple Priscilla and John Alden. 

Seated upon a "snow-white bull," Priscilla, 

as recounted in the poem, is flanked by the 

standing figures of Standish and Alden and 

followed by a file of Pilgrims.HS According 

to a recent scholarly account, the painting 

was exhibited at the National Academy of 

Design in New York in 1861 after which 

"Ehninger appears to have abandoned his 

sporadic efforts at historical painting."449 

Wedding Procession is the only narrative 

"history" painting in the collecti on , its 

acquisition h olding special meaning for 

Frederick and Julia. In a diary entry three 

days after her wedding (April 2, 1862) Julia 

recounts that "Frederick read Miles Standish 

to me. It was a very happy day, the more so 

because I greatly enjoyed listening co the 

poem as he read it."450 Although purchased 

twenty-six years afrer the Billingses' marriage, 

the painting surely evoked for them, in 

addition to its personal message, a sense of 

pride in American history and their place 

in it. 451 

The Pilgrim experience was a popular 

theme in nineteenth century art.452 The early 

Pan III: Selected Works from the Collection 

colonists were re-inscribed in art and 

lite ra ture as centra l protagonists of an 

historical progression, which began with 

Christopher Columbus and culminated, 

among other things, in the transcontinental 

railroad and the fulfillment of America's 

Manifest Destiny. An important precedent 

for Ehninger's painting, one that it tacitly 

acknowledges through its compositional 

derivation, is George Caleb Bingham's 

celebrated canvas of 1851, Daniel Boone 

Escorting Settlers Through The Cumberland 

Gap (Washington University Gallery of Art, 

St. Louis).453 This well-known painting, with 

its clear reference to religious iconographies 

for "The Flight into Egypt" or "Moses Leading 

the Israelites into the Promised Land," was 

widely understood by nineteenth century 

viewers as providential sanction for western 

expansion. 454 

Prior to making the oil painting, Ehninger 

produced in 1858 eight pencil drawings for 

an early version of a deluxe, leather-bound 

"coffee-table book," entitl ed Illustrations of 

Longfellow's Courtship of Miles Standish by John 

W Ehninger. Photographed from the Original 

Drawings by Brady (New York: Rudd & 

Carleton, 1859). Proclaimed by H enry 

Tuckerman to have "proved a favorite giftbook," a copy was owned by the Billingscs, 

containing eight photo-reproductions 

(presumably by Matthew Brady) of the 

original drawings.155 Quite possibly this book 

is the earliest American publication to 

employ photography for the reproduction of 

artworks, a subject upon which there is no 

available information. In a journal entry of 

November 28, 1858 Henry Wadsworth 

Longfellow wrote: "Ehninger has sent me a 

beautiful illustration of Miles Standish. It is 

the bridal procession going through the 

Plymouth woods; and is full of feeling."4

56 

Art and the American Conservation Movement - 95 
Pan llI: Selected Works from the Collection 

Jerome Elwell (1847-l912), Near Nonnan's WoeSea Coast Manchester, o.c., 7" x 11-1/2", 1877. 

This small painting is another of the 

Billingses' acquisitions associated with their 

mutual affection for the poetry of Henry 

Wadsworth Longfellow. Norman's Woe is a 

large rock located between Gloucester and 

Manchester off the southern coast of Cape 

Ann, Massachusetts, infamous for the large 

number of ships that foundered on it. 

Norman's Woe, and the tragic tale of the little 

girl lashed to the mast of a wrecked schooner 

("But the cruel rocks they gored her side / 

Like the horns of an angry bull"), was 

immortalized by Longfellow's Wreck of the 

Hesperus ( 1841) and its closing lines: "Christ 

save us all from a death like this / On the 

reef of Norman's Woe." Though Elwell's 

small canvas docs not represent a specific 

episode from Longfellow's poem, it surely was 

intended by the artist to stimulate the literary 

imagina tion. 

Norman's Woe was first painted by the 

Gloucester artist Fitz Hugh Lane in 1862. 

Elwell, also a native of Gloucester and 

younger than Lane, made something of a 

specialty copying the older, better-known 

artist's works. 457 Near Norman's Woe, a view 

of Gloucester Harbor from Rocky Point, does 

not reflect any known composition by Lane. 

Instead it is a rather conventional Romantic 

seascape with two diminutive figures gazing 

at a turbulent sunset over water. For reasons 

as perplexing as unknown, Jerome Elwell, 

currently consigned to near total oblivion, 

is described in Thieme-Becker's Allgemeines 

Lexikon der Biklenden Kunstler as among "the 

best American artists with which to reckon."4

58 

96 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

Charles Theodore Frere (1814-1888), On The 

Nile, o.c., 15" x 30", c. 1878 and Canal Flniacliah 

(?] Cairo, Egypt, o.c., 6-1/2" x 11-l/2", 1870s. 

These two works by Frere, one of the 

most popular nineteenth century painters of 

Orientalist subjects, are among the four 

canvases in the collection that depict themes 

of the Muslim Near East. Painted in either 

Paris or Cairo where he maintained studios 

at the height of the Orientalist vogue, Frere's 

canvases were extremely popular with 

American and European collectors. The 

artist made his debut at the French Salon in 

1834 and two years later went to Algiers, 

traveling extensively throughout the Near 

East before taking up residence in Cairo on 

a semi-permanent basis. At the Paris Salon 

of 1878 he exhibited The Nile-Evening, 

which may be the painting in the Billingses' 

collection.459 

Frere's small, cabinet-sized canvases are 

best described as Orientalist landscapes 

rather than the more popular genre scenes 

of harems and slave markets that provided 

the most prevalent form of Orientalism during 

the nineteenth century. The function of such 

paintings as On the Nile, with its distant 

twiligh t view of the pyramids at Giza, was 

assuredly to remind the Billingses of the 

famous monuments of antiquity rather than 

to serve the pol ltical agenda of 
..... , 

') 

) 

) 

..) 

colonialism.460 The prevalence of trees and 

water in the foreground of On the Nile, 

together with the serene calm evoked by an 

evening twilight, resonates more closely with 

another painting in the collection, William 

P. W. Dana's Brittany Beach, than with the 

exotic Orientalist confections of Jean-Leon 

Gerome, whose Turkish Interior (currently 

unlocated) was one of the most prominently 

featured works in the New York collection.461 

The representation of pri1nitive means 

of transportation, whether foregrounded 

against the Nile or, as in the case of Dana's 

canvas, against the coast of Brittany, and the 

evocation of nostalgia for a pre-industrial 

world of simplicity, a theme common to 

several works in the Billingses' collection, 

unite these paintings in their joint appeal to 

Frederick's and ] ulia's sensibilities. 

Sanford Robinson Gifford (182.3-1880), 

Venice, o.c., 11" x 24", l864. 

One of twenty paintings made by Gifford 

between 1868 and 1880 on the theme of 

Venice, this small oi 1 was probably a study 

for a larger, identical painting that was owned 

by the Billingses' Madison Avenue neighbor 

Frederick Ferris Thompson. 462 The 

preliminary drawing from the artist's 

sketchbook upon which these several 

paintings were based has survived together 

with a sketch of the sail design feamred in 

the Billingses' painting. 463 Enormously 

popular with the artist's clientele, these 

smaller, finished Venetian "cabinet pictures" 

we re attractive, according to Eleanor 

Harvey, "both for their appearance and the 

price, often less than half that of a full-scale 

Part ll1: Selected Works from the Collection 

painring."464 Invoking his signature Venetian 

formula of juxtaposing an architectural skyline 

(Isola Povillia) and decorative sails against a 

glowing, reflective field, Gifford produced a 

canonic example of Luminist aesthetics.465 

Luminist compositions, of which additional 

examples by Gifford, Kensett and Johnson are 

represented in the collection, stress low 

horizons, still, reflective bodies of water, open 

ends and horizontal formats.466 

Gifford first visited Venice in July 1857 

and again in J unc of 1869 when he made the 

drawing upon which the Venetian series is 

based.467 In a long letter to a friend, he wrote: 

"I did not know till now, when I am about 

leaving Venice forever, how strong a hold 

this dear old, magnificent, dilapidated, 

poverty-stricken city has taken on my 

affections .... Her material prosperity is gone, 

but the art which shed Lustre upon it and 

made it glorious is not to be extinguished."468 

The idea of Venice, non-industrial and 

technologically archaic, was first popularized 

for Anglo-Americans by the writings of John 

Ruskin, whose The Stones of Venice was first 

published in America in 1855. 

James MacDougal Hare (1828-1901), Mist in 

the Adirondacks, o.c., 13-1/4" x 26-1/4", 1884. 

Born in Scotland, James MacDougal Harr 

brought with him to America the memory 

of Sir Edwin Landscer's celebrated paintings 

of upland stags. Mist in the Adirondacks is 

clearly an effort to exploit the celebrity of 

one of Landseer's most famous canvases, Tile 

Sanctuary (1842), a gift of Queen Victoria 

to Prince Albert. In Landseer's painting a 

Art and the American Conservation Movement - 97 
Part III: Selected Works from the Collectio11 

large stag uavcrsing the border of a lake 

startles a flock of ducks who take flight into 

a twilight sky. The first of his symbolic 

pictures of deer, The Sanctuary was 

understood to d enote the violence that 

always lies beneath chc surface of tranquillity. 

According to a British critic, the wo rk 

intimated that "there was no purchasing 

safety for ou rse lves o n rhis earth, without 

bringing troub le a nd peril to others."169 A 

poem written by a friend of the artist 

acco1npan ied the e ntry in the Royal 

Academy ex hibition ca ta logue of 1842: 

See where th e startled wild fowl 

screaming rise 

And seek in marshaled flight those golden 

skies. 

Yon wearied swimmer scarce can win the 

land, 

l lis limbs yet falter on the water strand. 

Poor hunted hart! The painful struggle 

o'er 

How blesl the shelter of that island shore! 

There, whilst he sobs, the panting heart 

to rest, 

Nor hound nor hunte r shall his lair 

molest."·

110 

James Ha rl , along with his brother 

William, was a member of the Keene Valley 

colony of a rtists who summered in the 

Adirondack Moun rain s of northern New 

York State. Mis~ in the Adiro11dacks is typical 

of a number of deer paintings by Hart, all of 

which are d istantly related w Landseer's 

anima l pictures. Like Landseer, H a rt 

positions his solitary deer at the edge of a 

body of water from which explodes a flock 

of slarded ducks. A Romantic-Realist, 

schooled in the preferred style of the National 

Academy of Design, James Harr was one of 

the most prominent membe rs of the 

Adirondack school of artists which included, 

among others, George Smillie, whose work 

is a lso featu red in the Woodstock 

collection.471 

98 - Art and che American Conseniation Movement 

- ~ -

·~-~ , _ _, ~ 

- Hermann Ht!rwg ( 1832- l 932 ), Flood Tide Ostend, 

o.c., 17" x 22-3/4", 1869. 

This sma ll canvas, depicting a sailing 

vessel being winched into shore from a 

stormy sea, is a paradigmatic example of the 

Romantic coasta l shipwreck theme. Jean 

Antoine T heodore Gudi n 's ( 1801-1880) 

Shipwreck (oil on canvas, 13-1/4" x 21", c. 

1860- 1870) also in the Woodstock 

collection, is a European variant on the 

subjec t.

472 Where the Frenchm an fo regrounds the scene with a rock, a traditional 

symbol fo r the church and fa ith, the GermanAmerican Herzog depicts a group of figures 

attempting Lo winch a stranded ship ashore. 

This latte r s ubj ect, more typical for 

American than European marine painters, 

generall y denotes the conflict between 

human will and the power of natural forces. 

Whereas the Fre nc h pa inter grounds his 

subject in an older convention for salvation, 

Herzog is probably responding to the political 

symbolism of the "ship of state" a nd the 

immediate climate of the recently terminated 

American C ivil War.411 Scenes of shipwreck 

and coastal salvation remained popular until 

the final decades of the nineteenth century.47'1 

Shipwrecks, whether persona l o r political, 

struck a responsive chord in all Americans. 

No less a tastemaker than Andrew Jackson 

Downing, in his influential mid-century book 

The Architecrnre of Countr)' Houses, 

implausibly connected the theme with the 

home: "the mere sen timent of home, with 

its thousand assoc iations, has, like a strong 
i 

) 

) 

) 

J 

anchor, saved many a man from shipwreck 

in the storm of life. "475 

Arthur Quartley (1839-1886), the 

painter of Boats Becalmed (oil on canvas, 

1879), provides an alternate vision of marine 

life. Calm in tone and coloration, stable in 

composition, the canvas speaks to the 

scaling-down of pictorial rhetoric in much 

of the art of the 1870s. Consciously limited 

in scale and subject, Quartley's astringent 

style represses the Sturm und Drang of 

Romantic imagery in the interest of evoking 

an image of quietude. This "chastening" of 

style based upon "a pronounced simplification in compositional massing, an 

increased sophistication and abstract quality 

of the scumbling used to depict sea and sky, 

an observable flattening of pictorial space 

and the use of color to complement the mood 

of the scene," has been related to a shift in 

the national culture in the aftermath of the 

Civil War.176 

Paintings by Quartley are extremely rare, 

his career spanning little more than a decade. 

In 1881 critic G. W. Sheldon wrote that his 

"genius is indisputable ... his finest 

period is undoubtedly yet to come, and 

when it does come, his reputation will 

be cosmopolitan."477 

David Johnson (1827-1908), Study, Harbor 

Island, Lake George, o.c., 13-1/2" x 23-1/2," 1871. 

With the intention of honoring the spirit 

of the Billings Collection, the Rockefellers 

acquired this painting in the 1960s as a 

complement to the Kensett view of Lake 

George at Sunset ( 1872), acquired by 

Part I I I: Selected Works from the Collection 

Frederick and Julia. At the time the 

Rockefellers were no doubt unaware that 

Johnson's exacting realism, full of closely and 

precisely delineated details, was to a 

considerable extent inconsistent with the 

normative taste of the Billingses. 478 Nowhere 

else in the collection is there an example of 

(he scientific, quasi-photographic particularism of this painting. For the most part 

Frederick and Julia preferred romantically 

idealized, atmospherically-laden images of 

the American landscape, operatically 

transfigured in the manner of Bierstadt, or 

metaphorically charged with light in the 

Luminist style of Gifford and Kensett. By 

way of contrast, Johnson's tightly rendered, 

microscopically observed canvas conforms 

to a rival aesthetic program articulated by 

the Association for the Advancement of 

Truth in Art, the American equivalent of the 

English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.479 

Whether or not Frederick and Julia were 

fully conscious of the cultural crisis of the 

L860s and 1870s in which the Hudson River 

School came under siege from a younger 

generation of realists, they would surely have 

recognized some form of the critical rhetoric 

employed by one journalist writing in 1863: 

"They [Hudson River School artists] have 

done their work and, no doubt, done it to 

the extent of their ability; our business is only 

to bid them 'Farewell' while we turn to greet 

the young Americans who are to inaugurate 

the new day."480 Based on their collecting 

habits, the Billingses appear not to have been 

responsive to these exhortations, preferring 

instead the older Hudson River style or the 

newer Barbizon aesthetic. In both instances 

Romantic moodiness rather than quasiscientific facticity afforded the dominant 

aesthetic and psychological affect. Johnson's 

Harbor Island, Lal<e George, uniquely within 

the collection, fails to embody this sensibility. 

In conformity with the Romantic theory 

of associationism, few places in America 

possessed greater historical "associations" 

than Lake George. The setting for James 

An and the American Conservation Movement -99 
Part 11I: Selec1ed Works from the Collection 

Fenimore Cooper's novel The Last ofMohicans 

( 1826), the "Holy Horicon" evoked for 

Americans colonial history, Native 

American virtue and villainy, and the figure 

of the frontiersman, Natty Bumpo, the 

paradigmatic embodiment of national self, 

reliance. One of the great lakes of the world, 

Lake George was, according t o Cooper, 

unparalleled: "In one particular indeed, this 

lake has scarcely an equal. We allude to its 

islands, which are said to equal the number 

of days of the year .... We claim for America 

the freshness of a most promising youth, and 

a species of natural radiance that carries the 

mind with reverence to the source of all this 

is glorious around us."1

81 

Johnson fim visited Lake George in 1857 

and in the following year all of his paintings 

exhibiLcd al tht! National A<.:a<lt!my of Design 

were of Lake George subjects. He returned 

again in 1871, and in each of the next five 

years exhibite<l at least one Lake George 

painting at the Academy. The size of the 

Billings,Rockefe ller oil, together with an 

inscription, indicates chat it was a study for a 

larger painting, although, consistent with 

Pre,Raphaelite practice, the study canvas is 

highly developed. Another oil study of 1871 

in th e collection of Henry Melville Fuller 

included another oil study of 18 71, almost 

identical in locH tion, size and coloration. 

This study, together with Harbor Island, Lake 

George, probably servt!d for a larger, finished 

can vas dared 1876, currently in a private 

collection.182 A number of exquisite line 

drawings from this period indicate that pencil 

was employed out,of,doors and oils executed 

in the studio.48J T hese drawing, like the oil 

study, focus upon the natural triad of earth, 

air and water. No figural staffage is present 

to animate or provide scale for the landscape. 

The composition of distant mountain and 

foreground rocks is framed by lateral islands 

to produce a balan ced h a rmo ny t h a t is 

replicated in the subtle tonal unity of the 

work. Employing a fine brush and minute, 

a lmost invisibl e, brushstrokes, John son 

100 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

painted with scrupulous attention to detail 

and topography. Grounded in t h e Pre, 

Raphaeli te aesthetic of "truth to nature," this 

small cabinet picture follows the Ruskinian 

injunction to let "nature make the better 

part" of the painting.481 

William Kcirh (1839, 191 1), Mount Hood 

from Sandy River, o.c., 30" x 45", n.d. 

The deteriorated condition of t h is 

pain ting is due to the heavy glaz ing (the 

application of transparent layers of oil over 

colored pigments) that was, unfortunately, a 

significant practice of the a rtist's mature 

style.485 The near brown monotone color 

scheme of the canvas, like the dense glazing 

t echnique, was the produc t of the poorly 

assimilated influence of George Inness, the 

most admired Ame rican landscape painter 

of the later nineteenth century.466 Keith's 

view of O regon's Mount Hood, however, for 

all of its reliance upon lnness' Tonalist, 

Barbizon,derivcd aesthetics, reverts to older 

panoramic compositional modes, rejecting 

the more intimate, pastoral scenery of 

Tonalism. 487 The presence of a group of 

Indians in the foreground also invokes the 

earlier Romantic trope of historicizing the 

land, thus preserving the mythic illusion of 

the past through reference to the aboriginal 

inhabitants. These practices of erasure and 

denial of modern realities through studio 

manipulation , according to one account, 

offered assurances to Eastern audiences that 
) 

) 

) 

.J 

the grandeur of the West had not been 

compromised by progress.488 Conversely the 

inclusion of Indians as pictorial staffage could 

also serve as reminders of the ineluctable 

march of progress, their presence being 

equated with "ruins" of ancient 

c iv i 1izations.489 

The Billingses' painting of Mount Hood 

is one of several views of the mountain 

painted by Keith during his long career. 

According to an early biographer, he is 

reported to have climbed Mount Hood while 

working for the Oregon Navigation and 

Railroad (Henry Villard's parent company for 

the t akeover of the Northern Pacific), 

perhaps together with his lifelong friend John 

Muir.490 Among Keith's many patrons were 

railroad magnates Edward T. Harriman, 

Collis P. Huntington and Frederick Billings. 

As the westernmost mountain peak visible 

on the route of the Northern Pacific and one 

of the first great mountains seen by Billings 

in his early reconnaissance for a 

transcontinental railroad line, Mount Hood 

evoked multiple resonances for the former 

president of the Railroad. 

Mount Hood, one of several extant and 

active volcanoes in the Pacific Nonhwest, 

was first brought into national prominence 

by the art of Albert Bierstadt whose Mount 

Hood, Oregon (Southwest Museum, Los 

Angeles, 1865) was first exhibited at the 

National Academy of Design in New York 

along with the much celebrated Looking 

Down Yosemite Valley (Birmingham Museum 

of Art, 1865). These views first introduced 

Easterners to the wonders of the American 

West, simultaneously creating a market over 

the next several decades for countless 

paintings of these sites.491 The Northwest's 

volcanic peaks were especially appealing 

subjects, as Frederic Edwin Church's 

Cotopaxi, Latin America's most spectacular 

volcano, had been exhibited to impassioned 

reviews in 1862. In both instances, north 

and south, volcanoes were seen as emblems 

of divine providence and nature's awesome 

Part 111: Selected Works from the Collecti011 

force. 49l Another reference for both Keith 

and Church was Thomas Cole's magisterial 

view of Mount Aetna from Taormina (1844), 

a view that was considered "one of the finest 

in the world."493 In juxtaposing the classical 

ruins of an ancient Roman theater-the 

mutable works of man-with the eternal 

features of the landscape-the eternal works 

of God-Cole created a melancholy object 

for Romantic reflection. By way of contrast, 

in opposing the resurgent image of Mount 

Hood with "vanishing" Indian tribes, Keith 

paid homage to futurity and the westering 

trajectory of the "Course of Empire." In 

d escribing Mount Hood, travel writer 

Theodore Winthrop wrote in 1862: "It is 

only lately in the development of men's 

comprehensions of nature, that mountains 

have been recognized as our noblest friends, 

our most exalting and inspiring comrades, 

our grandest emblems of divine power and 

divine peace."494 Earlier considered "the 

original barrier to Eden," Mount Hood 

became during the course of the Billings era 

"a recreational Paradise. "495 

William KeiLh was considered the most 

important painter in San Francisco during 

the second half of the nineteenth century. 

He was often ranked with Bierstadt and 

Bradford though , unlike them, he did not 

paint Mount Hood from the perspective of 

a New York studio. He also counted among 

his closest friends and traveling companions 

John Muir and Carleton Watkins. 

According to Peter Palmquist, Watkins' 

biographer: "William Keith had nearly all of 

his arcistic output documented by 

Watkins."496 Near the end of the artist's long 

career, Ina Donna Coolbrith ("The Sappho 

of the Western Sea") dedicated several 

deathless verses to William Keith: "Upon 

the heights beyond my reach/ You drink from 

art's immortal spring / And visions dream 

beyond my speech / And paint the songs l 

may not sing."497 

Art and the American Conservation Movement-101 
Pan l ll: Selected Works from the Collection 

John Frederick Kensett (l8L6-l872), Lake 

George at Sunset, o.c., 23- 1 /2" x 35- l/2'', 1872. 

This painting, like the smaller Shrewsbury 

River, New Jersey, also occupies a significant 

niche in the construction of the art history 

of the Hudson River School. A paradigmatic 

example of a body of canvases painted in 

the final year of his life, known collectively 

as "The Last Summer's Work," Lake George 

at Sunset was probably acquired by the 

Billingses at the large auction of Kensett's 

studio contents held in New York between 

March 24th and 29th, 1873.498 This welldocumented event was widely reported in 

the press, an article in the Brooklyn Eagle 

being representative: "Mr. Kensett's last 

work, done during the past summer, consists 

of thirty-four pictures painted in three 

months, for that was the length of Mr. 

Kensett's last vacatio n , show remarkable 

industry and we know of no other artist who 

possesses such fac ility of execution, unless it 

is Mr. Frederic E. Church."499 

The Last Summer's Work was painted in 

three different locations: Lake George, 

Newport, Rhode Island, and in and around 

Long Island Sound, near Darien, Connecticut 

where Kensett had a summer studio. The 

latter group of canvases, seve ral of which 

were donated to the Metropolitan Museum 

of Art by the artist's son, are considered the 

masterpieces of the painter's late style. By 

way of contrast the Lake George pictures are 

thought co be more convemional: "The Lake 

George pictures, mostly sketches, are not 

especially innovative in composition, color 

or technique."500 The Billingses' painting is, 

l 02 - Arr and the American Conservation Movemenc 

however, an exception co this broader 

assessment. Any critical accou nt of this 

painring must acknowledge that it is a finished 

canvas and that its bo ldly reductive 

composition, poetic interpretation of light, 

and loose handling of pigment accord more 

with the seacoast paintings than the more 

conventional Lake George views. 501 

Comparison with the earlier Sh1·ewsbury 

River, New Jersey revea ls that Kensett had 

dramatica lly altered his style in the direction 

of greater colorism, denser atmospherics and 

mo re active brushwork. Roque, who 

apparently did not know Lake George at 

Sunset, has argued for the influence of the 

paintings of English landscape painter J. M. 

W. Tu rne r on the "Last Summer's Work," 

citing the reading of John Ruskin's Modem 

Painters as the critica l cond uit for the 

development of the late style. 502 In Modem 

Painters Ruskin, the most influential art critic 

who h as ever existed, paradox ically 

advocated both an aesthetic of "truth-tonature" and the painterly facture and color 

pyrotechnics of J. M. W. Turner. 503 

"' J-.....i A 

· --·- ts?ft 

John Frederick Kensetr ( 1816-1872), Shrewsbttr'I 

~iver, New Jersey, o.c., 5-3/4" x 11 • l/4", L853- • 

1856. 

In September 1853, the painter's old 

friend George Curtis, ed itor o f Harper's 

Weekly, invited Kensett to visit the Navesink 

Highlands in New Jersey, near Red Bank, 

where the Shrewsbury River empties into the 

Adantic.5°" From this visit eventuated no 

fewer than five closely-related views of the 

Atlantic coastline, which were pivotal in the 
) 

) 

) 

) 

development of the artist's personal style as 

well as the broader movement known as 

Luminism.505 A gift from the artist to Julia 

Parmly, this small sketch for several larger 

finished canvases has recently figured 

prominently in art historical discourses on 

the origins of Luminism. In the absence of 

any known drawing for the scene, Earl Powell 

has conjectured that the Billingses' oil sketch 

may have been executed on site, out-ofdoors; would of necessity date from 1853; 

and would have served as the pictorial source 

for the better known canvases, dated 

between 1856 and 1860, that are now in 

various public and private collections.506 

While the father of the purportedly 

indigenous American movement of 

Luminism is the Gloucester, Massachusetts 

painter Fitz Hugh Lane, John Frederick 

Kensett is considered one of the movement's 

earliest and most important practitioners. 

Shrewsbury River, New Jersey is not only 

Kensett's earliest dated Luminist 

composition, it is also his first marine painting 

affording the stylistic and compositional 

paradigm for his mature Luminist work. 507 

Lum in ism has been characterized as a 

chastened, abstemious mid-century aesthetic 

in which a distilled, silvery light serves as the 

dominant element of design. In these modest 

compositions, which contrast dramatically 

with the operatics of such Hudson River 

School painters as Cole, Church and 

Bierstadt, visual qualities of abstraction, 

balance, stillness, and reflection take 

precedence over picturesque form. Artistic 

self-effacement, effected through the 

elimination of painterly intercessions, 

displaces fluid and facile brushwork, which 

for the earlier generation of painters served 

as the signature presence of an artist in his 

canvas.508 The poetry of light as reflected in 

sky and water, intimacy of scale, and 

contemplative quietude are contrasted with 

the public and declamatory, the pictorial 

rhetoric of political boosterism often 

Part 111: Selected Works from the Collection 

associated with the Hudson River School. 

While it is unlikely chat Frederick and Julia 

would have recognized these qualities in 

Kensett's artwork, they would have been 

responsive to its broader cultural spirit of 

reserve and decorum. 

In her several studies of the Luminist 

movement, Barbara Novak has attempted 

to relate the style to the philosophical and 

religious imperatives of New England 

Transcendentalism. Emerson's metaphoric 

"transparent eyeball" is equated with the 

mirror-like finish of Luminist canvases, and 

the philosopher's erasure of the self ("All 

mean egoism vanishes. I am nothing. I sec 

all. I am part and parcel of God") is 

imbricated with the artistic self-effacement 

apparent in Luminist brushwork ("the artist's 

labor trail"). Further evidence for this 

association is provided by the friendship 

between Curtis and Kensett. It was the 

former, close friend and publisher of 

Emerson, Dana, Lowell, Longfellow and other 

Boston literati, who first introduced Kensett 

co these celebrated writers, most of whom 

the artist knew socially. 

Though small in size, Shrewsbury River, 

New Jersey looms large in the historical 

construction of mid-nineteenth century 

American landscape painting. Several writers 

attempting to interrogate the origins and 

meanings of the Luminist aesthetic have 

recognized this painting's paradigmatic role. 

In its creation of a compositional scheme 

based upon sky, water and shore, as illumined 

by a even-handed yet metaphorically 

charged veil of light, it is a fundamental 

example of the style. 

Anand the American Conservation Movement-103 
Part Ill: Selecced Works from the Collection 

Robert Crannell Minor (1839-1904), The Vail 

of Kenneth-England, o.c., 29-1/2" x 49-1/2", 

c. 1872-1874. 

Robert Crannell Minor, one of a host of 

Americans who joined the artist's colony at 

Barbizon during the 1860s and 1870s, was 

one of Frederick's and Julia's favorite painters. 

The inventory of the New York home lists 

four canvases hy Minor, and Woodstock 

contains two, making him the most frequently 

represented artist in the Billingses' 

collections. The appeal of Minor's work lies 

in the gentle, bucolic nature of his 

landscapes, which often represent, in the 

Barbizon manner, grazing flocks of sheep or 

cattle in a lighted clearing, comfortably 

enframed by old growth trees. In Minor's 

idyllic, pastoral world it is always summer, a 

perpetual June without storms, mud, manure 

or insects. "Late-century urban men and 

women, subject to pressures and frustrations 

not entirely unlike our own," observes Lois 

Fink, "found escape in gazing at placid beasts 

contentedly munching beneath skies that 

were always sunny."509 This large canvas, 

presently located in the second story hallway, 

enjoyed pride of place in the parlor of the 

Woodstock mansion, having been sent 

expressly from New York to Vermont.510 

Minor, a native of New York City, went 

to Barbizon in the mid 1860s, where he took 

up residence for three years as a disciple of 

Narcisse Diaz. He subsequently spent two 

years painting in England and exhibited at 

the Royal Academy in London in 1872.511 

Returning to New York in the 1870s, he 

opened a studio in Washington Square and 

104 - Art and che American Conservation Movement 

continued to paint in the Barbizon manner 

long after the American vogue for the style 

had disappeared. A critic for the American 

Art Association's annual exhibition in 1904 

wrote of Minor's conservative allegiances: 

His works have in them qualities of 

luminosity, depths of tone, and ripeness 

and vitality of color that carry one out 

of the domain of modern landscape back 

to the days when . . . Diaz, Dupre and 

Decamps were at their best. The secret 

of his power is that, like them, he feels 

nature as well as sees it, and paints it with 

heart as well as hand. 512 

The frequency with which the Billingses 

collected Minor's works suggests that the 

paintings held special meaning for them. The 

gentle, pastoral vision embodied within 

Minor's paintings, the sense of settled 

agricultural and silvacultural permanence, 

doubtless served as visual paradigms and a 

source of inspiration for the farm and forest 

of the Woodstock estate. Though he 

generally painted smaller bucolic "cabinet 

pieces," The Vail of Kenneth is one of his most 

ambitious large-sca le canvases. A second 

landscape by Minor in the Woodstock 

collection, entitled The Close of Day , is 

similar in lighting, coloration and handling 

of paint to The Vail of Kenneth. The principal 

distinction lies in the composition which, in 

lieu of opening al the center to allow for a 

distant vista (coulisse), features the heroic 

"centered-tree motif" favored by several of 

the Barbizon masters. 
) 

) 

J 

Edward Moran (1829-1901), Cu!Tn Gatherers, o.c., 25-1/4" x 39-1/2", c. 1875-1880. 

The older brother of the celebrated 

western landscape artist, Thomas Moran, 

Edward has been consigned to relative 

historical oblivion.513 In his own time he was 

considered one of the foremost, if not the 

foremost, American marine painter. 

According to one tum-of-the-century 

publication, he was "the greatest marine 

painter of the United States," a view that 

few today would support. 514 

Clam Gatherers was probably painted 

sometime after 1877, when Moran visited 

France and the coast of Brittany to join the 

colony of American artists at Pont-Aven. In 

1878 he executed Roes de Toqueville (private 

collection), a work that bears a striking 

resemblance to Clam Gatherers in terms of 

composition, coloration and handling of 

paint.51

5 The theme of fisher girls positioned 

against a low horizon and seacoast was 

popularized in the same year by 

John Singer 

Sargent, also resident in Brittany, when he 

exhibited The Oyster Gatherers at Cancale 

(The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington 

D. C.) at the Paris Salon to great critical 

acclaim. A writer for the New York Art 

Journal in 1880 noted the connection: 

His [Edward Moran's] recent visit to 

France has given the public a number of 

Normandy [sic] fisher-girls and women 

whose faces and figures commend them 

to favor. They belong to the same family 

that Mr. Sargent's maidens and matrons 

Part l1T: Selected Works from the Collection 

in his Fishing for Oysters at Cancale are 

member of, although, of course, 

Mr. Moran's treatment is firmer and his 

drawing carried further. 516 

Recognizing that Edward's somber 

palette and restrained brushwork we re 

conservatively resistant to the coloristic 

influences of England's greatest marine 

painter and his American disciples, the 

anonymous critic further commented: "The 

'Tournerism' which plays so brilliantly about 

the easel of Mr. Thomas Moran has never 

come within a league of his elder brother's 

studio."517 

Another well-known New York arr critic 

Earl Shinn (Edward Strahan), however, 

denounced Moran in 1879 for "trying to 

forsake old 'Hudson River' methods." 

Reviewing a painting exhibited at the 

National Academy entitled Normandy 

Shrimpers, he observed: "The fancy of Mr. 

Edward [Moran] tying on the shoes of 

[Antoine] Vollon and Jules Breton, without 

any previous visits to the academic shops 

where the sandals of those trained figurepainters were fitted, is an inspiring spectacle 

of audacity."

5 18 

The only painting in the Woodstock 

collection that displays, compositionally, an 

awareness of the newer aesthetic strategies 

of the Impressionists, Clam Gatherers exploits 

the dramatically low diagonal recession often 

favored by these artists. The emphasis upon 

the recession itself, states a recent historian, 

the starkness of its length and breadth 

beneath spacious skies, and the lack of 

incident portrayed except for travelers 

on their way, appealed to new 

intellectual and aesthetic concerns. 

These images signified the act of going, 

the process of flux and change inherent 

in many late-century experiences, and 

associated with contemporary 

philosophical concerns of "becoming" as 

opposed to "being."

519 

An and the American Conservation Movement - l 05 
Part Ill: Selecced Wcnl<.s from the Collection 

Although it is not generally recognized, 

it is likely that Edward Moran's scenes of 

women posed before a moody, atmospheric 

shoreline played a role in shaping Winslow 

Homer's 1880-1881 views of the north coast 

of England. 

Along these same lines there is a marked 

relationship between Moran's 1884 

watercolor of a small fishing boat in a stormy 

sea (Master Bedroom) and several oils and 

watercolors of the identical subject by Homer 

from approximately the same period. The 

exact nature of this relationship has yet to 

be established. 

Edward Moran (1829-1901), New York Harbor, 

o.c., 17-1/4" x 35-1/4", 1872. 

This painting probably documents the 

famous "America's Cup" yacht races held in 

New York Harbor and on Long Island Sound 

during the summer of 1872. Almost 

identical in style and composition to a 

painting in the Peabody Museum of Salem, 

Massachusetts entitled The Livonia and 

Sappho ( 1872), it possibly represents the 

New York Yacht Club's Sappho, which won 

two out of three races from Mr. James 

Asbury's British yacht Livonia. 520 

In likely conformity with John Ruskin's 

assertion that one of the most beautiful things 

in all of nature is the bow of a sailing vessel, 

Moran composed this work from an 

imaginary vantage in front of the two racing 

yachts. 521 Unlike the Peabody Museum 

painting, which shows Livonia and Sappho on 

a broad reach with jibs and spinnakers flying, 

106 - Arc and che American Conservacion Movement 

the Billingses' painting represents the two 

yachts tacking on a windward leg. The low 

vantage from which the scene is composed 

permits the artist to silhouette dramatically 

the full sails against a stormy sky. Moran's 

"America's Cup" series was exhibited at the 

National Academy of Design in the fall of 

1872 to critical acclaim, and gained the artist 

admission to the status of Associate. 

Pe(er Monin (1841-19 l 4), 011 the Trail in Idaho, 

o.c., 5-1/2" x 13-1/4", 1879-1880. 

During the summer of 1879 Peter Moran 

traveled, together with his more famous 

brother Thomas, throughout the American 

West.m Sponsored by the Union Pacific 

Railroad, the two brothers traveled by rail 

to California and on horseback to Utah and 

the Territories of Idaho and Wyoming. In 

late August they arrived at Fort Hall in 

Idaho Territory and, accompanied hy twenty 

troopers of the U. S. Infantry, set out for 

Jackson Hole and the sight of the Grand 

Tetons, one of whose peaks had been named 

after Thomas in honor of his services to the 

Hayden Survey of the Yellowstone.52 3 Due 

to the recent Bannock-Paiute war ( 1878) the 

expedition was not without risk to the two 

artists. After making pencil sketches along 

the Snake River and in Jackson Hole, the 

two brothers rejoined the Union Pacific line 

at Green River, Wyoming, where they made 

further sketches including some of the most 

important in Thomas' career.524 

On the Trail in Idaho is most assuredly a 

product of this expedition. The painting is 

related in composition, though not in style, 

to a body of over forty paintings of the Green 
) 

j 

..} 

..J 

.) 

River executed by Thomas Moran 

throughout his life. In these popular 

paintings, several of which were purchased 

by the Union Pacific, Thomas depicts the 

sandstone buttes of the region as the scenic 

backdrop to a caravan of Indians winding 

their way towards a distant cluster of 

repees.525 Even though Green River City was 

the site of a major depot of the Union Pacific, 

Thomas erased all evidence of bridges, raillines, smelters or telegraph poles, as seen, for 

example, in the contemporaneous 

photographs of Andrew Joseph Russell and 

William Henry Jackson.526 In much the same 

spirit Peter revises his brother's scheme 

through the use of a variant perspective in 

which the mounted Indians proceed in an 

extended file directly towards the viewer 

rather than moving into the space of the 

canvas. This aggressive composition was 

popularized in the early nineteenth century 

by French artists depicting military subjects 

and, more relevantly to our concern, by 

painters of Orientalist themes. 527 

In On the Trail in Idaho, Peter Moran 

conflates two traditions of representation in 

order to produce a narrative that works on 

several levels at once. In the first instance 

Moran's primordial, pre-industrial landscape, 

inhabited only by Indians and from which is 

excised any reference to the existence of the 

railroad, assured viewers that the "grandeur 

of the West had not been compromised by 

the advent of technological progress. "528 His 

second purpose was to associate the 

American Indian with the exotic inhabitants 

of North Africa. As both a conceptual and 

a formal strategy, the "Orientalizing" of the 

American Indian was begun in the early 

nineteenth century by artists like Alfred 

Jacob Miller who, as an admirer of French 

painter Eugene Delacroix, transformed Plains 

warriors into the aesthetic equivalents of 

Bedouin horsemen.529 The Romantic 

period's joint fascination with the Far West 

and the Near East is evident in the Billings 

Collection, given the existence of both 

Part 1Il: Selected Works from the Collection 

Orientalist paintings and western 

landscapes. 530 On the Trail in Idaho and 

William Keith's Mount Hood from Sandy 

River, however, are the only canvases that 

feature the presence of Indians, a subject 

never close to the heart of Frederick Billings. 

If, as is often asserted, the underlying 

presumption of both Orientalism and 

painting of the American West is that 

colonialism and Manifest Destiny wen~ 

justified as a civilizing and modernizing force, 

then On che Trail in Idaho doubtless spoke 

meaningfully to Frederick Billings. 

Best known for his graphic art and his 

foundational role in the establishment of the 

Philadelphia Society of Etchers (1880), Peter 

Moran painted numerous views of the 

western landscape including Grand Canyon 

of the Yellowstone with Artiscs (private 

collection), a work celebrating the union of 

art and enterprise in the appreciation of the 

American landscape. ln 1881, Peter Moran 

was commended by art critic S. G. W. 

Benjamin for his role in preserving on canvas 

aspects of an America thought to be 

disappearing: 

Catlin long ago pointed out the real 

direction for our figure painters to follow: 

but, instead of seeing the magnificent 

subjects presented to them, our artists 

have gone to Europe and devoted their 

attention to Italian, French, and German 

peasantry .... Many of the noble scenes 

which were to be found on this continent 

have vanished before the march of 

civilization. A few yet remain, such as 

Mr. Moran has represented. Now is the 

time to paint them. 531 

Art and r.he American Conservation Movement - l 07 
Part III: Selected Works from the Collection 

James Craig Nicoll (1847-1918), Maine Coast on 

a Summer Afternoon, o.c., 23-1/2" x 39-1/2", 1878. 

Very little is known about James Craig 

Nicoll except that he was the longest tenant 

(1870-1918) of New York City's famed Tenth 

Street Studio Building.532 During his lengthy 

tenancy he came to know almost every 

important American artist of the period 

indu<ling Church, BierslaJL, Humer ;md 

Chase. 

He was also a founding member of the 

American Society of Painters in Watercolor 

(along with Homer) and served for several 

years as its president. He exhibited at the 

1878 Paris Exposition and, according to an 

anonymous critic, was "the doyen of 

American marine painting. He is a familiar 

figure in the art life of New York. His pictures 

have much feeling and rare, good sentiment 

and are always deservedly popular." 5.n 

Beyond this brief notice, it is not known if 

he studied in Europe or where he studied. 

Maine Coast on a. Summer Afternoon. 

signed and dated 1878, is painted in the 

American "realist" style of the 1870s. The 

subject of solitary women posed before a 

pounding surf came into vogue during the 

years immediately after the Civil War. 

Whether understood as symbolic of 

bereavement for sons and lovers lost in battle 

or "an escape from the consequences of war 

and the transformation of the United States 

... into an urbanized, industrialized nation," 

the figure by the sea began to appear in 

paintings by Sanford Gifford, John F. Kensett, 

Eastman Johnson and, most famously, 

Winslow Homer. 534 As distant relatives of 

108 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

the gay and fashionable seaside tourists of 

French painting, the American protagonist 

projects a more alienated aura. In the 

Billingses' canvas the influence of Homer is 

perceptible in the parasoled woman posed 

near the seashore and in the greenish 

iridescence of the breaking waves. Minor's 

fashionably garbed figure, however, does not 

stand upright binding the sea to the 

horizontals of shore and sky. Rather than 

serving as a vertical bulwark against the 

starkness of the sea, as in Homer, the woman 

stoops to commune with nature and the land. 

In further contrast with Homer, Nicoll 

displays no awareness of French 

Impressionism, clinging instead to 

traditionally conservative modes of lighting, 

coloration and facture. 
) 

) 

) 

) 

) 

.) 

..) 

George H. Smillie (1840-1921), On the Hudson, 

o.c., 8-1/2" x 6-1/2," and Mountainous Landscape, 

o.c., 8-1/2" x 6-1/2", c.1870-l880. 

These identically framed, cabinet~sized 

landscapes were meant to be read as 

pendants. Typically combined by Hudson 

River School artists in a single composition, 

these discrete views of uplands and lowlands 

discourse with one another about the formal 

and ideational meanings of the national 

landscape. Representing the fundamental 

polarities of American nature: water and 

land, erosion and uplifr, effect and cause, the 

Hudson and the Adirondacks, they embody 

diverse meanings. To an informed viewer a 

scene of the Hudson River wou ld have 

aroused historical, cultural and scientific 

associations, fluvial symbolism ranging from 

Dutch settlement, to America's firsL school 

of landscape painting, to New York city's 

water supply. In sympathetic accord, a view 

of New York State's north country 

Adirondack mountains might elicit concepts 

of origins and resources. m 

Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson 

River School, poetically envisioned a similar 

conflation of the river and its mountain 

Part 111: Selected Works from the Collection 

source in a short lyric entitled The Wild 

(1826): 

Friends of my heart, lovers of nature's 

works, 

Let me transport you to these wild, 

blue mountains 

That rear their summits near the 

Hudson's wave; 

Though not the loftiest that begirt the 

land 

They yet sublimely rise, on their 

heights 

Your soul may have a sweet foretaste 

of heaven ... 

Painted in the conventional Hudson 

River School manner and employing a 

formu laic "Claudian" composition, the 

paintings are enclosed by identical 

semicircular framcs. 536 This framing device, 

a variant on the Renaissance "rondo," was 

employed to denote the quasi-religious 

nature of the subject, the American 

landscape. A formal expression of the cycle 

of eternity, the frames symbolize the timeless 

virtues of the American landscape. Smillie, 

a life-long member of the Hudson River 

School, shared the traditional theocratic 

belief in the sanctity of American nature. 

Together with his brother James D. Smillie, 

George was among a group of artists who 

summered regularly at Keene Valley in the 

Adirondacks. A height of land, located at 

the end of the valley, is still known as 

"Smillie's hill."537 

Art and r.he American Conservation Movement - l 09 
Pan 111: Selected Works from c/1e Collection 

Frank Waller (1842-1923), £gyprra11 Life, 

o.c., 9-1/2" x 13-1/2", 1878. 

One of the more in triguing Orientalist 

images in the Woodstock collection, this 

sma ll painting was one of three of Waller's 

works (two in New York) owned by the 

Billingses, making him one of their most 

favored artists. Waller was an important 

figure in New York arr circles and was a 

founder of the Art Students League, serving 

as its nrst president beginni ng in 1878. An 

academic Realist, he first went to Egypt in 

1872 to sketch anc.J gather m::itcrials for 

exhi bition in his New York studio. A 

newspaper critic reported on the works in 

progress: "Tombs of the Caliphs, just outsi<le 

Cairo, with the great desert in the 

background stretching far o ff into the 

perspective. Another inreresting subject now 

on Mr. Waller's easel is A Waterwheel on the 

Nile ... a method ... perhaps in use in the 

time of the Pharaohs."S18 

Fig. 17: Frederic A. Bridgm<1n, On cite Road w 

Bfakra ( 1878}, Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller 

National Historical Park. 

l 10- Art and tlie American Conservation Movement 

A related work is Frederick Arthur 

Bridgman's On tile Road to Biskra (Fig. 17). 

This painting, which features a single camel 

with two drivers, is even more iconic than 

Waller's Egyptian Life, repressing all vestiges 

of anecdotal narrative in the interests of 

monumentalizing the a nimal. The bestknown and most successfu l American 

O rientalist, Bridgman spent the years 1872 

and 1873 in the A lgerian city of Biskra, where 

he rented a studio in the poorest quarter of 

town. Prior to v isiting Algeria, he had 

worked at the American art colony at Pont· 

Aven in Brittany and continued throughout 

his long career to create imnges of Breton 

peasants alongside his more celebrated 

paintings of bedouins. SJY A further 

confirmation of the Viccorian penchant for 

exoricism is a statement made by Lhe artist 

when French troops were withdrawn from 

Algeria during the Franco-Prussian war and 

::i native insurrection ensued. Bridgman was 

appalled at the "ungrateful" behavior of the 

Algerians, reflecting upon "the perfidy and 

cruelty of the natives which remind one 

forcibly of what the Pmitans and the early 

settlers westward-bound in the United States 

had to endure in their battles for territory 

against the treacherous lnclians."540 Such 

imperialist sentiments concerning the 

conquered and colonized were held by most 

Victorians. More concerned with shoring up 

western myths about the Near East than 

exploring the realirics of social and political 

experience, these Orientalist images were a 

staple of most high Victorian collections. 

A third painting in the Woodstock 

collection thar prominently features camels 

is Samuel Colman's Arab Caravansary of 

1879 (Fig. 18). The presence or th is work in 

the collection indicates thal Frederick and 

Julia had more rhan an casual interest in the 

subject. Colman was another artist favored 

by Lhc Billingses and, according to the 

inventory of the New York collection, his 

paintings of desert Bedouin were hung 
) 

) 

) 

) 

.J 

alongside images of Breton peasants. An 

anonymous writer for Appleton's Journal in 

187 5 reported on a visit to Colman's 

Manhattan studio: 

The largest and most important class of 

his works were painted in Africa, in which 

country he penetrated into strange and 

remote regions, quite apart from the 

ordinary track of tourists and even 

of artists. Some of his most interesting 

paintings are of Moorish ruins of mosques, 

with their beautiful cowers and horseshoe 

arches, at Tlemsen and Mansoria in 

Algeria on the border of Morocco, quite 

remote from the sea .... Mr. Colman 

has brought back with him sketches 

taken on the borders of the desert. . .. 

Bands of Arabs, with horses, camels and 

the usual paraphernalia of the caravan, 

appear also, painted with fide lity and 

with the mature precision of an artist of 

great experience in the use of color. 54i 

Fig. 18: Samuel Colman, Arab Caravanary 

(1879), Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National 

Hisrorical Park. 

Part Ill: Selected \\'forks from the Collection 

Endnotes 

17 1 The pencil sketch upon which the Billingses' 

painting is based is illustrared in Gordon Hendricks, 

Albert Bierstadt: Painter of the American West (New 

York: Harry N. Abrams, 1974), fig. 155. 

m See Ludlow. 

m Ludlow, 412. Frederick Billings' first 

experience of rhe Yosemite was through the 

phorographs of Watkins. See Winks. 

>

74 For a sampling of the critical reception to this 

work see Anderson and Ferber, 200- 201 . 

m Hendricks, figs. 154, 156. Anderson and Ferber, 

fig.61. 

176 Ludlow, 444. 

177 Gordon Hendricks, 221, cites the diary of Esther 

Osborne, sister-in-law of the artist: "Saturday 

afternoons it was the fashion for the gay, fashionable 

world of San Francisco to drive and ride a cheval to 

the Cliff house where we danced, sat on the veranda, 

watched the seals on "Seal Rocks," drank lemonades, 

flirted, listened to the band etc. Albert used to take 

us all every Saturday afternoon. He drove handsome 

horses and a light open carriage." 

m For representative examples of these marines 

see Anderson and Ferber, figs. 63- 64. 

179 Anderson and Ferber, fig. 14. 

>$o For an account of the role of the Catskill 

Mounrain House in fostering the early Romantic 

cult of "wilderness" see Roland Van Zandt, The 

Catskill Mountain House (New Brunswick: Rutgers 

Univ. Press, 1966). 

'

81 Another way of staring this geo-cultural 

trajecrory would be to draw a line from Berkeley 

Rock, Newport, Rhode Island to the University o( 

California at Berkeley. Appropriarely enough it was 

Frederick Billings who suggested the name Berkeley, 

honoring tbe author of the poem "Wesrward rhe 

Course of Empire," for rhe site of the University of 

California. 

18' Hendricks, CL 143, CL L 72, CL 234 . 

JSI Hendricks, CL 172. 

4 See Hendricks, CL LOS (Boston, Museum of 

Fine Arts), CL 114 (Fogg Art Museum, Harvard 

University) and CL 184 (Reynalda House, WinstonSalem, North Carolina) and Anderson and Ferber, 

fig. 48 (National Museum of American Art, 

Washington D. C.), fig. 52 (Museum of Art, San 

Anronio, Texas). These works are variously dated 

between 1866 and 1870. 

Art and the American Conservation Movement - 111 
Part Ill: Selecred Works from the Collection 

m Hendricks, CL 260. 

ltl<> Hendricks, 268. 

is7 For Bierstadt's series of canonic views of 

Yosemite painted between 1864 and 1868 see 

Anderson and Ferber, figs. 41-4 7. 

'

80 Anderson and Ferber, 200, provide a sampling 

of contemporaneous criticism. Mark Twain's famous 

observation that Bierstadt's Yosemite is "more the 

atmosphere of Kingdom-Come than California" is 

quoted in Robertson, 23. 

JM? James Jackson Jarves, The An-Idea (1864), 

quoted in John Wilmerding, ed., American Light: 

The Luminisi Movement, 1850-1875, Exhibition 

Catalogue (Wiishingr.on: National Gallery of Art, 

1980), 15. 

i 9o An anonymous writer in the journal The Art 

Amateltr, "Art in San Francisco" (Sept. 10, 1879), 

wrote: 

Most of our artists have returned from their 

summer sketching tours, and are busy at their 

easels workmg up the result of these visits to 

Nature. William Bradford spent some time in 

the Yosemite Valley, and has proven to his 

friends' satisfaction that, though a marine 

painter by choice, he can see with an artist's 

eye, and render with an artist's hand, the glories 

of cliff ancl grassy slope. He is at work on two 

views of the great valley, both of them being 

orders from a New York banker. 

He goes on to state: 

Art thrives best in a community containing a 

leisure class; and as yet such a class cannot be 

said LO exist in San Francisco. The great fortune 

makers, such as the bonanza kings, the railroad 

magnates, the land-monopolists, and the 

successful stock brokers have accumulated their 

money so recently that they are not sufficiently 

accustomed to the novelty co treat themselves 

to any rest or enjoyment of the fruits of their 

labor. 

1

11 1 Anderson and Ferber, 87. Compare with 

William H. Goetzmann and William N. Goerzmann, 

The West of the lmaginaoon (New York: WW Norton 

and Company, 1986). 166: 

Bierstadc and the other painters of the Yosemite, 

as well as the cadre of accomplished 

photographers, succeeded in turning Yosemite 

into a sacred space in the American cult of 

naturalism. The painters had created 

transcendental vistas, and near-mythical 

sunsets; r.he photographers had monumentalized 

and framed the individual landmarks and 

112 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

views. For Americans and European visirors, 

in quest of scenic and unspoiled nature, 

Yosemite became a haven, the successor to 

Niagara Falls as the favored place co confront 

Nature's power. 

192 Overland Monthly (August 1875); San Francisco 

Chronicle (Sept. 15, 1878; August 3, 1879; April 

25, 1880). 

39J The Art Amateur 5 (November, 1881 ), 115-

116. Another journal, The Philallelphia Photographer, 

October, 1883, 7, reports: "He is what may be called 

a truthful painter, following nature conscientiously, 

adorning her, or chi:tnging her but little, except 

where her arrangements do nor suit the limits of the 

canvas" (quoted in Anderson and Ferber, 287). 

391 Clarence Cook, New Path (1864), quoted in 

Ferber and Gerdts, 23. Here we are reminded of 

Clarence King's famous diatribe against Bierstadt in 

Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada {Boston: J. R. 

Osgood, 1872), 207. 

19' The PhilaJelphia Phocographer, October, 1883, 8, 

reports: "Mr. Bradford is not only a splendid painter 

but an enthusiastic photographer. He was one of 

the first painters to perceive the value of 

photography as a helper to the painter" {quoted in 

Anderson and Ferber, 288). 

'

96 See Wilmerding, American Light, 131 for a short 

discussion of Bricher's reliance on Kensett. For a 

more general account of the artist's career see Jeffrey 

R. Brown, Alfred Thompson Bricher (Indianapolis 

Museum of Art. 1973). 

397 Wilmerding, American Light, 131. 

l98 See Gifford's Occober in the Catskills (Los Angeles 

County Museum) in Weiss, 321. 

399 Weiss, 13- 20. 

wo There is no monograph on Casilear and he is 

only marginally included in the Metropolitan 

Museum of Art's encyclopedic 1988 exhibition. See 

Howat, 142-144. 

40i Henry T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists: 

American Artist Life ( 1867; reprint, New York: James 

F. Carr, 1966), 521. 

•

02 For the shift in sensibility leading to the 

Barbizon aesthetic sec Burke and Voorsanger in 

Howat, American Paradise, 71-90. A typical critique 

of the American style Wl'IS written in 1879 by S. G. 

WBenjamin: 

If there has been a fault in this school of 

American landscape art, it has been, perhaps, 

in endeavoring to gel too much in a picture, in 
\ 

) 

.) 

) 

trying to be too literal; so that the great attention 

given to the details had excited wonder rather 

than stimu lated the imagination, and had 

marred the impression of general effect which 

should be the chief idea ina work ofart (Howat, 

73). 

Frederick and Julia appear to have been unaware of 

these critical debates, mixing Hudson River School 

works and Barbizon-inspired paintings freely in their 

collection. 40J Burke and Voorsanger in Howat, 78. 

404 For the contextand meaning of French Barbizon 

painting see Herbert, 60-65. Theodore Rousseau, 

the most intcllecLUal of the Barbizon group, was 

deeply concerned about the problem of 

deforestation of the Forest of Fontainbleau and 

fought a successful battle against loggers d uring the 

1850's, an association thar may not have been lost 

on Billings. "Everything I wanted to paint has been destroyed," lamented Daubigny in 1854, "trees cut 

down, no more water in the river, houses razed." 

Painting as a form of "salvage paradigm'' was not 

unique to Americans. 

4o5 Peter Moran of Philadelphia was among the 

leading practitioners of this genre. 

406 The Comte de Nieuwerk

erke, the head of 

official patronage for art during the Second Empire, 

is reported to have stated: "This is the painting of 

democrats, of those who don't change their linen 

and who want to put themselves above men of the 

world. This art displeases and disgusts me" 

(Bermingham, 13 ). 

407 See Bermingham, 74

- 96 for the distinctions 

between French and American painters. 

4os For Minor, see Benningham, fig. 67. 

409 See Janet Houghton's cata

logue for a full 

citation of the text of the letter. 410 One Hundred Crowned Masterpieces, n. d., 

clipping in New York Public Library Art File, 

Microfiche C309. 

41 1 

"The Summer Haunts of American Artists," The 

Century, September, 1885, 855. Clipping in the 

New York Public Library Art File, Microfiche C309. 

412 In a letter to Asher B. Du

rand in which Cole 

sought the painter's assistance in persuading a 

patron, Thomas Hall Faile of New York, ro 

commission a rnajor canvas, he quoted a few lines 

to demonstrate the pictorial qualities of the poem: 

Oh! ever in my waking dreams 

I dwell upon that happy hour 

Pan I I I: Selected Works from the Collection 

When midway on the mount I sate 

Beside the ruined tower. 

The moonshine stealing over the scene 

Had blended with the lights of even; 

And she was Lhere, my hope my joy, 

My own dear Genevieve. 

(Ellwood C. Parry III, The Art of Thomas Cole: 

Ambition and Imagination [Newark: Univ. 

of 

Delaware Press, 1988]. 202). 

See fig. 168 for Study for Genet1ieve (private 

collection) and fig. 169 for the Billingses' Citadel 

and Wateifall. 

413 For the most part Cole's patrons and the 

critical 

establishment preferred his topographic landscapes 

base<l 011 rtcugnizG1Glt: A111eric<m scenes to his poetic 

and allegorical images. A representative response 

appeared in the New York Mirror (2 

June, 1838): 

"His Arcadias and other scenes from the imagination 

have not the originality and truth-telling force 

which 

his nature pictures have" (quoted 

in Parry, 204 ). 

~H In a letter to one of his most supportive patrons, 

Robert Gilmer of Baltimore ( 10 May 1835), Cole 

wrote: "I think that a vivid picture of any object in 

the mind's eye is worth a hundred finished sketches 

made on 

the spot-which are never more than half 

true-for the glare of light destroys the true effecr of 

colour & the tones of Nature .... It [sketching) is in 

great measure a mere mechanical operat

ion." On 

another occasion, he wrote G ilmer (25 Dec. 1826) 

conceming his artistic process of achieving a "higher 

landscape": "The most lovely and perfect parts of 

Nature may be brought together, and combined in a 

whole, that shall surpass in beauty and 

effect any 

picture painted from a single view .... He who would 

paint compositions, and not be false, must sit clown 

amidst his sketches and combine th

em, and so have 

nature for every object that he paints" (Harvey, 30, 

47). 

415 S. G. W Benjamin, one of the more influential 

late nineteenth century historians of American 

art, 

wrote in 1880: "Bierstadt's smaller California scenes 

are generally more valuable than his large ones for 

artisticquality" (S. G. W. Benjamin, Art in America: 

A Critical and Historical Sketch [New York: Harper 

and Bros., 1880], 98). 

416 In terms of today's marker va

lue Cole landscapes 

have recently crossed the million dollar threshold. 

None of the other artists in the collection have 

attained this rarefied status. For a survey of the 

complex iconography of Niagara Falls see Elizabeth 

McKinsey, Niagara Falls: Icon of the American Sublime 

(Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985). The 

Billingses' painting is referenced in a footnote (208) 

as "attributed to Th

omas Cole." 

Art and the American Conservation Movement - 113 
Pan 111: Selecred Works from r.he Collection 

m For an illustrarion sec Parry, fig. 74. The 

Billingses' painting is reproduced as fig. 76 from a 

private collection. 

418 McKinsey, 202. 

419 See Parry, fig. 75. 

4w Parry, 101. 

'Ill These letters, currently preserved at Olana, are 

quoted in full in Janet Houghton's catalogue. 

m McKinsey, 202. 

42 J In 1871 Henry James .described Niagara as 

"choked in the horribly vulgar shops and booths 

anJ catchpenny artifacts which have pushed and 

elbowed to within the very spray of the Falls ... to 

ply their importunities in shrill competition with its 

lhunder" (Goetzmann and Goetzmann, 167). 

424 The canonic study of this theme is Susan Danly 

and Leo Marx, ed., The Railroad in American Art: 

Representations of Technological Change (Cambridge, 

MIT Press, 1988). 

m "Since the sixteenth century, that ideal-a 

world in which natural order predominates over 

complex changes-had suited the industrialists and 

landowners by belittling the undesirable effects of 

progress: cities, trains, and nature under cultivation 

appear romantic, controlled and insignificant .... 

Progress, under divine Providence, would be 

absorbed and purified by the nation's unsullied 

environment" (Howat, 212). 

416 Nelsons' Guide to Lake George and Lake 

Champlain (New York: T. Nelson and Sons, 1858), 

44-45. In 1998 petitions to the Commissioner of 

Parks caused the bridge to be studied for reopening 

to the public. It had been closed in 1970 when a 

rock thrown from the bridge killed a passenger on a 

tourist boat. It is estimated that it will cost 

$6,000,000 to reopen the bridge to pedestrian traffic. 

m Cf. Thomas Cole's numerous views of Roman 

aqueducts in Parry, plates 7, 8. 

428 E. P. Richardson and Otto Wittmann, Jr., 

Travelers in Arcadia: American Artists in Italy 1830-

1875 (Detroitlnstitute of Arrs, 1951),33. 

m Danly and Marx, 198. 

-1;o For Ernest Lawson's numerous paintings of the 

bridge see Adeline Lee Karpiscak, Emestl..awson: A 

Retrospective Exhibition of l lis Paimings (Tucson: 

Univ. of Arizona Museum of Art, 1979). For Luks 

see Elizabeth Milroy, Painters of a Netu Century: The 

Eight and American An (Milwaukee: Art Museum, 

1991). 

114 - Art and rhe American Conservation Movement 

ill Hill's watercolor was exhibited at the American 

Art Union in 1848. 

rn Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, 483. 

m David Sellin, Americans in Brittany and 

Normandy (Phoenix Art Museum, 1982), dates the 

interest in the French coastline from Whistler's visit 

tO Concarneau in 1861. He cites Dana, along with 

Kensett and Casilear, as earlier, "incidental" visitors. 

rn Fink, 204. 

m For the role of the Hudson River in the cultural 

life of mid-century America sec Sandra S. Phillips, 

Clunmed Places: HtllL~on River Artists and tlieir Houses, 

Scuclios, and Vistas (New York, I larry N. Abrams, 

1988). For compositions nearly identical to the 

Billingses' painting see Plate 4-5, 31. 

436 For an account of the mid-century 

Knickerbocker challenge to Boston's traditional 

cullural primacy see Weiss, 21-22 and Angela 

Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape 

RP(n'P~Pntotion and American Cu/rural Politics, 1825-

1875 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993), 65-105. 

m The rivalry between Billings and Henry Villard 

appears in retrospect to provide a reinscription of 

these antagonisms. The Knickerbocker poet Bayard 

Taylor described New Englanders as "a tribe of 

Schoolmasters and Preachers." John Durand, son of 

the artist, in reminiscing about rhe members of New 

York's Century Club, wrote: 

In New England, the metaphy~ical basis of 

morality is rota! abstinence, and a suppression 

of 1he emotions; in the Century it is tempernnce in all things, and a liberal construction of 

emotional impulses. In New England, where 

the emotions are more talked about than felt, 

they are, as far as practical life goes, held in 

ideal solution; in New York, where people are 

too busy to meditate, and the racial stock is 

more complex, the emotions have more natural play and are held to be living realities (John 

Durand, Prehistoric Notes of the Century Club 

[New York: Century Club, 1882], 12). 

4Js For an account of mid-nineteenth century depictions of this event see Ann Uhry Abrams, "Democracy, Regionalism and the Saga of Major 

Andre," in Patricia M. Burnham and Lucretia 

Hoover Giese, Redefining American History Painting 

(New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 54-63. 

439 The locus classicus for the doctrine of 

associationism was the writings of the English theorist Archibald Alison, whose Essays on the Nature 

and Principles of Taste was first published in 1790. 

For Alison's influence on American culture see 
.. , 

) 

) 

J 

Stein, John Ruskin. H O For a representative example of the allegorizing of nature see the celebrated essay by the Reverend Elias Magoon, "Scenery and the Mind." 

441 See Phillips, plates 30-33 for the still extant 

Rossiter House at Cold Spring. 442 See Miller, Empire, 82 for a discussion of the 

picturesque formula based on the paintings of 

French artist Claude Lorrain ( 1600-1682), the most 

influential landscape paradigm in the history of 

western art. 

HJ For these developments see McGrath and 

MacAdam. 4H The Billingses' painting is closely related in style, 

theme and composition to a nearly identical work 

in the Indianapolis Museum of Art, signed and dated 

1847. See David B. Lawall, Asher 

B. Durand: A 

Documentary Catalogue of the Narrative and Landscape Paintings (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 

1978), nr. 121, fig. 60. 

m For a thorough discussion of this painting see 

Angela Miller, Empire, 190- 193 and plate 6. 

446 Angela Miller, Empire, 176. 447 William H. Truettner, ed., The West as America: 

Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820- 1920 

(Washington D. C.: National Museum of American 

Art, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991),29. 

~s The passage illustrated by Ehninger reads: 

Led by a cord that was tied to an iron ring 

in its nostrils, 

Covered with crimson cloth, and a cushion 

placed for a saddle. 

She should not walk, he said, through the 

dust and heat of the noonday; 

Nay, she should ride like a queen, not plod 

along like a peasant ... 

"Nothing is wanting now," he said with a 

smile, "but the distaff; 

Then you would be in truth my queen, my 

beautiful Bertha!" 

While it is tempting, within the hermeneutics of 

post-modernism, to associate the "snow-white bull" 

with the myth of the Rape of Europa, contemporaneous critics were more concerned with the historic 

lack of cattle at Plymouth than with neo-classical 

allegories. The critic Francis H. Underwood, for 

example, writing in 1882 in defense of artistic license, noted a propos of the bull: "If carping antiquarians query, and say that the Mayflower brought 

no cattle, and that there was not a steer in the Plymouth Colony, white, red, or brindle, that is so much 

Pan III: Selected Works from the Collection 

the worse for them. Longfellow knew, as we all 

know, that the story ought to be true, and so he has 

given it" (Francis H. Underwood, Henry Wadsworth 

Longfellow: A Biograpliical Sketch [Boston: James R. 

Osgood and Company, 1882], 192). H 9 William H. Gerdts and Mark Thistlewaite, 

Grand Illusions: History Painting in America (Fort 

Worth: Amon Carter Museum, 1988), 161. 

45') According to David Tatham: 

As artifacts of an interrelationship forged 

among the poetic, dramatic and pictorial arts 

in mid-nineteenth century America the 

"Mazeppa," "Hiawatha," and "Enoch Arden" 

series [of Currier & Ives prints] had no real 

~qui valenLs in Lhe present century. The prints 

are the product of an era when the reading of 

poetry was an everyday activity for many 

people, the major poets were celebrated figures, and t:he poems themselves reverberated in 

popular thought (David Tatham, "Poetry, the 

Stage, and Currier & Ives," The American Art 

Journal 24 [1992], 105). 

451 A favorite painting in the New York collection 

(currently in the private collection of a descendent 

of the Billingses in Woodstock, Vermont) was the 

Return of the Mayflower by George H. Boughton 

(1833- 1905). Mansion files contain copies of a 

newspaper account of the auction at which Frederick 

paid $3,500 for this painting of a young 

Pilgrim 

couple (Priscilla and John Alden) watching from 

the shore as "The Mayflower" sails back to England. 

Depicted as exiles, the Pilgrim theme was inspired 

by Longfellow's poem and, perhaps, by the increasing immigrant presence in the United States. In the 

words of a recent historian: 

Rather than emphasizing the triumph of escape 

from the religious repression of the Old World, 

Boughton's paintings portray the pathos of a 

people voluntarily cut off from their homeland. 

That this couple is intended to represent John 

and Priscilla seems obvious, but it is typical of 

Boughton that he places the Pilgrims in small, 

isolated groups, in contrast to the massed body 

of the Mayflower passengers used in most depictions of the Landing, thereby enhancing the 

idea of exile, emphasizing separation rather than 

Separatism (John Seelye, Memory's Nation: The 

Place of Plymouth Rock [Chapel Hill: Univ. of 

North Carolina Press, 1998], 381).' 

Frederick later bought two engravings of the subject, signed by Boughton and recommended by art 

dealer Frederick Keppel who aptly observed: "You 

may well be proud of the possession of this lovely 

painting. I think it has more of the New England 

spirit in it than any other picture in the world." 

Art and the American Conservation Movement - 115 
Pan III: Selected Works from rhe Collection 

Bough ton's imagery, I ike that ofEhninger, was doubtless inspired by verses from The Courtship of Miles 

Standish: "Then from their houses in haste came 

forth the Pilgrims of Plymouth/Men and women and 

children, all hurrying down to rhe sea-shore/Eager, 

with tearful eyes, to say farewell to the May Flower/ 

Homeward bound o'er the sea and leaving them 

here in the desert." 

m See Trnettner, West as America, 55-95. 

m Sec Joshua C. Taylor, 143- 150 for the role of 

Bingham's painting in the construction of Manifest 

Destiny. 

454 The merging of promotional and biblical rhetoric for westward expansion can be found in several 

books in the Billingses' library. A characteristic example is found in C. W. Danc1's The Garden of the 

World, or the Great West: Its Wealth, Its Natural Advantages, and I ts Future. Also, Comprising a Complete 

Guide to Emigrants, with a Full Description of the Different Routes from Hon. Thomas H. Benton, Hon . 

Sam 1-Ioustort, Col. John C. Fremoni, and Other Old 

Settlers (Boston: Westworth, 1856). 13: "The Land 

of Promise and the Canaan of our time, is the region 

which, commencing on the slope of the Alleghanies, 

broadens grandly over the vast prairies and mighty 

rivers, over queenly lakes and lofty mountains, until the ebb and flow of the Pacific tide kisses the 

golden shores of the El Dorado." 

m Quoted in Cindy Dickinson, "Creating a World 

of Books, Friends and Flowers: Gift Books and Inscriptions, L 825-1860, '' Winterthur Portfolio 31 

(1996). 53. 

456 Samuel Longfellow, Life of Henry Wadsworth 

Longfellow, with Extracts from his] ournals and Correspondence, Vol. 2 (Boston, Ticknor & Co. 1886), 

327. The entry for November 6: "l gave a dinner to 

1kknor and Fields, the publishers, in honor of the 

success of Miles Standish; the other guests, T. Starr 

King and Whipple." 

m John Wilmerding writes: 

Jerome Elwell . .. copied one of Lane's paintings of Gloucester to be hung in the city hall. 

The origina l was burned when fire burned the 

hall after Lane's death, and the Elwell copy, exact 

in its reproduction, now hangs in the Sawyer 

Free Library at G loucesrer. Another copy, undated but signed by Elwell and viewing 

Norman's Woe ;ind Ten Pound Island from 

Rocky Neck, is rough and unpolished in parts 

and lacks Lane's professional touches and detail. Of Elwell himself there is little information except a brief informal biography by Helen 

Mansfield. She remarks that Elwell had refined 

tastes, enjoyed poetry, was deeply interested in 

116 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

art, and doubtless saw all that he could of Lane. 

Although there is no proof of direct instruction 

from the older and more accomplished artist, 

Elwell evidently gleaned much from Lane's 

marines (John Wilmerding, Fitz 1-lugh Lane: 

American Marine Painter [Salem, Mass.: The 

Essex Institute, 1964], 26). 

458 Hans Vollmer, ed., Allgemeines Lexikon der 

Bildenden Kunsiler (Leipzig: Seeman Verlag, 1953-

1962), Vol. 10. 

·• 5

9 For information on Frere see Clara Erskine 

Clement and Laurence Hutton, Artists of ihe Nineteenth Century and their Worl<s: A Handbool< (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1885), 272- 273. 

460 Since the publication of Edward Said's 

Orieni.alism two decades ago, i L hns become lhe academic fashion to label all forms of literary and artistic Oriental ism as dl:picrions of h;:ickw::irdness, decay, barbarism and Near Eastern violence and 

misgoverm.ent, thus opening a pathway for European colonial intl:rvention. Though Frederick Bi llings may have shared these views to some extent, 

especially with regard to the exploitation of American Indians, it is unlikely that he vicwe<l his 

Orientalist paintings as Imperialist tracts. 

4

61 Valued at $5,000 according to the inventory of 

the Madison Avenue home, a top valuation shared 

only by works by Bouguereau, Troyon, and Meyer 

Von Bremen (The Pious Mother, currently in the "'foylor Collection). 

461 The Thompson House at 283 Madison Avenue 

(now demolished) is described and illustrated in 

the great Gilded Age compendium of opu lent 

homes: Artistic Houses: Being Interior Views of a 

Number of ihe Most Beautiful and Celebrated Homes 

in the United States with a Descrijnion of ihe Art 

Treasures Contained Therein (New York, Benjamin 

Blom 1883, reprint 1971 ). Thompson's version of 

Venice is illustrated as an overmantel for the drawing 

room (see page 48). The Billingses' New York home 

at 279 Madison Avenue is not represented among 

the great houses. 

461 Weiss, 275 and 280. 

464 Harvey, 59. 

16s See Weiss, 126 for a quote from another letter: 

"The richly colored sails of the Venetian and 

Chioggian fishing boats have interested me a good 

deal from the striking contrasts of color they afford 

with the sky and water." On another occasion, when 

faced with a request to paint yet another Venetian 

scene, Gifford reluctantly agreed to consult his 

sketchbook to see if "perhaps something more may 

come out of them-but of that lam not confident" 
., 

-, 

) 

) 

) 

._) 

(Letter to John F. Weir, 6 May, 1875, quoted in Weiss, 

144). 

466 The definitive formula

tion of Luminism is 

found in Wilmerding, American Light. 

467 In a letter to a friend, quoted in Margaretta M. 

Lovell, Venice: The American View 1860

- 1920, 

Exhibition Catalogue (San Francisco: The Fine Arts 

Museums of San Francisco, 1984 ), 40, Gifford stated: 

"I have made a few sketches about Venice, from 

some of which I may make pictures." Judging from 

the number of paintings made on the subject of 

sailboats in the Lagoon, one famous example of 

which was owned by John Jacob Astor, Gifford 

frequently recycled the theme during the 1870s. 468 Lovell, 39. 469 Ormond, 170. 

470 Ormond, l70- 17l. 

47 1 For the Keene Valley artists see Mandel, Fair 

Wilderness, 20-21 . 

471 For a survey of the theme see Roger B. Stein, 

Seascape, Chapter 4: "In Pursuit of the Romantic 

Sublime." 

473 For the Dutch convention see J. Richard Judson, 

"Marine Symbols of Salvation in the Sixteenth 

Century," Marysas, Supplement 1 (1964 ), 136- 152. 

For the American symbol of the "Shipwreck of State" 

inter alia John Wilmerding, American Arc (New York: 

Penguin Books, 1976), 97. 

rn Winslow Homer's The Life Line of 1884 

(Philadelphia Museum of Art) is one of the last great 

statements of this theme in American art. Homer's 

painting, however, is responding to personal 

Darwinian imperatives rather than older religious 

or political forces. 

m Andrew Jackson Downing, The Architecture of 

Country Houses ( 1850; reprint, New Yo

rk: Dover 

Publications, L 969), xx. 

476 John Paul Driscoll and John K. Howat, John 

Frederick Kensett: An American Master (New York: 

W. W. Norton, 1985 ), 148. The locus classicus for 

this perceived shift of sensibility is Edmund Wilson, 

Pairiotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American 

Civil War (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962). 

477 Sheldon, American Painters, 49. 

478 The only monographic study of Johnson's art is 

John I. I-I. Baur and Margaret C. Conrads, Meditations 

on Nature: The Drawings of David]olmson (Yonkers, 

N .Y.: The Hudson River Museum of Westchester, 

1987). 

Part III: Selected Works from the Collection 

479 Though not an immediate member of the 

American Association, Johnson was, nonetheless, 

associated with their formal practices and 

ideological agenda. See Ferber and Gerdts. 4t<0 Ferber and Gerdts, 11 . 481 James Fenimore Cooper, "American and 

European Scenery Compared," in The Home Book of 

the Picturesque: Or American Scenery, Art and 

Literature (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1852), 69. Fifty 

years 

later Henry James renewed the paragorte of 

Italy and America: 

It is in a certain way unwise and even unkind to 

play this sort of game with the things of America 

and of Italy .... Lake George is quite enough 

like the Lake of Como to impel you ... to 

pursue the likeness to its inev

itable phase of 

unlikeness. The mountains which melt into 

those blue Italian waters are clad with olives 

and vines ... with a verdure produc

tive of a 

wholly different range of effects from that of 

the sombre forests of the North. And yet, such 

is the infinite mercy of the sun, its inscrutable 

cunning and power, that, today, as the morning light spent itself through the long hours over 

the sullen darkness of these Atnerican hills, it 

tempered and tinted and softened them, and 

wrought upon them such a sweet confusion of 

exquisite tones .. . that they seem to borrow 

their beauty from a southern air and to shine 

with that mild, iridescent, opaline glow which 

you enjoy from the little headland above 

Bellagio (Henry James, Lake George to 

Burlington: Two American Travel Sketches (1885; 

reprint, Edinburgh: Tragara Press, 1981], 

9- 10). 

462 Howat, American Paradise, 275 for the Fuller 

study and 276 for the finished painting. 483 Baur and Conrads, figs. 36- 39. 464 For American painters who did not have direct 

access to Ruskin's Modern Painters, Asher Durand, 

president of the National Academy of Design, 

transmitted his ideas in a series of "Letters on 

Landscape Painting" published in the art magazine 

The Crayon for 1855. 

485 Eugen Neuhaus, William Keith: The Man and 

the Artist (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, L 938), 

56, claims that Keith learned glazing from George 

Inness, adding that "his excessive use of medium has 

turned many of his pictures prematurely dark." 

486 Keith met Inness in San Francisco in 1890 but 

had begun to emulate his Barbizon-inspired style as 

early as 1885, a probable date for the Billingses' 

painting. John Mu

ir, Keith's long time friend and 

fellow traveler, referred to these paintings as "snuffArr and the American Conservation Movement- l l 7 
Part Ill: Selected Worl<s from the Collection 

brown," expressing disapproval for their lack of 

topographic clarity (NeuhaL1s, 56), Inness, reacting 

against the Romantic cult of wilderness, advocated 

painting more mundane aspects of nature. In his 

journal he noted: "The civilized landscape ... I 

love it more and think it more worthy of 

reproduction than that which is savage and untamed. 

Lt is more significant" (quoted in George Inness, Jr., 

Life , Art and Letters of George Inness [New York: 

Century Association, 1917], 148). Though adopting 

his Tonalist style, and converting to 

Swedenborgianism under the influence of Inness, 

Keith did not abandon the panoramic view, which 

was still very much in vogue in the San Francisco 

art market. The dark, monochrome aesthetic of 

Tonalism denoted for Inness, and presumably for 

Keith as well, the presence of the spiritual in the 

world as over and against emanations of the material. 

Claiming that the purpose of a work of art was to 

arouse an emotion rather than to instruct, Inness 

opposed the didactic and moralizing imperatives of 

the earlier Romantics, especially those of the art 

critic John Ruskin. 

487 For American Tonalism and related Barbizon 

inspired aesthetics see Bermingham. An anonymous 

reviewer in the Berkeley newsjournal The Wasp (July 

20, 1907) defined Keith's putative modernity as a 

function of eyesight: "The famous painter has al ways 

been near-sighted and some art critics ascribe to that 

peculiarity his great power of depicting landscapes 

in a broad comprehensive style. Seeing distant 

objects en masse only, the artist has avoided the great 

fault of painting with lavish and photographic 

accuracy of detail" (quoted in Brother Cornelius 

Fidel is, Keich: Old Master of California [New York: 

G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1942], 158). 

488 Another strategy for accommodating the 

presence of technology in the western landscape, 

especially the railroad, was practiced by Bierstadt 

who, in painting a view of Donner Pass for Collis P. 

Huntington, president of the Central Pacific, made 

only oblique reference to the railroad tracks, thereby 

both marginalizing and assimilating the machine 

into the mythic wilderness. San Francisco art critics 

applauded this subterfuge, one commenting: "The 

railroad, with its enveloping snow-shed, is indicated 

plainly enough without any obtrusion of its 

ugliness"; another stated bluntly: "The hard fact of 

the railroad is only hinted by a puff of smoke, and 

by an unobtrusive sketch of the line of the snow 

sheds" (quoted in Anderson and Ferber, 85). 

William Keith also painted a view of Donner Pass 

in 1878 and with a characteristic erasure made no 

reference to the presence of the railroad, substituting 

instead a group of nomadic Indians. Neuhaus, 19. 

In dealing with the theme of the "machine in the 

garden," nineteenth century artists employed a full 

118 - Art and the American Conservation Movement 

gamut of pictorial strategies ranging from denial 

(Keith) to assimilation (Bierstadt) to celebration 

(Matteson) to lamentation (Russell). Of these 

Frederick Billings appears to have been comfortable 

only with the first. 

489 The idea of the Indian as a noble "ruin" first 

emerge~ in the poerry of Willi;un C:nllt>n Rry;mt ;m<l 

Washington Irving. 

49

° Cornelius, 94. 

49 1 A critic for the New York Post ( 17 February, 

1865), in reviewing the exhibition, wrote of 

Bierstadt's Mount Hood: "Let us be thankful that 

Mr. Bierstadt has so successfully reproduced on his 

canvas the noble form of this king of mountains, 

and placing it before us, enables us through it to 

testify to rhe greatness and power of that Being who 

created it" (Anderson and Ferber, 85 ). 

4

<>1 For the meaning of Church's several views of 

Cotopaxi see Manthome. 

493 See Howat, 136 for Cole's famous canvas. 

494 Anderson and Ferber, 85. 

49

s For the first ascent of Mount Hood by Joel 

Palmer in 1845 see Joel Palmer and John Palmer 

Spencer, A Sight So Nobly Grand: Joel Palmer on 

Mouni Hood in 1845 (Portland: Oregon Historical 

Society Press, 1994), 21. 

496 Palmquist, 45. 

497 Cornelius, 94. 

498 See Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, "The Last 

Summer's Work," in Driscoll and Howat, 137- 161. 

4

99 Driscoll and Howat, 138. 

soo Driscoll and Howat, 141. 

501 For comparative purposes see Driscoll and 

Howat, plate 33 and fig. 79. 

502 Driscoll and Howat, 158. 

SuJ For Ruskin's paramount influence on American 

culture see Stein, John Ruskin. 

504 Janet Houghton, who has visited the site, asserts 

that it is the Navesink rather than the Shrewsbury 

River that is depicted. See her entry in the Caralogue 

of the Marsh-Billings Mansion Art Collection 

(1997). 

505 The classic stL1dy of this style is John 

Wilmerding's American Light. The Billingses' 

painting was lent for tbis formidable six months' 

exhibition and reproduced as fig. 81 . 
) 

) 

) 

J 

) 

506 Earl A. Powell, "Luminism and the American 

Sublime," in Wilmerding, American Light, 86- 88. 

For the related Shrewsbury River paintings see 

Driscoll and Howat, frontispiece, fig 61, plates 17-

19. 

507 Powell states apropos of the Billingses' painting: 

"The refinement of this picture, in which nature has 

been reduced to cryptographi c essentials of 

composition, is supreme." 

508 For an eloquent and impassioned definition of 

Luminist aesthetics see chapter 5 of Barbara Novak, 

American Painting of tl1e Nineteenth Century: Realism, 

Idealism and the Ame1ican Experience (New York: 

Harper and Row, 1975). 

509 Fink, American Art, 225. 

5lo Julia Billings' 1882 diary lists Minor's Vale of 

Kenneth along with Edward Moran'.<> Clam Gatherers, 

Peter Moran's On the Trail in Idaho and a second 

painting by Minor as among their most important 

acquisitions of the year. Mansion Box A 12. 

Frederick Billings' diary entry for June 7, 1886 reads: 

"Sent Minor's Vail of Kennett to Woodstock," 

signifying its importance to him. 

511 The principal somce of information on Minor 

is Bermingham, 158. 

512 Bulletin of the American Art Association (February 

24- 26, 1904 ). New York Public Library Art File, 

Microfiche M642. 

m The principal study of Moran's art is Paul D. 

Schweizer, Edward Moran: American Landscape and 

Marine Painter, Exhibition Catalogue (Wilmington: 

Delaware Art Museum, 1979). 

514 Theodore E. Sutro, Thirteen Chapters of American 

History Represented by the Edward Moran Series of 

Marine Paintings (New York: Scribner & Co., 1905 ), 

l 7. In contrast John Wilmerding, A History of 

American Marine Painting (Boston: Little, Brown and 

Company, 1968), 198 only mentions Edward Moran 

in passing as a student of Philadelphia painter James 

Hamilton. 

rn See Sellin, 180. 

H6 New York An]oumal (1880), 273: New York 

Public Library Microfiche M 788. In her "Lists" 

Julia Billings entitled this work Long Island Shore 

near Little Neck- Clam Gatherers, a designation 

consistent with the practices of numerous American 

artists of the period who gave American inflections 

to European themes. 

517 New York Art Journal, 274. 

Part III: Selected Works from the Collection 

518 Edward Strahan [Earl Shinn], "The Art Gallery: 

The National Academy of Design. First Notice," 

Art Amateur (June, 1879), quoted in Howat, 84. 

51 9 Fink, 231. 

52° For a detailed account of the races and 

illustrations of Moran's "America's Cup" paintings 

see Schweizer, 36-40 and figs. 22- 26. 

521 John Ruskin, The Harbours of England in The 

Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T Cook and Alexander 

Wedderburn (London: Routledge, 1904), Vol. 13, 

13-14. 

522 The only publication on the career of 

Philadelphia artist Peter Moran is an exhibition 

catalogue: Michael W. Schantz, Pete?" Moran 

(Philadelphia: Woodmere Art Museum, 1986). 

This publication provides an account of the artist's 

role in the 1890 Indian Census, a Federa lly 

sponsored documentation of the western tribes. 

523 For an account of this expedition see Thurman 

Wilkins, Thomas Moran: Artist of the Mountains 

(Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 178-

182. Thomas Moran's participation in the Hayden 

Survey of the Yellowstone in 1871 was sponsored 

by the Northern Pacific Railroad and underwritten 

by Jay Cooke who purchased sixteen watercolors 

from the artist. 

m See Anne Morand, Thomas Moran: The Field 

Sketches, 1856- 1923 (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma 

Press, 1996) for numerous reproductions of these 

drawings. 

m The best study of the Green River series is 

Nancy K. Anderson, '"The Kiss of Enterprise"' in 

Truettner, The West as America, 243- 248. 

'

26 See Truettner, The West as America, figs. 209-

214. 

m An apt comparison is provided by Leon Belly's 

Pilgrims Goir1gt0Mecca (Paris, Museed'Orsay, 1861). 

See Brian W. Dippie, Looking at Russell (Fort Worrh, 

Amon Carter Museum, 1987), fig. 83. Dippie makes 

numerous connections between Orientalist paintings 

and the compositions of Charles M. Russell. 

>

13 Anderson, '"The Kiss of Enterprise,'" in 

Truettner, The West as Ame1·ica, 248. From the 

available evidence Peter Moran's landscape 

backdrop for On the Trail in Idaho seems based on 

two discrete sets of drawings, one of the sandstone 

buttes of Green River, Wyoming and the other a 

view of Portneuf Canyon, Idaho. See Morand, 

Thomas Moran, plates 30 and 3.3 . 

Art and the American Conservation Movement- 119 
Pan III: Selected Works from the Collection 

129 See Dawn Glanz, How che West Was Drawn: 

American Art and the Settling of the Frontier (Ann 

Arbor, UMI Research Press, 1978), 32 refers to Miller 

as the "Delacroix of the American West" in drawing 

attention to the Orientalist influence on the artist. 

Oippie, Looking at Russell, 84-88, makes similar 

claims for the painting of Charles M. Russell. 

sro In this connection Charles Perkins Marsh's 

concern for desertification and his ill-advised 

attempt to introduce camels into the desert 

Southwest is also relevant. 

sii S. G. W. Benjamin, "The Exhibit ionsFourrccnth Annual Exhibition of the American 

Water Color Society," American Art Review ( 1881), 

quoted in Schantz. The painting is also known by 

the title of Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone with 

Thomas Moran and Frederick Billings. The Frederick 

Billings portrayed on canvas is a little known 19th 

century American artist, not the subject of this study. 

m Sec Blaugrund. 

m New York Public Library Art file, Microfiche 

N 115, undated, undocumented clipping for 

newspaper. 

SH The principal study of the iconography of the 

sea is Stein, Seascape, 89. 

m For the role of Lhe Adirondacks in the national 

imagination see Robert L. McGrath, A Wild Sort of 

Beauty: Public Places and Private Visions (Blue 

Mountain Lake, N. Y.: The Adirondack Museum, 

1992). 

516 For a discussion of the Hudson River School's 

use of rhe "Cl;iudian" formula see Novak, American 

Painting, 82. 

m Mandel, I 08. 

538 QuoLed in Ackerman, 230. Frederick Billings' 

interest in this painting of desert nomads is possibly 

relaLed to George Perkins Marsh's ill-fated attempt 

to introduce camels into the desert Southwest of the 

United Scates in May of 1856. A copy of Marsh's 

book The Camel: His Organization, Habiis and Uses, 

Considered with Reference to his Introduction into the 

United States, however, is not included in the 

mansion library. 

539 The best source for Bridgman's career is 

Ackerman, 20-32. 

5-w Ackerman, 22. 

S4I Ackerman, 68. The full title of the Billingses' 

picture is Arab Caravansary, Tlemcen, Algeria. 

120 - Arc and the American Conservation Movement 
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