THE LUMINIST MOVEMENT ^1850-1875

1

American Light

^Am&vcaft/jf^Ab

THE LUMINIST MOVEMENT ^1850-1875

PAINTINGS **• DRAWINGS }*> PHOTOGRAPHS

JOHN WILMERDING

with contributions by

LISA FELLOWS ANDRUS

LINDA S. FERBER

ALBERT GELPI

DAVID C. HUNTINGTON

WESTON NAEF

BARBARA NOVAK

EARL A. POWELL

THEODORE E. STEBBINS, JR.

National Gallery of Art, Washington
Copyright © 1980 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of

Art, Washington. All rights reserved. No part of this

publication may be reproduced without written permission of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

20565.

This catalogue was produced by the Editors Office, National Gallery of Art, Washington. Printed by Eastern

Press, Inc., New Haven, Connecticut. The type is Galliard, set by Composition Systems Inc., Arlington, Virginia. The text and cover papers are Warren Lustro

Offset Enamel Dull. Designed by Frances P. Smyth.

Exhibition dates at the National Gallery of Art

February lo-June 15,1980

Cover: Fitz Hugh Lane. Ships and an Approaching Storm

Off Owl's Head, Maine, 1860. Governor and Mrs. John D.

Rockefeller IV (detail, plate 9)

Frontispiece: Plate i. Fitz Hugh Lane. Lumber Schooners

at Evening on Penobscot Bay, 1860. Private collection.

Photo: Herbert P. Vose (see fig. i)

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Main entry under tide:

American light.

An exhibition to be held at the National Gallery of Art,

Feb. lo-June 15,1980.

Bibliography: p. 313

Includes index.

i. Luminism (Art)—Exhibitions. 2. Landscape

painting, American—Exhibitions. 3. Landscape

painting—i9th century—United States—Exhibitions.

4. Hudson River School—Exhibitions. I. Wilmerding, John. II. Andrus, Lisa Fellows.

NDI35I.5.A46 758'.fo973O74Oi53 79-244O9
Contents

Foreword 7

J. CARTER BROWN

List of Lenders 8

Introduction n

JOHN WILMERDING

I The Eye of the Mind: Overviews ofLuminism

On Defining Luminism 23

BARBARA NOVAK

Design and Measurement in LuministArt 31

LISA FELLOWS ANDRUS

Color Plates $7

Luminism and the American Sublime 69

EARL A. POWELL

The Luminist Movement: Some Reflections 97

JOHN WILMERDING

II Oppositions & Balances: Collateral Views ofLuminism

Church and Luminism: Light for America's Elect 15$

DAVID C. HUNTINGTON

Color Plates 193

Luminism in Context: A New View zn

THEODORE E. STEBBINS, JR.

Luminist Drawings 237

LINDA S. FERBER

"New Eyes"—Luminism and Photography 267

WESTON NAEF

White Light in the Wilderness:

Landscape & Self in Nature's Nation 291

ALBERT GELPI

Bibliography 313

LINDA L. AYRES

Index 323
Plate 2. John Frederick Kensett. Beach at Newport•, c. 1850-1860.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Gift of Frederick Sturges, Jr., 1978 (see fig. 2)

6
Foreword

FROM THE TIME OF ITS FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GALLERY has asserted a

strong and continuing interest in the art of our own country. Quite appropriately, several key American paintings were among the earliest acquisitions

Andrew Mellon made for the Gallery, and over subsequent decades this core

has grown steadily in quality and numbers to one of the largest departments in

the institution. The American collection now offers an outstanding overview

of this nation's most significant achievements in painting and, in the

company of other Washington collections, constitutes an unparalleled resource.

In sponsoring this publication and the accompanying exhibition, American

Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850-1875, the National Gallery inaugurates a

renewed and vigorous program in the study of American art. Our current

activities would not have been possible without the devoted nurturing of the

collection and periodic exhibitions by the late William P. Campbell, who for

many years served as assistant chief curator and was senior curator and the

curator in charge of American painting. Following Mr. Campbell's untimely

death in 1976, John Wilmerding was appointed senior curator and curator of

American art at the Gallery. Among the projects his department has undertaken

in the last two years have been the complete rehanging of the American

galleries in the West Building, publication of a new illustrated handbook of the

American collection—an early step in the ongoing cataloguing of our total

holdings—and the initiation of a major new series of exhibitions focusing on

important figures or aspects in American art.

Over a decade ago the Gallery mounted large monographic exhibitions

devoted to such artists as Gilbert Stuart, John Singleton Copley, Winslow

Homer, and John Sloan as well as Thomas Eakins, George Bellows, William

Sidney Mount, and John Gadsby Chapman. American Light has been a similarly ambitious undertaking, although its scope is somewhat broader. Concentrating on a crucial period in the middle of the nineteenth century, it examines a

style now called luminism, widely practiced by a number of fascinating figures

only fully discovered in recent years. Such talented painters as Fitz Hugh Lane,

Sanford GifTord, John F. Kensett, and Martin Johnson Heade were largely

obscured after their art passed out of fashion in the later nineteenth century.

Perhaps the most crucial artist of that period, Frederic Edwin Church, now

emerges as the most technically able and original painter in America prior to

Homer and Thomas Eakins. This exhibition brings before the public a group

of pictures with a common interest in the radiant effects of light and atmosphere. Together they stand as some of the most beautiful and compelling

paintings ever executed in the history of American art.

The Gallery is equally proud to publish this substantive book on the occasion

of the exhibition. We are honored to have contributions from some of the most

distinguished scholars in the American field. To their great credit and our

pleasure they have all transcended previously established views on the subject

of luminism with essays of provocative and fresh insights. We are confident

that the eloquent images of American landscape shown in this exhibition and

volume offer a memorable experience. Equally, the scholarship reflected here

promises to make an influential impact on our writing and thinking about

American art.

Our gratitude goes to Mr. Wilmerding for organizing this entire undertaking, and to Linda Ayres, the assistant curator of American art, for her tireless

efforts in coordinating many technical aspects of the exhibition and catalogue.

We are also indebted to Polly Roulhac for her skillful editing of these essays.

Above all we would like to thank the many lenders who have so generously

made this exhibition possible.

J. Carter Brown

Director
Lenders to the Exhibition

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York

Lyman Allyn Museum, New London, Connecticut

Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Mr. and Mrs. Harold Bell

Boston Public Library

The Bostonian Society, Old State House, Boston

The Brooklyn Museum, New York

Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio

Cape Ann Historical Association, Gloucester, Massachusetts

The Century Association, New York

Cincinnati Art Museum

The Cleveland Museum of Art

Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York

The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Design

The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire

Dallas Museum of Fine Arts

Dartmouth College Library, Hanover, New Hampshire

Mrs. James H. Dempsey, Jr.

Denver Public Library

Maitland C. DeSormo

Mr. H. Richard Dietrich, Jr., Philadelphia

The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Washington, D.C.

Jerald Dillon Fessenden

Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, Michigan

John Davis Hatch

Mr. and Mrs. Stephen G. Henry, Jr., Baton Rouge, Louisiana

The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia

Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington

Indianapolis Museum of Art

Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska

The Lano Collection

The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Margaret Farrell Lynch

Richard Manoogian

The Mariner's Museum, Newport News, Virginia

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries, Cambridge

Mrs. Flagler Matthews, The Henry Morrison Flagler Museum, Palm Beach

Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, Upperville, Virginia

Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Dr. and Mrs. M. S. Mickiewicz

Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, North Carolina

Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, New Jersey

Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, New York

Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts

The Museums at Stony Brook, New York

The National Archives, Washington, D.C.

National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

New Bedford Whaling Museum, New Bedford, Massachusetts

New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut

The New-York Historical Society, New York

New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown

Newark Museum, New Jersey

The Pell Family Trust; Hon. Claiborne Pell, Trustee

8
Acknowkfyments

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia

Mr. and Mrs. Andrew S. Peters, New Jersey

Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Art Museum, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

Reading Public Museum and Art Gallery, Reading, Pennsylvania

Mrs. H. Brown Reinhardt, Newark, Delaware

Reynolda House, Inc., Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Governor and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller IV

Mr. and Mrs. Wilbur L. Ross, Jr.

St. Johnsbury Athenaeum, Inc., St. Johnsbury, Vermont

The St. Louis Art Museum

The George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum, Springfield, Massachusetts

Southwest Harbor Public Library, Southwest Harbor, Maine

J. B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky

Eugene B. Sydnor, Jr.

The Putnam Foundation—The Hmken Art Gallery, San Diego, California

The Union League of Philadelphia

United States Naval Academy Museum, Annapolis, Maryland

University Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles

Vassar College Art Gallery, Poughkeepsie, New York

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond

Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore

Daniel Wolf

Mr. and Mrs. Erving Wolf

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut

and

Private Collections

THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART

wishes to express its gratitude

especially to the following individuals

for their assistance with this publication and exhibition:

Margaret Bond, Memorial Art

Gallery, University of Rochester, Rochester,

New York; Jeffrey R. Brown; Doreen Bolger

Burke and John K. Howat, Metropolitan

Museum of Art, New York; Beverly Carter;

Carl Grossman, Childs Gallery, Boston; Karen Current; John Paul Driscoll;

Stuart Feld and Jane Richards, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New

York; Mrs. Marjorie Frost; Professor William

H. Gerdts, City University of New York;

Professor George Heard Hamilton, Williams

College, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Sylvia Hochfield;

Meredith Hutchins, Southwest Harbor Public Library, Southwest Harbor,

Maine; Karen M. Jones, Antiques; John R.

Lane, Brooklyn Museum, New York; Janet

Lehr, New York; Laura Luckey, Museum of

Fine Arts, Boston; Maria Mallus, National

Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Kathie

Manthorne; Thomas Wendell Parker, Bostonian

Society, Boston; Suzanne Pastor and Susan Wyngaard,

International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House,

Rochester, New York; Bertha Saunders;

William Talbot, Cleveland Museum of Art;

Robert Vose, Jr., Vose Galleries, Boston; Joan

Washburn, Washburn Gallery, New York; Paul

White, National Archives, Washington, D.C.;

Cathy Gebhard; Patricia Alexiou and Carolyn Wistar.

9
Plate 3. Frederic Edwin Church. Twilight, "Short Arbiter TwixtDay and Night," 1850.

Collection of the Newark Museum, New Jersey (see fig. 205)

10
Introduction

John Wilmerding

THIS PUBLICATION, IN CONJUNCTION WITH AN EXHIBITION on the subject of

"American Light," attempts a fresh and comprehensive examination of the

culminating phase of Hudson River painting. This particular movement, now

commonly called luminism, is one of the most inconclusively studied areas of

American art, yet one with works of quality and interest as high as any in the

national school. The period in question is the third quarter of the nineteenth

century, from the death of Thomas Cole in 1848 to the country's centennial in

1876.

The central development of the luminist movement may be seen most clearly

in the work of a few key figures—Fitz Hugh Lane, Martin Johnson Heade,

Sanford Gifford, John F. Kensett, and Frederic Edwin Church, though we shall

also want to compare exemplary achievements by other contemporary and

related artists—such as Albert Bierstadt, A. T. Bricher, William S. Haseltine,

Worthington Whittredge, William Bradford, and William Trost Richards—as

well as the antecedents of luminism in the personalities and works of the

founding members of the Hudson River school. With the latter group is to be

found America's first sweeping consciousness of its landscape, and out of their

often idealized and literary conceptions gradually emerged more specific

plein-air recordings of nature.

Although generally presented chronologically, the material is worth considering thematically as well. For example, several artists painted contemporaneously along the Newport-Narragansett shore, around the coast of Mt. Desert

Island, Maine, and at Lake George. Likewise, at certain moments many of

these painters undertook similar views of glowing atmospheric sunlight,

threatening and explosive storm scenes, and incandescent twilight vistas. Seeing together a number of depictions of a favored locale, or different versions of

an obsessing meteorological drama, offers revealing insights into American

attitudes toward nature and the national identity during a crucial period of the

country's development.

One important aspect of this material requiring attention is the group of

principles of luminist style and how they apply to drawings and photography

of the period—material that, to date, has hardly been treated in this context. In

looking at relevant sketchbooks, along with other preliminary and finished

drawings, we may gain a sense of how precisely the luminist painter responded

to nature and then began to shape his conception artistically. Certain contemporary photography, too, shared similar modes of composition, viewpoint,

and recording of light effects. These examples of graphic arts demonstrate that

the luminist style resides not merely in the rarified colors of oil sketches and

finished canvases (though the paintings in this movement are among the most

beautiful and subtly colored in all of American art) but equally in the spare

outlines, spacious formats, and light-filled expanses of other related mediums.

Thus, luminist structure and light emerge as key stylistic elements to be

analyzed here. Aiding our understanding will be a few selected sequences of

sketches or versions of a particular subject—Heade's Newburyport marshes,

Lane's Brace's Rock series, Carleton Watkins' Yosemite Valley—where this

distinctive process is eloquently at work.

Such a study of luminism brings together a number of major American

painters, most of whom have been treated in separate monographic exhibitions

or books, though never in the comparative or focused manner undertaken

here. By proposing luminism as the conclusive development of early American

landscape painting (in contrast to the more traditional and often uneven

Hudson River school surveys), one can view it as the central movement in

American art through the middle of the nineteenth century. Indeed, its crystalline pictures of the 18505 stand as supreme manifestations of Jacksonian optimism and expansiveness—along with America's belief in the transcendent

spiritual beauty of nature. Moreover, the apocalyptic storm and twilight scenes

of the i86os—so visually and thematically different, yet conceptually and

structurally related—speak vividly of the turbulent Civil War years and the

n
poignant sense of loss in the aftermath.

During the seventies and after, the serenity of luminism yielded to a new,

more sober realism—evident in the work of Eastman Johnson, Winslow

Homer, and Thomas Eakins—while luminist structure began to give way to

the looser palette and fancies of impressionism—as seen in examples by George

Inness, Homer Dodge Martin, and James A. M. Whistler. For a time, however,

luminism clarified the special qualities of space and light in America's mental

and physical geography.

The concept of luminism has existed in the vocabulary of American art history

for the past thirty years. It owes its early definition perhaps most to the

historian John I. H. Baur, who in the late 19408 discussed the particularly

American consciousness of light and atmosphere in mid-nineteenth-century

landscape painting, and in 1954 first employed the specific term luminism for the

title of an article. His first and most ambitious essay, "Trends in American

Painting, 1815 to 1865," was written in 1947 as an introduction to the catalogue of

the pioneering M. and M. Karolik Collection of nineteenth-century paintings,

given to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts two years later.1 In this survey of a,

till then, neglected period, Baur described the significant circumstances leading to the rise of landscape painting during the second quarter of the

nineteenth century—among them, the influence of Ruskin's criticism, the

political nationalism of the Jacksonian era, and changes in taste away from

earlier neoclassical, historical, and biblical subjects.

Interestingly, he called attention to the later phase of Hudson River school

painting as having distinctive qualities and used the tide James T. Flexner also

stressed later of the "Rocky Mountain school." This seems in retrospect

primarily an effort to take account of the more distant horizons pursued by the

generation of painters following Cole. But Baur also found that generally the

early generation of Hudson River painters "limited their palette to dull greens

and browns within a fairly restricted range.552 It was the new use of intense

sunset colors, such as were evident in Thomas Rossiter's Opening of the Wilderness of 1849 in the Karolik Collection, that he saw exemplifying the later

luminist style and unifying its adherents in a single school.

Besides this original treatment of light and color, Baur described the intimate relation between artist and nature, the artist's concentrated process of

observation, lack of literary associations, interest in atmospheric tonalism, and

above all impersonal touch. Attempting to define various types of realism in

American painting of the period, he basically equated romantic realism with

the primary Hudson River painters and turned to the term of pantheistic realism

for the later painters of light. To him the purest example of this type was Fitz

Hugh Lane, who, with Martin Johnson Heade, Baur cited as representative of

i. Fitz Hugh Lane. Lumber Schooners at Evening on Penobscot Bay, 1860. Oil on canvas.

0.712 x 1.016 (28 x 40 in). Inscribed, l.r.: EH. Lane/i86o. Private collection. Photo:

Herbert P. Vose (see frontispiece)

2. John Frederick Kensett. Beach at Newport, c. 1850-1860. Oil on canvas. 0.558 x 0.864

(22 x 34 in). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Gift of Frederick Sturges, Jr.,

1978 (see plate 2)

12 INTRODUCTION
3. Martin Johnson Heade. Marsh field Meadows, Massachusetts, c. 1865-1875. Oil on canvas. 0.438 x 0.921 (17% x $6% in). Inscribed, 1.1.: MJ Heade;

and on stretcher: Marsh field Meadows, Mass. Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

an artistic mode culminating in the 18505 and sixties. The luminists were typical

also of a crucially neglected period in nineteenth-century American art, as Baur

confirmed in recounting their virtual lack of mention in the histories of

American art throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Along

with the work of Lane and Heade, Baur also called attention to the small

landscape studies of William Sidney Mount and the mature pictures of John F.

Kensett. Characteristic compositions of this group tended to stress a strong

sense of abstract formal design:

It consisted chiefly in a balanced grouping of masses with some simplification of

volumes and structure. At the end of the period it was modified, however, by a few men

who explored the possibilities of asymmetrical compositions and subtler spatial relations.3

Finally, Baur observed that at the very moment when the painting of

atmospheric light was reaching its zenith, a new "visual realism" was emerging

in the Barbizon-impressionist styles of William Morris Hunt and George

Inness. Today we can speculate that the rise and fall of what Baur came to call

luminism was indebted to indigenous factors as much as foreign influence, but

these initial perceptions of a separate period style hold up as remarkably

prescient.

In two subsequent articles, one appearing in 1948 and the other in 1954, Baur

refined and amplified his ideas. Reiterating that Cole "seems to have painted in

an atmospheric vacuum," he argued that the next generation around Lane and

Heade were part of "a spontaneous and general movement towards research in

atmospheric problems."4 The contemporary writing of James Jackson Jarves

INTRODUCTION 13
Plate 4- Sanford Robinson Gifford. October in the Catskills, 1880. Oil on canvas. 0.924 x

0.746 (36% x 29% in). Inscribed, 1.1.: S.R. Gifford 1880. Los Angeles County Museum

of Art; Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles C. Shoemaker, Mr. and Mrs. J. Douglas Pardee,

and Mr. and Mrs. John McGreevey (also fig. 4)

proved to be an important source for some of these thoughts, most notably the

often quoted lines

The thoroughly American branch of painting is the landscape. It surpasses all others in

popular favor, and may be said to have reached the dignity of a national school.... To

such an extent is literalness carried, that the majority of works are quite divested of

human association.5

This last notion of the detached artistic presence discussed in the writing of

Jarves and Baur was to'provide a key theme for elaboration by Barbara Novak

in her book of 1969, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century. Both in his

Brooklyn Museum essay and in the one for Perspectives (1954) Baur also initially

raised the comparison of Heade's painting with that of the early French

impressionists. At this point he merely noted Manet's belief that light was the

most important person in a picture, and that Monet too had painted a series of

haystacks in precise, changing conditions of time of day and atmosphere. At

the same time he did argue that "American light looks different from that of

Europe,"6 though examination of these differences was to be more fully

pursued by Novak and others later.

Baur's "American Luminism" for Perspectives broke other critical ground.

Correctly he saw that the movement was largely spontaneous, with various

catalysts and pervasive sources but no recognized leaders or organizers. Attention was called to several then obscure, and some still little-known,

precursors—George Harvey, Robert Salmon, John S. Blunt, and George

Tirrell—while related images were found in the work of Mount, George Caleb

Bingham, Jasper F. Cropsey, James Suydam, James Hamilton, and W. S.

Haseltine. In particular, Baur cited the formative influence of Robert Salmon's

crisp style of drawing and rendering light on the otherwise self-taught career of

Fitz Hugh Lane. Though we would argue today with Baur's assertion that

"Lane was not much interested in composition," we recognize his accuracy in

stressing that artist's "preference for scenes of considerable depth and long,

horizontal lines."7 Baur's sense of the ominous foreboding and threatening

drama in Heade's Newport thunderstorm pictures strikes another revealing

note. The surreal romantic strain in the latter's art would be picked up by

Stebbins, who sees this as part of an American current running from Allston to

Ryder, while other writers later sought to explore these images of "impending

catastrophe" in the turbulent national context of the mid-i86os.8

Even as other modes of realism began to emerge in the 18705, such major

figures of the later nineteenth century as Eastman Johnson and Winslow

Homer nonetheless grounded their early styles in the meticulous delineations

and limpid clarities of luminism. Baur accurately read a painting like Homer's

Dad's Coming of 1873 (fig. 177) as at once being indebted to earlier luminist

principles and intimating a new breadth of artistic touch and vision. However

much these first surveys of this movement might now be susceptible to points

of challenge, almost all current scholarly thinking on the subject has initiated its

argumentation in Baur's essays.

14 INTRODUCTION
Plate 5. Sanford Robinson Gifford. Sunset, 1863. Mr. and Mrs. Erving Wolf. Photo: Vose Galleries (see fig. 125)

Comparable in stature as a founder of modern American art scholarship is

E. P. Richardson. Although his 1944 volume American Romantic Painting

makes no mention whatever of Heade, he did include some brief comments on

both Heade and Lane in his survey, Painting in America, first published in 1956.

Richardson widely separated his discussions of Lane (whom he described as a

"minor poet of light") and Heade on the grounds that they belonged to

different generations. He placed Lane in what he categorized as the second

generation of romanticism (1825-1850), along with George Loring Brown,

James Pringle, and Russell Smith, figures who by comparison now seem a

good deal less interesting or able. Heade, understandably, is put in the context

of what Richardson titles, "The Closing Phase of Romanticism: The Generation of 1850. Luminism, Naturalism, and Sentimentalism."9

Less cogent and probing than Baur's, Richardson's summary of luminism

nonetheless included some important observations about luminist color. In

part, these were stimulated by Jarves' criticism in 1864, when he talked in The

Art-Idea about the romantics' "overstrained atmospheric effects . . . intense

gradations of skies and violent contrasts of positive color."10 Rjchardson also

emphasized this major coloristic element in certain luminist painting; he noted

that by the 18505 many artists were rendering vivid hot sunsets and twilights

across their canvases. Though various chemical dye colors had become available in pigments to artists during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,

these were mostly cooler hues of greens and blues, along with zinc white and

INTRODUCTION 15
5. Frederic Edwin Church. Twilight, c. 1856. Oil on

canvas. 0.610 x 0.915 (24 x 36 in). Inscribed, 1.1.: E E.

Church. Private collection. Photo: O. E. Nelson

chrome yellow. As Richardson observed, "The year 1856 is a landmark in the

history of the painter's medium"; for, important to American painters and

painting, this was when pigments in the hotter hues dramatically appeared.

After 1856 a series of sharp new reds and purples flared upon the artist's palette. Mauve

was quickly followed by magenta and cobalt violet (1859) and cobalt yellow (about 1861).

In the next few years most of the ancient mineral colors and practically all the organic

colors gave way to new synthetic products. Some of these proved to be fugitive and

quickly faded, others blackened in chemical combination with other pigments, but all

were new, brilliant, and irresistibly tempting to the artist's eye.11

This revealing scientific information is borne out by a glance at the fiery

panoramas of wilderness twilights painted by Lane, Heade, Frederic Church,

Sanford GifFord, and others during the 18505 and sixties. Actually, Lane's first

canvas to employ the new intense reds and purples was his Twilight on the

Kennebec (private collection), painted in 1849 and exhibited that year at the

American Art-Union in New York. The catalogue noted that "the western sky

is still glowing in the rays of the setting sun."12 This would suggest that at least

some red pigments were available by this date. Thus, our awareness of significant technical evidence has greatly helped to explain a major reason for the

luminist's turn to glowing evening subjects at this moment, in spite of what

Richardson noted as discoloration in certain pigment combinations (a number

of Lane and Heade canvases in particular have seen subsequent darkening,

"bleeding," or striating of the reds across their surfaces). What remains to be

explored now is their ideational relationship to the fiery turmoil of the Civil

War years and its aftermath.

This and other issues about luminism have emerged in the research of a

younger generation of art historians, whose publications began to appear in

the middle 19608. The first exhibition of the luminists as a group was a modest

but well-focused project undertaken by Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., and fellow

graduate students at Harvard in 1966. The small accompanying catalogue,

Luminous Landscape: The American Study of Light 1860-1875, made a valuable

contribution in focusing on some of the possible artistic relationships among

the various painters and in addressing the problematic role of Frederic

Church's art within the movement.13

This same year also saw the publication of a key monograph on Church by

16 INTRODUCTION
David Huntington, written in conjunction with efforts at the time to preserve

die artist's house and studio in Hudson, New York, and with the mounting of

the first major exhibition of his work in modern time.14 Huntington did not

address the topic of luminism directly but concentrated instead on Church's

originality of vision, particularly in terms of the artist's ideas about American

nature and his related adjustments of composition, color, and brushwork.

Clearly, all of Church's work does not belong within the classic luminist canon,

though several important pictures exemplify the style either in their panoramic

structure (Cotopaxi, fig. 225, and The Parthenon, fig. 29) or in their meticulous

draftsmanship and intense colors (Twilight in the Wilderness, fig. 204, and

Morning in the Tropics, fig. 128). Huntington's great achievement was to bring

Church out of a critical oblivion—one even more complete than the long

obscurity of Lane and Heade—into virtually the central place in midnineteenth-century American art.

Largely owing to these concerted efforts at the rediscovery of Church's

career, a number of his major pictures were acquired for distinguished American collections in the mid-sixties, most notably Twilight in the Wilderness by the

Cleveland Museum, Morning in the Tropics by the National Gallery, and Rainy

Season in the Tropics zx\& Andes of Ecuador (fig. 186) by J. William Middendorf.

Paintings as impressive as these demonstrated the one large oversight in the

1949 Karolik gift to Boston. For although this shrewd and farsighted acquisitor

had gathered some dozen Lanes and over two dozen Heades, he only sought

out three rather minor oils by Church. At the same time works long in public

collections, like the Corcoran's Niagara of 1857, were now reexamined as

singular national images.

The most far-reaching and influential revaluation of this whole area took

place with the publication in 1969 of Barbara Novak's American Painting of the

Nineteenth Century. With this volume she, along with Huntington, addressed

the crucial issue of the iconography of American painting, a matter largely

neglected in the more biographical and literary approaches previously taken by

historians. The book gives its foremost and most substantial attention to

luminism as a style and to its principal practitioners, although its author had

not as yet found Church to be of more than peripheral interest.

Seeing luminism as especially (though not uniquely) American, Novak

grounds the style in a native tradition that gave preference to measurement,

factuality, and scientific values.15 She persuasively links to Emersonian transcendentalism the luminist's distillation of light as a concretion of divine

presence—more in the pictures of calm, glassy clarity rather than ones of

vibrating, exotic color. With Baur's 1954 thoughts as a springboard, she goes

further in defining the specific qualities of light and space in luminism: its sharp

clarifications of objective form along with the parallel and regulated marks of

compositional divisions. Above all there is the anonymous artistic presence,

leaving on canvas no mark of individual stroke, only a classic silence of time

stilled. In addition, there is apparently a basic relationship between luminist

6. Alfred Thompson Bricher. GrandManan, c. 1890. Ink, wash, and Chinese white on

gray paper. 0.091 x 0.200 (39/16 x 7% in). Inscribed, l.r.: ATE (in monogram). Private

collection

7. David Johnston Kennedy. Entrance to Harbor—Moonlight, 1881. Gouache, Chinese

white, and pencil on paper. 0.235 x 0.380 (9% x 14% in). Inscribed, 1.1.: D J.Kennedy. 1881.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Purchase, 1968; Rogers Fund

INTRODUCTION YJ
 Seneca Ray Stoddard. The Letter "S" Ray Brook, 1890. Silverprint photograph. 0.167 x

217 (69/i6 x 89/i6 in). The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

hinking and the conceptual approach to art in the American folk tradition,

een in the popular image of Meditation by the Sea (c. 1860; fig. 150) and in the

rimitive, self-trained work of Lane's early work in printmaking.

Novak's thesis has proved to be provocative and stimulating ever since the

ook's publication over a decade ago. Some have taken issue with certain

xtensions of her argument, such as stretching luminism into an American

ision going back to Copley and forward to Sheeler, Hopper, Wyeth, and Sol

Lewitt. Questioned, too, have been her applications of luminist principles to

till life, genre, and portraiture, as well as the assumptions about the

movement's distinctively American character. Theodore Stebbins and William

Gerdts both have found surprising parallels in both eastern and western

European art. Now that this study has had time to take its own place in

American art literature, we might wonder more about the author's treatment

f Sanford Gifford as a "cosmopolitan luminist" or her virtual neglect of

Church.16 Nonetheless, this has been a book of singular importance in raising

nd broadening our understanding of luminism's place in the history of

American art.

During the decade from 1966, when Huntington's work on Church was

published, to 1976, when several new surveys of American art appeared with

sections devoted to luminism, almost all the painters of the movement were the

subject of exhibitions or monographs. These included Kensett, GifFord,

Bierstadt, Richards, and Bricher. Two books and two separate exhibitions were

devoted to Lane between 1964 and 1974, while Heade received a comprehensive

show in 1969, followed by a full study and catalogue raisonne six years later.

Aspects of luminism were taken up at various points in the later monograph on

Lane, while Theodore Stebbins includes a full and succinct section on the topic

in his 1975 biography of Heade.17

Partly owing to the national Bicentennial, a flurry of books and exhibitions

devoted to American art appeared in 1976. Among those relevant to the subject

at hand were the Pelican history American Art^ which allocated an entire

chapter to "The Luminist View," and the Museum of Modern Art's ambitious

and controversial show, The Natural Paradise, Painting in America, 1800-1950.

The book-length catalogue for the latter was comprised of several essays

touching on luminism in varying degrees, the most direct being "Fire and Ice in

American Art, Polarities from Luminism to Abstract Expressionism." The next

year saw publication of the most recent major survey of American art, that by

Milton Brown, who also devoted to luminism a specific subsection of a chapter

on landscape. Curiously, however, he reverts here to Richardson's relatively

circumscribed view of Lane and follows with comments on the idiosyncratic

and unrelated career of George Henry Durrie.18 Still, the very presence of such

a discussion in an authoritative history of American art is a reminder of how

compellihgly the subject of luminism has entered the field to stay, when both

the general term and individual painters of luminism were virtually unknown

just thirty years ago.

If luminism is a definable style at all, its principles ought to be visible in

media other than paintings. Yet parallel to the relative lack of attention to

American drawings and photography in general, close to no critical examination whatever exists on luminist drawings, sketches, and photographs. Even in

his most recent survey, his fresh and comprehensive American Master Drawings

and Watercolors^ Stebbins chooses to discuss Heade's exquisite charcoals of the

Newburyport marshes within the larger romantic traditions of Hudson River

and American Barbizon school landscapes. Lane, David Johnston Kennedy,

Henry Farrer, Bricher, and RJchards, all of whom produced luminist art, are

treated under other categories like romanticism, folk drawings, and the Victorian watercolor.19

Similarly, a photographer like Seneca Ray Stoddard is as obscure today as

Lane and Heade were three decades ago, and figures like Carleton Watkins and

William Bradford are not much better known. The most recent exhibition

given to luminism, that at the Coe Kerr Gallery in New York in the autumn of

1978, occasioned a thoughtful catalogue essay by William Gerdts but concentrated entirely on luminist painters and paintings.

8 INTRODUCTION
All of which brings us to the present exhibition and publication. The

ambitious sweep of concept here brings together the efforts of several individuals who have thought and written about luminism for more than a

decade. While collectively we hope to summarize the state of argumentation on

the subject to date, there is the equal aspiration to search the luminist horizons

afresh and to view them as panoramically and precisely as the style itself, while

furthering the dialogue on this crucial period of American art.

9. Carleton E. Watkins. Washington Column, 2,082 Feet, Tosemite (no. &), c. 1866.

Albumen photograph. 0.495 x 0.375 (19% x 14% in). Daniel Wolf

INTRODUCTION 19
Notes

I. H. Baur, "Trends in American Painting, 1815 to

M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paint

o 1865 (Cambridge, Mass., 1949), xv-lvii.

, "Trends in American Painting,55 lii.

, "Trends in American Painting,55 liii.

 I. H. Baur, "Early Studies in Light and Air by

n Painters,55 Brooklyn Museum Bulletin, 9, no. 2

1948): 3, 7.

s Jackson Jarves, The Art-Idea (New York,

; quoted in Baur, "Early Studies,551.

 I. H. Baur, "American Luminism, A Neglected

f the Realist Movement in Nineteenth-Century

n Painting,55 Perspectives USA, o (Autumn 1954):

ubsequent analyses of the comparison between

nd Monet, see Barbara Novak, American Paint

 Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the

n Experience (New York, 1969), 129-131; John Wil

 "Introduction55 in The Genius of American

(New York and London, 1973), 19-21; and Theo

tebbins, ]r., The Life and Works of Martin Johnson

New Haven and London, 1975), 54-55.

, "American Luminism,55 92-93.

r, "American Luminism,55 94- See also Stebbins,

7; and Wilmerding, "Fire and Ice in American

arities from Luminism to Abstract Expres

 in The Natural Paradise, Painting in America,

ed. Kynaston McShine [exh. cat., Museum of

Art] (New York, 1976), 44 and passim.

. Richardson, Painting in America, From 1502 to

nt (New York, 1965), 171, 226-227.

es, Art-Idea, 231.

hardson, Painting in America, 219.

y B. Cowdrey and Theodore Sizer, American

of Fine Arts and American Art-Union Exhibition

816-1852 (New York, 1953),

 22i- See also John Wil

, Fitz Hugh Lane (New York, 1971), 47.

 Davidson, Phyllis Hattis, and Theodore E.

, Jr., LuminousLandscape: The American Study of

0-1875 [Fogg Art Museum] (Cambridge, Mass.,

14. David C. Huntington, The Landscapes of Frederic

Edwin Church: Vision of an American Era (New York,

1966), and his Frederic Edwin Church [exh. cat., National

Collection of Fine Arts] (Washington, D. C., 1966).

15. Novak, American Painting, 95.

16. Novak, American Painting, 15, 240.

17. John Wilmerding, Lane, 56 and passim; and Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., "A Note on Luminism55

 in Heade,

iO5-no.

18. John Wilmerding, American Art (London and New

York, 1976), chap. 12; and "Fire and Ice.55 See also Milton

Brown, American Art to 1000: Painting, Sculpture, and

Architecture (New York, 1977).

19. Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., American Master Drawings and Watercolors, A History of Works on Paper from

Colonial Times to the Present (New York, 1976), chaps. 4-7.

RODUCTION
I The Eye of the Mind: Overviews of Luminism
ii. Fitz Hugh Lane. Brace's Rock, Brace's Cove, 1864. Oil on canvas. 0.254 x 0.381 (10 x 15 in). Inscribed, l.r.: E H. Lane/i864. The Lano Collection (see plate n)

Previous page: 10. Martin Johnson Heade. Thunderstorm, Narragansett Bay, c. 1870. Oil on paper mounted on canvas. 0.245 * 0.470 (9% x 18 % in). Inscribed, l.r.: MJ. Heade;

illegible date. Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh

22
On Defining Luminism

Barbara Novak

SINCE ITS RECOGNITION AND NAMING SOME TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO,

luminism-a clear, lucid mode of expression-has been subject to some misunderstanding and confusion. This is an approprate moment to define the term,

as I understand it, and to discuss the key difficulties in its interpretation. The

main question is: Which paintings do we call luminist and which do we not?

Many factors enter into the luminist mode. Not all of them are always

present in a single work. Thus we might establish a scale of priorities that must

be discernible in a work before we can call it luminist. That such works resist

labeling may be further testimony to their excellence. But a viable concept of

the luminist mode can only be sustained by strictly adhering to a set of

guidelines that give the definition of luminism the same clarity as the paintings

themselves. What are these factors? And how do we evaluate them in deciding

that we are indeed dealing with a luminist work of art?

On Structure

Luminist structure stresses the horizontal and fortifies an extended format with

what I have called luminist classicism., an organization in which planes take

measured steps into space, parallel to the picture surface.1 My use of the term

classic here is essentially Wolfflinian and depends on the mensurational control

of the parts between the planes.2 These delineations are often aided by subtle

horizontal alignments, as in many of Martin Johnson Heade's marshes and

seascapes, in Fitz Hugh Lane's quiet waters, or in John F. Kensetfs Newport

marines. Short vertical accents and occasional diagonals play against these, but

horizontality is the dominant factor. In more mannered luminism, as in

Heade's Approaching Storm: Beach Near Newport (1860; fig. 79), anticlassic

elements enter in, but the diagonal pull operates as a foil for the sea's strict

horizon. Here, luminist anticlassic structure can be seen as a subcategory of

luminism, dependent upon luminist classicism before it can exist in opposition

to it.3

On Measure

In luminist landscapes, measure confines natural elements within an abstract or

ideational order. This order operates both across the surface and in depth. As in

classic art, mathematical and geometric correlations predominate over organic

irregularities. Luminist measure, imposing an absolute order on reality, also

gives specificity to the ideal. Thus the categories of the real and ideal are

reciprocally tempered. Quantification affects every aspect of luminist art:

structure, form, tone, light are all subject to the subtlest discretions of calculated control. These minute and economic discriminations release poetic rather

than cerebral effects.

On Planarism and the Primitive

With luminist paintings, the attitude to the picture surface or plane is of central

importance. Firm respect for the plane is characteristic of American painting at

large and can be termed a major indigenous factor. The luminist emphasis on

the plane keeps us conscious of surface aspects. This planar stress is fortified by

the existence of a strong parallel tradition of primitivism that has endured in

America from the limners on. That tradition is, of course, conceptual—as is

luminism. Insofar as luminism is predominantly mental, it is less optical; and

relative levels of opticality might also be used to gauge whether or not a work is

luminist.

Luminist planarism is sometimes directly related to the primitive bias of the

artist. Lane often lapsed back into primitivism, disrupting the idea of

chronological "progress." But the line between primitivism and conceptualism

in luminism is hard to draw. Kensett's best luminist work comes after an optical

or pragmatic beginning; it suggests more a preoccupation with concept than a

reversion to primitivism.

23
On Primitivism and Provincialism

t times the primitive "look" can also be characterized as provincial, with no

ejorative overtones. Moreover, there is, in the nineteenth century, a "Western

emisphere" look that unites the art of the United States with that of Canada

nd South America as well. Distance from the mainstream, especially from the

ophisticated art centers that would familiarize the artist with the formulae for

matching"—in E. H. Gombrich's terms—would to some extent account for

is look.4 The bias of American art would seem to be toward the more natural

stinct of "making." Extended access to traditions that stress the "matching"

rmula can change this, as is often evident in the works of American expatriate

tists.

On Indigenous versus Unique Properties

While some qualities of luminism are indigenous, none is unique in the sense of

eing exclusive to America. Uniqueness in this sense is almost impossible to

nd in the history of art. There are only a limited number of formal factors the

ainter can rearrange and combine in any culture. But it is precisely the "mix"

 these factors that we can ultimately isolate as indigenous. Webster's New

orld Dictionary defines indigenous as i. born, growing, or produced naturally

 a region or country; native. 2. innate; inherent, inborn.5

Elsewhere, I have stressed similarities with painting in Germany (especially

e art of Caspar David Friedrich) and in Scandinavia.6 In Scandinavian art

ese seem to emerge from the tempering of a strong folk or primitive tradi

on, similar to that of America, resulting in parallel attitudes to structure, and

pecially to the plane. In a few instances, as in occasional paintings byChristian

0bke and C. W. Eckersberg, the parallels with American luminism are strik

g. But much other Scandinavian landscape painting of the mid-nineteenth

entury apparently had more effective recourse to the "matching" formula and

nds to be more painterly. Thus, how often such parallel comparisons occur

ust be considered in determining whether American luminism per se can be

id to exist elsewhere.

We must also assess how many of the complex factors that comprise Ameri

an luminism are present in other works and other national traditions and in

hat combinations. Nor can we leave out the strong philosophical compo

ent. Friedrich, even more than the Scandinavians, shared the American sense

f God in nature. There are often similarities, as in the mystical denial of ego

at comprises a large part of the luminist definition. Yet in other instances, as

art of the German and northern European tradition, Friedrich stresses ego

nd the alienation of ego that progressed into twentieth-century ex

essionism.

On Sources of Luminism

 possible explanation for certain parallels of structure between American

12. John Frederick Kensett. NarrtigansettBay, 1861. Oil on canvas. 0.356 x 0.610 (14 x 24

in). Inscribed, on rock:/JT. 61. Private collection. Photo: Herbert P. Vose (see plate 12)

luminism and paintings in Europe lies of course in similar sources. The two

main pictorial sources open to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century

landscapists, Claude Lorrain and the Dutch, were precisely those drawn upon

by the Americans, who continued using them later than their European

colleagues. It is very likely that the open-ended unframed compositions that

characterize luminism derive at least in part from seventeenth-century Dutch

art. Traditional Hudson River compositions rely more heavily on the lateral

tree frames of the Claudian mode, as well as on other conventions of Claudian

organization (the foreground coulisse, the middle-ground pool of water, the

distant mountain). These are used almost interchangeably by some members of

the school for bucolic or pastoral effect.

When some of these same artists—especially Kensett—produce luminist

pictures, the Dutch paradigms are transformed into compositions in which the

sky occupies less space, and the horizontal format is further emphasized

(Shrewsbury River; fig. 202). The Dutch paintings are often melting and

painterly in touch (Jan van Goyen, Aelbert Cuyp). Their American luminist

counterparts, harder and more crystalline in surface handling, frequently

abandon the almost monochromatic gold of the Dutch for local color exuding

cool luminist light. They are also more deliberately classic in their orientation

to the plane.

The most significant American addition to the open-ended Dutch convention is the classic alignment of planes. Luminist classicism, in this instance, has

little to do with what has been called the "classical" tradition of the Claudian

 NOVAK
landscape. Rather it represents an alternative convention which, in abandoning Claudian prototypes, draws not only on the example of the Dutch but on

the primitive orientation to the plane and on certain pragmatic responses to

what John Neal called the "prose" of nature.7

That prose is transformed into poetry by luminist artists through a powerful

penetration of the real. It is not a poetry imposed, through certain conventions

of the picturesque, upon nature. It is a poetry floated up to the surface from

within nature and made manifest by a source of light that also wells up from

within.

On Luminist Light

The nature of luminist light has been widely misunderstood. Like any muchused term, luminism is now subject to a certain amount of debasement. In lay

parlance, any painting in which light is the most expressive feature may be

called luminist. For me, this abandons other factors, both formal and philosophical, crucial to the definition of luminism.

Luminist light is indeed one of the key factors of the mode. It is, in fact,

questionable whether we are dealing with luminism at all if the light is not

present. But luminist light has its own specific properties, just as impressionist

light has. Luminist light tends to be cool, not hot, hard not soft, palpable rather

than fluid, planar rather than atmospherically diffuse. Luminist light radiates,

gleams, and suffuses on a different frequency than atmospheric light. With

atmospheric light, which is essentially painterly and optical, air circulates

between particles of strokes. Air cannot circulate between the particles of

matter that comprise luminist light.

Luminist radiance occurs not because of interactions, overlaps, and dissolutions of stroke, but because of minute tonal modulations, nearly invisible when

viewed close-up. From a distance, the coalescence of these tonalities mimics the

effect of radiant light and negates the idea of paint. For this reason, many

paintings by Lane do not yield their full quota of light until viewed from afar.

An impressionist painting, such as a Monet, might also radiate light effects but

rarely loses its equal insistence on paint.

The smooth glow of luminist light is only on few occasions (as in K0bke's

Frederiksborg Castle, Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen) found in European paintings. Even Friedrich does not achieve it. His surfaces are more mat.

Despite the smoothness of surface, his light exists more as painted color than as

crystalline transparency. Paint, touch, handling, stroke interfere with the purity

of luminist light. Soft, atmospheric, painterly light is not luminist light. It is

something else. How much can stroke be allowed to mediate the textures of

light in a painting we wish to call luminist>

On Stroke

The absence or presence of stroke would seem to be a decisive factor in

13. Washington Allston. Moonlit Landscape, 1819. Oil on canvas. 0.610 x 0.889 (24 x 35 in).

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Gift of Dr. W. S. Bigelow (not in exhibition)

determining whether we are dealing with luminism. Stroke carries with it the

sense of paint. When this happens, the idea of light as pure emanation gives

way to an idea of paint that approximates or represents light. The illusion is

lifted. We remember we are dealing with a painting of light, not with light

itself. The reminder of the actual process of painting recalls to us the agent of

process, the painter. It denotes not only the artists activity, but the artist's

presence. That presence introduces us to a self, who, as it were, stands between

the image seen and the spectator. The more that artist's self, embedded in the

"signature" of stroke, occupies our attention, the less we are dealing with the

selfless image of luminism.

Stroke also transmits an idea of ongoing time. Luminist time is absolute. It is

Platonic and Newtonian. It is a "shaped" time, controlled by strict measure.

There are good art-historical reasons for reading paintings in terms of time as

well as space. The introduction of the relativism of stroke violates luminist

eternity, which has already been set by the mensurational definition and planar

parallels of luminist structure.

Stroke lessens the hyper-clarity of object penetration central to John I. H.

Baur's 1954 definition of luminism. In luminism, the absence of stroke

heightens the textural properties of natural elements beyond the compass of

normal vision: the hard, taut ripples in a lake, the crystallinity of rocks, the

NOVAK 25
t4- Robert Salmon. Boston Harbor from Constitution Wharf (View ofCharlestown, 1833), 1833. Oil on canvas. 0.680 x 1.035 (26% x 40% in). United States Naval Academy Museum,

Annapolis, Maryland

26 NOVAK
15. Albert Bierstadt. The Marina Piccolo,, Capri, 1859.

Oil on canvas. 1.167 x 1.829 (42 x 72 in). Inscribed, l.r.:

A. Bierstadt, 1859. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Gift of Albert Bierstadt

16. William Stanley Haseltine. Marina Piccola, Capri, 1856. Oil on paper on canvas. 0.305 x 0.470 (12 x

i8y2 in). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.;

Gift of Mrs. Roger H. Plowden, 1953 (below)

minute identities of pebbles. Luminist anonymity erases both artist and spectator and penetrates thingness, the ding an sick of which Aldous Huxley has

written.8

Though Baur did not include luminist classic structure in his definition,9 he

stressed the selflessness of the smooth luminist surface. The expressive impact

of luminism is dependent on the glassy surface, which transforms paint into a

substance that shines and emanates. The medium itself is subsumed by the

illusively hyper-real image. The linear edges of reality are pulled taut, strained

almost to the point of breaking. This is why I have called luminism a kind of

impersonal expressionism.10

On Silence

We can also say that stroke, carrying action, implies sound. A key correlative of

luminism is silence. Luminist silence, like luminist time, depends on measured

control. Without movement between strokes or between units of form, we hear

nothing. Luminist silence implies presence through the sense of thereness

rather than through activity. Inaudibility is a correlative of immobilized time

and objects. Contemporary critics spoke of Kensetfs repose. Yet luminist SINOVAK 27
17. William Stanley Haseltine. Capri, 1869. Oil on canvas. 0.505 x 0.802 (19% x 31% in).

Inscribed, 1.1.: W S Haseltine/'1869 Rome. The Cleveland Museum of Art; Purchase, Mr.

and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund

On Luminist Chronology

It seems unprofitable to set a clear developmental timetable for luminism.

Depending upon our criteria for definition, we might want to consider

Washington Allston's Coast Scene on the Mediterranean (i8n; fig. 101), with its

open-ended composition and radiant back-lighting, the earliest luminist painting in America. If we call such a painting proto-luminist, we can probably push

the problem ahead several decades, to include such works as Robert Salmon's

Boston Harbor from Constitution Wharf (1833; fig. 14), Thomas Cole's A merican

Lake Scene (1844; Detroit Institute of the Arts), and the remarkable genre

pictures by William Sidney Mount (Eel Spearing at Setauket, fig. 256) and

George Caleb Bingham (Fur Traders Descending the Missouri) Metropolitan

Museum of Art, New York) around 1845. Bingham's Fur Traders especially is an

archetypical example not only of luminist light but of luminist structure. There

is an increasing incidence of luminist pictures in the oeuvre of Lane, Heade,

Kensett, and, with variable frequency, Asher B. Durand, Sanford GifFord,

Jasper E Cropsey, William Bradford, William S. Haseltine, Frederic E. Church,

and Albert Bierstadt (to name only major figures) through the fifties and into

the sixties. Though Lane dies in 1865, others continue to make luminist paintings after that time. But a strict developmental emphasis somewhat mitigates

our view of luminism as a mode, larger than style, to which many American

artists had access at will, when need so dictated.

lence, in the repose of inaction, represents not a void but a palpable space, in

which everything happens while nothing does. We have here a visual analogue

of Eckhart's "central silence,55 and Thoreau5s "restful kernel in the magazine of

the universe.5511

On Size

The intimacy of the luminist mode sets certain limits on size. In contrast with

more ambitious Hudson River school rhetoric, there are few large luminist

paintings. Yet the paradox is that we seem to be dealing with what Gaston

Bachelard has called "intimate immensity55: "As soon as we become motionless,

we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense . . . immensity is

the movement of motionless man.5512 Thus the measured spaces of luminism

are immense in scale, though small in size. This is further evidence of its

conceptual nature.

Though much nineteenth-century nature painting in America was to some

extent touched by transcendental attitudes, luminism was the most profound

expositor of transcendental feelings toward God and nature and God as nature.

Insofar as they were timeless, universal, and mystical, those feelings were best

served in landscape painting by luminist classic structure, luminist selflessness,

and luminist light.

We return to the problem stated earlier. What are the priorities we set for

deciding which paintings are luminist? Luminism has many components. In

practice, they often separate out. We encounter paintings with luminist structure, but not luminist light. We discover others with luminist light, but

without the structure. In still others, light and structure are major expressive

factors, but stroke mitigates the egoless mood.

What are we willing to dispense with to place a painting under the rubric of

luminism? Do we abandon anonymous selflessness, and the correlative intensity of object penetration? Then we could allow for the "painterly luminism55

of, say, a GifFord. But is not "painterly luminism55 a contradiction in terms? The

tolerance of stroke will, to some extent, eliminate luminist time as well as the

intense probing of "things55 in nature. It will also eliminate the famous Emersonian transparent eyeball and set the stage for the entrance of personality and

ego into the luminist arena. Yet some works by GifFord, as for example Hook

Mountain} Hudson (1866; fig. 84), fall naturally within the luminist canon.

Beyond this, can we not sometimes speak of luminist characteristics or properties, without the need to label a whole painting luminist?

28 NOVAK
It becomes evident, as I have said elsewhere, that there are few pure luminist

artists.13 But there are pure luminist works. Perhaps if we see luminism more

readily not as a movement but as a mode to which artists had recourse

whenever it was formally and philosophically viable, we might also clarify our

guidelines for definition. It is time we attached to the term the lucidity that

luminism itself implies.

Notes

18. Frederic Edwin Church. The Icebergs (The North), 1861. Oil on canvas. 1.632 x 2.851

(64% x U2% in). Inscribed, E E. Church/ &6i. Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Anonymous gift. Photo: Sotheby Parke Bernet (see plate 19)

1. Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth

Century: Realism, Idealism and the American Experience

(New York, 1969), 105.

2. See Heinrich Wolfflin, Principles of Art History (New

York, 1932).

3. Novak, American Painting, 126 ff.

4. See E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (New York,

1960) especially chap. 9, pp. 291 ff.

5. Webster's New World Dictionary, College Edition

(Cleveland and New York, 1960), 742.

6. See Barbara Novak, "Influences and Affinities: The

Interplay Between America and Europe in Landscape

Painting before 1860" in The Shaping of Art and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century America [Metropolitan

Museum of Art] (New York, 1972), 27-41. See also Novak,

American Painting, 9,55.

7. See Harold E. Dickson, ed., Observations on American Art: Selections from the Writings ofJohnNeal (1793-1876),

Pennsylvania State College Studies no. 12 (State College,

Pa., 1943), 46.

8. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (New York,

1954), 28.

9. See John I. H. Baur, "American Luminism, A Neglected Aspect of the Realist Movement in Nineteenth-Century American Painting," in Perspectives USA,

p (Autumn 1954): 92, where Baur observes: "Lane was

not much interested in composition; indeed there is

evidence to show that he scarcely composed at all except

to choose, like a photographer, his place in the landscape

and the extent of his view." Luminism went far beyond

this, I feel, in its calculated planar distinctions and controlled alignments.

10. See Novak, American Painting, 97.

n. Carl Bode, ed., Selected Journals of Henry David

Thoreau (New York, 1967), 33-34, entry for Aug. 13,1838.

12. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (New York,

1964), 184.

13. Novak, American Painting, 95.

NOVAK 29
19- Frederic Edwin Church. The Ox-Bow (after Thomas Cole), 1844-1846.

Oil on canvas. 0.514 x 0.768 (2Ol/4 x 30% in).

Inscribed, 1.1.: FEC. Mr. and Mrs. Andrew S. Peters, New Jersey

30
Design and Measurement in LuministArt

Lisa Fellows Andrus

LUMINISM HOLDS A UNIQUE PLACE IN AMERICAN ART. As one aspect of a

mode of painting based on measurement and design, it shares stylistic attributes with such indigenous American artists as Copley and Eakins: with its

portrayal of the specific and familiar according to precepts of pictorial order,

luminism is characterized by a heightened perception of reality carefully organized and controlled by principles of design.1

 As one of the styles of landscape

painting to emerge in the nineteenth century, luminism embraced the contemporary preoccupation with nature as a manifestation of God's grand plan. It

was luminism more than any of the other schools that succeeded in imbuing an

objective study of nature with a depth of feeling. This was accomplished

through a genuine love and understanding of the elements of nature—

discernible in the intimate arrangement of leaves on a bough—and their

arrangement to reveal the poetry inherent in a given scene.

If we cannot explain the quality of an artist's perception or sensibility that

causes him to create paintings in a certain style, we can at least examine

contemporary attitudes toward art and nature that may have influenced his

stance toward reality and composition. Particularly important in reflecting and

influencing the landscape painter's viewpoint are the "Letters on Landscape

Painting" Asher B. Durand published in The Cmyon in 1855 and i8562 and the

works of John Ruskin, the first of which appeared as volume one of Modern

Painters in 1847. Such writings along with instruction books provided precepts

and procedures for the creation of landscape paintings through measurement

and design.

The first principle of landscape painting in the mid-nineteenth century was

the preeminence of nature over art. Consequently, the young artist was advised

not to seek tutelage with a master or to study books and other paintings before

he had first learned all he could from a dedicated study of nature. He must

"scrupulously accept whatever she presents him, until he shall, in a degree, have

become intimate with her infinity. .. . I would see you impressed, imbued to

the full with her principles and practice," Durand wrote, "and after that

develope [sic] the principles and practices of art."3

The young artist turned to nature to learn her alphabet, the multiplicity of

her forms—the way a weed grows, the life history of a tree as evidenced in the

conformation of limbs, the effect of atmosphere on light and color, the mathematical ratios of reflections on water. By studying nature with such intensity he

increased his power of sight and his ability to define forms. Even more

important, he developed his capacity for love, love that grew with knowledge,

seeing what was there exactly for what it was without artifice or false sentiment.

As Ruskin explained, "Sight is a more important thing... than drawing; and I

would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love Nature, than teach

the looking at Nature that they may learn to draw."4 It was only through the

cultivation of the eye, the mind, and the heart, as well as the hand, that an artist

could hope to create paintings that elevated the portrayal of nature. It was this

transformation from fact to art that had to be learned for oneself and could not

be taught.

Studying with an established artist or adopting the conventions found in

books as a shortcut for the representation of nature only replaced technique for

perception, and the American landscape painter abhorred the substitution of

the hand of man for the hand of God. As Durand explained, a painting "will be

great in proportion as it declares the glory of God by a representation of his

works, and not the works of man."5

Durand and Ruskin were so persuasive in their advocacy of this, the first step

in a young painter's education, that many artists made the mistake of thinking

that imitation was all that was required in finished pictures. The true beauty in

nature, however, could only be conveyed through a careful selection and

composition of her forms. Once the elements of nature were fully understood,

therefore, Durand recommended the study of books and other paintings for an

understanding of the principles of art, but always with the reservation that the

31
tudent weigh these against his own observations.6 The rules of art must not

ntrude upon a true appreciation of nature.

Painters could turn to several different sources to learn about selection and

design in landscape. First were writings on the picturesque, most notably the

eries of volumes by William Gilpin. Although Gilpin's point of view was

pictorial—he gave the art-idea precedence over truth to nature—he did de

cribe types of composition that were adapted by the luminist artists to create

works in a more natural mode. Second, were the manuals designed to teach the

Anglo-Dutch tradition of landscape to painters of watercolor. The guidelines

provided by these books were the most useful to the luminists since they taught

he artists how to emphasize order already present within nature. Third, were

he works of Ruskin with their celebration of J. M. W. Turner, providing a

isionary interpretation of reality that countered the more orthodox luminist

ommitment to the view selected. Even though these three approaches to

andscape painting were strikingly different, it was not unusual for one artist to

work in more than one mode or, as Frederic Church did, to create paintings in

ll three.

The books by William Gilpin provided the most conventional formulas for

he selection of a view for a painting. Taking as models the pastorals of Claude

Lorraine and the stormy landscapes of Salvator Rosa, Gilpin sought out

cenery in the British Isles that resembled these canvases. The pictures accom

anying his texts were general enough to provide prototypes for American

rtists seeking appropriate views in their own country and included variations

n only a few basic motifs. The scenery chosen was rough and uncultivated,

with mountains in the background; a lake, winding river, or hills in the middle

istance; and an irregular foreground usually with rocks, dead trees, or a few

lumps of shrubs providing a base for the composition. The tripartite division

f the picture was further conventionalized by the gradation of tones: usually a

ark foreground, a light middle ground, and a tone in between for the distance.

A framing element such as a tree, an outcropping rock, or the slope of a

mountain embraced the main view and further guided the eye in the progres

ion through the landscape.7

Once the major subject had been selected the artist still had to adjust his

iewpoint and arrange the minor elements to create "a harmonius whole."8 He

ould choose an asymmetrical disposition of forms so that the dark foreground

was set off from the distance by a strong diagonal. This was the type of

omposition used by Thomas Cole and Church in their representations of the

Oxbow River (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and fig. 19) and by

Albert Bierstadt in his View from the Wind River Mountains, Wyoming (1860; fig.

36). Or the artist could select the more usual symmetrical massing of forms that

arried the eye back to the center of the picture.

Although the master subject was to be portrayed substantially as found—

Durand believed this was more important than Gilpin—it was not to be

xpected that the secondary elements such as rocks and trees would necessarily

20. Thomas Cole. The Clove, Catskills, 1827. Oil on canvas. 0.635 x 0.838 (25 x 33 in). New

Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut; Charles F. Smith Fund.

Photo: E. Irving Blomstrann

be of the appropriate form or that they would occupy the most auspicious place

in the view.9 The subordinate motifs could, therefore, be arranged at will; and,

according to the principles of picturesque beauty, they should be selected and

distributed to provide interest and contrast. Consequently, the foreground was

rough and broken and often strewn with lichen-covered rocks and decaying

logs to set off the more regular forms in the middle distance. Trees were useful

to provide a vertical accent to a predominantly horizontal view, and both trees

and rocks could be placed to lead the eye to the center of the composition. In

Cole's The Clove, Catskills (1827; fig. 20), for example, our gaze is directed in a

zigzag pattern from the contrasting light-colored rocks in the left foreground,

across on a diagonal to the gnarled tree on the right, then to the left and the

rocky outcropping with the waterfall, and to the right, left, and right again in

the three overlapping mountains. These succeeding components in the composition act as relays, conducting our perusal of the scene further back to the

climax at the opalescent horizon. While the clove itself was a well-known

example of a picturesque view in America, our experience of the view is

carefully orchestrated by the character and the placement of the subordinate

elements and the calculated contrast of dark and light.

2 ANDRUS
21. Thomas Cole. Summer Sunset, 1834. Oil on wood panel. Inscribed, back of panel: T

Cole/Catskill/i834. 0.343 x 0.495 (^3% x 19% in). The New-York Historical Society, New

York

The selection of the view and the situation of the major and minor forms

according to Gilpin's formulation still did not determine whether a painting

was substantially picturesque or true to nature. This was decided by the

treatment or manner of representation, whether an artist turned to a conventional or perceptual portrayal of the elements of nature.

Before an objective representation of nature could elicit the kind of aesthetic

response described by Ruskin and Durand, nature had first to be deemed

worthy of artistic consideration. Criteria were thus first established by Gilpin

in choosing the paintings of Claude Lorraine and Salvator Rosa as models.

These artists served as intermediaries between art and an aesthetic appreciation

of nature through the portrayal of landscape in terms that were recognizably

pastoral or sublime. The elements of nature as depicted by Claude and Rosa

became conventions adapted by other artists seeking the same kind of literary

associations.

Thomas Cole as founder of the American school of landscape painting

adapted the principles of picturesque beauty and the conventions of Claude

and Salvator Rosa to his representation of the native scenery and opened up a

path that eventually led to an appreciation of nature without the intermediary

of artistic formulas. Although he had been influenced by Wordsworth to see

22. Asher Brown Durand. Sunset, 1878. Oil on canvas. 0.635 x 0.940 (25 x 37 in).

Inscribed, 1.1.: A.B. Dumnd/iSyS. The New-York Historical Society, New York

nature as a manifestation of the Divine Being, Cole was still attached to the

pictorial and associative qualities that precluded a true appreciation of nature.

He did make drawings of views, but he disliked painting specific scenes which

he considered mechanical exercises. Instead, he believed the artist should create

original compositions based on a selection and combination of his sketches. He

wrote to Durand that it was important to "wait for time to draw a veil over the

common details, the unessential parts, which shall leave the great features,

whether the beautiful or the sublime dominant in the mind."10

The representation of nature as a revery of impressions most often elicited

stereotyped compositions and conventional treatment: the irregular rhythms

of the contours of the land, the reflecting body of water, the graceful framing

tree, the stumps, dead limbs, and clumps of weeds, and over all, an enveloping,

generalizing haze. Cole's Summer Sunset (1834; fig. 21) and Catskill Creek (1845;

fig. 69) and Durand's Sunset (1878; fig. 22) were paintings made with other

paintings in mind and the experiences in the open air temporarily forgotten.

The nondescript landscape forms treated in a general manner do not refer to a

specific place but are dream images recalled through the golden haze of Claude.

Why Durand should create such paintings after damning the "poisons of

conventions" in his "Letters" is difficult to understand.11 He had praised

Claude's portrayal of light but at the same time condemned the substitution of

amere[ly] pleasing pictures" for a "true representation of nature."12

ANDRUS 33
The treatment of landscape in conventionally poetic terms announced the

presence of the artist's sensibility within the picture. The painter could also

assert himself through the touch of paint on the canvas. Cole's paintings often

contain an energy that speaks more of the man than of nature. We are aware of

movement through the leaves, in the reach of limbs, and even running through

ocks. The artist's brushstroke becomes a factor in animating nature with his

personality. It is difficult to look at a painting by Cole without thinking of Cole,

himself.

In Durand's Kaaterskill Clove (1866; fig. 23), on the other hand, it is possible

o lose all sense of the artist and self in an appreciation of nature. The main

features of the view are the same as in Cole's Clove, Catskills and follow the

general formulation for a picturesque view with a dark foreground, framing

rees, and distant mountains; but the selection of the subordinate elements and

heir treatment are not guided by conventional formulas. Nature is not made to

appear pastoral or theatrical or anything other than itself. Durand's picture is

much less dramatic than Cole's and more fully integrated. The rocks and trees

n the foreground seem less studio props than inherent parts of the scene.

Durand has avoided the typically picturesque twisted boughs and cascading

waterfall. His trees are not dependent upon a conjunction of ideas for their

nterest but upon the close observation of specific individuals studied for their

unique qualities. The fallen trees are evidently carefully placed to provide

23. Asher Brown Durand. Kaaterskill Clove, 1866. Oil on canvas. 0.972 x 1.524 (38y4 x 60

in). Inscribed, l.r.: A.B.Dumnd/i866. The Century Association, New York. Photo: Frick

Art Reference Library

opposition to those still standing, to underscore the position of the rocks

beneath them, and to direct our eye to the clove, but their role, although

important, is a subtle one. They appear as they might have been found and do

not call attention to themselves through association with the pastoral or

sublime or the artist's touch. Although Durand did experiment with a protoimpressionist technique in some of his studies, his purpose was clearly to depict

nature as truthfully as possible, not to assert his own presence; and in fact, we

are more aware of the textures of nature than brushstroke and paint.13 In

Kaaterskill Clove, the principles of art are clearly used at the service of nature to

reveal the poetry inherent in a well-known view.

With a greater concern for a perceptual representation of nature came a new

emphasis on the accurate portrayal of the sky and light. Although Gilpin had

recommended the observation of weather conditions and of light at different

times of the day, his admiration was reserved for glowing sunsets reminiscent

of Claude and for the contrast of overcast and broken skies that accounted for

alternating tones across the landscape.14 In Cole, light and weather were also

used for effect rather than a measure of perceptions. They set the mood for his

paintings—a radiant harmony for his Summer Sunset and drama and contrast in

The Clove, Catskills. In Durand'sKaaterskill Clove, on the other hand, a perception of atmospheric perspective becomes the main subject of the painting, for

the artist replaced Cole's picturesque alternation of dark and light with progressively paler tones for the receding mountains. Durand had described in his

"Letters" the properties of atmosphere as "the power which defines and

measures space ... a veil or medium interposed between the eye and all visible

objects. .. . It \s felt in the foreground, seen beyond that, and palpable in the

distance. It spreads over all objects the color which it receives from the sky in

sunlight or cloudlight."15

Until the end of his life, Durand continued to describe his moisture-laden

skies within a narrow range of values. He recommended gray as "the principal

ingredient in atmospheric tone"16 and avoided the brilliant colors and crystalline air often portrayed by the luminists. He persevered in his admiration for

Claude's representation of light, atmosphere, and water; his acknowledgment

of Turner's contribution to the depiction of skies was vague and probably no

more than a concession to the popularity of Ruskin.17 Durand had refined the

perception of certain types of atmospheric conditions, but it remained for

others to discover the pictorial possibilities of light outside of the conventional

categories.

The increased concern with the perceptual representation of light in the 18508

was a result of the value placed on the objective study of nature in the open air

and the growing distrust of theory and conventions that did not coincide with

personal experience. Ruskin's M0*fera Painters which was "in every landscape

painter's hand"18 reaffirmed the merit of relying on sight rather than tradition.

His descriptive passages were widely admired for their eloquence, perception,

and scientific knowledge.19 He devoted four chapters alone to an analysis of the

34 ANDRUS
26. Sanford Robinson Gifford. Mt. Mansfield, 1858. Oil on canvas. 0.178 x 0.356 (7 x 14

in). Inscribed, 1.1.: S.R. GIFFORD. The George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum,

Springfield, Massachusetts. Photo: Jill Gibbons Hammond

24. George Inness. The Close of Day, 1863. Oil on canvas. 0.635 x 0.889 (25 x 35 in).

Inscribed, l.r.: Geo. Inness, 1863. The J. B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky

25. Martin Johnson Heade. South American River, 1868. Oil on canvas. 0.660 x 0.571 (26 x

22!/2 in). Inscribed, 1.1.: M] Heade 68. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; M. and M. Karolik

Collection (at right)

sky and clouds.20 Unquestionably Ruskin inspired many to see for the first time

effects and forms in nature they had previously barely observed.

By the 18505 the features of the picturesque composition—rough foreground, reflecting body of water in the middle ground, and mountains in the

distance—were a commonplace. There was even a standard circuit taken by

artists and tourists of the picturesque spots in the mountains of New York state

and New England. The most favorable viewpoints for observing the famous

scenery were often marked by a rest house and publicized in books illustrated

by the traveling artists.21 It must have been the most natural thing in the world

for the painter to stroll through the countryside with his sketchbook or

painting paraphernalia in hand looking for the site where the scenery arranged

itself to create the expected relationships.

ANDRUS 35
The picturesque composition continued to be employed well into the i88os.

t provided a balanced arrangement of the features of the landscape that

eemed particularly satisfying and that could be adapted to a variety of intents,

rom poetic revery to a perceptual rendering of a carefully selected view.

Among the most subjective canvases were those of George Inness, an intense,

brooding man who sought to infuse his paintings with the divine through the

medium of his own spirituality rather than an objective portrayal of God's

handiwork. In such pictures as The Close of Day (1863; fig. 24), the master

ubject is not a distant mountain but the double appearance of the setting sun

glowing in the hazy sky and reflected in the water, the dual image enframed by

he vertical tree, the land masses, and clouds. A similar arrangement of light

and forms can be found in Martin Johnson Headers South American River (1868;

fig. 25) and Church's Morning in the Tropics (1877; fig. 128), but the exotic

vegetation is more precisely delineated than Inness' generalized landscape

elements and nearly engulfs the double core of light. These two paintings are

neither the subjective dream images of Inness, nor the perceptual renderings of

pecific views, but compositions created from sketches and memory

Church was also capable of a pastoral interpretation of the typically pic

uresque composition. In his Mt. Ktaadn (1853; fig. 194), he introduces the

graceful elm, watering cows, road rutted with wheel marks, bridge, and cluster

of buildings that appear so often in European antecedents. The conviction that

comes from the study of perceived truths, that is evident in the predominance

given to the sky, the clarity of the atmosphere, and the rendering of the

contours of the mountain, is diminished by the incorporation of the timeworn

conventions.

The picturesque composition was given new vitality in the views of the

American wilderness. Instead of reiterating the pictorial cliches set forth by

Gilpin and prevalent in the European tradition of landscape painting, artists

now made new discoveries. In Church's Sunset (1856; fig. 89) mdTwilightin the

Wilderness (1860; fig. 204) the elements of the landscape are portrayed with an

eye for the unique qualities that made each view distinctive from all others. The

rocks and trees are rough and untamed but not histrionic. They are rendered

with regard to their individual characteristics, not just in the foreground but as

foreground blends into the middle distance. The contours of the hills and

mountains have a singularity about them, and they are sharply delineated, not

obscured by the intervening atmosphere. For the first time we are aware of the

ground and water as a horizontal plane extending into the distance, the

penetration of space measured and marked by a rock or shrub or reflections.

More than anything else, it is the lucidity of the atmosphere and the quality of

he light that gives the views freshness and specificity by sharpening forms and

recording time of day and weather conditions. In Sunset', all the elements of the

andscape conduct our eye from the lower left to the right and the point of

greatest contrast in the sky. The curving and broken trees on the left introduce

he movement that is carried along the irregularly descending foreground and

distant mountains and the horizontal reflections in the water. The momentum

to the right is halted and directed upward by the rising foreground and rocks.

In Twilight in the Wilderness our eye is led to the sky by the framing tree,

the reflecting body of water, and the dip in the mountains in the center of the

canvas. In both paintings the landscape serves as a mediator for the brilliant

effects above that could only be realized by the intense perception of specific

conditions. In Twilight in the Wilderness we are especially struck by the carefully

studied cloud formations and are reminded of Ruskin's descriptions of the

types of clouds, their transparency and evanescence, the role of the wind in

their configuration, and the effect of light and color.22 By capturing the

transient effects of light, when the color is constantly changing, Church gave

the painting of landscape views an immediacy and new meaning.

The prominence given to the sky in Sunset and Twilight in the Wilderness is

largely a factor of the new breadth of the composition: the large portion of the

canvas devoted to sky and water, the horizontal continuance of the mountains

uninterrupted by a pronounced summit, and the open penetration of the

framing trees. The effect of the panoramic composition is to render the

painting less "pictorial," less self-sufficient, less an exclusive entity with reference only to itself, and more a segment of a larger whole, of a horizontal

extension expanding for 360 degrees.

Sanford Gifford developed a modification of the picturesque composition

that enabled him to emphasize his major concern and master subject, the effects

of light and color. He selected and modified views to create bowls of the

landscape to serve as containers for the light-filled air. In his most conventional

compositions,Mt. Mansfield (1858; fig. 26) andOctoberin the Catskills (1880; fig.

4), the mountains rise up on either side of the view to embrace the color-filled

atmosphere. The clarity of the trees and rocks in the foreground are in contrast

with the veiled forms in the distance. Gifford believed that "the really important matter is not the natural object itself, but the veil or medium through

which we see it."23 More than anyone else's, Gifford's paintings describe the

quality of atmosphere noted by Durand: "It is felt in the foreground, seen

beyond that, and palpable in the distance. It spreads over all objects the color

which it receives from the sky in sunlight or cloudlight."24 Gifford's contribution was to portray the atmosphere as a vehicle for color rather than a modifier

of tone.

October in the Catskills was preceded by two other paintings, Kauterskill Falls

(1862; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and Sunset in the Adirondack

(1865; private collection),25 where the same compositional format was adapted

to different views. Very similar trees on the left, together with secondary trees

and rocks, provide a frame for the color-laden atmosphere and indistinct

mountains and waterfalls. In Twilight on Hunter Mountain (c. 1865; fig. 85), the

bowl is adjusted to a more panoramic scene. A preliminary sketch (1865;

Sketchbook IV, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York) reveals that Gifford

regularized and broadened the depression and shifted it to the center of the

6 ANDRUS
27

. Jasper Francis Cropsey. Evening at Paestum^

1856. Oil on panel. 0.241 x 0.394 (9% x 15% in).

Inscribed, Lr.:J.E Cropsey 1856. Vassar College Art

Gallery, Poughkeepsie, New York. Photo: Peter A.

Juley & Son (above)

28. Sanford Robinson Gifford. Roman Campagna^

1859. Oil on canvas. 0.152 x 0.258 (6 x 10% in). In-

scribed, l.r.: S R Gifford 59. Vassar College Art Gal-

lery, Poughkeepsie, New York. Photo: Peter A.

Juley & Son (above, right)

29. Frederic Edwin Church. The Parthenon, 1871.

Oil on canvas. 1.122 x 1.832 (44

3

/i

6 x 72y8 in)

. Inscribed,

1.1.: E E. Church/i87i. The Metropolitan Museum of

Art, New York; Bequest of Maria De Witt Jesup, 1915

(right)

ANDRUS 37
30. Sanford Robinson Gifford. The Ruins of the Parthenon, 1868. Oil on canvas. 0.705 x 1.356 (27% x 53% in).

Inscribed, 1.1.: S R Gifford 1880. The Corcoran Gallery of

Art, Washington, D.C.

icture so that it complemented the ascending curve of the mountain in the

ackground; he thus created an oval of mountain and valley bisected by the

tand of trees in the middle distance. Gifford carefully repositioned the fallen

ogs to underscore the slope of the depression and the tree stumps to mark off

istances. The thoughtful placement of the minor forms to create a sense of

alance and measured ratios is equivalent to his weighing of color sensations:

he lavender of the mountain against the complementary yellow of the sky and

he touches of complementary green in the red landscape.

The quality of measure and precision that Gifford introduced into his

ictures had the effect of rendering them less picturesque. Twice he painted

amous views and reduced the characteristics that had previously made them

ictorial. When Cole and Jasper Cropsey portrayed the Roman campqgna

Roman Campqgna, 1843, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; Eve

ing at Paestum, 1856; fig. 27) they depicted the foreground as rough and

roken and emphasized the irregularity of the ruins diminishing the classical

ualities of poise and mensuration. Gifford, on the other hand, smoothed out

he landscape to create a shallow depression that rises to meet the vertical

rcade and harmonizes with the descending slope of the mountain (fig. 28). He

lso eliminated the broken, solitary piers that lent Cole's and Cropsey's paint

ngs their air of picturesque decay. He preferred to maintain the diagonal

lignment of the lintels and thereby preserve the integrity of the classical

architecture. Interestingly enough, by substituting measure and precision for

the picturesque conventions of rough and irregular forms Gifford convinces us

of his commitment to the truth of the view; and, yet, this was also an invention,

a transformation of the given topography according to principles of design.

Nothing could more dramatically illustrate Gifford's subordination of the

elements of a view to the quality of light and air than a comparison of Church's

and Gifford's representations of the Parthenon. In Church's painting (1871; fig.

29), based on a photograph,26 the point of view was clearly selected to make the

Parthenon the master subject of the composition. It is given prominence by its

position in the center of the pictorial field on a slight rise of ground, silhouetted

against the sky, and bathed in light. Its poise and serenity are set off by the

framing columns on the right, in contrast to the jumble of large-scale fragments

cast in shadow in the foreground.

In Gifford's painting (1880; fig. 30), the master subject is the view from the

Acropolis with the southwest corner of the Parthenon on the left and a

medieval tower and the Erechtheum on the right enframing the distant bay and

mountains. The foreground is nearly empty The fragments now in the middle

distance and of the same scale as the temple lead our eye up to the columns with

the crisp play of light and shade on the flutes set off against the expanse of sky.

Gifford was fascinated by the Parthenon. He meticulously measured it and

noted its subtle curvature, but the painting he created he considered "not a

8 ANDRUS
picture of a building but a picture of a day."27

 Although the Parthenon is but a

fragment in Gifford's version, the painting as a whole is more classical than

Church's. The nearly empty foreground, the horizontal sweep of bay and

mountains poised between the verticals of the architecture, and the gentle

concavity of the ground relate to the lessons learned from measuring the

building rather than reproducing it. Church's use of scale-jump and the

diagonal shadow are baroque in comparison; the elements of the picturesque,

whether they were applied to landscape or architecture, were based on irregular rhythms and contrast. The more measured and serene the composition the

less it had to do with picturesque beauty.

Whereas the picturesque composition continued to be the preferred format

of American artists for representing views of mountains, lakes, and winding

rivers, there was an increased desire to portray segments of nature that Gilpin

would have found simply uninteresting. The landscape lacked the distinctive

master subject, the terrain did not have enough variety or contrast, the foreground sometimes extended into space without being distinguished as a

separate plane, and the minor elements of lichen-covered rock and decaying log

might be omitted altogether. But what was most telling was the omission of a

framing element that penetrated significantly above the horizon. Such views

were particularly fresh because the reference was clearly to nature itself rather

than to pictorial conventions. As early as 1850 Church painted Twilight, "Short

Arbiter TwixtDay andNight" (fig. 205), where the unassuming landscape serves

as a foil for the effects of the sky. Only the rocks on the left provide enough of a

contrast and of a modified frame to show that the conventions of the picturesque were not entirely forgotten.

William Hart made a conscious effort to avoid picturesque conventions

altogether in his Upland Meadow (1872; fig. 31). Traditionally, the foreground

had served as a visual base for the spectator and as a transition into the middle

distance, but in Upland Meadow the foreground forms a triangle that rapidly

draws us into the pictorial space. At the last minute the plunge into the

landscape is blocked by a post and rail that are aligned with a fence further back,

thus opening up the landscape to a broad panorama. The view is entirely

composed of sloping lines creating interlocking triangles. There are no trees to

give a vertical accent to counter the low-lying forms, and the few smooth rocks

are close enough to the same size to provide homogeneity rather than contrast.

Such pictures were only possible when the artist accepted the pictorial ideas

presented by nature rather than tradition.

Upland Meadow provides visual documentation for the principles of landscape painting that Hart described in his lecture as president of the Brooklyn

Academy of Design. While he acknowledged "that art, like everything else, was

founded on theory and governed by rule," he warned the student against

choosing a view simply "because

 cit looked like a picture.'" The result "would

be tame," and the artist justifiably censored for imitating "some ideal picture."

It was better "to select a subject or scene as far removed from the conventional

31. William Hart. Upland Meadow•, 1872. Oil on paper. 0.292 x 0.508 (u% x 20 in).

Inscribed, 1.1.: W71 Hart/i872. Private collection. Photo: Helga Photo Studio

(see plate 27)

as possible" and to establish a point of view that revealed "the individuality of

the scene.. . . Accessories should not be made to appear as the principal in the

completed work"; and, Hart further explained, "'sky treatment5 was of the

highest importance." After working out of doors, the artist should return to

the studio and "contract, intensify, and subject the sentiment to the picture,"

incorporating his own ideas and feelings that caused him to select the view or

that were inspired by it. The artist was advised, however, "not to alter or

modify the scene at the expense of nature and truth."28

John E Kensett was well known for his ability to endow a typically picturesque view with his own poetic feeling.29

 While the general format of his

compositions might be familiar enough (Sunset, Camels Hump, Vermont, c.iSsi;

fig. 80), the details were portrayed with the perception and love Durand and

Ruskin claimed as the true province of the landscape painter. In his representation of light suffused through the atmosphere or reflecting off the limpid

surface of water he created a mood of perceptive meditation that induced the

spectator to see the poetry inherent in nature. Perhaps from a desire to

appreciate nature free of formulas Kensett developed a compositional format

for portraying picturesque views independent of picturesque conventions.

In View Near Cozzens Hotel, West Point (1863; fig. 243), Kensett depicted the

famous scene from an unorthodox vantage point. Instead of symmetrically

enframing the Hudson River with elevated foreground, the sloping headlands

at either side, and distant mountains, as was the general practice, he shifted his

angle of observation to create an asymmetrical composition: the river on the

ANDRUS 39
ft, the western bank on the right, the mountains in the background, and no

oreground at all. In his lecture, Hart explained that the artist "having found his

ubject,... is next to enquire how much of his picture or panorama, of which

e is the centre, he can take in upon the canvas."30 Kensett's decision was to

elect a portion of the panorama that countered Gilpin's definition of the

cturesque: a scene that looked like a picture. Kensett's painting decidedly did

ot look like any picture from the tradition of landscape painting, unless it was a

egment of one of those endless, moving panoramas that had stopped; it was a

egment poised between views of the river and the land. The effect of such a

omposition was threefold. First, it makes the spectator think of a painting less

 an art object and more as a fragment of nature related to a larger whole.

econd, it demonstrates the possibilities of design in unorthodox relation

hips. And third, it reveals how endlessly fascinating is the portrayal of light:

he subtle modulation of tone on the glassy surface of the water, the graduated

eils of atmosphere enveloping the mountains, and the evanescent illumination

 the sky. Again and again, the eye is drawn away from the contrast of color

nd form in the landscape to the water and air as a medium for the play of

minescence.

Because of the prominence given to the sky and so to the effects of light, the

anoramic landscape became the preferred compositional format for the

minist artist, and the coast and marshlands replaced the mountains as the

rimary theme. The extended horizon presented an alternative to the irregular

hythms and enclosed compositions of picturesque beauty and the primary

ormal motif against which minor variations of verticals, diagonals, curves,

regular lines, and parallel horizontals were played. The importance of the

orizon as a straight line, an element of geometry, meant that the other

omponents of the composition must necessarily be placed with a conscious

ess of design which was almost architectonic. The location of each form in

rms of its relationship to every other and the intervals between them became

matter of carefully measured ratios.

The incorporation of measure and design in panoramic compositions had a

umber of origins. Foremost was the importance given to depicting the

pecific and familiar in the earliest landscape paintings made in the New World:

pographical views of gentlemen's seats and townscapes recording the like

ess of a growing metropolis. Related to this concern with the representation

f portraits of places were the portraits of ships. Both types of paintings served

o document appearances for those who were closely associated with the

ubject in question. Accuracy was important, and the pictures were often

rosaic. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, the topographer's

oncern for recording facts was blended with the landscape painter's preoccu

ation with realizing the truth of nature, truth derived from a perceptual study

f the facts filtered through the mind and endowed with a depth of feeling.

The transformation from topography to poetry and from fact to truth was

nhanced by a portrayal of light and the application of principles of design.

There were three sources for the adaptation of design in panoramic compositions. First were the practical techniques used in the making of pictures and the

transferring of images from paper to canvas. Second were the examples from

the tradition of art: the precepts outlined in the instruction books and adapted

by other artists. Third was the artist's own sensibility that enabled him to

realize the potential for design in a given subject. Naturally, the pragmatic,

traditional, and intuitive origins of design were fused in the creation of the final

image.

In the course of his career Fitz Hugh Lane developed from an uninspired

topographer of town and harbor views and a painter of ships' portraits to the

most sensitive of the luminist painters. It was in his early years that he acquired

the tools of his trade: knowledge of perspective and ship's architecture. Undoubtedly it was then that he first relied on the mechanical aids which stood

him in good stead later: a drawing machine to measure distances accurately and

use of transfer lines to transpose the views from his sketchbook to his canvas.31

A comparison of Lane's paintings of Norman's Woe (Normals Woe., Gloucester., 1862, fig. 61; and Normals Woe., 1862, fig. 32) with the drawing on which they

were based (1861; fig. 33) reveals that in his mature style he maintained the

topographer's allegiance to the accuracy of the view but, through the principles

of art, elevated the factual to the poetic. The selection of the scope of the

panorama demonstrates that the process of design was already at work. Lane

chose a point of sight with an eye for the balance of contrasts: the solid curve of

the shore against the void of sea and sky, the reach of land anchored by the

island, one rock in the foreground silhouetted against the water and another

enclosed within the line of the shore. The forms are situated on the paper with a

precision that marks off the recession of space and locks the coast and island

into the plane of water. The smaller rocks act as units of measure charting the

distance across the inlet. The commitment to the carefully measured view is

documented by the ruled grid superimposed over the drawing to aid in the

transfer of the scene to the canvas.

In the two paintings the dimensions and placement of the island and

coastline have been scrupulously reproduced; but contours have been subtly

adjusted, and the details introduced in the first painting to give interest have

been modified or omitted from the second to emphasize the structure of the

composition. The picturesque wrecked hull has been eliminated from the final

version, and the plants in the foreground subordinated. The ripples in the first

canvas are stilled in the second, the three parallel curves moved up the shore to

become tide lines. In both paintings the outlines of the island and rocks have

been regularized toward the geometric. One of the foremost lessons of the

instruction books demonstrated the importance of recognizing geometric

analogies to the forms being copied.32 This was to help in the delineation of

contours—unnecessary, of course, if the artist was using a drawing machine—

and to create order and harmony. The manuals also taught the artist to discover

alignments in nature to create order.33 In the second painting Lane aligns the

0 ANDRUS
33. Fitz Hugh Lane. Norman's Woe, 1861. Pencil

on paper. 0.216 x 0.647 (8y2 x 2$% in). Inscribed,

I.e.: E H. Lane del., 1861. Cape Ann Historical

Association, Gloucester, Massachusetts

32. Fitz Hugh Lane. Normals Woe, 1862. Oil on

canvas. 0.546 x 0.895 (21% x #% in). Cape Ann

Historical Association, Gloucester, Massachusetts

ANDRUS 41
34. Fitz Hugh Lane. Gloucester Harbor at Sunset,

late 18505. Oil on canvas. 0.622 x 0.978 (24.% x 38y2

in). Private collection. Photo: Fogg Art Museum,

Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

reflection of the headland with the rocks in the water. The result is to subordinate the minor elements of the rocks to the more significant pattern created by

the shore and its mirror image. The reflections, not present in the drawing, are

important in setting the mood of crystalline stillness but also in stating the

philosophical relationship of land and sea. The dark form of the land and its

reflection is intersected by the light form of the sea of the same dimensions.

They complement and complete each other. Similarly the prominent horizon is

opposed by the verticals of the schooner's masts. In the first painting the

placement of the boat may have been suggested by the ruled line in the drawing

that intersects the horizontal spit of the island. In the final version the schooner

was placed to the left to create a subtler and more evocative relationship,

countering the panoramic thrust of the painting, the sweeping curve of the

shore and its offshoot, the island, and providing a link between the sea, the

island, and the cloud above. The center of the inlet is now a void around which

the tensions of curves, horizontals, and verticals are poised. Lane discovered

abstract relationships only intimated by the site. The balances he achieved in

his paintings were never stable, never resting on a firm foundation, but were

suspended along the horizon like the transfer lines in his drawings and the

riggings of the ships that were often an important part of the pictorial structure.

As a painter of ships' portraits Lane became thoroughly familiar with

different kinds of vessels, the shapes of their sails, the lengths of their masts and

spars, and the complex system of ropes, shrouds, and ratlines. In the early

portraits the ships were situated parallel to the picture plane with their sails full.

In his later paintings the ships provide a structure superimposed on the

glowing sky and luminous sea. They pivot on their axes to define the plane

extending from foreground to horizon. The vertical masts counter the prominent line of the horizon, and the hulls interrupt, then discreetly continue the

lateral thrust through alignment with deck or portholes. Most remarkable is

the fragile balance achieved through a subtle tension among forms. In both

Gloucester Harbor at Sunset (late 18508; fig. 34) andBoston Harbor ^.1850-1855; fig.

239) ships, barks, and schooners revolve around a smaller schooner near the

42 ANDRUS
35. Fitz Hugh Lane. Christmas Cove, Maine, 1863.

Oil on canvas. 0.394 x 0.610 (i$% x 24 in). Private

collection. Photo: Childs Gallery

center of the picture, silhouetted against the evening light. The position of each

vessel relative to the point of balance is determined by a reckoning of its size,

the amount of foreshortening, and the disposition of the sails, furled or

deployed, cast in shadow or in light. In Boston Harbor, for instance, the bark on

the left with dark sails distended approximates in mass the ship on the right

partially hidden by the smaller vessels, its topsails reefed. The schooner in

shadow is countered by the smaller schooner placed against the light, masts

intersecting the horizon and oars extended, a compendium of the poised

balance of the picture as a whole.

In Entrance of Somes Sound from Southwest Harbor (1852; fig. 72), Owl's Head,

PenobscotBay,Maine (1862; fig. 113), andChristmasCove,Maine (1863; fig. 35), the

verticals of the barks are juxtaposed to the low-lying land, their balance echoing

the perpendicular and horizontal relationship established in the right foreground, the man and rowboat in the first two paintings and the rocks and trees

in the third. In both harbor and coast views the vessels' role is crucial in

establishing order and balance through right-angled geometry along the horizon and through the precise measurement of hulls by portholes, masts by

masthoops and spars, and sails by reef bands and reef ropes. The verticals and

horizontals subdivided by increments of mensuration provide lines of regulation against which to gauge the topography of the land and the spacious

latitudes of the sea.

The solution to the problem of creating contrast and order in panoramic

seascapes was provided in part by the very nature of the content: sailing vessels

against the horizon; but there were also present in Lane's paintings artistic

principles that he most likely gleaned from one of the manuals that taught the

Anglo-Dutch tradition of landscape to the painter of watercolors. These

instruction books were much more pragmatic than the theoretical writings of

Durand and went further than Gilpin in particularizing the creation of order in

a variety of landscapes. Although written for watercolorists the rules for

composition and tone could be applied equally well by the painter of oils, and

even the descriptions of techniques were relevant to the luminist artist who

sought to conceal his brushstrokes by a careful blending of tones.

ANDRUS 43
36. Robert Salmon. Boston Harbor from Castle Island, 1839. Oil on

canvas. 1.016 x 1.524 (40 x 60 in). Signed, l.r.: Painted by R. Salmon.

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; Adolph D. and Wilkins C.

Williams Fund, 1973

The most comprehensive of the instruction books on landscape painting

published in the United States was Fielding Lucas' Progressive Drawing Book

(1826-1827), which incorporated the writings of the English watercolorist John

Varley.34 Varley's intention was to give the representation of views variety and

order by achieving a balance through the opposition of forms and tones. He

described the creation of contrast by juxtaposing an irregular shape such as a

rock or a tree with the smooth surface of a body of water in the middle distance

as Gilpin had done, but he also discussed balance through opposition in

panoramic seascapes, a topic which Gilpin had avoided. To relieve the lateral

expanse of the horizon and the recession of planes parallel to the pictorial

surface characteristic of marine paintings Varley stressed the value of foreshortened sailing vessels. He also described how sails adjusted to provide

contrast of dark and light could offset the spacious breadth of sea and sky, and

how reflections on water introduced shade without weight and a streak of light

gives relief to vessels.35 The alternation of dark and light tones was useful for

leading the eye into the picture especially if a light object were placed against a

dark ground and a dark object against a light ground, as Lane had done with

the stones set on the shore and others silhouetted against the inlet in his

paintings of Norman's Woe.36 The principle of "partially intercepting one

object by another, in order to subdue it, for the sake of elevating a third object"

is illustrated in all Lane's paintings of harbors, and the advocation of a little red

to alleviate the prevailing grays and greens of seascapes was met by Lane

through the expediency of a sailor's shirt.37

Ideally, the thoughtful disposition of contrasts created a harmony that

appeared completely natural, the result of "observation" rather than "contrivance." As Varley explained, "All the leading lines, ascending or descending,

should so balance each other from the different sides of a picture, that a ball,

rolling down one of them, should be impelled up on the other side, and so on in

succession, til it settled near the centre of the picture."38

In some of Lane's paintings (Gloucester Harbor at Sunset) the balance of

contrasts achieves a poised stillness that is totally assured. In others (Norman's

Woe) there is a brittle tension as if with the slightest movement the image would

crack. Lane was capable of a fluid handling of forms; but more and more he

created compositions where the abstract relationships were not hidden but

self-evident, and this is what distinguishes his paintings from those closer to

the European tradition such as the work of the English-born Robert Salmon

(fig. 36; also figs. 14,104-105). Reality is selected and composed with an eye for

geometric relationships that provided a structure for observations of the

ever-changing effects of light.

The introduction of sailing vessels in Lane's paintings meant that the balance

44 ANDRUS
38. Fitz Hugh Lane. View in Town Parrish,

1863. Pencil on paper. 0.248 x 0.737 (9% x 29

in). Inscribed, I.e.: E H. Lane del. Cape Ann

Historical Association, Gloucester, Massachusetts

37. Fitz Hugh Lane. Babson and Ellery

Houses, Gloucester, 1863. Oil on canvas. 0.540 x

0.896 (2iV4 x 35V4 in). Inscribed, l.r.: EH.

Lanej86s. Cape Ann Historical Association,

Gloucester, Massachusetts

ANDRUS 45
39- Sanford Robinson Gifford. On the Nile, 1872. Oil on canvas. 0.432 x 0.787 (17 x 31 in).

Inscribed, l.r.: S.R. Gifford, 1872. Eugene B. Sydnor, Jr. Photo: Herbert P. Vose (see

plate 22)

of forms was often intricate, hinging on the delicate weighing of tones on a

sail's patch. Other artists who used the same principles could select views where

the contrasts were far less subtle depending on the situation of a few wellchosen forms or lines to provide contrast with the panoramic horizon.

The types of composition for the organization of views of the sea, shoreline,

or low-lying landscape were limited to the location of an isolated object against

the horizon; the arrangement of forms parallel, diagonal, or curving into the

picture plane; and the asymmetrical placement of rocks or a headland to

interrupt the extension of the horizon.

The most prevalent luminist composition was based on the organization of

the major forms parallel to the picture plane, to emphasize the panoramic

expanse of the taut horizon. According to an article that appeared in the

Art-Union (London) in 1844 the horizontal composition was the most

easily managed, . . . and after that the horizontal and perpendicular. . . . They are ...

productive of more grandeur and solemnity than any others, from the natural associative character of the two orders of forms. A horizon of water is a fine thing in itself, and

never fails, with the contemplative, of ordering up vast associations, and amongst them

those of eternal duration, repose, latent power, and danger. . . .

The [horizontal and perpendicular] possess all the elements of pictorial harmony, that

is, relation on some points, and opposition on others, with subordination of one to the

other: the horizontal is indicative of a universal law of nature, that of a general

subsistence and repose of inanimate matter; and the perpendicular, that of power and

action to preserve its position; added to which the horizontal is its own base, being a

subsistence of all other lines in nature, while the perpendicular requires one.39

The horizontal and perpendicular composition, therefore, had a twofold advantage. It was a straightforward means of creating pictorial order through the

balance of contrasts, and it had universal connotations.

Variety within the format of parallel horizontals could be achieved through

the broken forms of shoals of rocks, the curves of islands, hills, and mountains,

and the uneven contours of clouds and vegetation. Vertical accents were

introduced by the masts of ships, trees, beacons, smokestacks, or even figures.

(Compare, for instance, Lane's Bracks Rock, c.i864 [figs, n, 74, 91, n6-n7], and

Babson andEllery Houses, Gloucester, 1863 [fig. 37; see also fig. 38], Church's Beacon

OffMt. Desert, 1851 [fig. 88], Heade's Thunderstorm, Narragansett Bay, c.i87O

[fig. 10] mdBecalmed, Long Island Sound, 1876 [fig. 249], Gifford's The Desert at

Siout, Egypt, 1874 [fig. 126] and On the Nile, 1872 [fig. 39], and Samuel Colman's

Storm King on the Hudson, 1866 [fig. 148].) In each case the quality of luminism

portrayed was determined not only by the representation of light and the

panoramic composition but by the pervasive quietude and the rigor of the

design.

Heade's paintings and drawings of marshes (figs. 40-42) are among the most

disciplined of those created in the luminist style. In over one hundred pictures40

he worked within a limited vocabulary experimenting with the abstract relationships presented in the instruction books as the basis for contrast and

harmony. The major element to which all others are related is the panoramic

horizon dividing the low, flat landscape from the sky. The pronounced horizontal proportions of paper and canvas emphasized the breadth of the topography, and oblong clouds and attenuated shadows cast by the rising or setting

sun were frequently used as minor parallel accents. Contrast was furnished by

the snaking curves or diagonals of the river, which defined the receding plane of

the landscape extending from foreground to horizon. Vertical articulation

followed the suggestions in the books for domed, angled, or vertical forms.41

Occasionally, Heade introduced a small tree at one side of the canvas, but

primarily he worked with the haystacks. Their domed shape provided two

kinds of opposition: the contrast of curve to straight line and the contrast of a

short object to the length of the horizon. The haystacks, like the river, emphasized the depth of the ground plane, marking off distances in measured

ratios. In his charcoal drawings Heade interjected the angle of a sloop's sail to

counter the extended horizon and the curve of haystacks. The vertical mast

links the alternating dark and light tones of the marsh to the dark and light

clouds, and the dotted diagonal of birds adds a lightness of touch to the

predominantly heavy forms. In each of his pictures, Heade reordered the

pictorial elements, setting line against curve and angle and dark against light to

achieve the desired balance of contrasts. The marsh scenes are a compendium

of the luminist purpose: the portrayal of the particular facts of a specific place

arranged to reveal universal truths through a measured and balanced composition and tonal modulations of light.

Although luminism was foremost a style of landscape, the luminist atmo46 ANDRUS
40. Martin Johnson Heade. Marshfield Mendows, 1878. Oil on canvas. 0.451 x i.n8 (17% x 44 in). The Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire

42. Martin Johnson Heade. Newburyport Marshes, i86os. Charcoal and chalk on paper.

0.251 x 0.521 (97/8 x 20% in). Private collection.

41. Martin Johnson Heade. Twilight on the Marshes, i86os. Charcoal and colored chalks

on paper. 0.280 x 0.559 (n x 21% in). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; M. and M. Karolik

Collection.

ANDRUS 47
43. George Caleb Bingham. The]oily Flatboatmen, 1846. Oil on canvas. 0.965 x 1.232 (38 x

48y2 in). Inscribed, on boat, l.r.: C.C. Bingham. The Pell Family Trust, Hon. Claiborne

Pell, Trustee. Photo: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (upper left)

45. Thomas Eakins. Shad Fishing at Gloucester on the Delaware River, 1881. Oil on canvas.

0.308 x 0.464 (i2y8 x i8ys in). Inscribed, on back: T. E. Philadelphia Museum of Art; Gift

of Mrs. Thomas Eakins and Miss Mary A. Williams (upper right)

46. Eastman Johnson. The Cranberry Harvest, Nantucket Island, 1880. Oil on canvas.

0.692 x 1.384 (27V4 x 54y2 in). Inscribed, l.r.: E. Johnson—1880. The Putnam

Foundation—The Hmken Art Gallery, San Diego, California (lower right)

4- Winslow Homer. An Adirondack Lake, 1870. Oil on canvas. 0.616 x 0.971 (24-% x 38y4

n). Inscribed, 1.1.: Winslow Homer 1870. Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington,

eattle (not in exhibition)
sphere and balanced scenery also provided a setting for the arrangement of

people outdoors. As early as the 18408 William Sidney Mount and George

Caleb Bingham created genre paintings where the figures are the primary

structural element in the landscape. In Eel Spearing at Setauket (1845; fig. 256),

the woman and boy with oar and pole define a triangle with the boat as the

base. The two figures are tied to the shore in the background through alignment and parallels, primarily the thrust of landscape and reflection reinforcing

the angled thrust of boat and pole. In The Jolly Flatboatmen (1846; fig. 43), the

dancer is the apex of a triangle enclosing the other men with the extended oars

as the base. Each figure is posed with an eye for alignments with verticals,

horizontals, and diagonals. The dimensions of the ladder and hanging shirtsleeves introduce modules that are repeated throughout, creating a stable and

architectonic composition, against the parallel planes of ever-lightening blocks

of scenery.42 The use of figures as ordering elements in the landscape was

further developed by Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, and Eastman Johnson

in the second half of the nineteenth century. Occasionally the ruler-straight

horizon and parallel shoreline act as a proportional gauge for a statuesque maid

(Johnson, Lambs, Nantucket, 1874; fig. 175); but more frequently there was a

balance between figures and setting (Homer, Dad's Coming, 1873; fig. 177), or

the figures served as focus, modules, or contrasting verticals in the panoramic

view (Homer, An Adirondack Lake, 1870, fig. 44; High Tide: the Bathers, 1870,

fig. 298; Promenade on the Beach, 1880, fig. 178; Eakins, Max Schmitt in a Single

Scull, 1871, fig. 179; Shad Fishing at Gloucester on the Delaware River, 1881, fig. 45;

Johnson, The Cranberry Harvest, Nantucket Island, 1880, fig. 46). The specific

quality of the light and character of the setting became more important with

the increased interest in working outdoors, and the landscape became less a foil

and backdrop for the figures and more an environment in which they participated along with the other elements in the composition.

In the desolate views of the coast only an occasional small-scale figure or boat

relieved the vast expanse of sea, sand, and sky. The major contrast to the

panoramic horizon was provided by the diagonal thrust or the sweeping curve

of the shoreline. In the diagonal compositions the proportion devoted to the

beach and ocean varied from painting to painting as did the angle of the slope

dividing the breakers from the beach. In some paintings the breakers are almost

parallel to the picture plane, and in others the diagonals of high-tide mark and

rollers plunge sharply to the horizon where they are gathered together. In all

the different views the major formal interest is the opposition of the dynamic

tension of diagonals against the restful horizon, the energy of the breakers

against the smooth sand. (Compare Heade's Thunderstorm, Narragansett Bay

[fig. 10]; Bricher's Morning Sunlight, Narragansett Bay, 1872 [fig. 47], Rocks in

Surf, 1871 [fig. 297], and Seascape [fig. 352]; Richards5 Shipwreck^ 1872 [fig. 295],

East Hampton Beach, 1871-1874 [fig. 294], On the Coast of New Jersey [fig. 48];

Hamilton's What are the Wild Waves Saying? 1859 [fig. 49]; and Silva's^. Summer

Afternoon at Long Branch, 1885 [fig. 50].)

47. Alfred Thompson Bricher. Morning Sunlight, NarragansettBay^ 1872. Oil on canvas.

0.356 x 0.622 (14 x 24!/2 in). Inscribed, I.e.: A.T.Bricher 1872. Private collection. Photo:

Herbert P. Vose

48. William Trost Richards. On the Coast of New Jersey, 1883. Oil on canvas. 1.022 x 1.835

(4oy4 x 72y4 in). Inscribed, l.r.: Wm T. Richards. 1883. The Corcoran Gallery of Art,

Washington, D.C.

ANDRUS 49
9- James Hamilton. What Are the Wild Waves Saying?', 1859. Oil on canvas. 0.508 x 0.750

20 x 29% in). Inscribed, 1.1.: Hamilton; and on verso, l.r.: Jos Hamilton/Philada

8s9/touched up—1868. The Brooklyn Museum, New York; Gift of Mr. Robert E. Blum

50. Francis A. Silva. A Summer Afternoon at Long Branch, 1885. Oil on canvas. 0.610 x 1.118

(24 x 44 in). Inscribed, 1.1.: FRANCIS A. SILVA./8s. Mr. and Mrs. Wilbur L. Ross, Jr.

Photo: Herbert P. Vose

51. Martin Johnson Heade. The Coming Storm, 1859. Oil on canvas, 0.711 x i.n8 (28 x 44

in). Inscribed, 1.1: M]Heade /i8$9. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Gift of

the Erving Wolf Foundation, 1975 (not in exhibition)

In paintings with the curving shoreline, the water is a smooth plane locked

and bound by the rocky coast, sand and beach grass, or tall pines, like the

relation of a mirror to its frame. Waves are little more than ripples in the

surface. In views where the shore has the added contrast of vertical trees or hills

and rough boulders, the paintings become less panoramic and more picturesque as the horizon is blocked or concealed by rough and irregular forms.

(Compare Lane's paintings of Norman's Woe [figs. 32,33]; Heade's The Coming

Storm, 1859 [fig. 51] and The Stranded Boat, 1863 [fig. 120]; Bradford's Fishermen's

Homes., Near Cape St. Johns, Coast of Labrador, c. 1876 [fig. 52]; Suydam's Beach

Scene, Newport, 1860 [fig. 351]; Gifford's Hook Mountain, Hudson, 1866 [fig. 84]

and Twilight in the Adirondacks [Adirondack Museum, Blue Mountain Lake,

New York].)

The asymmetrical view with headland or iceberg heavily weighted at one

side of the composition and tapering off or abruptly stopped could be the most

picturesque of all seascapes or the most startlingly realistic. The picturesque

views portrayed dramatic, usually inhospitable, and remote scenery characterized by a roughness of forms, broken surfaces, and jagged contours. In

Church's Grand Manan Island, Bay ofFundy (1852; fig. 53) and Sunrise Off the

Maine Coast (1863; fig. 214), Bierstadt's The Marina Piccola, Capri (1859; fig. 15),

and William T. Richards' The League Long Breakers Thundering on the Reef

(1887; fig. 54), a serrated wedge of rocky cliffs, rising precipitously from a rough

50 ANDRUS
52. William Bradford. Fishermen's Homes, Near Cafe St. Johns, Coast of Labrador,

c. 1876. Oil on canvas. 0.432 x 0.736 (17 x 29 in). Inscribed, l.r.: WmBradford76 (>).

Elton R. Barber. Photo: Brenwasser (not in exhibition)

53. Frederic Edwin Church. GrandManan Island, Bay ofFundy,

1852. Oil on canvas. 0.538 x 0.789 (2i3/i6 x 3iyi6 in). Inscribed, 1.1.: F

Church/$2. Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; Gallery Fund. Photo: E. Irving Blomstrann (upper right)

54- William Trost Richards. The League Long Breakers Thundering on the Reef, 1887. Oil on canvas. 0.710 x i.n2 (2715/16 x 44yi6 in).

Inscribed, 1.1.: Wm. TRichards 1887. The Brooklyn Museum, New

York; Bequest of Alice C. Crowell (lower right)

ANDRUS 51
5. Alfred Thompson Bricher. Morning at Grand Manan, 1878. Oil on canvas. 0.635 x 1.270 (25 x 50 in). Inscribed, II: ATBricher 1878 (ATB is in monogram). Indianapolis Museum of Art;

Martha Delzell Memorial Fund. Photo: Robert Wallace

2 ANDRUS
56. William Bradford. Ice Dwellers Watching the Invaders, c. 1870. Oil on canvas. 0.870 x

1.327 (34y4 x 52y4 in). Inscribed, 1.1.: Wm. Bradford. New Bedford Whaling Museum,

New Bedford, Massachusetts; Gift of William F. Havemeyer, 1910 (see plate 20)

sea, is thrust across the center of the canvas. The straight horizon line either is

absent altogether or presents a contrast to the prevailing, irregular forms. Even

in Alfred Bricher's Morning at Grand Manan (1878; fig. 55), where the horizon

and sky are given greater prominence, seven schooners interrupt the horizontal

expanse, their angled sails echoing the slope of the escarpment. Bricher considered the painting "very picturesque"43

 acknowledging the qualities of pictorial

contrast in crisp sails linking precipice and sea, the morning mist above the

light-reflecting water, and the crossing diagonals of breakers and smooth

overflow.

The most picturesque seascapes were the Arctic paintings of William Bradford reconstructed back in the studio from a selection of photographs made on

the spot and from his memory and imagination (Ice Dwellers Watching the

Invaders, c. 1870, fig. 56; and the work In Polar Seas, 1882, fig. 346). While the

photographs (fig. 57) were often of an isolated wall of ice or ship and iceberg

the paintings were a compendium of the experience of smooth water, towering

crags of ice, and the broken terrain of smaller floes. The geometry of the ship's

masts and spars provide the only gauge to chart and measure the inhospitable

region. Bradford, like Church in his paintings of South America (Andes of

Ecuador, 1855, fig. 186; and Cotopaxi, 1863, fig. 225) and Bierstadt in his pictures of

57. William Bradford. Extended Section of the Front of a Glacier, 1872. Albumen photograph. 0.284 x 0.383 (n5

/16 x i5yl6 in). Private collection. Photo: Janet Lehr

the far West (Storm in the Mountains, 1870-1880; fig. 58) sought to encompass the

breadth and drama of the newly explored territory by incorporating different

views in the same painting. Ruskin had demonstrated that to realize a view in

all its actuality it was necessary to include the multiple aspects that could be

seen by looking, turning, looking, and remembering—thus creating a

visionary topography more true than a detached portion of the panoramic

scene.44

The most strikingly realistic of the panoramic views were precisely those that

Ruskin had denounced: a narrow slice of the sweeping horizon that left the

spectator wondering about the portion of the landscape cropped at either edge

of the frame. Kensett's Beacon Rock, Newport Harbor (1857; fig. 59), Shrewsbury

River (1859; fig. 202), and Eaton's Neck, Long Island (1872; fig. 83), Mount's

Crane Neck Across the Marsh (c. 1851; fig. 106), Richards' Lighthouse on Cape Cod

(1865; fig. 60), and Suydam's Paradise Rocks, Newport (1865; National Academy

of Design, New York) juxtapose the irregular headland with the straight

horizon to create an asymmetrical composition of solid against void. Although

these pictures are unorthodox they are not painted without a knowledge of

artistic principles. The abstract design, the weighing of a few simple forms, is of

ANDRUS 53
8. Albert Bierstadt. Storm in the Mountains, c. 1870-1880. Oil on canvas. 0.965 x 1.524 (38 x 60 in). Inscribed, l.r.: A Bierstadt (AB is in monogram).

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; M. and M. Karolik Collection

4 ANDRUS
crucial importance because of the absence of the more obvious pictorial

elements to give interest.

With luminism the artist's transition was completed: from an appreciation of

landscape to a realization, through the intermediary of art, of the harmony

inherent in nature. The commitment to the facts of the view and the truth of

nature together with a knowledge of artistic principles led to the creation of

paintings that seemed to compose themselves. The artist's educated and intuitive eye selected scenes that were naturally ordered and directed the subtle

rearrangement and introduction of accents that convey that order to others.

Above all, it is through the most orthodox luminist works, the quiet, understated paintings, that the artist makes the viewer aware of his own depth of

feeling. He reveals the poetry in nature as inevitable, self-evident, and ever

present.

60. William Trost Richards. Lighthouse on Cafe Cod, 1865. Oil on canvas. 0.229 x 0.407

(9 x 16 in). Inscribed, 1.1.: W.T.R./July 6.6$. Mrs. James H. Dempsey. Photo: Cleveland

Museum of Art (see plate 24)

59. John Frederick Kensett. Beacon Rock, Newport Harbor, 1857. Oil

on canvas. 0.571 x 0.915 (22% x 36 in). Inscribed, Lr.:JEK.S7(JF is in

monogram). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Gift of

Frederick Sturges, Jr., 1953

ANDRUS 55
Notes

1. Many of the ideas in this paper first appeared in my

published dissertation Measure and Design in American

Painting 1760-1860 (New York, 1977). I would like to acknowledge my debt to Barbara Novak for her thoughtprovoking questions and encouragement.

2. A. B. Durand, "Letters on Landscape Painting," The

Crayon, i (1855): 1-2, 34-35, 66-67, 97~98, 145-146, 209-20,

273-275, 354-355; and 2 (1856): 16-17.

3. Durand, "Letters," Crayon, 1:2.

4. John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing, intro. by

Lawrence Campbell (London, 1857: rpt., New York, 1971),

3-

5. Durand, "Letters," Crayon, 1:66.

6. Durand, "Letters," Crayon, 1:66.

7. William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye, &c.

and Several Parts of South Wales &c. Relative Chiefly to

Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Summer of the Tear 1770,5th

ed. (London, 1880), 21, 46,128-129; Observations Relative

Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Tear 1776 on

Several Pans of Great Britain; Particularly the High-Lands

of Scotland, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (London, 1792) 2:2, m-m; Two

Essays: One, on the Author's Mode of Executing Rough

Sketches; the Other, On the Principles on Which They Are

Composed (London, 1804), 28-29; Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching

Landscape; with a Landscape Poem and Two Essays, 3rd ed.

(London, 1808), 12, 28,125.

8. Gilpin, Wye, 31.

9. Durand, "Letters," Crayon, 2:16; Gilpin, Three Es

ays, 68.

10. Cole to Durand, Jan. 4,1838; quoted in Louis Legrand Noble, The Life and Works of Thomas Cole, ed. Eliot

S. Vessell (New York, 1853; rpt. Cambridge, 1964), 184-185.

n. Durand, "Letters," Crayon, 1:2.

12. Durand, "Letters," Crayon, 1:274.

13. See Durand, "Letters," Crayon, 1:274 for the importance of the "concealment of pigments and not the

parade of them." Barbara Novak, American Painting of

the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism and the American Experience (New York, 1969), 91.

14. Gilpin, Wye, 139, and Scotland, 7:12; 2:177; Elizabeth

Wheeler Manwaring, Italian Landscapes in Eighteenth

Century England (New York, 1925), 37.

15. Durand, "Letters," Crayon, 1:146.

16. Durand, "Letters," Crayon, 1:274.

17. Durand, "Letters," Crayon, 1:274-275.

18. Worthington Whittredge, "Autobiography," ed.

John I. H. Baur, Brooklyn Museum Journal, i (1942)155.

19. See Roger B. Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic

Thought in America 1840-1900 (Cambridge, 1967).

20. Modern Painters, 5 vols., 3rd ed. (Boston, 1873),

1:314-388.

21. The best-known books are Joshua Shaw's Picturesque Views of American Scenery (1820); William Guy Wall's

The Hudson River Portfolio (1828); American Scenery illustrated by the English artist William Bartlette (1840); and

Lotus-Eating with drawings by Kensett (1852).

22. For Church's drawings of clouds see Theodore E.

Stebbins, American Master Drawings and Watercolors, A

History of Works on Paper from Colonial Times to the Present

(New York, 1976), 127. For Church's use of photographs

of clouds see David C. Huntington, The Landscapes of

Frederic Edwin Church: Vision of an American Era (New

York, 1966), 79-

23. Nicolai Cikovsky, Sanford Robinson Gifford 1823-1880.

[exh. cat., University of Texas Art Museum] (Austin,

1970), 16.

24. Durand, "Letters," Crayon, 1:146.

25. Illustrated in Gifford, 56.

26. Elizabeth Lindquist-Cook, "Frederic Church's

Stereoscopic Vision," Art In America, 61 (1973): 74.

27. Ila Joyce Weiss, "Sanford Robinson Gifford, (1823-

1880)" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1968), 328-330.

28. William Hart (1823-1894) became the first president

of the Brooklyn Academy of Design in 1865. The synopsis

of his talk is provided by Henry Tuckerman, Book of the

Artists (New York, 1857; rpt. 1966), 549-551.

29. Tuckerman, Artists, 510-514.

30. Tuckerman, Artists, 550.

31. Evidence of Lane's use of a drawing machine is

given in drawings with convex horizon. See Andrus,

Measure and Design, 275, n. 8.

32. John Gadsby Chapman, The American Drawing

Book (New York, 1858), 43, 59-

33. John Burnet, Practical Essays on An (London, 1893),

73-

34. The book was associated with the name of the

publisher Fielding Lucas, Jr., but was compiled and

illustrated by John H. B. Latrobe under the pseudonym

E. Von Blon (Baltimore, n.d. [1826-1827]).

35. Lucas, Progressive Drawing Book, 31-36, 46, 48,

60-62.

36. Lucas, Progressive Drawing Book, 29, 30.

37. Lucas, Progressive Drawing Book, 53-54; Philip F.

Hersh ("F. H. Lane: With a Fetish for Red," Gloucester

Daily Times, July 14,1967), noted that there is a little red in

95 percent of Lane's paintings.

38. Lucas, Progressive Drawing Book, 51.

39. J. B. Pyne, "The Nomenclature of Pictorial Art,"

(London) Art-Union, 6 (1844)142.

40. Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., The Life and Works of

Martin Johnson Heade (New Haven and London, 1975),

42.

41. Lucas, Progressive Drawing Book, 60-61.

42. Andrus, Measure and Design, 58-59.

43- Jeffrey R. Brown, with Ellen W. Lee, Alfred

Thompson Bricher 1837-1008 [exh. cat., Indianapolis

Museum of Art] (Indianapolis, 1973), 23.

44. Ruskin, Modern Painters, 2:409, 4:138-143.

56 ANDRUS
Plate 6. David Johnson. Chocorua Peak, New Hampshire, 1856.

Private collection. Photo: Helga Photo Studio (see fig. no)

57
Plate 7. Robert Salmon. Wharves of Boston, 1829.

The Bostonian Society, Old State House, Boston; Gift of the Estate of Edmund Quincy, 1894.

Photo: Richard Cheek (see fig. 105)

8
Plate 8. Fitz Hugh Lane. Ship "Starlight" in the Fog, 1860.

Buder Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio (see fig. 112)

59
Plate 9. Fitz Hugh Lane. Ships and an Approaching Storm Off Owl's Head, Maine, 1860.

Governor and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller IV (see fig. 73)

60
Plate 10. Fitz Hugh Lane. Entrance of Somes Sound from Southwest Harbor, 1852.

Private collection. Photo M. W. Sexton (see fig. 72)

61
Plate n. Fitz Hugh Lane. Brace's Rock, Brace's Cove^ 1864.

The Lano Collection (see fig. n)

62
Plate 12. John Frederick Kensett. Narragansett Bay, 1861. Private collection. Photo: Herbert P. Vose (see fig. 12)

63
Plate; 13. John Frederick Kensett. Sunset, Camel's Hump, Vermont, c. 1851. The Art Museum, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey (see fig. 80)

64
Plate 14. Sanford Robinson GifFord. Twilight on Hunter Mountain, 1866.

The Lano Collection (see fig. 85)

65
ate 15. Martin Johnson Heade. Duck Hunters in the Marshes, 1866.

rivate collection. Photo: Vose Galleries (see fig. 344)

6
Plate 16. Martin Johnson Heade. Sunrise on the Marshes, 1863.

Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, Michigan;

Gift of the Viola E. Bray Charitable Trust, 63.5 (see fig. 77)

67
. Fitz Hugh Lane. Norman's Woe, Gloucester, 1862. Oil on canvas. 0.712 x 1.270 (28 x 50 in). Margaret Farrell Lynch. Photo: Kennedy Galleries

8
Luminism and the American Sublime

Earl A. Powell

BY THE BEGINNING OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY the philosophical concept

of the sublime had developed as an aesthetic which associated the emotions of

fear, awe, and exaltation with certain aspects of the natural landscape. During

the previous century this aesthetic had evolved in the critical writings of

European philosophers to explain the intensity of emotion they felt when

inspired by scenes in nature that revealed vastness of dimension, sharp contrasts of light and shadow, storm-ravaged and tormented landscapes, and

mountainous scenery—all settings that illustrated the disparity that existed

between man and nature. However, during the early nineteenth century the

meaning of the sublime was expanded to encompass also the feeling of spiritual

calm man derived from the contemplation of boundless panoramas and lightfilled landscapes that emphasized the illusion of space, infinity, and quiet.1

Landscape painting in both Europe and America reflected these changing

perceptions of nature and the sublime. In particular, the visual legacy of the

sublime experienced a rich and complex evolution in the United States. There

the philosophy of Edmund Burke (1729-1797), later synthesized by Immanuel

Kant (1724-1804), was fused with religious and nationalistic attitudes long

associated with the mythology of America. The sublimities of the American

wilderness provided American painters with an unparalleled opportunity to

create a new national iconography based on a biblical interpretation of nature.

This interpretation was central to the Puritan idea of the "American" as a

prophetic identity; it was a theology that underscored the redemptive importance of the New World experience in the grand scheme of salvation. That

America was seen by early theologians as the New Jerusalem and later as

redeemer nation established a framework for the development of a biblical

interpretation of American history within the context of Protestant reformed

thought.2

Puritan theology was based on man's fulfilling the prophecies of the scriptures, and America was interpreted as the new world, the future millenial

kingdom, described in the Book of Revelations. This interpretation was in part

inspired by the Protestant idea of prophetic selfhood. According to Sacvan

Bercovitch,

The American made his sainthood visible by identifying the literal-spiritual contours of

the land. For the European, nature might evoke the spiritual qualities in the viewer's

mind, enlarge his soul, fill him with ideas commensurate with his deepest feelings. But

in its historical reality, as the English or German landscape, nature remained part of his

specific, concrete, and therefore limiting (if cherished) personal or national past and

present. The American scene by definition transcended past and present.3

Such an interpretation of the scriptures, associating landscape with biblical

prophecy, had an eduring influence on American perceptions of nature and, by

extension, on American landscape painting. Interest in the Apocalypse and the

ensuing millenium (during which Christ would reign and holiness would

prevail) and its association with landscape imagery experienced a surge of

popularity in the years following the establishment of the Republic. At that

time American writers and artists were most concerned with the problems

involved in creating a national art which would emphasize the new nation's

unique position in world history. American landscape painters, beginning with

Thomas Cole, associated the purpose of art with their scriptural interpretation

of wilderness themes. Cole announced with conviction in his "Essay on American Scenery," published in 1835, a belief in the prophetic mission of the artist:

Prophets of old retired into the solitudes of nature to wait the inspiration of heaven. It

was on Mount Horeb that Elijah witnessed the mighty wind, the earthquake, and the

fire; and heard the 'still small voice 'St. John preached in the desert;—the wilderness

is YET a fitting place to speak of God.4

Significantly, in American landscape painting the recreation of the sublime

experience was infused with national and historical importance based on the

69
iteral visualization of a new world landscape that was unavailable as a source of

nspiration to European artists. Thus Americans drew separate visual conclu

ions from the same philosophical and rhetorical sources, based on their acute

ensitivity to their land's unique historical position as a new world. And in the

onfluence of the idea of the sublime with perceptions of the American

andscape in the work of certain aritsts—particularly the so-called luminist

painters, Fitz Hugh Lane, John Frederick Kensett, Martin Johnson Heade,

and Sanford GifFord—a new formulation of sublime expression eventually

merged.

The notion of the sublime inherited by nineteenth-century landscape

painters derived primarily from two principal sources, Burke's Essay on the

ublime and Beautiful, published in 1756, and Kant's Critique of Judgement,

which appeared in 1790. However, the concept of sublimity had first emerged

n antiquity in the rhetorical treatise of Longinus, which was later revised by

Boileau in 1694. Delivered conceptually intact to the philosophers of the

ighteenth century, the theory of the sublime underwent further transforma

ion at the hands of Dennis, Addison, Baillie, Hume, Burke, Kames, Reid, and

Alison. Kant, however, in his Critique of Judgement, the summation of

ighteenth-century aesthetics, ultimately coordinated and synthesized all

peculation on the sublime in that era. Samuel Monk attributed cardinal

mportance to the Critique and its influence on the arts of the nineteenth

entury:

n his [Kant's ] critiques are expressed the philosophical ideas which form the basis for

he art of his time, and this is true even if a given artist was not familiar with his works

. . it may be said that eighteenth century aesthetic has as its unconscious goal the

Critique of Judgement.5

As the precursor to Kant, Burke's Essay occupies a central place in the

development of the history of naturalism in painting because it firmly and

consummately explained the emotion of the sublime in categorical terms.

Moreover, it identified sublime emotion as religious. Burke defined the sub

ime as "the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling," and he

associated it with the power and majesty of God: "we may be admitted, if I may

dare say so, into the counsels of the Almighty by a consideration of His

works."6 Landscape imagery was central in providing inspiration to the sub

ime, and in the Essay Burke consolidated earlier arguments which associated

nature with God. In so doing he resolved many of the issues of concern, about

he relationship between God and nature, that had occupied the interests of

earlier philosophers. Thomas Burnet's important treatise, The Sacred Theory of

he Earth, of 1681-1689, was a preliminary and influential model for the transla

ion of theological concepts into an aesthetics of landscape. The Sacred Theory,

as scholars have noted, was a central work in the evolution of naturalism and

he sublime, for Burnet for the first time found positive religious values in the

contemplation of those parts of the landscape—mountains, for instance—

which were vast and, by traditional standards, ugly. He endowed them with

both aesthetic and quasi-theological significance; in the imperfections of nature, as M. H. Abrams notes, "the speaking face of the earth declares the

infinity, the power, and the wrath of a just deity."7 Most importantly Burnet

gave respectability as visual symbols to a particular geological formation,

mountains, by identifying them with the Almighty. His reaction to nature

would inspire Burke to construct his theory of sublimity and would later

stimulate the high romantic imaginations of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

There is something august and stately in the Air of these things that inspires the Mind

with great Thoughts and Passions; we do naturally, upon such Occasions, think of God

and his Greatness.

And yet these Mountains ... are nothing but great Ruins; but such as shew a certain

Magnificence of Nature.8

Burke's essay was an attempt to advance the assumptions of Burnet's Sacred

Theory. He based his logic on the correctness of Burnet's contention that the

physical forms of nature declared the presence of the deity He constructed his

analysis of sublime emotion based on an assumption that there is a psychological reaction to size and scale in nature: "By looking into physical causes our

minds are opened and enlarged."9 Ultimately, for Burke, the experience of fear

was the highest form of sublime emotion:

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger. . . whatever is in any

sort terrible ... or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the 'sublime';

that it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.10

Fear, gloom, and majesty, aspects of nature which evidenced some manifestation of God's wrathful power, were primary sources for inspiring the sublime,

as was a vastness of dimension. In addition to seeing the large size of objects as

a physical representation of the sublime, Burke also included their opposite:

"as the great extreme of dimension is sublime, so the last extreme of littleness is

in some measure sublime likewise.. . ."n He also devoted a separate section of

his treatise to space, commenting that "infinity has a tendency to fill the mind

with that sort of delightful horror, which is the most genuine effect and truest

test of the sublime."12

The essential difference between Burke's ideas and those of Kant involved

the distinction between theoretical principles and empirical ones. Kant referred to this distinction as the "transcendental exposition of aesthetic judgements ... compared with the physiological, as worked out by Burke."13

 In The

Critique of Judgement Kant did not devalue the physical manifestations of

nature and the landscape as a source of the sublime; rather, he adapted Burke's

categories of the sublime to fit his own philosophy. Like Burke, Kant included

desolation, natural cataclysms, gloom, abrupt contrasts of light and dark, and

the scale and magnitude of objects as phenomena capable of inspiring the

sublime. The crucial difference between the two theories of sublimity was

Kant's insistence that "the sublime is not to be looked for in the things of

nature, but only in our own ideas."14 The experience of the sublime, moreover,

transcended and transformed the importance of the object; for Kant "sublimity

70 POWELL
62. James Mallord William Turner. The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons^ 1810. Oil on

canvas. 0.902 x 1.200 ($$% x 4.7% in). The Tate Gallery, London (not in exhibition)

must be sought only in the mind of the judging subject."15

The significance of Kant's theory in the formal development of painting lies

in the belief that the function of the artist as creator and arbiter of the aesthetic

experience must be accorded the highest priority in the evolution of a work of

art. Literary assumptions about art found no place within this new philosophical context nor within later luminist painting. Thomas Cole believed, by

comparison, that art had a literary and didactic function and that its major

purpose was to contribute to the moral well being of humanity. In an article

published in 1840, in the Knickerbocker, he remarked,

The art of painting is not merely a thing for amusement... it forms, on the principles of

eternal nature a world of its own. Its influence on man, morally and intellectually, has

been and is far more extensive than many of you have ever dreamed of. In ages past, it

has made moral and religious impressions on the mind and character of nations.... It is

an engine capable of great good, or great evil. It speaks a language intelligible to all

nations.16

Cole's famous Course of Empire series (The New-York Historical Society,

New York) of 1836 is a case in point. Cole enjoyed using art as propaganda to

enforce his own argument for nature. In the development of high romantic art

such as his, the artist, as a creative sensibility working to produce a selfconscious formal statement through style and composition, was of singular

importance. In luminist painting the reverse is true; the personality and style of

63. Martin Johnson Heade. Thunderstorm Over NarragansettBay-, 1868. Oil on canvas.

0.819 x 1.384 (32y8 x 54V2 in). Inscribed, 1.1.: MJHeade/ 1868. Amon Carter Museum, Fort

Worth, Texas (see plate 17)

the artist were effaced and great efforts were made to develop a formal style

consistent with the moods of nature as it actually appeared. The "idea" contributed by the artist lies in his choice of scene and the realistic manner in which

he conveyed the condition or mood of nature, not in the translation, interpretation, or rearrangement of nature as in romantic art. The quiet stability and

mirrored reflections of Fitz Hugh Lane's Norman's Woe, Gloucester (1862; fig. 61)

illustrates the ultimate influence of this transcendental philosophy. Ralph

Waldo Emerson discussed concepts which had their source in Kant in his

Thoughts on Art, 1841, in which he commented on the "productions of the Fine

Arts," noting, "Here again the prominent fact is the subordination of man. His

art is the least part of his work."17

This distinction would have far-ranging and important consequences on the

art of landscape painting in the nineteenth century, because Kant's interpretation of the sublime caused a revolution in perceptions of nature and attitudes

toward landscape. Interest in an object as being sublime in and of itself gave

way to representations of nature in which nature was transformed to personify

a subjective state of mind.

Kant's interest in the sublime and the premises of his Critique were echoed in

Archibald Alison's influential Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, which

had achieved considerable notoriety by 1825. First published in 1790, Alison's

Essays did not receive full appreciation until a second edition appeared in i8n;

other editions followed in quick succession in 1812,1815,1817, and 1825, with a final

edition appearing in i842.18 Though Kant's Critique of Judgement was the great

POWELL 71
document which synthesized all aesthetic speculation on the sublime at the end

of the eighteenth century, Alison's work was important because it supported a

parallel interpretation of sublimity that was more accessible to readers less

inclined to come to terms with the complexities of German philosophy. Alison's Essays, as Monk noted, "by translating beauty and sublimity into purely

mental 'emotions'. . . stressed the importance of the individual as opposed to

the object in the aesthetic experience."19 Nature as object was replaced in the

aesthetic experience by the judging faculties of the perceiver, which interpreted

natural facts as spiritual emblems. Under the influence of the new transcendental philosophy perceptions of nature and the use of landscape symbology

altered significantly, and with them the formal appearance of landscape art. The

important new emphasis on the condition of mind and imagination in the

experience of art resulted in the transformation of the older, gothic-literary

sublime of Burke to new artistic concerns for space, light, and infinity as

symbols or emblems with equal emotive and religious impact. It meant in

formal terms the difference between J. M. W. Turner's The Fall of an Avalanche

in the Grisons (1810; fig. 62) and Martin Johnson Heade's Thunderstorm Over

NarragansettEay (1868; fig. 63), a difference between activation of the elements

in the former and contemplation of future action in the latter—the known

experience versus the unknown potential. Samuel Monk speculated that in the

new art "there might grow up a tendency to reduce the object to its minimum

importance and to emphasize above all the impression which the object makes

on the artist. In its extreme phases this tendency would produce impressionism, as it did in the paintings of Turner. . . ."20

Turner was the most advanced landscape artist of the romantic age, the most

capable of drawing the visual conclusions that were, indeed, attributed to his

art by Monk. Kant's transcendentalist philosophy influenced other landscape

artists both in Europe and the United States in a different but related way. If the

diminution of nature as object and as a source of aesthetic pleasure could

produce one extreme, in Turner's diffused, light-filled watercolors, it also

encouraged another, intense realism devoted to concerns for color and light in

literal space, in which artistic identity is sublimated and the perceiving faculties

of the artist function as a "sensibility." The placid, quiescent canvases of the

luminists, austerely composed and tightly painted, were American equivalents

of Kantian and neo-Kantian visualizations of the sublime. These paintings

more clearly reflect the imperatives of transcendentalist philosophy than any

others of the period. They were not, however, insular or provincial reactions to

Kant. These pictures related to international developments in landscape art in

northern Europe and England. Barbara Novak has eloquently discussed the

relationship of luminism to Emerson's transcendental writing,21 but it is important to realize that Emerson was himself deeply, crucially influenced in his

perceptions of nature by Kant.

Emerson came to appreciate Kant primarily through Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Emmanuel Swedenborg; but he clearly acknowledged his indebtedness to Kant in his writings. In The Transcendentalist, he wrote, "The

extraordinary profoundness and precision of that man's [Kant's] thinking have

given vogue to his nomenclature, in Europe and America, to that extent that

whatever belongs to the class of intuitive thought is popularly called at the

present day Transcendental"*2 Consequently, luminist painting is as interesting

for the important correspondences it maintained with international romanticism as it is for its distinctively American qualities of form and style. Novak

attributes the appearance of luminist paintings to Emerson's influence directly,

particularly with regard to the luminist artists' self-effacement of style, citing in

support of this interpretation Emerson's famous lines,

Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into

infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or

parcel of God.23

Emerson and luminist painting, the visual paradigm of transcendentalism,

were clearly American manifestations of a new perception of nature, its source

in Kant, which affected landscape art and poetry in an important, indeed

crucial, way. William Wordsworth, in The Prelude, commented on the struggle

between the physical eye and the eye of the poet's imagination.24 Friedrich

Schiller likewise discussed a similar conception of the poet/artist and his

relationship to nature, in which nature became a unit of idea through a

sensibility seeking to unify itself with divine authority. In his important essay

On the Aesthetic Education of Man he commented on the potential for divinity

which man carried within himself, and which could be realized through a

union of absolute "reality" and absolute "formality" which involved an imaginative fusion of the sensibilities with nature.25

In this union the sublime experience was transformed into a new mode of

landscape expression; the traditional sublime setting was augmented by the

transcendental sublime sensibility, a sensibility that found its roots in man's

internal perception of time and space. A contemplative view of nature thus

displaced terror and majesty, and luminist art concentrated on developing an

intense realism in which absolute stillness prevailed in compositions resonant

with colored light. To enforce the contemplative idea, as opposed to the grand

theater of Burke's sublime, required a new emphasis on space, and space,

implying infinity, was a central concern of luminist painters. It was emphasized

laterally, along the horizon line, and in depth, through the traditional manipulation of perspective devices. Another distinguishing characteristic of

luminism was silence, silence echoing in still waters. Barbara Novak emphasized this aspect of the transcendental sublime, commenting, "If the older

sublime could be characterized by the vigorous sound of a cataract, the repose

of Lake George, steeped in silence, found its oral equivalent in unruffled

water."26

It is important to emphasize that the transcendental sublime did not actually

create a new vocabulary of formal expression or add new meaning to the

72 POWELL
categories of sublime expression already attributed to it by Burke and others.

Luminist painting developed existing attributes of sublimity within an entirely

new context of visual expression and philosophical support. Burke, for instance, had previously associated the concept with silence and infinity. He had

also declared that "littleness" was sublime to a degree, anticipating Emerson's

reference to nature and "the still small voice." In discussing the transcendental

sublime defined here, Novak has asserted that "in this new concept of sublimity, oneness with Godhead is complete, and the influx of the divine mind is no

longer mediated by the theatrical trappings of the late eighteenth century

Gothic."27 This insight is accurate; however, the traditional sublime would

have continuing relevance for Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt, for instance, each of whom developed an important formal vocabulary based on the

awsome grandeur of nature in the American West, the South American tropics,

and the Arctic. The older sublime was perfectly adaptable to the newer American ideas concerning Manifest Destiny. What is fascinating about the concept

of the sublime is that it offered flexibility of interpretation which could

accomodate the older theories of Burke as well as the contemplative argument

for nature offered by luminist painters.

For a painter such as Church the external forms of nature were as important

to his conception of art as was his interpretation of American light; for luminist

artists intuition and mood were more important. The latter looked upon

landscape composition from a point of perspective conditioned by Kant and

later interpreted by Emerson and others. Luminist painting articulated a

perception of nature in which, to quote Emerson, "the whole of nature is

metaphor of the human mind."28 It is interesting that both "sublimes" corresponded to traditional religious positions first articulated by Puritan theologians who associated God with landscape and saw in the wilderness of America

the promised millenium. In the landscape art of nineteenth-century America

the sublime found its widest, most diverse and interesting range of expression.

Sublimity in landscape related to nationalistic and religious mythology and

added a new chapter to the history of the concept. The simple but important

distinction that obtained between the formal resolutions of painters was the

condition of the landscape itself, which in America offered wider potential for

symbolic interpretation. Indeed, as Bercovitch has noted,

Intermediary between the Puritan and God was the created Word of scripture. Intermediary between the Romantic and God was the creating imagination. Intermediary

between the Transcendentalist and the Oversoul was the text of America, simultaneously an external model of perfection and a product of the symbolic imagination. . . .

29

In his Essay Burke commented that the sublime as a concept was not

adaptable to visualization, that painters failed "to give us clear representations

of these very fanciful and terrible ideas."30 As interest in the sublime developed,

however, as a central component of anticlassical sentiment and with the displacement of the formal concerns of the Enlightenment for the subjective

64. Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg. An Avalanche, or Ice-Fall, in the Alps, Near the

Scheideck, in the Valley ofLauterbrunnen^ 1803. Oil on canvas. 1.099 x 1.600 (4.3% x 63 in).

The Tate Gallery, London (not in exhibition)

65. James Mallord William Turner. Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the

Alps^ 1812. Oil on canvas. 1.461 x 2.375 (57*72 x 93J/2 in). The Tate Gallery, London (not in

exhibition)

POWELL 73
6. John Martin. Belshazzar's Feast, 1826. Mixed media intaglio with hand coloring.

.481 x 0.680 (i815/i6 x 26% in). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Gift of Mr.

nd Mrs. William Benedict (not in exhibition)

nterest in nature that characterized the romantic era, sublime art increased in

direct proportion. In England Philip James deLoutherbourg, J. M. W. Turner,

nd John Martin, to name only three of the many artists who attempted to

mbody the sublime in their art, created a new visual context for the development of sublime imagery which related most specifically to Burke. In Germany

Caspar David Friedrich evolved a singular expression of the sublime which was

nspired by the writings of the German romantic philosophers and critics,

ncluding Kant, Schiller, and the Schlegel brothers,31 and which in its actualiza

ion of nature relates most specifically to luminism. In English art the sublime

was translated into pure theater in an attempt to inspire appropriate emotions.

DeLoutherbourg's Avalanche, or Ice-Fall, in the Alps . . . of 1803 (fig. 64) is an

xcellent example of the approach toward the sublime adopted by artists who

lected to depict natural disasters in which nature, as surrogate for the Almighty, demonstrates His wrath. The melodramatic quality of the painting is

mphasized by its theatrical use of chiaroscuro. The scene is presented as simple

drama, which should not be surprising since the artist made an important

eputation in England as Garrick's stage and scene designer and who created

he famous panorama he called the Eidophusikon.

The precocity of Turner's achievement in visualizing the sublime is evident in

two early landscapes, The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons (1810, fig. 62) and

Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812; fig. 65). Both pictures

convey an impression of nature churned into an apocalyptic fury. In form, style,

and subject, each work incorporates the range of Burke's association of sublimity with majesty, gloom, and terror. These pictures are of particular interest

because of the way in which Turner expressed the force of the disaster by

identifying emotive response with vigorous, painterly brushwork. Confronted

by these paintings we might remember that the sublime was initially formulated as a rhetorical construct. What Turner succeeded in accomplishing in

these pictures was a fusion of form, content, and idea that is relevant for

understanding the stylistic intent of romantic realist art, including luminism.

Bialostocki has noted,

From the fifteenth century on, when theories of rhetoric greatly influenced the art of the

Renaissance and the Baroque, the doctrine of the appropriateness of form to content

that was developed by Aristotle and other ancient theoreticians assumed increasing

importance. The doctrine had two aspects, often closely interrelated: (i) the figures

should accord with the traditional characterization of the historical or legendary heroes

represented: (2) the form should be suited to the subject matter.32

In 1829 Thomas Cole visited Turner in his studio where he viewed Hannibal

Crosing the Alps and declared it "a sublime picture, with a powerful effect of

chiaroscuro," while at the same time decrying Turner's later work because

it was, "destitute of all appearance of solidity: all appears transparent and

soft. . . ,"33 Cole defended his opinion of Turner's painting by referring to

Alison. His comments are interesting because they implicitly support the

concept of a relationship between style and idea that explains the commonality

pertaining between the turbulent, apocalyptic sublime of Hannibal and the

still, quiescent canvases of the luminists.

I think there is in Alison's work on taste a passage in which he attributes the decline of

the fine arts to the circumstance of painters having forsaken the main object of art for the

study of its technicalities. The same cause yet exists to the very great deterioration of

painting. The means seem a greater object of admiration than the end,—the language of

art, rather than the thoughts which are to be expressed. The conception, the invention,

that which affects the soul, is sacrificed to that which merely pleases the eye.34

That style should reflect idea, be subservient to it, explains the intent of much

romantic landscape painting. This concept of art supported differing visualizations of the sublime when the artistic document referred to a condition or

mood of nature.

The most spectacular sublime art to emanate from England was that of John

Martin, who evolved a conception of sublimity based on interpretations of the

Bible, particularly the Book of Revelations, and on John Milton's Paradise Lost.

Martin confirmed what Wordsworth had maintained, that "the grand

storehouse of enthusiastic and meditative imagination is the prophetic and

lyrical parts of the holy Scripture, and the works of Milton."35 More so than any

4 POWELL
English artist of the period Martin accentuated the formal elements of the

sublime attributed to it by Burke.Tn mezzotint engravings, avidly collected in

their day, he succeeded in visualizing and stereotyping sublime emotion.

Engravings of Martin's paintings such as Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand

Still (i$i6),Belshazzar}s Feast (i826;fig. 66), or the Deluge (1826) popularized the

sublime throughout Europe. But his engravings of Paradise Lost., which were

published in 1827, gave him an international reputation. Martin's engravings

after Milton combined the diverse elements of the sublime in compositions

which emphasized dizzying perspectives, extraordinary scale, desolate, vast

landscape, and mighty architectural complexes of fantastic proportions. These

elements attained visual unity in the rich chiaroscuro effects inherent in the

mezzotint medium itself. Such imaginative landscapes were, of course, theatrical in the extreme; but the notion of the sublime conveyed in their imagery was

infectious. Nathaniel Parker Willis mPencillingsBy the Way, published in 1835,

related an experience he had during his travels in Europe that was colored by

Martin's work.

We were coursing the banks of a river, in one of the romantic passes of the mountains of

Styria, with a dark thunderstorm gathering on the summit of a crag overhanging us. I

was pointing out to one of my companions a noble ruin of a castle seated very loftily on

the edge of one of the precipices, when a streak of the most vivid lightening shot straight

upon the northernmost turret, and the moment after several large masses rolled slowly

down the mountainside. It was so like the scenery in a play, that I looked at my

companion with half a doubt that it was some optical delusion. It reminded me of some

of Martin's engravings. The sublime is so well imitated in our day, that one is less

surprised than he would suppose when nature produces the reality.36

In a study of the development of the sublime in American art Thomas Cole is

of particular importance because he was the first major talent to confront the

ideas of the sublime and attempt to incorporate them within a formal vocabulary of American landscape. His art was transitional; and in his painting he

never approached the transcendental realism of the luminists of the following

generation, although in his writings he came near to an understanding of the

kind of imagery and style that would characterize the luminist conceptualization of nature and its reflection of spiritual mood.

Cole equivocated on the sublime, which is one reason for characterizing his

art as transitional. However, he was the first landscape painter of great ambition and commensurate talent to attempt to unite the sublime with the

mythology of America. In so doing he virtually created a new art form by

elevating landscape to the level of history painting. But he did not, for instance,

find Niagara to be sublime when he went to visit it before he departed for

England in 1829. Niagara, to American viewers, was the quintessence of the

sublime experience, but Cole, according to his biographer, Noble, "was disappointed. Lifted by no rapture, burdened by no sense of overpowering grandeur, he gazed upon it almost without an emotion above that of surprise at

himself."37 Cole's painting of Niagara supports Noble's observation. The artist

67. Thomas Cole. Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, c. 1827-1828. Oil on canvas. 0.990 x

1-372 (39 x 54 in). Inscribed, 1.1.: T Cole. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; M. and M.

Karolik Collection (not in exhibition)

painted a distant view of Niagara, in which the presence and immense scale of

the cataract are diminished, although the wilderness setting of the falls was

restored to its original pristine setting, obviously to impress the English

audience for whom he painted this work. Cole was more interested in depicting the American landscape as a sublime wilderness, a totality of experience in

and of itself, than he was compelled to exploit the sublimity of man's relationship to nature through the size and scale associated with sites such as Niagara.

His art was interesting in this way; more than any other American painter of his

time Cole employed the language of art in literary and metaphorical terms, to

enforce an idea of America as the first Garden. Noble commented that

Niagara to Cole was, by his own declaration, far less than the mountains. They were

symbols of the eternal majesty, immutability and repose, which no cataract could ever

be. And no multitude of such symbols could ever detract from the dignity and force of

each single one. Nay, the greater the multitude, the more impressive the symbolism of

each, arising from the greater skill which the mind would naturally acquire in tracing it,

and the ever-deepening insight into the divine realities which were symbolized.38

In his later Essay on American Scenery of 1835 Cole revealed no evidence of

disaffection for Niagara, referring to it as "that wonder of the world where the

sublime and beautiful are bound together in an indissoluble chain."39 But he

POWELL 75
68. Thomas Cole. Landscape with Tree Trunks^ 1825. Oil on canvas. 0.673 x 0.820

(26% x 32y2 in). Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design; Walter H.

Kimball Fund (not in exhibition)

never attempted to paint another version of the falls to substantiate his mature

judgment. Concurrent with his painting Niagara (1830; Art Institute of

Chicago), however, Cole painted two important compositions, only one of

which is known to exist. This picture, The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden

(fig. 67), was painted in 1827-1828 and was exhibited in 1828 at the exhibition of

the National Academy of Design to unfavorable criticism. Cole realized that

these first attempts at what he called "a higher style of landscape," may have

been failures, but the Expulsion was the first major attempt by an American

artist to combine the beautiful and the sublime in a single work. Of the

Expulsion Cole wrote, "I have introduced the more terrible objects of nature,

and have endeavored to heighten the effect by giving a glimpse of the Garden

of Eden in its tranquillity."40 The picture is a singular documentation of the

sublime and reveals Cole's interest in the theatrical sublime which was influenced by Martin's engravings of Paradise Lost.

Cole's most effective sublime images were envisioned as grand theater.

Critics praised his great series The Course of Empire, completed in 1836, for the

sublimity of its conception and interpreted it as a great epic poem.41 We should

remember that earlier romantic art was consciously crafted and carefully composed with the intent to stimulate responses traditionally associated with an

experience of literature and poetical imagery. The Course of Empire represented the apex of didactic, moralizing art. The series was a watershed in the

evolution of romantic landscape painting in that it concentrated in its imagery

the agony of a conscience unable to reconcile both the onward progress of

history and the economic changes associated with nascent industrialization

with the theological position which traditionally interpreted American landscape as the biblical garden. In formal terms the great series was grand theater

in the same way that Turner's Carthage paintings and Martin's Paradise Lost

mezzotints were.

In his picturesque canvases Cole invoked the idea of the sublime through

traditional associations with storms, such as that depicted in his well-known

1825 painting Landscape with Tree Trunk (fig. 68). However, in his Essay on

American Scenery Cole alluded to the direction the development of the sublime

would take in making reference to emerging transcendental concerns with

nature. In the Essay he discussed silence, stillness, and solitude, which he

identified with the lakes of America:

Embosomed in the primitive forest, and sometimes overshadowed by huge mountains,

76 POWELL
69. Thomas Cole. Catskill Creek^ 1845. Oil on canvas. Inscribed, l.r.: T.

Cole/1845. 0.661 x 0.915 (26 x 36 in). The New-York Historical Society,

New York

they are the chosen places of tranquillity; and when the deer issues from the surrounding woods to drink the cool waters, he beholds his own image as in a polished

mirror. . . ,

42

Cole's reference to water as a reflecting surface symbolizing the sublime of

stillness was not an image he would develop with frequency in his later work.

But it was prophetic of the static, mirrored waters the luminist painters

preferred to the craggy, picturesque landscapes Cole favored in his own wilderness landscapes. He was inspired to comment on this form of the sublime after

contemplating twin lakes in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

There are two lakes of this description, situated in a wild mountain gorge called the

Franconia Notch.. .. Shut in by stupendous mountains which rest on crags that tower

more than a thousand feet above the water . . . they have such an aspect of deep

seclusion, of utter and unbroken solitude, that, when standing on their brink a lonely

traveler, I was overwhelmed with an emotion of the sublime, such as I have rarely felt.43

Here Cole indicates that his experience of the sublime of solitude, the

transcendental sublime, was revelatory and wholly new, for he contrasts this

feeling with the traditional sublime of Burke. It is a fascinating transitional

description contrasting the physiological sublime, which he discusses by referring to the physical scale of his surroundings—the "stupendous" mountains

towering a thousand feet above him—with the contemplative image of still

water. For Cole the sense of isolation in a wilderness setting reinforced by the

tranquil lakes symbolized the ultimate sublime. This description of this experience "of awfulness in the deep solitude" is essentially equivocal in the literature

of the sublime, as was the appearance of water in Cole's landscapes. In his

wilderness landscapes Cole generally restricted the areas of water to the middle

distance of the picture, consistent with his interest in balancing the elements of

a picture to conform to the compositional rules of the picturesque. Even late in

his career, when he began to show a concern for greater expanses of sky, such as

that in the landscape Catskill Creek (fig. 69) of 1845, he achieves careful balance

through discreetly apportioned areas of land and water. The reflective surface

of the water is relatively small and appears as a circular orb in the lower center of

the picture, locking the composition into a rigid formal arrangement. This

represents in fact a very different attitude toward light, space, and reflected

light than the luminists would adopt. In this picture the viewer is aware of

compositional equilibrium arrived at through careful arrangement of the

masses of nature. Pictorial unity does not result from tonal gradations of color

POWELL 77
nd light. Cole was always acutely conscious of the need for such balance in his

ndscapes, and this concern did not permit a specific element of landscape to

chieve dominance, symbolic or otherwise, as a primary artistic concern. He

oted in his Essay:

 was not that the jagged precipices were lofty, that the encircling woods were of the

mmest shade, or that the waters were profoundly deep; but that over all, rocks, wood,

nd water, brooded the spirit of repose, and the silent energy of nature stirred the soul to

s inmost depths.44

Early in his career Cole defended his position with regard to the idea of

composition" in a well-known letter to his patron Robert Gilmor. In the letter,

ritten in December 1825, Cole responded to Gilmor's request for a landscape

hat described an actual view. Cole's famous response—"If the imagination is

hackled, and nothing is described but what we see, seldom will anything truly

reat be produced either in Painting or Poetry"45—was an eloquent defense of

ompositional principles based on a close association of literature, poetry, and

ainting. Cole went on to note, "The most lovely and perfect parts of nature

ay be brought together, and combined in a whole, that shall surpass in beauty

nd effect any picture painted from a single view."46 Thus, in most of his

ndscape paintings Cole adjusted the general view of nature, usually by

rranging foreground elements, to conform to his idea of nature as a spiritual

xperience. He never relinquished this sense for balance and harmony in his

ompositions, nor permitted one aspect of the landscape to intrude as a

ominant visual symbol.

Luminist painting did not adhere to the same understanding of the princi

es of composition. If one compares Cole's late Catskill Creek (fig. 69) of 1845

ith a luminist canvas such as Fitz Hugh Lane's Normals Woe (fig. 61) of 1862,

he difference in the perception of nature, its significance as metaphor, and the

asic understanding of composition clearly differentiate the two artists and

heir work, and the generation separating them. Cole belonged to the earlier

eneration of landscape artists who were deeply influenced by Anglo-romantic

otions of nature derived from Wordsworth and other literary figures. Catskill

reek with its lowered horizon and what, for Cole, is a vast expanse of sky,

eflected in a pool of water in the center, identifies with an earlier tradition of

ndscape. Nature as a described experience, not stillness and light, is its

ubject, and the picture reveals the textural, expressive style Cole favored. He

as clearly blocked out the elements of composition on the canvas to obtain

verall harmonic balance. The large tree on the left of the picture penetrates the

xpanse of sky, as do smaller trees on the right, which tend to unify earth and

ky with water as the primary visual anchor, creating what Cole would have

escribed as a true classical "composition" of American wilderness. In Lane's

ormals Woe the perception of nature is such that sea and sky fuse in a

mirrored union in which time stops and the artifice of classic landscape

omposition is no longer apparent. In luminist painting the viewer does not

xperience nature from outside the picture but from within as an intuited

phenomenon: the plane of a luminist canvas extends toward the viewer to

encompass his presence in the conceptualized space of the landscape itself. This

aspect of luminism has drawn extended discussion from other scholars, who

have explored its affinities with Emersonian transcendentalism, explained its

formal style in terms of photography, and described its influence on the

emergence of a tight, realistic mode of expression derived from Ruskin's

Modern Painters.41 Luminism unquestionably evolved as the result of impact

with these important sources. However, luminist art relates as well to the

general dissemination of Kantian thought throughout northern Europe and

America.

In its American phase luminism represented Kant's perceptions of nature at

their most distinguished and refined level. There were earlier related parallels

in European romantic art. These occurred most eloquently in the art of the

German romantic landscapist Caspar David Friedrich, whose enigmatic paintings, laden with religious symbols, puzzled many contemporary critics, who

responded with curiosity to this artist's precocious and unique concern for

space and light. As such, Friedrich's paintings were the first manifestations of

an emotive response to nature which did not involve human events and which

was concerned with transmitting an internal vision of nature coincidental with

external reality. Heinrich von Kleist's criticism of Friedrich's painting Monk by

the Sea (Monch am Meer, 1808-1810; fig. 70), one of the most quintessentially

sublime paintings of the century, could as easily have been a critical response to

certain pictures of Lane, Heade, or Kensett, particularly Heade's remarkable

drawings of the marshes on the Plum Island River at twilight. Von Kleist was

astonished by Monk by the Sea, commenting, "Because of its monotony and

boundlessness, with nothing but the frame as a foreground, one feels as if one's

eyelids had been cut off."48 Friedrich's art represented the first visual consolidation and influence of Kant in European art and the first demonstrated interest

in the transcendental sublime, the sublime of space and its attendant light. In

this picture and in others, for instance Large Enclosure Near Dresden (1832; fig.

71), light assumes major importance as a spiritual metaphor for divinity in

nature. It also unites with space and silence in a pictorial union that designates a

new visualization of the sublime.

The same interest in uniting an internal, or intuited experience of nature,

with the reality of natural appearances can be seen in American landscape

during the decade of the i86os. The unifying characteristics of style in the art of

Kensett, Lane, Heade, and Gifford conspired to recreate an experience of

nature that was associated with God and in which, as Novak remarked,

"oneness with Godhead is complete."49 This art related to Emerson and

through his writing the overriding influence of Kant in a wholly unique way.

What luminist art achieved, in Europe and America, was a reformulation,

under the impact of transcendentalist philosophy, of the formal appearances of

nature into a new vocabulary of religious symbols. Earlier romantic landscape

art such as Cole's was overtly didactic; one can "read" the symbolism in most of

8 POWELL
7o. Caspar David Friedrich. Monk by the Sea, 1808-1810. Oil on canvas, i.ioo

x 1.715 (435/i6 x 67% in). Staatliche Schlosser und Garten, Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin (not in exhibition)

71 Caspar David Friedrich. The Large Enclosure Near Dresden, 1832. Oil on

canvas. 0.735 x 1.030 (28% x ^Vie in). Gemaldegalerie Neue Meister, The

State Art Collections of Dresden, German Democratic Republic (not in

exhibition). Photo: Gerhard Reinhold, Leipzig-Molkau

POWELL 79
2. Fitz Hugh Lane. Entrance of Somes Sound from Southwest Harbor, 1852. Oil on canvas.

0.604 x 0.908 (23% x 353/

1

 in). Private collection. Photo: M. W. Sexton (see plate 10)

73. Fitz Hugh Lane. Ships and an Approaching Storm Off Owl's Head, Maine, 1860. Oil on

canvas. 0.610 x 1.007 (24 x 39% in). Governor and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller IV. Photo:

O. E. Nelson (see plate 9)

Cole's paintings, which consciously made reference to the classical landscape

radition represented by Claude Lorrain. Luminist paintings attempt, on the

ther hand, to visualize an intuited experience of nature through the stylistic

onfluence of color, light, and space and the supra-reality of silence. One of the

mportant arguments presented by Kant, as Gombrich noted, was his opposi

ion to logicians who separated the symbolic from the intuitive act.50 Kant

elieved that all knowledge of God was merely symbolic, and the symbolic for

im meant intuitive experience. This same application applies to luminist

andscape and explains the special concern for eradicating evidence of expres

ive style in this art. This resulted in interpretations of nature that most closely

pproximated an intuited spiritual experience of the sublime.

Fitz Hugh Lane and Martin Johnson Heade, working independently,

reated luminist pictures that exemplified the transcendentalist fascination

with the contemplative sublime. Lane's interest in the stillness and serenity of

rozen time, encapsulated in compositions of austere beauty with images

eflected in the mirrored surfaces of water, is evident in his 1852 picture,

ntrance of Somes Sound from Southwest Harbor (fig. 72). In this precocious

xample of Lane's early maturity primary visual concern is manifested for

uplicating an experience of nature in which all elements are locked into a

ectangular format stabilized by verticals and horizontals. The compressed

horizontal waterline of the landscape is reinforced by its reflection in the water,

and the vertical masts of the ship are likewise emphasized through the duplication of reflection. The atmosphere of the painting glows with a unifying,

warmly tinted light which bathes the scene from above. The absence of cast

shadows further emphasizes the severely controlled impression of stasis in this

picture, which distills an intuition and mood of nature, eternalizing it in silence

and light.

The decade of the i86os was an historical watershed for America. The

convulsions of the Civil War shattered the national psyche. It is both curious

and revealing that during the years immediately prior to the conflict Lane

produced a series of paintings that further distilled the concept of transcendental sublimity. In 1860 he pointed Ships and an Approaching Storm Off Owl's Head,

Maine (fig. 73), a picture that looks back to the traditional sublime in which

storms figured prominently. This painting conveys a brooding anticipation in

the darkness, stillness, and silence compressed in its severe formalism. The

primary visual element, the large vessel in the middle center of the composition, counterpoints the impending drama of the storm, as its listless white sails,

furled and shortened in readiness and anticipation, hang limply, silhouetted

against the darkening sky.

During the war years Lane painted his most profound and refined landscapes, including the versions of Norman's Woe and culminating in the oils

0 POWELL
depicting Brace's Rock, Gloucester (figs, n, 74, 91,117). The pictures of Brace's

Rock were completed in 1863 and 1864 and represent in Lane's art the extreme of

the sublime of silence. Their impact is made more profound if one realizes that

these fragile visions, surreal in their intense, penetrating analysis of the silence

of nature, unifying that mood with a state of mind, were painted during the

American apocalypse. Once again Lane's interest in structure and geometry

asserts itself; the composition is organized, in each of these canvases, along

horizontal bands which recede into the light and space of the sea. The Brace's

Rock paintings are remarkable, ideated mirrors of nature that reflect the soul of

the artist, fusing the mind of man with the sublime spiritual universe of the

Almighty, represented in the empty, light-filled atmosphere of the Atlantic.

Younger than Lane, who died in 1865, Martin Johnson Heade continued and

expanded the luminist imperatives which evolved in Lane's art. Although there

is no evidence that the two were familiar with each other's style, the formal

affinities and interest in the essential characteristics of transcendental art and

the sublime make it impossible to separate their achievements. Heade's 1862

painting Lake George (fig. 75) is particularly interesting to study in comparison

with earlier American romantic landscape concerns such as Cole's. In this work

Heade has reduced the scale and dominance of the mountain range and focused

instead on the space of sky, reflected in an equally large surface of water. The

tightly painted and painstakingly detailed foreground rocks intensify the impression of a stilled experience of nature encapsulated within the spatial

container of the picture. The foreground in this picture is of interest in addition

to the intense realist style in which Heade painted it. The spatial construction

in most luminist paintings is achieved by means of receding horizontal lines, or

bands; Lane's Somes Sound is a case in point. In the i86os, however, an interest in

careful foreground technique was coupled with discrete spatial concerns that

involved leading the eye into luminist space along a serpentine curve progress74. Fitz Hugh Lane. Brace's Rock^

1864. Oil on canvas. 0.261 x 0.387

(ioy8 x i$% in). Private collection.

Photo: Childs Gallery

POWELL 81
5. Martin Johnson Heade. Lake George, 1862. Oil on canvas. 0.661 x 1.264 (26 x 493A in). Inscribed, 1.1.: MJ Heade / 1862. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; M. and M. Karolik Collection

ng from a lower corner of the picture and receding diagonally until it curves

back into the composition in the middle distance. This has the effect, in

pictures such as Lane's Normals Woe and Heade's Lake George, of creating a

patial wedge, a geometric triangle of water. Kensett would favor this compo

itional format as well, because it offered the artist the option of directing visual

ocus gradually into the well of sublime space and suffiisive color that was the

ubject of luminism. The precedent for this kind of composition, so effective in

affirming the singular identity of the open, laterally configured space favored

by these artists, could have been Frederic Church's brilliantly innovative canvas, Niagara, painted in 1857 (Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). In

his picture the rim of the falls is described by a receding diagonal, which

progresses into space from the lower left corner of the composition and then

cuts back to the left abruptly at an angle to define the far rim of the horseshoe

falls and which, simultaneously, becomes the horizon of the picture. In other

luminist paintings the negative space, demarcating the emptiness into which

the waters of Niagara pour, is transformed into the reflected, mirrored space of

still water. Space-defining geometry occupied the concerns of these artists and

facilitated the creation of a visual experience of space which seemed to be a

continuum of the viewer's own world.

Heade, more so than Lane, experimented with the formal geometry of space

that emphasized infinity in more exaggerated but extremely effective compositions. He too became interested in the theme of the stranded boat and in 1863

2 POWELL
76. Martin Johnson Heade. Sunset on the Newbury Marshes, 1862. Oil on canvas. 0.638 x 1.270 (25!

/16 x 50 in). Inscribed, l.r.: MJHeade/ 1862.

Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore; Gift of Dr. Alan C. Woods, Jr.

painted this subject in a format very close to that of Lane's Brace's Rock series.

At this time Heade also began to paint the pictures of the Marshfield and

Newbury marshes which were so conceptually precocious and clearly established his artistic reputation as a major contributor to the tradition of the

sublime. These paintings are paradigmatic of the open composition of

luminism and emphasize wide-angled perspective recession. As such, they

create the sensation of sublime space more than other landscape art of the same

period. Heade, moving in the same tradition established decades earlier by the

German Friedrich, extends the space of the picture to incorporate conceptually

the viewer's world. When one views a Heade painting of the marshes, it

appears as if one were looking at nature with one's "eyelids cut off." Sunset on

the Newbury Marshes of 1862 (fig. 76; see also fig. 77) is one of the earliest

examples of Heade's manifest interest in space, light, and the silence of the

sublime. In the picture a triangular wedge of water, the bend in the salt river,

opens up the solid plane of earth and marsh grass which appear to extend

uninterrupted and unimpeded beneath the viewer. The lines of recession are

established by discreet placement of haystacks that recede into the distance

with dramatic and compelling effect. The lines of the juncture between the

higher ground on the perimeter of the marsh and the edge of the marsh itself

also expand to exaggerate and reinforce the visual experience of rushing into

deep space. In no other American landscapes does spatial recession play such an

important role or is it developed with such careful geometric precision. In this

POWELL 83
77- Martin Johnson Heade. Sunrise on the Marshes', 1863. Oil on canvas. 0.661 x 1.276 (26 x

50% in). Inscribed, l.r.: MJ Heade 63. Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, Michigan; Gift of the

Viola E. Bray Charitable Trust (see plate 16)

78. Martin Johnson Heade. Twilight on the Plum Island River, i86os. Charcoal and

colored chalks on paper. 0.276 x 0.556 (io7/8 x 2i7/8 in). Private collection

sense Heade's marsh pictures are fixed points in a Copernican universe in

which space and light fuse to simulate world and God.

If Lane's pictures of Brace's Rock represent the intensity of his interest in the

sublime of silence, Heade's charcoal drawings of twilight on the Plum Island

River (i86os; fig. 78) are counterparts to them. In no other collected body of

work does an artist manifest concerns for space as a visual sublime continuum.

These drawings were produced at various times between 1862 and 1868, and

their refined sense of geometry and spatial development require special consideration. In the drawings, which together sequentially emphasize the passage of

time, Heade situates the viewer literally in the reflecting mirror of water which

opens into the space of the picture. As a result the landscape is not framed in

any traditional sense but "bends" or warps around the viewer, implying in the

most sophisticated visual terms an extension of space in both directions, into

and away from the picture plane. The haystacks are placed in dual line on either

side of the receding diagonals, which define the riverbanks and enforce further

the sensation of infinite space as well as the impression that one is rushing

forward, into and through it. The placement of the sailboat, whose stern just

touches the apex of the triangle formed by the banks of the river, and the flat

plane of the sail block the headlong rush forward into space implied by the

receding perspective lines. This design contributes to the creation of a visual

and spatial tension that enforces what is a consummate experience of the

sublime of space and silence.

Heade's thunderstorm paintings are perhaps his most dramatic sublime

pictures—that is to say, in a traditional sense where they individually invoke an

impression of impending disaster. Stebbins has discussed these works as having

apocalyptic significance, comparing them to Church's Twilight in the Wilderness

(1860; fig. 204).51 These paintings, like Lane's Ships and an Approaching Storm

(fig. 73), incorporate in their stillness and sense of nervous anticipation an

emotive content of rare power and impressiveness.^/^rfl^w/f Storm: Beach

Near Newport (i86os; fig. 79) reveals Heade's interest in the intensity of foreground realism that appeared in his earlier painting of Lake George; but here

the landscape appears distant and surreal; the rock formations in particular do

not seem to be of this world. The stillness of the scene is enforced by Heade's

intense focus on the rocks and also his depiction of the waves, which are frozen

in time at the peak of cresting and appear as if they had been torn from paper.

The blackness of the sky is contrasted against the whiteness of the beach, a

dark-light contrast that relates to Burke's psychological description of sublime

scenes. But the overall impression achieved is one of extreme tenseness and

apprehension. Thunderstorm Over Narragansett Bay of 1868 is more open in

composition and is perhaps more accessible as a perceived human experience of

nature. In this work the storm is closer to us in time, and those soon to be

inundated by it are making preparations in anticipation. One sailboat has been

beached and others are making toward shore or lowering sail to prepare for the

first strong gusts of wind which will announce the arrival of the storm. The

sense of stillness just prior to the blast is heightened and maintained by the

mirrorlike reflections and calm of the water.

The art of John Frederick Kensett and Sanford Robinson Gifford represents

a different stylistic approach to silence and light than the art of Lane and

84 POWELL
79. Martin Johnson Heade. Approaching Storm: Beach Near Newport, i86os. Oil on canvas. 0.711 x 1.479 (28 x 58!

/4 in). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; M. and M. Karolik Collection

Heade. Kensett was interested in related aspects of natural experience, and in

his Newport marines and his pictures of the Shrewsbury River his art approaches an intensity of expression with regard to silence and light similar to

the other mid-century painters. More than Lane and Heade, Kensett approaches a tonalism which evokes a feeling for the atmosphere and light which

envelops nature at a specific time of day. In his compositions Kensett preferred

to offset the masses with voids to create space and to emphasize its openness

and light. Lane's concern for receding horizontals does not seem to have

affected Kensett's style, although many of his Newport scenes incorporate the

curving serpentine waterline which both Lane and Heade adopted in the

sixties, perhaps in response to Church's Niagara. More than that of any other

American landscape painter identified with luminism, Kensett's career demonstrates a shift in the visual concern for landscape, from the conventional

picturesque to an interest in open space and quietism. The painting Sunset.,

Camels Hump) Vermont (c. 1851; fig. 80) is, for instance, very close in its

compositional arrangement to Cole's Catskill Creek of 1845 (fig. 69). It is,

nevertheless, a picture of mood, depicting a poetic experience of nature. The

distinction between the picturesque mode of landscape expression and the

intuited unification of light, space, and silence that identifies Kensett's mature

style is considerable. If we compare his painting Shrewsbury River (fig. 81) of

1856, which is filled with the white light of luminism, with the earlier work, we

can see the extent to which Kensett's vision has altered. In the later picture

Kensett balances the mass of landscape, along with its reflection in the still

water of the river on the left of the canvas, against an area of marsh grass on the

lower right. The remainder of the composition consists of light, hovering in

the palpable atmosphere and reflected in the unrippled surface of the river. The

refinement of this picture, in which nature has been reduced to cryptographic

essentials of composition, is supreme. Three-dimensional masses are opposed

POWELL 85
o. John Frederick Kensett. Sunset) Camel's Hump, Vermont, c. 1851. Oil on canvas. 0.305

 0.410 (13% x i6yi6 in). The Art Museum, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

see plate 13)

1. John Frederick Kensett. Shrewsbury River, 1856. Oil on academy board. 0.152 x 0.305

6 x 12 in). Inscribed, \.\.: JFK 1856. Private collection, Woodstock, Vermont. Photo:

Charles Uht

in diagonal opposition with the rarified and insubstantial veils of light, color,

and atmosphere reflected in water. Unlike Heade's marsh pictures, in which an

impression of deep, recessive space is conceived by an almost horizontal

orientation of objects along wide-angled perspective lines, Kensett's pictures

wrap the viewer in a tinted spatial envelope, which offers an equivalent

experience of silence, color, and light. Kensett's Newport paintings such as

Newport Coast (fig. 82) and Bench at Newport (see pi. 2), both painted in the

decade of the 18508, are supreme examples of Kensett's mature execution and his

interest in heavy, palpable atmospheric effects. In each of these pictures the eye

follows the gentry curved contour of the waterline from the lower center of the

picture to a massive rock formation, painted in great detail. The compressed

mass and heaviness of the rocks, consolidated in the lower left of each picture, is

contrasted by the openness and space of the water and sky. A sense of visual

release into space is effected in this opposition of earth and rock with water and

air, a release that is both exhilarating and contemplative and conducive to

feelings of sublimity which correspond with the imperatives of the transcendental sublime. Kensett's interest in depicting nature as an experience of light,

space, and silence occupied his interest for a considerable period, as is evident

in the 1872 painting Eaton'sNeck, Long Island (fig. 83), which comes as close as

any work in his oeuvre to duplicating the sense of acceleration into space

visualized in Heade's work. This picture, minimized in detail and reduced in

the extreme to simple geometric areas of dark and light masses in juxtaposition,

is a classic example of the luminist artist's interest in a continuum of space and

light as the principal subject of painting.

Sanford Robinson Gifford was concerned with special effects of light and

color, especially at twilight; and his pictures, more than those of his contemporaries, exaggerated the natural appearances of light for expressive effect.

James Jackson Jarves commented on this feature of Clifford's style in his book

The Art-Idea: "Gifford has an opulent sense of color, but its tone is artificial and

strained, often of a lively or deep brimstone tint, as if he saw the landscape

through stained glass."52

In most of his pictures Gifford favored the warm spectral colors, unlike

Kensett, whose light usually appeared to be watery and silvered and heavily

atmospheric. Gifford's pictures are thus more dramatically charged with colored atmosphere, which, because of its hotness, often appears "smoky." But in

his river paintings he adheres to many of the same formal conventions of

composition which appear in the work of the other luminists.yl Twilight in the

Adirondack* (1864; Adirondack Museum, Blue Mountain Lake, New York) and

Hook Mountain, Hudson (1866; fig. 84) are classic luminist compositions, in

which the eye is led into space following a curving beach. The landscape is

minimal and reflected in clear, mirrorlike surfaces of water which multiply the

effects of silence and space. Gifford is perhaps better known for his more

original contributions to the corpus of mid-century landscape, which focus on

effects of twilight in mountainous regions. Twilight on Hunter Mountain of 1866

6 POWELL
82. John Frederick Kensett. Newport Coast, c. 1850-1860. Oil

on canvas. 0.461 x 0.769 (i8yi6 x $0% in). Richard A.

Manoogian. Photo: Helga Photo Studio

83. John Frederick Kensett. Eaton's

Neck, Long Island, 1872. Oil on canvas.

O.457 x 0.915 (18 x 36 in). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Gift of

Thomas Kensett, 1874

POWELL 87
85. Sanford Robinson GifFord.

Twilight on Hunter Mountdin,

1866. Oil on canvas. 0.775 x 1-372

(3oy2 x 54 in). Inscribed, l.r.:

S.R. Gifford 1866; on back:

Hunter Mountain/S.R. Gifford

Pinxit. The Lano Collection

(see plate 14)

fig. 85) is one of GifFord's most interesting pictures, revealing the excessive

olor effects which he preferred, to Jarves' distaste. The slumbering orange

ight which bathes this landscape and the purple haze which obscures the

mountain are of a visual intensity that relate more to the pyrotechnics of

Church than to the frozen luminosities of Lane and Heade. GifFord is interest

ng for this; his art related to the contemplative, or transcendental sublime,

articularly in his river scenes, in which smoky atmospheric effects are mirrored

n silent waters darkening at twilight (fig. 86). At the same time, however,

GifFord was able to draw inspiration from the high romantic tradition con

inued by Frederic Edwin Church in his generation and, before him, Thomas

Cole. The foreground of Hunter Mountain is dotted with the stumps of trees

which have been cleared to make way for a westward-expanding frontier. Such

eferences to the encroachment of civilization appear often in Cole's painting.

GifFord's twilight pictures of the i86os, particularly Hunter Mountain, are

mportant transitional pictures in which luminism as an atmospheric percep

ion of nature and space is combined with more traditional landscape concerns.

The emphasis GifFord placed on tinted, sulphuric, atmospheric efFects, by

combining them with other associative references to landscape, relates his

work to both classic luminism and to the more spectacular and melodramatic

concerns for apocalyptic efFects and light which occupied Church.

Frederic Church was the quintessential painter of the American sublime. His

art formed the standard against which virtually all other talent in the United

States was judged, and in the decade of the i86os his influence on landscape

painting in America was enormous. Church however was not a luminist

painter in the sense that Lane was. His landscape paintings were not intuitive.

But he maintained an interest in American light and explored light in the

landscape with spectacular results that associated his art with the imperatives of

the traditional sublime. In a series of important pictures depicting sunset in the

wilderness, Church created a startlingly vivid body of work using the newly

available cadmium colors. The culminating painting in this series, whose

prophetic symbolism anticipated the Civil War, was the 1860 picture Twilight in

the Wilderness. Church became interested in this theme early in his career during

8 POWELL
84. Sanford Robinson GifFord. Hook Mountain, Hudson, 1866. Oil on

canvas. 0.207 x 0.482 (8y8 x 19 in). Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven,

Connecticut; Gift of Miss Annette I. Young in memory of Professor D.

Cady Eaton and Mr. Innis Young

86. Sanford Robinson Gifford. River Scene by Moonlight, 18705. Oil on

canvas. 0.226 x 0.400 (87/8 x 15% in). Inscribed, on back: Gifford. Mr. and

Mrs. Erving Wolf

POWELL 89
a trip to Mt. Desert Island in Maine in 1850. Following his visit to Maine he

commenced painting water scenes which attempted to capture the transient

effects of light as the sun rose over the Atlantic. These paintings resound with

vivid hues—oranges, reds, and purples—which reflect off and through a

low-lying, scudding cloud cover and from the surface of the water. The color is

thus entrapped in a rich band of brilliant light emphasized between two areas

of dark. The idea for these pictures was probably Fitz Hugh Lane's Twilight on

theKennebec of 1849 (private collection), which he exhibited at the Art Union

that year.53 Lane was one of the first artists to take advantage of the new colors,

and this precedent also could have had an important influence in Church's

decision to employ cadmium colors. During the fifties Church painted Mt.

Desert (c. 1850; fig. 87),Beacon OffMt. Desert (1851; fig. 88), wASunset (1856; fig.

89) all of which explore pyrotechnic effects of light reflected off water and

clouds. Twilight in the Wilderness of 1860, in which color resonates with a fiery

intensity, culminates in an experience of the sublime new to American art, one

which David Huntington has called "the supreme moment of cosmic

time . . . the natural apocalypse."54 It is an extraordinary painting in which

primeval wilderness, the traditional American symbol of the biblical Garden, is

depicted at the most dramatic, awesomely beautiful and mysterious moment of

the day. It is a picture through which Church offers visual access to a moment of

communion with the Almighty. It is a heightened visualization of a moment in

an experience of nature as it unfolds in time; one is acutely aware of the

significance of time in this picture, of its transience and ephemerality. The

subject of the painting is light, charged with vivid pinks and oranges, which

reflect from the underside of heaven and are mirrored in still, reflective waters.

The band of intense yellow light that separates the earth and sky emphasizes the

space compressed between. The combined union of light, color, space, and

silence in this painting celebrates an experience of sublimity unknown before

its time in the world of art. The painting defies simple categorization as a

"luminist" work of art, but there can be no doubt that the subject of the picture

is, literally, American light, symbolic of the new world Apocalypse. It is a

compelling work of art which combines two aspects of the sublime, the

traditional interest in nature as object and the transcendental concern for

nature as experience, through color, space, and silence.

Church was the first artist to extend American landscape to include such

traditionally sublime subjects as erupting volcanoes, monumental icebergs,

and ancient ruins, painted experiences from his travels in South America, the

Arctic, and the Holy Land. Cotopaxi (fig. 225), the dramatic tour de force he

painted in 1863 at the height of the Civil War, would undoubtedly have

appealed to traditionalists well versed in the psychological implications of

Burke. Church's Aurora Borealis (fig. 190) of 1865, on the other hand, carried

representations of light in nature to a new extreme of sublimity and drama.

Church interpreted nature as history, employing a vocabulary of the sublime

which visualized every mode of expression attributed to it. He was an encyc87. Frederic Edwin Church. Mt. Desert, c. 1850. Oil on paper. 0.228 x 0.357 (815/ie

 x HYie

in). Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York, The Smithsonian Institution's National

Museum of Design.

lopedic artist, incorporating in his art aspects of the aesthetics of Burke and

Kant. Most importantly, Church recreated the American experience, as he did

in Twilight in the Wilderness, as an apotheosis of light.

It is important to remember that the American landscape had long been

identified as the site of the promised millenium. The Apocalypse of St. John as

described in the Book of Revelations had been incorporated in the wider

context of Protestant theology by Puritan ministers intent on delimiting the

new world experience and identifying it with the course of sacred history.

Interest in the millenium and the Apocalypse was resurgent in the nineteenth

century and it is a possible, though tentative assertion that a vocabulary of

apocalyptic symbols emerged in landscape painting which related to the long

tradition of considering American history as religious history. American light

was the most obvious and overriding symbolic concern of mid-century

painters; but other images, which can be identified in the Book of Revelations,

appeared in landscapes painted in a quietistic mode, as well as in Church's

spectacular visions of natural apocalypse, bringing together the transcendental

and high romantic sublime. The crescent moon appears, for instance, in the

works of Sanford Gifford with some frequency and is ascendent in the evening

sky, along with the evening star, in Twilight on Hunter Mountain. The moon

appears often in the art of the German romantics, particularly Friedrich. It is

mentioned in Revelations as symbol of the Apocalypse and is described "a great

wonder in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her

90 POWELL
88. Frederic Edwin Church. Beacon OffMt. Desert, 1851. Oil on canvas. 0.787 x 1.168 (31 x 46 in). Inscribed, l.r.: EChurch/-^. Private collection. Photo: Helga Photo Studio

POWELL 91
89. Frederic Edwin Church. Sunset, 1856. Oil on canvas. 0.610 x 0.915 (24 x 36 in). Inscribed, on rock, l.r.: E E. Church 1856 c. Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, New York

2 POWELL
feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars55

 (Rev. 12:1).

The rainbow is also introduced as an apocalyptic image in the Revelations of

St. John, where one is described as encircling the throne of heaven ("there was

a rainbow round the throne, on sight like unto an emerald55—Rev. 4:3).

Frederic Church had a special fascination for rainbows and they were prominently featured in two major paintings, Niagara of 1857, and the spectacular

South American landscape painted in 1866, Rainy Season in the Tropics (The Fine

Arts Museums of San Francisco). The introduction of symbolic imagery from

the Bible to support a high romantic argument for wilderness is consistent with

Church's visual references to light as a metaphor. The appeal of such symbolism for the American imagination had always been strong and touched on a

deeply ingrained Protestant tradition, in which the American landscape was

interpreted as a metaphor for biblical landscape.

The Last Judgment was most often associated in the popular imagination

with the catastrophes described in Revelations. The engravings of John Martin

depicting these events are a case in point and represent the visual extremes of

the traditional sublime. However, the Bible also introduces the sublime of

silence in the extraordinary discourse in Revelations which establishes the

visual setting of the throne of heaven on the Day of Judgment. This fascinating

and provocative passage has, perhaps, a special significance in relation to the

transcendental sublime of mid-century landscape. What is described is the

biblical equivalent of a luminist vision: "before the throne there was a sea of

glass like unto crystal55 (Rev. 4:6). This reference to still, mirrored water which

defines the space intervening between the viewer and the throne of the Almighty has a special poignance in the context of the landscape painting of

nineteenth-century America.

Indeed, the Reverend Louis Noble, Thomas Cole's biographer and

Church's companion on an 1859 voyage to Labrador and Newfoundland, used

this very language from Revelations to describe his impression of icebergs in

the northern waters:

Wonderful to behold! It was only a fair field for the steepled icebergs, a vast metropolis

in ice . . . glittering in the sunset. Solemn, still, and half-celestial scene! .. . I said

aloud, but low: The City of God! The sea of glass! The plains of heaven!'55

Luminism, depicting the transcendental sublime, represented a paradigm of

the "sea of glass55 referred to in the Bible. However, even in such spectacular

apocalyptic visualizations as Frederic Church's Cotopaxi, reflective water is

important in the composition where it contrasts with the drama of the volcanic

eruption, the active Apocalypse. Still water in American landscape painting

represented more than a contemplative view of nature. For the symbolic

imagination, such scenes were associated with the sublime of silence and space

and related at yet another level, in which American light subsumed all experience as a manifestation of the sublime, a symbol of the throne of heaven. The

frozen light of the transcendental sublime and the high romantic drama of the

traditional sublime depicted extremes of emotive responses to nature, both of

which identified American nature with the sublime.

These disparate but related expressions of the sublime continued to interest

American landscape painters as the century drew toward a close and other

forms of art, notably impressionism, began to displace older literary and

biblical concerns for landscape. Albert Bierstadt capitalized on the majestic

sublimity of the mountains of the far West but he also found the image of the

stranded boat just as compelling as late as 1889, when he painted the Wreck of the

"Anton" in Loring Bay, Alaska (fig. 90). Space and light continued to have

symbolic significance in American landscape following the Civil War; but the

spiritual light and stilled silence of mid-century American landscape was

perhaps the most refined form of expression the sublime achieved in art. The

perception of nature that was so carefully cultivated in this art represented the

end of a tradition which associated American landscape and American light

with sacred history and the sublime.

90. Albeit Bierstadt. Wreck of the "Ancon" in Loring Bay, Alaska, 1889. Oil on paper

mounted on panel. 0.356 x 0.502 (14 x 19% in). Inscribed, l.r.: ABierstadt (AB is in

monogram). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; M. and M. Karolik Collection

POWELL 93
Notes

1. For an extended discussion of the concept of the

sublime see Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime, A Study of

Critical Theories in Eighteenth Century England (Ann

Arbor, 1960).

2. See Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the

American Self (New Haven, 1975), for a detailed and

comprehensive discussion of Puritanism and its influence on American perceptions of history and religion,

especially chap. 5, "The Myth of America."

3. Bercovitch, American Self, 151-152.

4. Thomas Cole, "Essay on American Scenery," 1835,

republished m American Art, 1700-1960, Sources and Documents, ed. John McCoubrey (New Jersey, 1965), 98-109,

99-100.

5. Monk, The Sublime, 6. See also Rosario Assunto,

"Tragedy and the Sublime" mEncyclopedia of World An, 14

(New York, 1967): 268-276.

6. Edmund Burke, An Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Prof. Henry Merely (New York, 1886), 44, 60.

First edition 1756.

7. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York,

1971), ioi.

8. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, ioi.

9. Burke, Essay, 12-13.

10. Burke, Essay, 44.

11. Burke, Essay, 81.

12. Burke, Essay, 81.

13. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans.

James Creed Meredith, Great Books of the Western

World (Chicago, 1952) 42: 511. First edition 1790.

14. Kant, Critique of Judgement, 498.

15. Kant, Critique of Judgement, 501.

16. Thomas Cole, "A Letter to Critics on the Art of

Painting," Knickerbocker, 16 (1840): 230-233, 233.

17. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Thoughts on Art," 1841;

republished in American Art, 70-80, 73.

18. See Walter John Hippie, Jr., The Beautiful, the Sublime and the Picturesque in Eighteenth Century British

Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale, 111., 1957), 158.

19. Monk, The Sublime, 154.

20. Monk, The Sublime, 155.

21. See Barbara Novak, American Painting of the

Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American

Experience (New York, 1969), chaps. 5, 6, and 7.

22. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Transcendentalist" in

Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E.

Whicher (Boston, 1960), 198.

23. Cited in Novak, American Painting, no.

24. Monk, The Sublime, 204.

25. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of

Man, trans, and intro. Reginald Snell (New York, 1965),

63-64.

26. Barbara Novak, "American Landscape: Changing

Concepts of the Sublime," The American Art Journal, 4,

no. i (Spring 1972): 36-42, 40.

27. Novak, "American Landscape," 42.

28. Emerson, "Nature" in Selections from Ralph Waldo

Emerson, 35.

29. Bcrcovitch, American Self, 165.

30. Burke, Essay, 70.

31. William Vaughan, "Caspar David Friedrich" in

Caspar David Friedrich 1774-1840, Romantic Landscape

Painting in Dresden [exh. cat., Tate Gallery] (London,

1972), 13.

32. Jan Bialostocki, "Characterization" in Encyclopedia

of World An, 3 (New York, 1960): 371-375, 371.

33. Louis Legrand Noble, The Life and Works of

Thomas Cole, ed. Elliot S. Vesell (Cambridge, Mass.,

1964), 81. First edition 1853.

34- Noble, Thomas Cole, 81-82.

3 5. William Wordsworth, Literary Criticism, quoted in

Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 33.

36. Nathaniel Parker Willis, Pencillings By the Way, 3

vols. (London, 1835), 2: 37-38.

37. Noble, Thomas Cole, 72.

38. Noble, Thomas Cole, 73.

39. Thomas Cole, "Essay on American Scenery," in

American Art, 105.

40. Noble, Thomas Cole, 64.

41. Noble, Thomas Cole, 168-169.

42. Thomas Cole, "Essay on American Scenery" in

American Art, 104.

43. Cole, "Essay on American Scenery" in American

An, 104. Cole had been impressed by this scene earlier. In

his notes pencilled into the leaves of his sketchbook on a

trip to the White Mountains in 1828, Cole commented,

"The perfect repose of these waters, and the unbroken

silence reigning through the whole region, made the

scene peculiarly impressive and sublime; indeed, there

was an awfulness in the deep solitude, pent up within the

great precipices, that was painful." Noble, Thomas Cole,

67.

44. Thomas Cole, "Essay on American Scenery" in

American An, 104.

45. Noble, Thomas Cole, 63.

46. Noble, Thomas Cole, 63.

47. See Novak, American Painting, and John Wilmerding, American An (London and New York, 1976).

48. Heinrich von Kleist, cited in Vaughan, "Documents and Reminiscences," Caspar David Friedrich, 107.

49- Novak, "American Landscape," 42.

5 o. E. H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images, Studies in the An

of the Renaissance (London, 1972), 184.

51. Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., Manin Johnson Heade

(New Haven, 1975), 77-

52. James Jackson Jarves, The An-Idea, ed. Benjamin

Rowland, Jr. (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 193. First edition

1864.

53. John Wilmerding, Fitz Hugh Lane (New York,

i97i), 49-

54- David C. Huntington, The Landscapes of Frederic

Edwin Church (New York, 1966), 82.

5 5. Louis L. Noble, After Icebergs with a Painter, A

Summer Voyage to Labrador and Around Newfoundland

(New York, 1861), 223.

94 POWELL

7- Timothy H. O'Sullivan. Summits of the Uinta Mountains, Utah Territory, c. 1868-1869. Albumen photograph. 0.203 x 0.286 (8 x u% in). The National Archives, Washington, D.C.

6
The Luminist Movement: Some Reflections

John Wilmerding

Luminism and Literature

THE PULL OF AMERICAN "LIGHT," THAT PALPABLE, SPIRITUAL BEAUTY of the

American wilderness, was first felt across the western reaches of the Atlantic

Ocean as Europe's earliest explorers to the New World glimpsed its indefinite

edges. Almost from the beginning were fused the real vastness of space

(experienced at sea and soon discovered on land), the sun's golden radiance

setting in the west, and the sense of spiritual as well as physical riches in this

new continent. Looking to the glowing western horizon, therefore, promised

the gold of this world and of the next. That consciousness of salvation and of

the divine presence in man's world was stimulated by Puritan theology and

revivified by transcendentalism. Indeed, Henry David Thoreau could write:

Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a West as distant and as

fair as that into which the sun goes down. He appears to migrate westward daily, and

tempt us to follow him. He is the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We

dream all night of those mountain-ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor

only, which were last gilded by his rays.1

As F. O. Matthiessen has pointed out, the culmination of transcendentalism

coincides with a great moment in American cultural expression around the

midpoint of the nineteenth century. For example, just between 1850 and 1855

appeared Ralph Waldo Emerson's Representative Men, Nathaniel Hawthorne's

Scarlet Letter and House of the Seven Gables, Herman Melville's Moby Dick and

Pierre, Thoreau's Walden, and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, let alone John

Greenleaf Whittier's Songs of Labor and Henry W. Longfellow's Hiawatha.2

Matthiessen's own important book on this period, American Renaissance,

was first published in 1941, and stands as a broad seminal study of American

culture and literature parallel to John Baur's writing at the time on painting.

Here are many of the first observations, we now take for granted, about social

and intellectual developments in mid-nineteenth-century America: the

emergence of technology over agriculture, the gold rush of 1849 and its

initiation of a truly gilded age of acquisitiveness, the rise of photography

concomitant with plein-air painting. But perhaps most of all there was what

Emerson himself claimed as "a new consciousness.... Men grew reflective and

intellectual."3 Since Matthiessen's perceptive remarks about Emerson and his

contemporaries are frequently directly related to the work of the luminist

painters, some of these themes deserve recapitulation here.

For example, speaking of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Matthiessen cites the central role of abstraction, meditation, and symbolism in the writer's work.

Whether we look at the novel or essay of the time or at the first classic examples

of luminist imagery, we become aware of a spiritual presence abstracted before

us. Further, by the sense of order and balance present we too assume a posture

of contemplation. However critics may continue to interpret the meaning of

the letter A in The Scarlet Letter, it clearly reverberates with the symbolic

content of art and creativity. As David Huntington has shown us, so, too, do

the eloquent canvases of Frederic Church speak their own symbolic language

of an American Edenic paradise. But the abstraction Matthiessen notes has

equally to do with form as with content. He cites the symmetrical design of

Hawthorne's novel, the author's use of light and dark contrasts in the ordering

of his scenes (both dramatic and landscape), and his keying of events to specific

moments of time or season.4 Heade's measured marshes and Lane's stilled

surfaces possess parallel symmetries, contrasts, and clarities.

One of the most revealing images Hawthorne employs, that of the mirror, is

a recurring theme in others as well, from Emerson to Fitz Hugh Lane:

Glancing at the looking-glass, we behold—deep within its haunted verge—the smouldering glow of the half-extinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and

a repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove further from

the actual, and nearer to the imaginative.5

97
n other words, the mind's eye itself is a form of mirror—observing, imagining,

nd transforming, such that for writer and painter alike reflection truly meant

oth what was perceived and the act of perceiving, inextricably fused together.

Or, to quote Matthiessen: "perpetually for Hawthorne the shimmer of the now

was merely the surface of the deep pool of history.55 6 Clearly, the mirror surfaces

ound so repeatedly in luminist canvases were equally vehicles for carrying the

mind's eye from the specific objectivity of the present moment and place to a

ranscendent cosmos beyond time.

Of course, it was Emerson the philosopher who has most famously articu

ated for us the union of man and God through nature. Announcing himself to

e a "transparent eyeball,55 he found it possible for the "currents of the Univer

al Being55 to circulate through him.7 Not accidentally, Emerson himself had

verlapping careers as a minister, natural scientist, and poet. Indeed, he stated,

America is a poem in our eyes; its simple geography dazzles the imagination,

nd it will not wait long for metres.55 8 We need not look beyond the controlled

measurements and design of a Martin Johnson Heade or Lane composition

rom the i86os to see the American landscape shaped in poetic rhythms. One

apacity the artist-poet possessed was to perceive the harmony between the

oul and matter, the sublime and the ordinary, the seer and seen. Emerson often

ompared this "OversouP to water, which like the currents passing through the

ransparent eye, brings us back to the layered meanings of reflection.9

Emerson's observations, taken here primarily from the landmark essays

Nature (1836) and The American Scholar (1837), seem to fall into three natural

roupings—first, the significance in looking at horizons:

Our age is ocular.

ut is it the picture of the unbounded sea, or is it the lassitude of the Syrian summer, that

more and more draws the cords of Will out of my thought and leaves me nothing but

erpetual observation, perpetual acquiescence and perpetual thankfulness.

he health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can

ee far enough.

here is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all

he parts, that is, the poet.

n the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds

omewhat as beautiful as his own nature.

he link between mental states and moments in nature:

very hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of mind, from

reathless noon to grimmest midnight.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

And, finally, the ordering of nature:

n view of the significance of nature, we arrive at once at a new fact, that nature is a

iscipline.

Nature hastens to render account of herself to the mind. Classification begins.

Things are so strictly related, that according to the skill of the eye, from any one object

the parts and properties of any other may be predicted.10

Not merely do horizontal depth and order dominate most pure luminist

designs, even as Emerson sees their dominance in nature; but the cogency and

compactness of Emerson's style would also seem to find counterparts in such

intimately wrought works as Lane's Brace's Rock (1864; fig. 91) or Albeit

Bierstadt's Wreck of the "Ancon" in Loring Bay, Alaska (1889; fig. 90). In this

regard it is worth noting the penchant of Emerson and most of his contemporaries for such smaller-scale forms of writing as the essay, short story, and

sketch. Even the epigrammatic sentences and notational recordings of Thoreau

suggest a parallel with the scrupulous delineations of natural details in luminist

pictures. It is a provocative coincidence that the most famous political utterance of the day, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, dates from exactly the same time

as Lane's painting Brace's Rock. Both are startlingly compact and poetic; they

are self-contained meditations on the moment; they intimate a higher, timeless

serenity.

As with Lane and Emerson, we feel with Thoreau too the desire for full

immersion in nature. Thoreau seeks to take nature's pulse as much as his own.

He records his delight in the sensations of touch, as with water on the skin; of

hearing, as with birds or a telegraph wire; or of sight, as in the autumnal tints

on a red maple. The total union of artist and subject is a central aspect of pure

luminism as most recently summarized by Barbara Novak; and with Lane's

Brace's Rock still in mind, we can see the same aspiration of the transcendentalists to achieve both the spaciousness of the horizon and the immediacy of

observed phenomena. There is an essence of fact and feeling, in this small

painting of vast scale, that parallels Thoreau's intention to "cut a broad swath

and shave close.5511 This landscape is as much an embodiment of thought as of

nature. Its patiently adjusted design seeks to provide, through revealed physical order, a construct for revery: "In the spaces of thought are the reaches of

land and water, where men go and come. The landscape lies far and fair within,

and the deepest thinker is the farthest traveled.5512

Distance, therefore, both measured and mental, is a significant element in

the imagery of nature at this time. On one walk Thoreau urged climbing a tree

to elevate our vantage point and gain the broader, deeper view. It is noteworthy

that quite frequently the luminist painter sought out vistas from unusually high

points of view. See, for example, John E Kensett5s View Near Cozzens Hotel, West

Point (1863; fig. 243), Frederic Church's Andes of Ecuador (1855; fig. 186), Sanford

Gifford5s Mt. Mansfield (1858; fig. 26), Worthington Whittredge's Home by the

Sea-Side (1871; fig. 92), or Eadweard Muybridge's Valley of the Tosemite from

Glacier Point (1872; fig. 93).

Stillness and silence are two other elements that we have already noted in the

classic luminist style, and these too form a theme Thoreau celebrates. Consider

how closely his word images match paintings like Lane's Entrance of Somes

Sound from Southwest Harbor (1852; fig. 72), Gifford's H00& Mountain, Hudson

8 WILMERDING
92. Thomas Worthington Whittredge. Home by the

Sen-Side, 1871. Oil on canvas. 0.369 x 0.648 (14.% x 25%

in). Inscribed, l.r.: W. Whittredge. Los Angeles County

Museum of Art; William Randolph Hearst Collection

93. Eadweard J. Muybridge. Valley of the Tosemitefrom

Glacier Point (no. 33), 1872. Albumen photograph. 0.430

x 0.545 (i615/i6 x 2i7/16 in). University Research Library,

Special Collections, University of California, Los

Ajigeles (below, right)

(1866; fig. 84); drawings like David Johnson's Tongue Mountain, Lake George

(1872; fig. 274), Aaron Draper Shattuck's Lake George (1858; fig. 275); and

photographs like S. R. Stoddard's views of Upper Saranac Lake (figs. 94-95),

Carleton Watkins' Mirror Lake, Tosemite (1866; fig. 96), and Timothy O'Sullivan's Summits of the Uinta Mountains, Utah Territory (c. 1868-1869; fig. 97):

To be calm, to be serene! There is the calmness of the lake when there is not a breath of

wind. .. . So it is with us. Sometimes we are clarified and calmed healthily, as we never

were before in our lives, not by an opiate, but by some unconscious obedience to the

all-just laws, so that we become like a still lake of purest crystal and without an effort our

depths are revealed to ourselves. All the world goes by and is reflected in our deeps.

Such clarity!13

Reflection took on an especially reverent air at evening. Twilight was a

poignant period of time's passage, and by the i86os, it seemed to assume

association with loss of more than day. Thoreau wondered,

What shall we name this season?—this very late afternoon, or very early evening, this

severe and placid season of the day, most favorable for reflection, after the insufferable

heats and the bustle of the day are over and before the dampness and twilight of

evening! The serene hour, the Muses' hour, the season of reflection!14

Sunset pictures by later Hudson River school and luminist painters appeared

from the 1840$ on, as may be seen in the examples by Thomas Cole, John S.

Blunt, Asher B. Durand, Lane, Heade, Kensett, Bierstadt, Gifford, Jasper E

Cropsey, and, above all, Church. The latter's series of some half-dozen major

WILMERDING 99
4- Seneca Ray Stoddard. Upper Saranac Lake, East From Saranaclnn^ 1889. Silverprint

hotograph. 0.165 x 0.217 (6% x 89/i6 in). The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

95. Seneca Ray Stoddard. Upper Saranac Lake, South from Saranac Inn, 1889. Silverprint

photograph. 0.167 x 0.219 (69/i6 x 85/16 in). The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

anvases throughout the 18508 culminates with the spectacular Twilight in the

Wilderness of 1860. Virtually burning with the intensity of stained-glass windows, these paintings inspire deeply contemplative, even devotional, re

ponses.

Although Emerson and Thoreau come most readily to mind as intellectual

nd literary parallels to luminism, there are striking relationships also in the

arly work of other major writers. Herman Melville was at this time a youthful

riend of Hawthorne's, and several of his themes follow directly from the older

writer's work. An opening paragraph of Moby-Dick contains the familiar phrase,

meditation and water are wedded for ever."15 Like Hawthorne, too, Melville

ften constructed his word pictures around oppositions of light and dark, calm

nd storm, good and evil. And reminiscent of the writing of Emerson and

Thoreau is his synthesis of general and specific, or philosophical and reportor

al. Just as Thoreau sought to tie his own existence to the larger rhythms of

nature, Melville modulated his prose to match the changing environment of

he sea as he experienced its flux. The chapter entitled "Sunset" is a perfect, and

articularly appropriate, example here. In it emerge Melville's sense of self,

ubject, and artifact as comparable organisms: "Yonder, by the ever-brimming

goblet's rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue.

The diver sun—slow dived from noon—goes down; my soul mounts up!"16

By contrast, Walt Whitman's poetry can be less directly linked to the spare

meditations of much luminist art, yet his exultant and celebratory songs of self

and America do bear comparison with the large-scale pyrotechnics of Church

and Bierstadt. In setting out to catalogue his cosmos \& Leaves of Grass, first

published in 1855 just four years after Moby-Dick, Whitman's all-encompassing

lines set down the variety and vastness of America with Church's naturalist

sweep. Whitman joined his colleagues by calling out, "Give me the splendid

silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling."17 In fact, the colors of sky and earth

are recurring motifs, as exemplified in the short poem "A Prairie Sunset":

Shot gold, maroon and violet, dazzling

silver, emerald, fawn,

The earth's whole amplitude and Nature's

multiform power consign'd for once

to colors;

The light, the general air possess'd by

them—colors till now unknown,

00 WILMERDING
9i. Fitz Hugh Lane. Bracks Rock, 1864. Oil on canvas. 0.254 x 0.381 (10 x 15 in). Inscribed,

on stretcher: EH. Lane/1864. Mr. and Mrs. Harold Bell

No limit, confine—not the Western sky alone—

the high meridian—North, South, all,

Pure luminous color fighting the silent

shadows to the last.18

Matthiessen contrasts this language of nature's harmonies to the plein-air

paintings of William Sidney Mount.19 For example, in Farmer's Nooning (1836;

fig. 98) and especially Eel Spearing at Setauket (1845; fig. 256) we enter a rarified

world of optimism and self-contentment.

Finally, we can note the perhaps surprising correlation between luminist

imagery and the early writing of Henry James. Baur first called attention to an

apt passage in a story called "A Landscape Painter," which James published in

The Atlantic Monthly in 1866:

I shall never forget the wondrous stillness which brooded over earth and water. .

The deep, translucent water reposed at the base of the warm sunlit cliff like a great basin

of glass, which I half expected to hear shiver and crack as our keel ploughed through it.

And how color and sound stood out in the transparent air! . . . The mossy rocks

doubled themselves without a flaw in the clear, dark water.. . . There is a certain purity

in this Cragthorpe air which I have never seen approached—a lightness, a brilliancy, a

crudity, which allows perfect liberty of self-assertion to each individual object in the

landscape. The prospect is ever more or less like a picture which lacks its final process, its

reduction to unity.20

96. Carleton E. Watkins. Mirror Lake, Yosemite, c. 1866. Albumen photograph. 0.521 x

0.400 (2oy2 x 15% in). The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

WILMERDING IOI
98

. William Sidney Mount. Farmer's Nooning ^ 1836. Oil on canvas. 0.511 x 0.629 (20% x

24% in). Inscribed, 1.1.: VPw. 5. Mount 1836. The Museums at Stony Brook, New York,

Gift of Frederick Sturges, Jr., 1954

100. John K. Hillers. Tosemite Valley^ c. 1886. Albumen photograph. 0.327 x 0.206 (i2

7/8 x

8V

8 in)

. The Denver Public Library, Western History Department (at right)

Although we ordinarily associate James' writing with a more cosmopolitan

culture and style of writing fashionable later in the nineteenth century,

paradoxically this piece captures the quintessential features of luminist art. The

repose, the wonder, the glassy mirror are obvious keynotes. At the same time

the brooding and threatened cracking suggest a hidden tension also seen in the

darker side of luminism, in such works as Heade's thunderstorm series at

Newport or Lane's Ships and an Approaching Storm Off Owl's Head, Maine

(1860; fig. 73). The image of mossy rocks doubled in dark water finds corollaries

in the latter's Brace's Rock (figs, n, 74,91,116-117) and Norman's Woe (figs. 32-33,

61) series, Kensett's Shrewsbury River (1856; fig. 81), and Jack Killers' views of

Yosemite Valley (figs. 99-100). James' reference to "crudity is a reminder of the

conceptual strain Barbara Novak has explored. The individuality of all objects

perfectly describes the self-effacing precision of the luminist touch; and "reduc-

tion to unity," its process.

99. John K. Hillers.

Tosemite Falls Cliff, California, c. 1886. Albumen

photograph. 0.327 x 0.206

(i2

7

/

8 x 8y8 in)

. The Denver

Public Library, Western

History Department

102 WILMERDING
The Precursors ofLuminism

When does luminism begin?

As Baur argued, "The beginnings of American luminism were everywhere

and nowhere."21 That is to say, its sources can be found in the work of a number

of artists, and while there is no one focal precedent, several precursors are

readily identifiable. Perhaps the major forerunner is Washington Allston,

southern born, Harvard educated, and European trained. His years with

Benjamin West in London, along with travel to the great European art centers

during the first decade of the nineteenth century, gave him a solid grounding in

the traditions of heroic history painting. Yet coming from a younger generation attuned to the rising tide of romanticism, and responding to the experience of travel through the alluring landscapes of Switzerland and Italy, Allston

increasingly found nature herself to be his most forceful mode of artistic

expression.

To capture his feelings about nature on canvas Allston made special use of

color glazing techniques he had observed in the Venetian masters. These

imbued his grand biblical subjects set in dramatic landscapes with a character of

mystery. When he turned to pure landscapes, he fused observation and recollection in paintings which seemed indebted simultaneously to experience and

imagination. In a few memorable scenes light suffuses the composition. Literally as well as poetically light organizes the central axis in Coast Scene on the

Mediterranean of i8n (fig. 101) and Moonlit Landscape of 1819 (fig. 13; see also fig.

102), both frequently cited as notable proto-luminist canvases. Although the

radiance of sunlight and moonlight respectively dominates these designs, the

genre elements of figures silhouetted in the foreground also engage our

attention. This sort of diversionary detail is, for the most part, suppressed in

pure luminist painting by the next generation. Still, the clear, classical structure

and enveloping aura of reverie, which imply a unified harmony between the

soul and nature, are among the earliest notes in American painting anticipating

a fully developed style a few decades later. Quite appropriately the transcendentalist Margaret Fuller could write of Allston's work: "The calm and meditative cast of these pictures, the ideal beauty that shone through rather than in

them, and the harmony of coloring were unlike anything else I saw."22

101. Washington Allston. Coast Scene on the Mediterranean^ i8n. Oil on canvas. 0.864 x

1.016 (34 x 40 in). Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, South Carolina (not in

exhibition)

102. Washington Allston. American Scenery. Time: Afternoon with a Southwest Haze, 1835.

Oil on canvas. 0.470 x 0.622 (i8y2 x 24y2 in). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Bequest of

Edmund Dwight

WILMERDING K>3
Among the first artists to be interested in rendering similar light effects

across identifiable harborscapes were John S. Blunt and Robert Salmon. The

former was a native of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, while the latter was born

on the English border with Scotland; both made their way to Boston and were

actively painting there during the 18208. With their work we immediately sense

a new documentary awareness of the landscape, missing in Allston's imagina

ive idyls. The formulas of their compositions are still close to Allston, who

had, during that period, himself settled in Boston, receiving younger aspiring

painters and attempting vainly to conclude his own commissions. Notable in

Blum's New Tork Harbor at Sunset (c. 1815-1824; fig. 103) and Salmon's Moonlight

Coastal Scene (1836; fig. 104) are the same axial and central light, and silhouetted

figures. But now instead of Allston's promenading family greeting a lone

horseman, we have laborers and fishermen engaged in their practical tasks of

he moment.

Allston's Moonlit Landscape was exhibited periodically in the years after its

completion in 1819; and it seems to have had an influence on others as well, for

Lane painted similar moonlight marines during the 18508, when he was visiting

Boston regularly. Blunfs New York scene also anticipates the strong red and

yellow tonalities of Lane's later Boston harbor pictures. While there is no

concrete proof Blunt spent any time in the New York area, at least one of his

previously known paintings has long been tided Picnic on Long Island (1823;

Nina Fletcher Little, Brookline, Massachusetts) and like most artists of his time

he doubtless did some traveling along the east coast in search of subjects.23

Although the coloring and rather open design of New Tork Harbor at Sunset

might initially support a dating closer to mid-century, we can firmly place this

cene in the early 18205; for shortly after, a parapet railing was constructed

around the top of the fortress and would surely have been recorded in any later

rendering. Moreover, the relatively simplified forms of the ship and archi

ecture all point to Blunts hand and other comparable views by him at that

ime.

The pictures by Salmon that come closest to early luminism are his large

views across Boston harbor painted toward the end of the decade. Shortly after

his arrival in Boston in 1828, he painted several major canvases, some for theater

backdrops, as well as the ambitiously scaled Wharves of Boston (fig. 105). In this a

crisp, golden light clarifies the myriad details of shiprigging and shoreline

architecture. It is on one level an image of bustling industry, evident in the

103. John Samuel Blunt. New Tork Harbor at Sunset, c. 1815-1824. Oil on canvas. 0.578 x

0.734 (22% x 28% in). Private collection (not in exhibition; above)

104. Robert Salmon. Moonlight Coastal Scene^ 1836. Oil on panel. 0.422 x 0.616 (i65/8 x

24!/4 in). Signed, l.r.: R.S. 1836. The St. Louis Art Museum; Purchase: Funds provided by

Mr. and Mrs. Duncan C. Dobson, Contributions in memory of Henry B. Pflager, Tax

Funds 1973 and Eliza K. McMillan Fund (not in exhibition; below)

104 WILMERDING
great sailing vessels doing business on distant seas and in the crowded wharf

buildings recently built along the expanding waterfront. But the warm serenity

of light and atmosphere also reinforces a pervasive feeling of bursting optimism, a visible index of Josiah Quinces productive mayoralty locally, as well

as of the new energies of Jacksonian Democracy then just emerging nationally.

With his two major Boston views done later in the 1830$—composed respectively from Constitution Wharf and Castle Island—Salmon achieved an even

greater spaciousness. His maintenance of a relatively low vantage point and

horizon line allows the great expanses of light-filled sky to envelop the design.

More importantly, he has now pushed his shoreline into the far distance; and

while figures still give scale and activity to the foreground, our vision goes

more intentionally to the central panorama. These shifts in design and in the

viewer's relationship to the subject are crucial steps luminism would refine even

further. What they mean is that genre elements previously favored are being

absorbed into the greater drama of nature in flux. We might conclude, therefore, that Salmon's art was significantly moving toward luminist light, structure, and subject matter, though without achieving all three completely or

together.

Mention of the genre elements in his landscape foregrounds brings us to the

major genre painters who were forerunners of pure luminism: William Sidney

Mount and George Caleb Bingham. Virtually Mount's entire career is associated with eastern Long Island, New York, where he was born and grew up.

After some training in New York City, he returned to the Stony Brook area to

paint the familiar scenes of everyday life among his friends and neighbors. In

effect, the doings of local farmers were, in Mount's hands, the new subjects of a

contemporary American history painting. The former biblical or mythological

themes so preferred by earlier academicians are now transformed into celebrations of the everyday.

The warmth, humor, and calm we find in such Mount paintings as Farmer's

Nooning speak unabashedly of the Jacksonian era's expansive spirit. But it is the

role of light as an agent of tranquility that is of pertinent concern here.

Although the anecdotal activity among the foreground figures remains the

principal subject, we are also drawn to the golden fields opening up in the

background, while all is bathed in the full light of high noon. This presence of

light as a metaphor of plenitude and well-being reaches its supreme form in

Mount's art m Eel Spearing at Setauket, where harmonious order derives as well

from the carefully balanced and utterly stilled composition. Now, for the first

time in a major way, clear, sharp reflections play a vital role in the total design.

Mount's effort to record a specific place ("Hon Selah B. Stong's residence in the

distance during a drought at Setauket, Long Island") and moment ("calm, and

the water as clear as a mirror, every object perfectly distinct")24 is regularly cited

as a singular early instance of the luminist sensibility. But his method of

near-mathematical measurements and scientific precision, along with the instinct to compose in horizontal parallel zones, likewise brings us to the thresh106. William Sidney Mount. Crane Neck Across the Marsh, c. 1851. Oil on

wood panel. 0.324 x 0.432 (12% x 17 in). The Museums at Stony Brook, New

York; Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Carl Heyser, Jr., 1961

105. Robert Salmon. Wharves of Boston, 1829. Oil on canvas. 1.016 x 1.689 (40 x 66% in).

Inscribed, l.r.: R. Salmon¡1829. The Bostonian Society, Old State House, Boston; Gift of

the Estate of Edmund Quincy, 1894. Photo: Barney Burstein (see plate 7)

WILMERDING IO5
icy. Thomas Cole. View Across Frenchman** Bay from Mt. Desert Island, After a Squall,

1845. Oil on canvas. 0.968 x 0.588 (38y4 x 62% in). Cincinnati Art Museum; Gift of Miss

Alice Scarborough (not in exhibition)

old of typical luminist processes. In a later oil sketch, Crane Neck Across the

Marsh (c. 1851; fig. io0)? he moves even further to the open distances of luminism

(compare Heade's Becalmed, Long Island Sound, 1876; fig. 249).

With George Caleb Bingham's flatboatmen pictures painted on the Missouri

and Mississippi rivers, also in the later 18408, we encounter an equivalent

fusion of genre themes and plein-air landscape. Before leaving for a period of

study and travel in Dusseldorf in the later 18508, Bingham drew an extensive

picture of daily river life in the American Midwest, exemplified mFur Traders

Descending the Missouri (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and The

Concealed Enemy (Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts) of 1845, and The Jolly Flatboatmen (fig. 43) from the following year.

Here are combined a precision in rendering solid forms and a warm hazy light

that makes the space behind seem to dissolve into an atmospheric infinity. On

this point Barbara Novak has argued that "the sharply focused foreground and

hazed distance represent. . . the unique polarity of luminist vision."25 It is

arguable whether such dominant figuration in Mount and Bingham is consistent with classic luminism, though certainly the rigorously measured parallels,

balanced masses, and envelope of light all establish an ambience for uplifted

thought.

However, only when we turn to pure landscape do we find the formulas of

history and figure painting transferred fully to the frame of nature. In fact,

Thomas Cole has very much treated The Clove, Catskills (1827; fig. 20) as if it

were a stage now occupied not by people but by gesturing trees and assertive

rocky promontories. The vivid colors of autumn and dramatic passage of storm

clouds also articulate the theatrical and even spiritual drama of natural and

cosmic history. Now the inventory of nature's moods and elements is alone

capable of carrying elevated moral narratives. This notion that landscape might

be charged with symbolic content was an important foundation for the evolution of luminism. Proclaimed Cole, "The wilderness is yet a fitting place to

speak of God."26 In his "Essay on American Scenery," published in 1835—thus

making it almost exactly contemporary with Emerson's Nature—he argued

that one should study American scenery both for pleasure and edification.

To Cole what distinguished the American landscape from Europe's was its

wildness, because it had not yet been altered or ravaged by past civilizations.

This meant not merely that Americans could contemplate the promise of the

present ("the mind's eye may see far into futurity"), instead of meditating on a

lost past, but that it signified that one was truly in the purer world of God's

making: "We are still in Eden."27 Like his contemporaries Cole saw a

heightened purity worthy of thought in

another component of scenery, without which every landscape is defective—it is water.

Like the eye in the human countenance, it is a most expressive feature: in the unrippled

lake, which mirrors all surrounding objects, we have the expression of tranquility and

peace.28

If lakes were "chosen places,"the sky was the "soul of all scenery," and the

autumn was the "one season when the American forest surpasses all the world

in gorgeousness."29 Cole and his fellow painters often linked these themes

together in what Emerson described as "the sublime moral of autumn and of

noon."30 Looking at Cole's paintings Summer Sunset (1834; fig. 21) and Catskill

Creek (1845; fig. 69), we might well be reminded of Emerson's opening lines of

his second essay on "Nature":

There are days which occur in this climate, at almost any season of the year, wherein the

world reaches its perfection; when the air, the heavenly bodies and the earth, make a

harmony. . . . These halcyons may be looked for with a little more assurance in that

pure October weather which we distinguish by the name of the Indian summer. The

day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide fields. To have lived

through all its sunny hours, seems longevity enough.31

In Cole's more direct transcriptions of nature, such as his Catskill pictures

done later in his career, there is a new openness of composition as well as an

attention to more specific light effects. Both these aspects anticipate the

full-blown treatment by his luminist successors. He himself remarked about

the symbolic and observed features of light at day's end: "At sunset the serene

arch is filled with alchemy that transmutes mountains, and streams, and

temples, into living gold."32 Other late Cole subjects, particularly the paintings

done at Mt. Desert Island, Maine on a trip there in 1844, look forward to the

thematic and compositional features of luminism. For example, his large

canvas View Across Frenchman's Bay from Mt. Desert Island, After a Squall (fig.

107) gives us a bold panorama of natural drama across both sea and sky, which

106 WILMERDING
io8. Asher Brown Durand. American Wilderness ^ 1864. Oil on canvas. 0.641 x 1.016 (25*74x

 4°

 m) • Inscribed, 1.1.:

A.B. Durand/i864. Cincinnati Art Museum, The Edwin and Virginia Irwin Memorial

will receive even grander resolution during the next two decades in the work of

Lane, Church, and A. T. Bricher.

Following Cole's death in 1848, the mantle of informal leadership of the

Hudson River school passed to Asher B. Durand, who had been trained as an

engraver and, after a period of portrait painting, had turned late to a career as

landscapist. As a consequence of several factors—his work in prints, the

increasing taste for accurate recordings of identifiable American scenery, and

the influential writings of John Ruskin—Durand's style was a good deal more

precise in drawing and finish than Cole's. He generally continued many of the

same formulas of design, notably the solid foreground platform, framed by

rising silhouetted trees, and usually a valley tunneling our vision into the

distance. These devices are variously apparent in his paintings Kaaterskill Clove

(1866; fig. 23) andAmerican Wilderness (1864; fig. 108), while his Sunset (1878; fig.

22) and Landscape with Birches (c. 1855; fig. 109) present that central suffusion of

glowing light increasingly common in his later work and, of course, basic to the

mature luminist style.

As a widely read critic at home in England as well as in America, John Ruskin

very much influenced the artistic thought of Durand, Lane, and many of their

contemporaries. Modern Painters by Ruskin was first published in London in

109. Asher Brown Durand. Landscape with Birches', c. 1855. Oil on

canvas. 0.610 x 0.457 (24 x 18 in). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston;

Bequest of Mary Fuller Wilson

1844 and appeared in New York three years later; his Elements of Drawing was

published on both sides of the Atlantic in 1857. The earlier volume was notable

for its warm praise of J. M. W. Turner, whose work was itself much admired by

Cole, Church, Gifford, and probably also Lane. Ruskin further affected a good

deal of Durand's thinking as the latter articulated it in his "Letters on Landscape Painting." These appeared in The Crayon in 1855, almost contemporaneously with Ruskin's volume on drawing.

Where Ruskin argued that "we have to show the individual character and

liberty of the separate leaves, clouds, or rocks," Durand stated that "every kind

of tree has its traits of individuality"33 If Durand could speak of nature "fraught

with lessons of high and holy meaning," Ruskin also talked of "moral

analogies" and urged us to listen to nature's "sweet whispers of unintrusive

wisdom, and playful morality."34 Glancing again at Durand's paintings, we

WTLMERDING 107
no. David Johnson. Chocorua Peak, New Hampshire, 1856. Oil on canvas. 0.486 x 0.717

(19% x 28y4 in). Inscribed, l.r.: DJ./i8$6 (DJ is in monogram); on verso: Chocorua

Peak.N.H. /D.Johnson, 1856. Private collection. Photo: Helga Photo Studio (see plate 6)

might well keep in mind Ruskin's ethereal description of clouds as "definite and

very beautiful forms of sculptured mist" and his more down-to-earth observation that "all distant colour is pure colour: it may not be bright, but it is clear

and lovely"35 In this regard the painter advised:

When you shall have acquired some proficiency in foreground material, your next step

should be the study of atmosphere—the power which defines and measures space. ... I

can do little more than urge on you the constant study of its magic power, daily and

hourly, in all its changes.36

It is clear that in the later paintings of Cole and Durand are present several

qualities which will be fully refined by their luminist successors. One interesting secondary figure of the Hudson River school is David Johnson, who as a

painter fairly closely followed the conventions of the movement's leaders. His

Chocorua Peak, New Hampshire (1856; fig. no) has the familiar, carefully observed details, reflecting river, enframing tree, and golden distance. This painting foremost—effulgent, almost glaring—is just about as near as Johnson and

the basic Hudson River conventions come to luminism. In fact, he was able to

move further in some of his drawings, for instance Tongue Mountain, Lake

George (1872; fig. 274) where material foreground disappears altogether. Our

eye instead is carried across the glassy water—hardly interrupted by a small

promontory in the left middle ground—to the distant mountains bathed in

sunlight. Just the barest touches of pencil indicate shoreline reflections in an

otherwise purified scene. The new emphatic horizontality of composition

enhances this perception of broad depth and stillness. Only a few painters, now

grouped as luminists, synthesized these variables together, and even then with

individual variations of style. Paradoxically, those who emerged to work fully

in this refined mode around 1850 have left us a legacy both recognizable and

elusive.

Mature Luminism

The principal exponents of luminism are commonly thought to be four: Fitz

Hugh Lane (1804-1865), John Frederick Kensett (1816-1872), Martin Johnson

Heade (1819-1904), and Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880). However, historians have placed differing emphases on these figures and the relationships

among them. Baur found Lane and Heade to be the leading figures; James

Thomas Flexner put Kensett foremost. Barbara Novak calls Lane "a paradigm

of luminism," while Stebbins argues that "the archetypal luminists now appear

to be Heade and Sanford Gifford.5'

37

 Novak makes her judgment largely on the

grounds that Lane's mature art appears to embody the quintessential processes

and attitudes of the style, whereas Stebbins reasons that Heade and GifFord

worked most consistently within the luminist format. In addition, he cites the

important contribution of Heade's friend Frederic Church (1826-1900) to the

movement. Yet Church's role here is an idiosyncratic one, in which he brought

to the movement a distinctively nationalist iconography through his powerful

sunset paintings. As these made the most daring use, relative to that of his

colleagues, of the new cadmium colors, his wilderness landscapes have come to

occupy a critical position in the luminist treatment of light.

Speaking generally, we may observe that, as in the evolution of many styles

in the history of art, here there is an early archaic phase, lasting from around

1848 to 1855. During these years the first dramatic light effects began to appear in

the work of these painters, as did the new open formats. For Lane and Kensett

it was a period of breaking out of earlier graphic traditions and away from the

compositional conventions of Salmon and Durand, as they moved toward the

new poetic style. Over the next decade luminism held to a classic phase. Some

of the most stilled and peaceful creations come at this time. In the early fifties

Lane and Kensett were painting harbor scenes in broad noontime light, but by

the end of the decade they and others were turning increasingly to conditions

of haze, fog, and mist. Also, during this time Church commenced his series of

twilight paintings, which stimulated others to attempt the subject often from

1860 on. By the mid-sixties and running into the later seventies, a late phase of

more romantic or painterly luminism is evident. In this period occur many of

the great evening pictures by Heade and Gifford, as well as most of the major

thunderstorm subjects. Though several of the group had begun to travel quite

108 WILMERDING
m. Fitz Hugh Lane. Salem Harbor, 1853. Oil on canvas.

0.660 x 1.067 (26 x 42 in). Inscribed, on sail of center

boat: FHL/iSss. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; M. and

M. Karolik Collection

far afield from the New England coast by this time, now several set ofl

widely—to the Arctic, South America, California and Alaska, the Mediterra

nean, and the Near East—in search of more exotic subject matter. At the same

time we may further notice a new loosening in brushwork, appropriate to ar

interest in denser, softer envelopes of light and moisture.

The earlier years of luminism coincide with and illuminate the culminating

years of Jacksonian optimism. The middle period of course parallels the

national crisis of the Civil War, and it is unsurprising that emerging out o!

these years are the luminist subjects of violence and explosion. During the lasi

phase one is conscious of an almost schizophrenic polarity in the luminisi

vision, as it is torn between drama and calm, clarity of ideals and melanchol)

meditations on loss, one period of history and art left behind and anothei

uneasily unfolding.

In the work of Lane, who died as the Civil War was coming to an end, then

is only the scantest intimation of the turbulence and escapism to appear later ir

luminism. A Gloucester, Massachusetts, native, who grew up and first prac

ticed art there, Lane also spent several years in Boston learning lithography

This gave him a basic grounding in conceptualizing forms in linear patterns

and something of the graphic clarity in his prints carries over to his oils. During

112. Fitz Hugh Lane. Ship "Starlight" in the Fog, 1860. Oil on canvas. 0.762 x 1.270 (30 x 50

in). Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio (see plate 8)

WILMERDING IO9
H3- Fitz Hugh Lane. Owl's Head, Penobscot Bay, Maine, 1862. Oil on canvas. 0.406 x 0.660 (16 x 26 in). Inscribed, on back of canvas:

Owl's Head—Penobscot Bay, by EH. Lane, 1862. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; M. and M. Karolik Collection

no WILMERDING
the 18405 he had the opportunity, in Boston, of seeing the work of Salmon first

hand, as well as most probably AUston's landscapes and the marines by Thomas

Birch of Philadelphia. In any case, his early paintings are close to earlier

established traditions, indebted to seventeenth-century Dutch and

eighteenth-century English art.

A major turning point in Lane's career seems to have come with his first trip

to Maine in 1848, when he went to Castine to visit the family of his Gloucester

friend, Joseph Stevens. Although Cole and Alvan Fisher had visited Mt. Desert

Island earlier in the 18408, Lane painted on his visit Twilight on the Kennebec

(private collection), his first response to that wilderness area seen in the

burning reds of pigments newly available. Subsequent trips to the Maine coast

in the summers of the 18505 led Lane to sketch extensively around Owl's Head at

the southern end of Penobscot Bay, the town of Castine on its eastern side,

and, further east, Blue Hill and the region around Mt. Desert Island. Two

typical paintings from this period are the arresting Entrance of Somes Sound from

Southwest Harbor of 1852 (fig. 72) and Salem Harbor (fig. m), painted closer to

home the following year.

We know Stevens owned a copy of Ruskin's Modern Painters, which Lane

most likely knew as well.38 Certainly, these placid scenes by him with their

glaring light and painstakingly ordered reflections recall the English critic's

instructions:

A piece of calm water always contains a picture in itself, an exquisite reflection of the

objects above it. If you give the time necessary to draw these reflections, disturbing

them here and there as you see the breeze or current disturb them, you will get the effect

of water. . . . The picture in the pool needs nearly as much delicate drawing as the

picture above the pool.39

By the end of the 18508 Lane's compositions had become more horizontally

shaped and designed, and the glowing light earlier pervasive was now focused

along the horizon or around the sun directly seen above it. This is true in the

paintings Gloucester Harbor at Sunset (fig. 34) and Boston Harbor (fig. 239), both

mid to late 18508; Ship "Starlight" in the Fog, 1860 (fig. 112); and Christmas Cove,

Maine, 1863 (fig. 35). The presence of the sun in its axial position in several of

these later pictures also suggests some awareness on Lane's part of Turner's

work, easily brought to his attention through Ruskin's writing.

If we look closely at Lane's handling of the ripples on his water surfaces, with

their small intermingled strokes of different colors, Ruskin's detailed passages

on color mixing spring to mind:

In distant effects of rich subject, wood, or rippled water, or broken clouds, much may be

done by touches or crumbling dashes of rather dry colour, with other colours afterwards

put cunningly into the interstices. . . . The process is, in fact, the carrying out of the

principle of separate colours to the utmost possible refinement; using atoms of colour in

juxtaposition, instead of large spaces.40

In the early i86os Lane undertook a number of paintings which indicate he

may have become aware of the work of Heade, who was just at this time

beginning to paint not far from Gloucester in the Newburyport and Ipswich

marshes. For example, Lane's only known storm subject, Ships and an Approaching Storm Off Owl's Head, Maine (fig. 73), dates from 1860 and was a

theme that almost obsessed Heade in the next few years. Likewise, two pastoral

landscapes rather reminiscent of Heade and quite unusual for Lane, Riverdak

(Cape Ann Historical Association, Gloucester, Massachusetts) and Babson and

Ellery Houses, Gloucester (fig. 37), were painted in 1863. Among Lane's most

beautiful achievements from his last years are two jewels of mind and soul,

Lumber Schooners at Evening on Penobscot Bay (1860; fig. i) and Owl's Head,

Penobscot Bay, Maine (1862; fig. 113). Thinly painted and delicately colored, these

works seem to possess an infinite transparency as our inner and outer vision

carries outward to the rosy tints of day's passage.

Consideration of time was a special matter for Lane and luminism. Instead of

the more generalized renderings of season to be found in Cole's work—

whether in such allegorical works as the Voyage of Life (National Gallery of

Art, Washington, D.C.) and the Course of Empire (New-York Historical

Society, New York) series, or in observed New England scenery in spring,

summer, or autumn—now time is marked to a moment. Color and light match

not merely a precise meteorology but appear to stay nature's flux with a

poignant yet alluring subtlety. Occasionally, Lane painted more than one

version of a particular locale. In some instances there was the promise of

additional commissions; more often he became intrigued with viewing a

subject at different times of day. The most obvious contrasts were between day

and night, as in the records he made—of Half Way Rock, off the Marblehead

shore (18508; collection of George Lewis) and Indian Bar Cove, Brooksville,

Maine (1850; collection of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph H. Davenport, Jr., Lookout

Mountain, Tennessee). Elsewhere he drew and painted Owl's Head near

Rockland, Maine, from various shifting vantage points around the headland.41

These latter suggest the changes in day and hour as he cumulatively experienced the environment. With the two versions of Norman's Woe we have the

even more unobtrusive shifts in late afternoon daylight and tide levels.

The summary series of Lane's career in every respect is that devoted to

Brace's Rock, an outreaching ledge off Eastern Point, Gloucester, Massachusetts. In August 1863, he made two pencil drawings of the point, one from each

side. The more familiar view looks easterly, and Lane's executor Joseph Stevens

noted at the lower corner of the drawing that five versions of the view were

painted for different friends (fig. 114). At the same time Lane also made a

drawing from the other side of the point, looking westerly, which he entitled

Brace's Cove, Eastern Point (fig. 115). On this was noted "Painting ordered from

the entire sketch by Mrs. S. G. Rogers of Roxbury. Shortly before his death

Lane prepared a canvas 22 x 36 for it, and that was all!" The location of this

canvas is not known, if it was ever saved, but a smaller oil from this approximate vantage point came to light in 1977.

It is impossible to tell in what order Lane worked on these various drawings

WILMERDING HI
us. Fitz Hugh Lane. Brace's Cove, Eastern Point, 1863. Pencil on paper. 0.273 x 0.381 (10%

x 15 in). Inscribed, 1.1.: E H. Lane I Aug. 1863. Cape Ann Historical Association, Gloucester, Massachusetts (not in exhibition)

and oils. Moreover, one of the views of Brace's Rock, also discovered only in

recent years, is but a small oil sketch (fig. 116), and there is no way of knowing if

this is one of the five paintings Stevens listed. At present, beyond the little oil

sketch there are three finished oils of this view located. Obviously, the drawing

was Lane's initial record of the site. It is taken from some distance back on the

beach; and while the contours of the protruding rock itself are accurately

detailed, the nearer spit of dark rocks is only vaguely delineated. With the oil

sketch (a relative rarity for Lane—only a few others are extant), the colors of

early morning are added, along with the small beached sailboat. The yellow

rays of the sun radiate up from the horizon, bathing the whole with the fresh

promise of day.

In the finished oils, all about ten by fifteen inches, Lane has made the crucial

change to late afternoon (fig. 117; see also figs, n, 74,91,116). The sun is no longer

visible; only a clear light fills the sky before us, while its last pink rays are cast

from our right across the top of the rocky outcropping. Other changes have

occurred as well. The small boat is now abandoned and wrecked in shallow

water, making the human presence more remote than before, whereas the

lowered sails in the oil sketch imply recent activity. Like a zoom lens, Lane has

moved in closer to the rocky ledges cutting off much of the foreground beach

sketched in the initial drawing. Likewise, the nearer spit of dark rocks is more

n4. Fitz Hugh Lane. Brace's Rock, 1863. Pencil on paper. 0.267 x 0.381 (10% x 15 in).

Inscribed, I.e.: E H. Lane del., Aug. 1863. Cape Ann Historical Association, Gloucester,

Massachusetts

sharply exposed by the lowered tide (in keeping with the ebbing hour). But

this closer finger of rocks is also more solid and perfectly tapered, as if to

punctuate the space evenly between Brace's Rock in the background and the

beach edge in the foreground. Further, these now equally clear lines of land

find a minor echo in the triple points of the bowsprit and broken masts on the

boat.

Ruskin's extensive remarks about symmetry, balance, and order seem so apt

to the process of composition here that it is hard to believe Lane was not well

aware of his ideas:

Symmetry, or the balance of parts or masses in nearly equal opposition, is one of the

conditions of treatment under the law of Repetition. For the opposition, in a symmetrical object, is of like things reflecting each other: it is not the balance of contrary natures

(like that of day and night), but of like natures or like forms; one side of a leaf being set

like the reflection of the other in water.

Symmetry in Nature is, however, never formal nor accurate. . . .

 42

Elsewhere Ruskin comments on other aspects evident in Lane's Brace's Rock

series—shadows in shallow water and how they shift according to our changing angle of vision:

When you are drawing shallow or muddy water, you will see shadows on the bottom, or

on the surface, continually modifying the reflections. . . . The more you look down

n2 WILMERDING
into the water, the better you see objects through it; the more you look along it, the eye

being low, the more you see the reflection of objects above it.43

Quite probably the final picture in the group is the one in which the masts of

the abandoned hull have been turned inward, to carry our vision back into the

center and to balance more directly the stretching points of rock opposite.

Also, Lane has made a number of minor adjustments in the outlines of the

ledges and their complementary reflections mirrored below, to achieve that

Ruskinian "living symmetry, the balance of harmonious opposites." In the

same way the clumpy foreground rocks are now barer, in echo of the lumpy

shape of Brace's Rock beyond, while a tuft of yellow wildflowers angles up

across the water's edge as a parallel to the broken masts rising just above the

horizon. In short, like some piece of classical chamber music, all components

work with individual purity and total clarity. We may summarize Lane's

contribution to luminism here as twofold: the near-serial vision evident in his

slight shifts of vantage point and moment from image to image, and a structure

of nature revealed to be the transcending touch of the first Creator.

n6. Fitz Hugh Lane. Brace's Rock, Eastern Point, 1864.

Oil on canvas. 0.133 x 0.216 ($% x Sl/2 in). Inscribed, on

log: EH. Lane; at l.r.: EH. Lane. The Lano Collection. Photo: Bob Grove (above)

ny. Fitz Hugh Lane. Brace's Rock, Eastern Point,

Gloucester, c. 1864. Oil on canvas. 0.254 x 0.381 (10 x 15

in). Private collection. Photo: Museum of Fine Arts,

Boston (not in exhibition; below)

WILMERDING H3
8. John Frederick Kensett. An Inlet of Long Island Sound, c. 1865. Oil on canvas. 0.362 x

610 (i4y4 x 24 in). Inscribed, on rock at 1.1.: EK. Los Angeles County Museum of Art;

ift of Colonel and Mrs. William Keighley

p. John Frederick Kensett. Water Scene, Newport, i86os. Oil on canvas. 0.457 x 0.381 (18

 15 in). Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington; William Lowe Bryan Memorial

Twelve years Lane's junior, John F. Kensett also followed a similar path

during his early career, arriving as well by the late fifties at a style of serene and

orderly painting. Kensett came from Connecticut and gained his first art

experience as an engraver in New Haven. His learning to draw with precision

was to imbue his subsequent work with its own clarity of outlined and

well-balanced forms. But whereas Lane confined most of his travel to the

northern New England coast, Kensett made an early visit to Europe for several

years of study and experience. And more like the other younger luminist artists,

he continued his artistic excursions back to Europe and across America into the

18708. At just about the same time that Church was undertaking his twilight

series, Kensett painted his own Sunset, Camel's Hump, Vermont (fig. 80).

Though the relatively enframed tunnel view into the background recalls similar

compositions by Cole and Durand that must have been familiar to Kensett, the

great care and attention given to the hot ethereal drama is strikingly close to

Church's contemporary vision.

By 1859 when Kensett painted his view of Shrewsbury River in New Jersey,

he had decisively embraced the strongly lateral panorama of mature luminism

(fig. 81). In addition, all sense of a foreground platform is gone, save for a few

mossy strips to the side. Our eyes carry quickly across to the bold hill coming

down seemingly near the far horizon. In this instance, as with Lane, it is

instructive to compare the initial oil sketch with the larger finished canvas. For

although the view is clearly identifiable as the same in each, certain crucial

refinements are evident as Kensett moved, so to speak, from nature to art. Most

obvious are all the sharpened contours. But other distracting bands of marsh

grass are gone in the final design. The white and gray sails acquire crisper

silhouettes bisecting the shorelines behind. Kensett has also slightly exaggerated the profile of the headland to give it a more commanding presence. Its

mirror image in the water is equally strengthened, now smoothly coinciding,

rather than messily intersecting, the tuft of marsh grass in the left foreground.

Altogether we are again witnessing that luminist process of fusing observation

with meditation.

Much the same approach appears in all of Kensett's subjects from this date

on, as he virtually discards the dark and narrow woodland interiors associated

with Durand and earlier conventions for wider and farther reaching views. In

scenes painted around New York we find Kensett consciously giving the

viewer a sense of open distance, whether in the uninterrupted foreground of

An Inlet of Long Island Sound (1865; fig- n8) or the aerial vantage point of View

Near Cozzens Hotel, West Point (1863; fig. 243). Perhaps his most familiar

pictures are those around the beaches and rocky promontories of the Newport,

Rhode Island shore, done mostly during the decade of the i86os. Here we find

him selecting variably elevated viewpoints across the coves and water, correH4 WILMERDING
120. Martin Johnson Heade. The Stranded Boat, 1863.

Oil on canvas. 0.578 x 0.927 (22% x $6% in). Inscribed,

l.r.: M.J. Heade/i86s. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; M.

and M. Karolik Collection

spondingly shifting densities of clear light to hazy atmosphere and subtly

changing colors in the water from dark blue to the palest silvery greens.

Kensett painted some subjects such as Beacon Rock in Newport Harbor

many times, altering each version with minute changes in tide or horizon level

or in intensity or angle of sunlight and with inclusion of minor figural details.

In the case of the pair tided Newport Coast (fig. 82) and Beach at Newport (fig. 2),

both c. 1850-1860, there is the obvious addition of figures and rowboat in the

latter, but also the altered angle of view to the horizon and different cast of

sunlight on the rocks. Newport offered, with other areas of inland and coastal

New England (such as Lake George, New York; Cape Ann, Massachusetts;

and Mt. Desert, Maine, were others), a special appeal for artists at this time, for

recently advancing road and rail transportation were making such attractive

places increasingly accessible. The first resort hotels were under construction,

and by the seventies the building of summer cottages had proliferated. Consequently, such locales at once possessed pleasing civilized amenities and still

untrammeled landscape scenery. In these years joining Kensett at Newport

were numerous colleagues: Heade, Worthington Whittredge, James Suydam,

W. S. Haseltine, and A. T. Bricher. For the luminists especially, the repeated

versions they undertook of one view reveal a characteristic intensity, devoted

foremost to defining nature's timeless unity through its momentary fluctuations.

The format of one of Kensett's last pictures, Eaton's Neck, Long Island (fig.

83), though it was unfinished at his death in 1872, is one which Martin Johnson

Heade made an essential part of his luminist achievements. Heade's art also

evolved out of a conceptual tradition related to folk art, for his first art training

near his native Lumberville, Pennsylvania, came from the painters Edward and

Thomas Hicks. After early travel abroad and in America, Heade turned from

portraiture and genre to landscape subjects in the 18505. These are based on

standard Hudson River school formulas, though by the early sixties he had

found in the coastal marshes of New England a subject to be of life-long

attraction for his brush. First in Newburyport, Ipswich, and Marshfield,

Massachusetts, later in New Jersey and Florida, he painted canvas after canvas

of the broad, nearly empty wetlands, in varying conditions of light, hour, and

atmosphere. Appropriately, these tidal areas, neither wholly landscape nor

seascape, whose solidity and direction were always undulating, appealed to this

restless and introspective personality.

WILMERDING H5
2i. Martin Johnson Heade. Rio de Janeiro Bay, 1864. Oil on

anvas. 0.455 x o.pn (17% x 357/8 in). Inscribed, 1.1.: MJ.

Heade/ 1864. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.;

Gift of the Avalon Foundation 1965

Very possibly his path crossed that of Lane's around 1863, as there is stylistic

vidence in both painters' work at this time of an apparent exchange of

nfluence between them. For his part, Lane seems to have been newly attracted

o pure landscape, as in his Riverdale and the Babson and Ellery Houses, Glouces

er (fig. 37), wherein one is reminded of Heade's pinker, gray-green tonalities

nd clumpy haystack forms. On the other hand, Heade's The Stranded Boat

1863; fig. 120) is similar in composition (albeit quite personal in its wetter

tmosphere) to Lane's Brace's Rock of the same date (fig. 117). Certainly, the two

rtists were working not very far apart along Boston's North Shore. One of

Heade's earliest dated pictures here is Sunset on the Newbury Marshes of 1862

fig. 76). Paralleling Lane's technique of shifting viewpoints in the Brace's

Rock series, Heade undertook a companion painting to his Newburyport

cene the next year, now titled Sunrise on the Marshes (fig. 77). He has simply

moved the pair of trees at the left of the earlier painting to the right hand side of

he second picture and turned his gaze around to face the early morning sun.

What is singular about these marshland compositions is the attenuated ratio of

width to height which Heade introduced. Whether this was in response to the

mpact of his friend Church's monumental painting Niagara (1857; Corcoran

Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) which boldly stressed such a horizontal

ormat, or to the naturally open character of the terrain is hard to determine

with certainty. In any case, it remains the basic format for most of Heade's later

reatments of the subject. Among the modulations he does introduce during

he 18708 are softer, wetter light effects and correspondingly looser brushwork

and textures (see the views on the Marshfield Meadows, fig. 40).

One painting of 1862, Lake George (fig. 75), is hauntingly surrealistic and

seems to forecast the impending storm scenes Heade would paint over the next

few years. The Lake George area attracted at this time numerous other colleagues, including Kensett and David Johnson. The geography of the surrounding mountains, broad inland lake, and cloud-filled sky was to have a

continuing appeal as well for photographers, from Seneca Ray Stoddard to

Alfred Stieglitz. Heade's pink and blue colors reflect the immediate beauty of

this popular wilderness locale. Yet somehow the barrenness of his stony

foreground and the dryness of the air seem also to suggest some unseen

tension. To what extent that hidden drama might be related to the larger crisis

of the nation, then full into civil strife, is a provocative speculation. Whatever

was unconscious for Heade in the Lake George painting certainly erupted in a

powerful group of storm scenes, painted almost entirely near Narragansett in

the years between 1859 and 1868. Interestingly, these generally tend to be of

storms threatening or just breaking, so we face the almost unbearable and

unsustainable strain of a moment between calm and explosion, day turning

into artificial night, and earthly geography becoming unworldly.

Closely related were Heade's first South American canvases, also from the

middle and later sixties, such as Rio de Janeiro Bay (fig. 121; also fig. 122), South

American River (fig. 25), and Omotefec Volcano, Nicaragua (fig. 123), which

variously give us visions of wild tropical light, dense, primal jungle, and

exploding meteorological drama. One cannot help but wonder if there was not

some escapist impulse in these deep excursions into distant heartlands, a flight

and pursuit—on the one hand, a search for an expanding American frontier

n6 WILMERDING
122. Martin Johnson Heade. The Harbor at Rio de Janeiro, 1864. Oil on

canvas. 0.467 x 0.848 (18% x 33% in). Inscribed, 1.1.: MJ.Heade/'64.

Richard A. Manoogian. Photo: Helga Photo Studio

123. Martin Johnson Heade. Omotepec Volcano, Nicaragua, 1867. Oil on

canvas. 0.470 x 0.927 (i8y2 x 36% in). Inscribed, 1.1.: HEADE '67. Private

collection. Photo: Henry D. Childs (not in exhibition; below)

and, on the other, a withdrawal from turbulence at home. Whatever the

explanation, Heade's stormy world was confined to the decade of the Civil

War. During the 18708 he returned to vistas of serene and intimate calm, almost

abstract in their emptiness (Becalmed, Long Island Sound; fig. 249), and even

into the eighties continued to indulge in luminist themes long after he had

moved on to other subjects and places. The painterly Great Florida Sunset (1887;

fig. 124) glows with the long-past passion of luminism for those hot cadmium

colors, like the smouldering embers of a fire burning into the dawn of a very

different day.

Heade's career has numerous echoes in that of Sanford Gifford, the youngest

of the classic luminist painters: his love of travel and the exotic, his penchant for

the long horizontal composition, and his attempts at hazy afternoon and

evening landscapes. Coming from upstate New York, Gifford made frequent

excursions to paint throughout the upper Hudson valley and other mountain

areas of New England, though he was interrupted by several visits to Europe,

first in 1855 and again in 1868. From Thomas Cole he derived many of his

compositional formulas, such as the elevated view down a valley or across a

mountain range, and from Joseph Turner's art (experienced both through Cole

and at first hand abroad) he gained a love of suffused amber light flooding his

landscape vistas.

His most derivative subjects are those from the 18408, when his pictorial

designs retained Cole's rather closed-in stages, but gradually during the fifties

his views opened out into depth as well as breadth. Sky began to command an

increasing ratio of the canvas surface; and by the next decade he was exploring

the full range of sunlight effects throughout the day and evening, along with a

brushwork that varied from the precise to the painterly. Some of his river and

lake views done along the upper Hudson and in the Adirondacks exhibit the

familiar luminist favoring of a sweeping panorama across placid water, delicately balancing bands of light and dark forms in the manner of Kensett. In

other instances he selected deep views taken from mountain crests or ridges;

among his favorites repeatedly painted were Kaaterskill Falls, the Catskill

Mountain House, and Mt. Mansfield, Vermont. And he joined Kensett,

Church, and others in exalting the end of day, as in the impressive Twilight on

WILMERDING W?
Hunter Mountain (1866; fig. 85) or the more intimately scaled Sunset (1863; fig.

125) and .4 Winter Twilight (1862; fig. 233). With the first we have a picture of

almost melancholic desolation. Its date of 1866 reminds us not only of the recent

losses the nation had suffered but also of the advancing axe of civilization over

nature. Here across the entire foreground are the felled trees of a recently

cleared wilderness forest.

This mixture of praise for nature and melancholy for its loss drew Gifford, as

it did Church, to the sites of older civilizations in Italy, Greece, and the Near

East. Now distance of place and time were fused with the spatial distances of

classic luminism. In part the worn and tumbled columns of the Parthenon, as

painted both by Gififord and Church, are petrified surrogates for the fallen trees

they had recorded in the American wilderness. Church went on to Petra, and

Gifford to Egypt, as if in deeper search of renewal amidst the silent heat and

light of Western man's most ancient landscapes. It was at this time Gifford

painted Ruins of the Parthenon (1868; fig. 30), his last major picture. Of his visit

he recorded: "I broke my shins among the marble fragments of the Parthenon,

and drowned my eyes in the exquisite blue of the Aegean and the lovely hues of

the Pentelicus and Hymettus."44 An appropriate metaphor of the luminist

124. Martin Johnson Heade. Great

Florida Sunset, 1887. Oil on canvas. 1.321

x 2.439 (52x 96 in). Inscribed, l.r.: MJ.

Heade 1887. Mrs. Flagler Matthews,

The Henry Morrison Flagler Museum,

Palm Beach, Florida. Photo: Lee Brian

sensibility, a kneeling figure (probably GifFord himself) measures the marble

fragments of the temple in the foreground, thereby fixing both his golden

landscape and his place within it. Not long after, he was dead, and the

following year a memorial exhibition and catalogue were planned at the

Metropolitan Museum. A former colleague had this to say:

Gifford loved the light. His finest impressions were those derived from the landscape

when the air is charged with an effulgence of irruptive and glowing light. He has been

criticized for painting the sun; for dazzling the eye with the splendors of sunlight

verging on extravagance. But is it not a quality of genius, in all the arts, to verge on

extravagance, and yet remain calm>45

This special strain between extravagance and calm marked the culminating

glory of the luminist achievement. But it was also a strain that finally cracked

the bell jar of its world.

H8 WILMERDING
125. Sanford Robinson Gifford. Sunset, 1863. Oil on canvas. 0.242 x

0.394 (9% x 15% in). Inscribed, l.r.: S. R. Gifford 1863. Mr. and Mrs.

Erving Wolf. Photo: George M. Gushing (see plate 5)

127. Sanford Robinson Gifford. Indian Summer on Claverack Creek,

1868. Oil on canvas. 0.419 x 0.762 (16% x 30 in). Inscribed, 1.1.: SJL

Gifford; and on the reverse: S.R. Gifford pinxit 1868. Private collection. Photo: Herbert P. Vose (at right)

126. Sanford Robinson Gifford.

The Desert at Siout, Egypt, 1874.

Oil on canvas. 0.533 x 1.016 (21 x

40 in). Inscribed, on back: S R

Gifford 1874. Jerald Dillon Fessenden. Photo: Herbert P. Vose

WILMERDING np
128. Frederic Edwin Church. Morning in the Tropics, 1877. Oil on

canvas. 1.381 x 2.137 (54% x 84J/8 in). Inscribed, l.r.:

RE.CHURCH11877. National Gallery of Art, Washington,

D.C.; Gift of the Avalon Foundation 1965 (not in exhibition)

Frederic Edwin Church and Other Related Figures

The one significant figure integral to any discussion of luminism, Frederic

Edwin Church, was never purely a luminist painter. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, he became Thomas Cole's only formal pupil in the mid-i84os, just

before the older master's death. As a kind of homage to that important period

of apprenticeship, Church painted his own version of The Ox-Bow (1844-1846;

fig. 19), after Cole's well-known masterpiece now in the Metropolitan

Museum. Though all the familiar configurations are present, and the palette a

similar pale green-blue, Church's picture pays less attention to the artist

surveying the scene from the foreground and more to the overall brightness

and freshness of the landscape spreading out beyond. Within the next few years

Church made dramatic steps toward an independent personal style, no longer

tied to what David Huntington has described as the "Old World" conventions

of European landscape painting that included the darker and framed compositions Cole had borrowed from English art. Rather, with his bold rendering in

the Niagara of 1857 Church importantly altered the shape of American landscape imagery. For in this monumental canvas he deemphasized and destabilized the foreground by sweeping it almost clean of diverting details and

by placing the viewer virtually on a platform of rushing water. Further, he

suggested a vast unfolding continent over the horizon with clouds rising half

into view at our most distant point of vision. Perhaps most influential was his

decision to increase the canvas width to more than twice its height, thus

stretching the traditional pictorial rectangle for a view of nature. Huntington

persuasively argues that all these devices were Church's original response to the

particular character of the American wilderness: its purity, force, and expanse.

They certainly contributed to the picture's immediate popularity and, with it,

the artist's ascendant reputation.

Church did not experiment greatly with this new horizontal format in

subsequent paintings, though, as we have seen, it appears to have widely

affected the work of others such as Heade and GifTord. He did continue its use

regularly in his small oil sketches of light and cloud effects, where the

panoramic shape seemed most congenial to capturing expressive sections of

sky. He also carried on with the large-scale canvas he had used for Niagara, as if

increased physical size metaphorically suited both America's literal spaciousness and his own grandeur of vision. Niagara relates to luminism only in its

structure and moral sense of American nature. It is otherwise too painterly and

action-filled, quite distinct from the usually stilled and fixed moments painted

120 WILMERDING
by Heade and his colleagues. Church's great cataract was nonetheless a part of

two major wilderness sequences he was pursuing throughout the 18508 and

early sixties, one North American and the other South American. Possibly

conscious of these contrasting continental polarities, he also alternated within

these groups between landscape and seascape, sunrise and sunset, tropical heat

and Arctic ice.

The most consistently spectacular is the northern series, which took Church

to interior New England and coastal Maine, Grand Manan Island off Canada,

and ultimately to the Arctic. Several stimuli may have been at work: the

examples of Cole and Lane who had been to Mt. Desert Island, Maine,

respectively, in 1844 and 1848. The latter^ Twilight on theKennebec was exhibited

in New York in 1849. Meanwhile Thoreau began his trips into the Maine woods

in 1846 with a voyage to Mt. Katahdin, followed by other ventures to inland

lakes and rivers during the mid-fifties. His account of the difficulties of

reaching and climbing the great mountain must have presented the painter

with an exciting vision to pursue. Among the key pictures in this sequence

were, chronologically: Twilight, "Short Arbiter Twixt Day and Night" (1850; fig.

205), Beacon OffMt. Desert (1851; fig. 88), Grand Manan Island, Bay ofFundy

(1852; fig. 53), Mt. Ktaadn (1853; fig. 194), Sunset (1856; fig. 89), Twilight in the

Wilderness (1860; fig. 204), Sunrise Off the Maine Coast (1863; fig. 214), and

Aurora Borealis (1865; fig. 190). Generally, the coastal marine pictures face

easterly to sunrises, while the inland landscapes look to western sunsets. Some

have speculated that Church saw nationalist associations in the western orientation, which all agree culminates with the apocalyptic Twilight in the Wilderness of 1860. Yet if we can also consider the allusions of optimistic promise in

dawn and melancholy loss in dusk, this complex group could equally illuminate

the troubled picture of America in these years.

Manipulation of the brilliant cadmium reds and yellows in many of these

paintings to such an intense key is possibly Church's singular contribution to

luminism. Basically, he was able to identify their brilliant orchestration with

the heroic and sublime nature of the American paradise and thus enlarged the

stylistic limits previously characteristic of luminism, namely that vision of "the

still small voice" of calm. By setting these pyrotechnics in wilderness locations

Church brought the American viewer closer to the awesome presence of the

divine hand. At the summit of Katahdin, Thoreau breathlessly exclaimed,

What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in

nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on

our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact!***

Thus while Church's handling of composition and paint only peripherally

borders on luminism, the sense of vast stillness verging on an imminent

crescendo of light and sound had a profound impact on the movement.

Church made his first excursion to the Arctic north in 1859 along with the

Reverend Louis L. Noble, biographer of Thomas Cole. Two years later Noble

published their account of the adventure, After Icebergs with a Painter, and it

was clear that in scenes like Aurora Borealis and the recently discovered Icebergs

(The North) (PL 19) the artist felt himself participating in a cosmic experience:

All the sea in that quarter, under the last sunlight, shone like a pavement of amythest,

over which all the chariots of the earth might have rolled, and all its cavalry wheeled with

ample room. Wonderful to behold! it was only a fair field for the steepled icebergs, a vast

metropolis in ice, pearly white and red as roses, glittering in the sunset. Solemn, still,

and half-celestial scene! In its presence, cities, tented fields, and fleets dwindled into

toys. I said aloud, but low: "The City of God! The sea of glass! the plains of heaven!"47

If Thoreau's naturalist writings served as the prophetic context for Church's

pilgrimages in northern terrains, then the explorations of the natural scientist

Alexander von Humboldt provided a strong stimulus for Church to follow in

probing the scenic grandeur of South America. Humboldt had made a number

of pioneering trips through the northwestern mountain ranges of that continent at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and Church owned several

volumes of Humboldt's books about the region. In addition, Turner's art

offered those radiant precedents of centrally illuminating eruptions of sunlight,

which Church was to adapt to his huge South American canvases, exemplified

by Andes of Ecuador (1855; fig. 186), Cotopaxi (1863; fig. 225), and Morning in the

Tropics (1877; fig. 128). Again, we find Church fascinated with sunrise and sunset

as cyclical components in this cosmic theater. Here one might stand as a

newborn American witnessing the very unfolding of natural history through

the first passages of Genesis itself.

Church was so attuned to the original vision of his day that he was one of the

first to sense the subtle but marked shifts in artistic taste following the Civil

War. He himself largely gave up painting in the 18705 and turned rather to the

creation of his own literal world of nature, history, and art in the building and

landscaping of his house, Olana, at Hudson, New York. But, like Gifford at the

end of his painting career, he undertook to depict the great inspirational ruins

of the ancient past in eastern Europe. Ironically, although trie clear light of

luminist order and design bathes the standing remains of The Parthenon (1871;

fig. 29), fully the lower half of the picture is darkened by a broad advancing

shadow. The shining sun is also setting.

Beyond Church there are a large number of other painters whose work

borders on the luminist style in varying aspects or degrees. Some, familiar

names in the pantheon of the later Hudson River school, only painted partially

luminist pictures; others are simply lesser figures either not so original in vision

or able in technique as the core group discussed here; still others are close to

totally unknown, producing the rare work of surprising luminist qualities.

Works on the edge of luminism include those by Jasper Cropsey, Albert

Bierstadt, and Worthington Whittredge—all contemporaries of Church,

Heade, and Gifford—who took up certain basic luminist subjects and

WILMERDING 121
30. Jasper Francis Cropsey. Lake George, 1871. Oil on canvas. 0.508 x 0.838 (20 x 33 in).

nscribed, l.r.i/JE Cropsey /tip. The New-York Historical Society, New York

131. Jasper Francis Cropsey. Mt. Washington from Lake Sebago, Maine, 1871. Oil on canvas.

0.407 x 0.762 (16 x 30 in). Inscribed, \.\.:JF Cropsey/iSp. The Mint Museum of Art,

Charlotte, North Carolina

129. Jasper Francis Cropsey. Italian Campagna, 1848. Oil on paper mounted on canvas.

0.241 x 0.406 (9% x 16 in). Inscribed, l.r.: ROME J.E Cropsey i&tf. Mrs. H. Brown

Reinhardt, Newark, Delaware. Photo: William D. Pugh

22 WILMERDING
132. Albert Bierstadt. Surveyor's Wagon in the Rockies, probably 1858. Oil on paper mounted on

canvas. 0.197 x 0.327 (7% x i27/8 in). Inscribed, l.r.: ABierstadt (AB is in monogram). The St. Louis

Art Museum; Gift of J. Lionberger Davis 158:1953

133. Albert Bierstadt. Buffaloes on the Prairie, 1881. Oil on board. 0.140 x 0.200

($% x 8 in). Inscribed, \.\.: AB i8& AB (AB is in monogram). Collection of Dr.

and Mrs. M. S. Mickiewicz (see plate 28)

methods. Cropsey's style emerged from its early indebtedness to Cole and,

paralleling the direction of many colleagues, moved toward more open and

light-filled compositions around mid-century. In Bareford Mountains, West

Milford, New Jersey (fig. 302) of 1850 we recognize the crisp drawing, clear light,

and horizontal space related to luminist thinking. Also fairly early, Cropsey

painted the Italian campagna in Cole's footsteps, but with even greater attention to the glowing ambience of atmospheric light (fig. 129). With his Evening

atPaestum (1856; fig. 27), of course, we come to that central theme articulated

by Church and Gifford. Later in the seventies Cropsey expanded his formats

further, painting extensively throughout upper New York and New England.

His views of Lake George (1871; fig. 130) and Mt. Washington from Lake Sebago,

Maine (1871; fig. 131), are typical in holding over from Cole's generation such

devices as the genre details and framing trees to the side in the foreground,

while drawing our principal attention to the bathing haze, tinted skies, and

quiet reflections occupying most of the view.

By contrast, Bierstadt became Church's great rival during their maturity and

painted similar pictorial machines of enormous size and bombastic effect.

German by birth, he grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and made

several return trips for study abroad. Familiar with the European landscape

and with its artistic traditions, especially the influential training of the Diisseldorf school, Bierstadt developed a style emphasizing meticulous draftsmanship, strong local coloring, and often melodramatic effects. At his best he put

these elements to powerful use in the many western landscapes he did deriving

from his various travels across the American plains and Rocky Mountains to

the west coast.

Interestingly, one of his first major works employing a luminist sensibility

was a specific Civil War subject, The Bombardment of FortSumter (1861; fig. 301).

With its aerial point of view, sharp uninterrupted horizon line, and crystal clear

sunlight, the painting suppresses the narrative action in the background in

favor of this outwardly serene environment. From his western trips came his

small study of the Surveyor's Wagon in the Rockies (probably 1858; fig. 132); its

empty foreground belongs to the space of luminism, while its subject lends an

appropriate metaphor for its stylistic process. One reason luminism so suited

exploration painting and photography was that it was literally involved in the

measurement of landscape. But Bierstadt was also capable of exploiting, to

highly expressive ends, the vivid reds of luminist sunsets, as is evident in both

his small oil sketch and larger finished canvases of buffaloes on the prairie (figs.

133-135)- These stand as partial responses to Church's eastern paintings but carry

similar exclamations of nationalist feeling about the endless western plains.

When Bierstadt got to the western mountains, he found it natural to

position himself in elevated vantage points, as in the View from the Wind River

Mountains, Wyoming (1860; fig. 136). The general composition reverts back

more to older Hudson River school conventions, although its gold haze across

the distance belongs to luminism. Entering the Yosemite Valley elicited from

WILMERDING 123
34- Albert Bierstadt. Sunset on the Prairie, 1861. Oil

on canvas. 0.686 x 1.117 (27x 44 in). Inscribed, l.r.: A

Bierstadt, 1861. Private collection. Photo: Herbert P.

Vose

Bierstadt the same reverential sentiments Church experienced in the Arctic

seas. His friend Fitz Hugh Ludlow described their conviction of "going to the

original site of the Garden of Eden"; heroically attempting to measure the

stunning distances of earth and mountains, he admitted, "When Nature's

ightning hits a man fair and square, it splits his yardstick."48 Moving up and

down the valley, Bierstadt set down numerous views on the spot and later, in

gigantic canvases in his studio, of the valley from sunrise to sunset. Ludlow

spoke for him with a similar language of heightened metaphor and celebration:

There lies a sweep of emerald grass turned to chrysoprase by the slant-beamed sun—

chrysoprase beautiful enough to have been the tenth foundation-stone of John's

apocalyptic heaven. Broad and fair just beneath us, it narrows to a little strait of green

between the butments that uplift the giant domes. Far to the westward, widening more

and more, it opens into the bosom of great mountain-ranges,—into a field of perfect

light, misty by its own excess,—into an unspeakable suffusion of glory created from the

phoenixpile of the dying sun.49

Bierstadt followed other luminist impulses in seeking subjects in Italy and in

portraying the melodrama of a thunderstorm. Yet while the central and

spiritual presence of light places many of his pictures close to pure luminism,

his treatment of nature in resounding movement is outside its classic and

orderly harmonies. Certainly the turbulent theme of his Storm in tke Mountains

(c. 1870-1880; fig. 58) at once recalls Heade's Newport sequence but has none of

the luminist sense of time suspended, even as Heade strains it with the black

horror vacui of impending doom. Bierstadt's light and storm have exploded out

of luminism's control.

William Bradford was a neighbor and friend of Bierstadt's in New Bedford

and pursued some of the same themes as a result of the association. Lane's work

was another early influence, as was the presence in the area during the mid-iSsos

of the Dutch-trained painter Albeit Van Beest. On the one hand, Lane gave

him an example of careful drawing and precise compositions, while Van Beest

on the other introduced a Dutch sensibility for low horizons and dense

atmospheric skies. Although Bradford later followed in Bierstadt's footsteps

out west to paint a sunset in the Yosemite Valley, a view of Mt. Shasta, and a few

124 WILMERDING
135- Albert Bierstadt. The Buffalo Trail, 1867-1868. Oil on canvas. 0.813 * 1.220

(32 x 48 in). Inscribed, l.r.: ABierstadt (AB is in monogram). Museum of

Fine Arts, Boston; M. and M. Karolik Collection

136. Albeit Bierstadt. View from the Wind River Mountains, Wyoming,

1860. Oil on canvas. 0.768 x 1.226 (3oy4 x 48y4 in). Inscribed, 1.1.: A

Bierstadt i860 (AB is in monogram). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston;

M. and M. Karolik Collection

WILMERDING 125
7- William Bradford. Coast of Labrador, 1866. Oil on canvas. 0.508

0.762 (20 x 30 in). Inscribed, l.r.: Wm Bradford 1866. Collection of

he High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Frank L.

urns, 1977.1. Photo: Jerome Drown

8. William Bradford. Labrador Coast, c. 1860. Oil on canvas. 0.406 x 0.765 (i8yi6 x 3oy8

). Inscribed, l.r.: Wm. Bradford. The Cleveland Museum of Art; Purchase, Mr. and

rs. William H. Marlatt Fund (see plate 21)

other Western landscapes, his real love of travel found fullest expression in

several long summer expeditions to the Arctic. These began in the mid-fifties

and culminated with an ambitious voyage in 1869, documented in a large folio

publication with over a hundred illustrative photographs.

Generally, Bradford's earlier views—such as Fishermen** Homes, Near Cape

St. Johns, Coast of Labrador of 1876 (fig. 52) and Coast of Labrador from the sixties

(fig. 137; see also fig. 138) and Arctic Scene of 1870 (fig. 139)—are characterized by

precise detailing, controlled alterations of dark and light forms, cool light

reflections, and pale green-blue tonalities. Cape St. Johns is particularly appealing for its glint of light running along a brief edge of the horizon. Bradford's

weakness was in repeating himself so often in later years that some works

simply become formula pieces. He also devoted much attention in that latter

part of his career to Arctic photography. In his paintings of the 18708 and

eighties he turned increasingly to daring and sometimes effusive light and color

effects. The strangely refracted and reflected sunlight in the polar summer

created wondrous luminist environments. In the paintings of icebergs alone he

caught surreal combinations of intense greens and blues tinting the otherwise

white ice and atmosphere. By contrast, Ice Dwellers Watching the Invaders (c.

1870; fig. 56) pushes beyond the extremes of light and dark in Church's Cotopaxi

with its hot orange sunset across the frigid floes. There are further comparisons

6 WILMERDING
intended between man and nature, embodied in the image of the "machine in

the garden." As the title implies, this is in part an invasion of the steam engine

and its black smoke into the white purity of this ultimate earthly wilderness. As

with Bierstadt, it is the morality in nature as expressed through light in such

Bradford paintings which make them relevant to a discussion of luminism.

Likewise, in a way parallel to Bierstadt, certain works by the Hudson River

school painter Worthington Whittredge deserve attention here. In two areas

especially—the Newport shore and the Colorado plains—he found subjects

naturally suited to the luminist style. His painting Second Beach, Newport

(i87os-i88os; fig. 140) possesses the flat open luminist structure, though the

rather loose handling of paint and details, along with the motion of shallow

waves and fair-weather clouds, is not truly luminist in character. More fully

typical of the style are the various views he undertook overlooking the distant

shoreline beaches from the rolling hills above, known by such titles as Old

Homestead by the Sea (see fig. 141). Standing on elevated ground, we glance out

through warm hazy light to expanding fields and ocean. At the farthest point of

sight in the center of the canvas is the ruler straight horizon, a line we feel is at

the juncture not merely of earth and sky but of the finite seen and transcendent

unseen.

When Whittredge got to the western plains and mountains, he responded

139. William Bradford. Arctic Scene, 1870. Oil on

canvas. 0.489 x 0.902 (19% x $$l/2 in). Inscribed,

l.r.: Wm Bradford. Indiana University Art

Museum, Bloomington. Photo: Ken Strothman

similarly to the expansive views all around him. Known in several versions is

the scene Crossing the Ford, Plane River, Colorado (see figs. 142 and 259). He had

spent the entire decade of the 18508 in Europe, traveling with fellow artists and

studying at Diisseldorf. Now seeing the western spaces of America, he identified the awesome breadth as a distinctive feature of the national landscape,

physically and mentally:

I had been accustomed to measure grandeur, at the most, by the little hills of Western

Virginia; I had never thought it might be measured horizontally as on our great

Western plains. In fact, I believe it is the accepted idea that all grandeur must be

measured up and down. . . .

Often on reaching an elevation we had a remarkable view of the great plains. Due to

the curvature of the earth, no definite horizon was visible, the whole line melting away,

even in that clear atmosphere, into mere air. I had never seen any effect like it, and it was

another proof of the vastness and impressiveness of the plains.50

For all the stilled light throughout and open water in the foreground, however,

the towering screen of trees establishes attention in the middle ground thus

modifying the luminist aspects of his work.

The Newport shore and adjacent Narragansett Bay area also attracted in the

18705 painters like Alfred Thompson Bricher, William Trost Richards, and

Francis A. Silva, who devoted almost their full careers to recording coastal

WILMERDING 127
140. Thomas Worthington Whittredge. Second Beach, Newport,

c. 18705-18808. Oil on canvas. 0.775 x 1.277 (30% x $0% in). Inscribed, 1.1.: W. Whittredge. Collection, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Gift of the T. B. Walker Foundation

141. Thomas Worthington Whittredge. Old Homestead by the Sea, 1883. Oil on

canvas. 0.559 x 0.812 (22 x 32 in). Inscribed, 1.1.: W. Whittredge 1883. Museum of

Fine Arts, Boston; M. and M. Karolik Collection

128 WILMERDING
142. Thomas Worthington Whittredge. On the Plains, Colorado, 1877. Oil on canvas. 0.762 x 1.270 (30 x 50 in).

Inscribed, l.r.: W. Whittredge 1877. St. Johnsbury Athenaeum, Inc., St. Johnsbury, Vermont

WILMERDING 129
143- Alfred Thompson Bricher. Narrqgansett Beach—The Turn of the Tide, 1870 (>). Oil

on canvas. 0.508 x 1.016 (20 x 40 in). Inscribed, 1.1.: A TBricher 1870 (?). Mr. and Mrs.

Stephen G. Henry, Jr., Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Photo: Herbert P. Vose

144. Alfred Thompson Bricher. Time and Tide, c. 1873. Oil on canvas. 0.639 x 1.277 (25% x

50% in). Inscribed, lliATBRICHER (ATB is in monogram). Dallas Museum of Fine

Arts; Foundation for the Arts Collection, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Frederick M. Mayer.

Photo: Bill J. Strehorn (at left; see also plate 30)

145. Francis A. Silva. Indian Rock, NarragansettBay, 1872. Oil on canvas. 0.502 x 0.902

(i9% x 35V2 in). Inscribed, l.r.: FA. SILVA.72. Mr. and Mrs. Erving Wolf (opposite page)

130 WILMERDING
marine scenes. Often not as original or varied as the major figures of the later

Hudson River school or of the luminist movement, they nonetheless produced

a number of memorable and strong images. Bricher was fully capable of lovely

luminist effects in insistently lateral beach views looking out on Narragansett

Bay (fig. 143), some with a hazy sun dominating the axis of the composition,

others with only a glare of light flooding along the horizon's edge. He selected

similar motifs on the New Hampshire beaches at Little Boar's Head, and in the

later 1870$ he was inspired to execute some eloquent luminist oils at Grand

Manan Island off Canada. In a manner reminiscent of Kensett, he contrasts the

bold headlands on one side with the glassy expanses of water on the other (fig.

144). In Morning at Grand Manan (1878; fig. 55) we further recognize

luminism's discovery of intense golden colors, given focal order by the molten

sun.

The same general format preoccupied Francis A. Silva and James Hamilton.

Neither is a major talent, yet each was occasionally capable of approaching the

quality of the leading luminists. Silva painted extensively around the Narragansett Bay area, often carrying Bricher's formulas to excess. He did paint a

noteworthy view ^Indian Rock, Narragansett Bay in 1872 (fig. 145), seen from

the opposite direction of the vantage point Bricher chose for an oil done at the

same time. This was a popular rocky promontory for artists; William S.

WILMERDING 131
46. William Stanley Haseltine. Castle Rock, Nahant, 1865. Oil on

anvas. 0.610 x 0.965 (24 x 38 in). Inscribed, l.r.: W.S. Hasel

ne/i86s. The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Haseltine joined the group sketching there and made his own painting the

ame year. James Hamilton preferred to paint empty stretches of beach with

reaking waves, devoid of such identifiable headlands. Usually his crashing

reakers intimate too much noise and activity to belong within the restrained

onfinements of luminism, but he frequently relished stressing the long reflec

ons of sunset or moonlight crossing great stretches of water.

Somewhat different variants of these coastal subjects, so appealing to the

uminist mind, appear in the work of W. S. Haseltine and William Trost

Richards. Both were highly able draftsmen and took special pleasure in record

ng the rock faces of bold headlands and promontories. Haseltine is best known

or his many pictures done along the Massachusetts coast just north of Boston

t Nahant. As we look at several of his works together, we become aware of a

rocess similar to that explored by Lane and Heade, namely, the methodical

movement of the angle of vision step by step up and down and across an

ntentionally limited terrain. Like Bierstadt, too, Haseltine found Italian light

nd water to offer similarly compelling views, most notably at Capri. For his

art, Richards' work offers us such sparkling small gems as his Lighthouse on

ape Cod (1865; fig. 60), a perfect exemplar of infinite luminist tranquillity. His

Newport marines make interesting comparisons with the contemporaneous

xamples of Whittredge, Kensett, and Bricher already mentioned. Likewise,

his coastal panoramas at New Jersey and his geological studies of rising cliffs in

the i88os invite scrutiny with Haseltine's sequences at Nahant (see figs. 146-

147).

Luminism was a widespread phenomenon, finding idiosyncratic expression

in the occasional picture of other painters known better for their places in the

mainstream of the Hudson River school. Certainly, Samuel Colman's Storm

King on the Hudson (1866; fig. 148) possesses powerful luminist elements: the

impending storm clouds, the relatively still plane of water, and the focusing of

attention deep into the expanding horizon. William Hart, generally considered

a second-level artist in the school, still could produce the utterly peaceful

landscape of rolling green meadows quite equal to Kensett5s work. And in

Across the Marshes (c. 1877; fig. 149) by the little-known Frederick DeBourg

Richards, we have a luminist work of surprising beauty and quality. At once

obviously recalling the green wetlands of Heade's art, this also has its own

personal note in the dazzling red flowers dotted across this watery prospect.

We may see yet further evidence of luminist elements appearing in other less

familiar figures and areas of the country. For instance, hazy light and wet

atmospheric effects often dominate the oils of Louis Henry Mignot, Norton

Bush (a follower of Church), Joseph R. Meeker, and Richard Clague—the

latter two working principally along the gulf coast of Louisiana and Miss

2 WILMERDING
147- William Stanley Haseltine. Rocks at Nahant,

Massachusetts, 1864. Oil on canvas. 0.559 x 1.016 (22 x

40 in). Inscribed, 1.1.: W.S. Haseltine/1864. The Lano

Collection. Photo: Washburn Gallery

148. Samuel Colman. Storm King on the Hudson,

1866. Oil on linen. 0.816 x 1.520 (32% x s97/s in).

Inscribed, l.r.: S.Colman, 66. The National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, B.C.; Gift of John Gellatly

WILMERDING 133
9- Frederick DeBourg Richards. Across the Marshes, c. 1877. Oil on canvas. 0.365 x

724 (14% x 28y2 in). Inscribed, l.r.: EDeB. Richards. Private collection. Photo: Helga

hoto Studio (see plate 26)

sippi. Luminism as a style elsewhere reached over the boundaries of folk art,

 may be seen in the somewhat crude but silvery-gray beach scenes of James A.

uydam and in the outright primitive painting of Meditation by the Sea by an

nknown artist (c. 1860; fig. 150). For all its unique charm, this little work shares

ith luminism that almost surreal emptiness, here reinforced by the razor line

 the horizon, let alone its title, which reminds us that once again we are in the

esence of intensely thoughtful landscapes.

Graphic Arts

ccupying narrower but very important corners of the luminist world are its

rawings, watercolors, and photography. In the former we secure our first

impse of the artisfs receiving and interpreting eye. The luminist process is

ually at work on a more intimate and hesitant scale, offering the preliminary

nes of structures to be illuminated more fully in larger, finished forms. It is

ear that even without color, most luminist drawings are still sensitive to

uggesting precise nuances of light, whether it models form, falls in reflections

cross water, or suggests spacious passages of earth and sky. In terms of design

e find the familiar emphasis on strongly horizontal formats with the fore

round usually open.

Lane was the most indifferent draftsman of the major luminists. Probably

ecause he was partially crippled in his legs, getting around was not easy and

rompted him to carry the least cumbersome equipment he could. His draw150. Anonymous. Meditation by the Sea, c. 1860. Oil on canvas. 0.343 x 0.495 (*$% x *9%

in). After an engraving illustrated in Harper's monthly, 21 (1860): 450. Museum of Fine

Arts, Boston; M. and M. Karolik Collection

ings seldom have the refinement or assurance of his mature oils. Sketching for

him was a process essentially of recording the outlines of coastal features, plus

occasional shading to suggest textures or tonal contrasts he might amplify in

his paintings. Only in a few instances did he add passages of watercolor to his

initial drawings; more often he simply made notes on details or areas he knew

should have specific colors in the subsequent oils. In this regard we may

speculate again about his awareness of Ruskin's criticism. For in the Elements of

Drawing are a number of advisory passages which seem directly relevant to

Lane's way of working: "It is best to get into the habit of considering the

coloured work merely as supplementary to your other studies; making your

careful drawings first, and then a coloured memorandum separately.5551

Two aspects especially about Lane5s drawings are basic to luminism: his

frequent practice of taping together, horizontally, sheets from his sketchbook

so to extend his lateral record of a shoreline, and his less usual method of ruling

the paper off into mathematically calculated quadrants so to place objects in

space with exactitude. For him it was initially important to define both

observed and pictorial space, such that the world he saw as well as interpreted

would have an ultimate order among its parts and harmony in its whole. That

he usually reserved the subtle delineation of light and color for execution in the

4 WILMERDING
studio confirms that the atmospheric ambiences of his paintings are truly

distilled by acts of memory and recollection.

By comparison, the drawings of Heade are quite different in numerous

ways. There are a few small sketchbooks known with several dozen generally

slight pencil drawings, but these are mostly quite notational and seldom

display noteworthy luminist qualities. More remarkable are the larger charcoal

drawings, numbering nearly a dozen and on the average, measuring eleven by

twenty-two inches. They appear to be a singular group: most depict the

Newburyport marshes in charcoal and chalks, and together they form an

unusually close sequence of a carefully circumscribed and identifiable locale.

No other such series is known in his career, which suggests that these were

deeply related to his major period of luminist subjects and working methods.

In the marsh group specifically there is one early small watercolor with the

primary features carried through the rest. We view along the marsh river to a

sailboat in the middle distance, with salt haystacks placed to either side, all just

about intersecting the horizon like notes on a sheet of music paper or columns

observing entasis in a classical Greek temple. Following this preliminary sketch,

Heade continued the same view on larger sheets of tan paper with pencil and

charcoal and finally on darker paper with yet stronger, blacker charcoal and

highlights of white gouache. In what are obviously the final drawings in the

series, an arc of ducks descends from the sky, and the loom of a distant

lighthouse is visible at the horizon. With the lines of shadows cast by the

haystacks in an earlier drawing falling across the page from right to left and

then reversed in later works, Heade was systematically capturing the shifts in

light from morning to afternoon and lastly in the darker views, to twilight.

But where Lane was largely interested in outline, Heade cared far more

about modeling solid forms and palpable space. As with the Brace's Rock

group, he was also seeking to focus a serial vision on a fixed quadrant of

landscape, as light and mood shifted by the hour (figs. 41, 42, 78). At the same

time these are not photographic records, for the luminist pictorial processes

were at work on more than observed phenomena. Heade selectively eliminated

haystacks unnecessary to his increasingly pure design as he moved from version

to version. The foreground contours of the river become gradually equalized,

and the line of ducks, first loose in appearance, changes to a gentle arc

mirroring the river's edge below. A second sailboat introduced in an earlier

drawing likewise disappears as unessential. Finally, the flat linear wisps of

clouds acquire greater tightness of shape and placement in the last image

(presumably that in the Karolik Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

Provoked, one wonders if the final linking of the central cloud with the mast of

the sailboat in the form of an unobtrusive cross did not perfectly suit the

underlying spiritual content of much luminist art.52

David Johnston Kennedy's eerie moonlight coastal scenes, done along Delaware Bay (see fig. 151), and Bradford's Labrador watercolor (fig. 152) contain

something of Heade's surreal tonalism. In all cases the horizon line is very low,

151. David Johnston Kennedy. Ship Ashore on the Atlantic Beach, 1876. Watercolor. 0.232 x

0.391 (9!/8 x 15% in). Inscribed, 1.1.: DJ.Kennedy/1876; on back: Ship Ashore on the Atlantic

beach. / October 2oth 18761 by D.J.Kennedy Philada. Private collection. Photo: Helga Photo

Studio

152. William Bradford. Repairing the Fishing Lugger, 1862. Wash drawing on paper. 0.245

x 0.442 (9%xi73/8 in). Inscribed, l.r.: WmBradford/1862. Private collection. Photo: Helga

Photo Studio

WILMERDING 135
153- Sanford Robinson Gifford. Shelburne, New Hampshire, July 30, 1859. Pencil on

paper heightened with white. 0.152 x 0.235 (6 x 9% in). Inscribed, I.e.: Shelburne—July

30th 59—. Vassar College Art Gallery, Poughkeepsie, New York

and the orange moon or sun sits weightily within the bottom half of the

composition. Both Bradford and Kennedy (even with the latter using some

touches of intense color) rely foremost on strong oppositions of light and dark

for expressive effect. The calculated choice of paper darker than white or

off-white, such as tan or blue, with details heightened in white wash, was one

way of approaching coloristic effects in luminist drawings by tonal means

alone. Thus, in William Hart's sketches of the White Mountains we can see

such uses of white chalk and gouache for his passages of sunset. Although his

compositions are not particularly luminist in layout, these light effects do

approximate the brilliance and character of the red pigments in Church's major

canvases.

When we turn to Gifford's body of drawings, we may discern various

ingredients of luminism at work: the aerial view (Palmer Hill, Catskill

Mountains, 1849, fig- 269; and View at Lake George, 1848, fig. 276), the panoramic

format expanded by employing two adjacent sketch sheets together as one (see

the 1868 Sketchbook, Brooklyn Museum, New York), and the entire foreground given to a glassy water surface (Adirondack, 1866, fig. 272; Lago

d'Orta, 1868, fig. 268; and Shelburne, New Hampshire, 1859, fig. 153). The same

lateral sweep and attenuated format are present in Whittredge's infrequent

luminist drawings, such as the View from Mr. Field's Farm at Newport (c. 1859, fig.

299), in the unusual early sketch of New York at the Entrance of the Hudson from

Hoboken (1846; fig. 300) by L. R. Mignot, and in the evocative double view of

154. William Trost Richards. Coastal Scene, c. 1882. Pencil on sketchbook page. 0.127 x

0.200 (5 x 77/8 in). The Brooklyn Museum, New York; Gift of Miss Edith Ballinger Price

155. William Trost Richards. Paradise, Newport, 1877. Gouache on gray paper. 0.584 x

0.940 (23 x 37 in). Inscribed, l.r.: Wm. T. Richards, 1877- National Gallery of Art,

Washington, D.C.; Adolph Caspar Miller Fund and Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund,

1979 (see plate 25)

136 WILMERDING
156. William Trost Richards. Paradise Valley, Newport, 1882. Gouache on paper. 0.559 x 0.915 (22 x 36 in). Inscribed, 1.1.:

W

m

 T. Richards. 1882. The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Washington, D.C. Photo: eeva-inkeri

WILMERDING 137
157- Homer Dodge Martin. Landscape-, Mt. Marino, 1860. Pencil on white wove paper.

0.254 x 0.340 (10 x 13% in). Inscribed, I.e.: Mt Marino Oct 16 1860. Cooper-Hewitt

Museum, New York, The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Design

Lake George (1858; fig. 275) by Aaron Draper Shattuck. The pencil drawings by

Haseltine, Richards, and Bricher anticipate the same planar rock faces and

shoreline stretches executed on a larger scale in their oils. However, the relative

fineness of drawing and shading in many of these sketches attests to the

quasi-scientific nature of much luminist thinking, in this case the concern for

marking geological surfaces accurately. Richards as well was capable of the

most refined and controlled effects in varied uses of pencil, sepia, and full

watercolor. Such resplendant works as the tiny stippled drawing (in Sketchbook B, c. 1882, at the Brooklyn Museum, New York,fig. 154), or the larger Lake

Squam from Red Hill (1874; fig. 340) and the major Paradise Valley, Newport

(figs. 155-156), indicate he was equally adept at drawing on almost every scale.

Kensett, who was usually so consistent as a luminist in his artistic maturity,

as a draftsman worked more in a traditional Hudson River school mode. Many

of his sketches have a fragile, slight character not quite up to the measured

delineations of pure luminism, though his natural sensitivity to distances and

full light is noteworthy. Conversely, David Johnson seemed less adventurous

in embracing full luminism as a style in his paintings, yet could produce totally

luminous drawings like that of Tongue Mountain, Lake George (1872; fig. 274).

Lastly, with regard to the whole area of drawings it remains to take note of the

158. Homer Dodge Martin. Landscape, Fort Ann, 1861. Pencil on paper. 0.219 x 0.299 (8%

x n% in). Inscribed, l.r.: Fort Ann Aug. 27-61. The Art Museum, Princeton University,

Princeton, New Jersey; Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., Collection

surprising luminist moments captured in the little-known works of Henry

Farrer, or the drawing of Gloucester (fig. 277) by the unidentified M.L.B. on

July 23,1872, so reminiscent in subject and handling of Lane's work at the same

site a decade before. And in the landscape views of Homer Dodge Martin (figs.

157-158) we are brought to an artistic personality who seemed to be conscious

not just of earlier Hudson River details and certain contemporaneous qualities

of luminist light but also of soft optical sensations closer to the independently

emerging currents of American Barbizon and impressionist painting.

Having quite a different relationship to luminist art than drawings is the

distinct and fascinating category of photography. Partly for technical reasons

photography did not fully come into its own as a medium for luminist

landscape until the i86os and seventies. By then the wet-plate process had

supplanted earlier Daguerrean and related techniques; larger cameras and

glass-plate negatives were developed; and steadily improved lenses made possible shorter exposure times. Photographers were increasingly able to transport their equipment further and develop exposed plates more readily. All

these factors well suited the coincidental needs of artists in search of the last

frontiers. Photography additionally provided just the means of joining the

aesthetic with the naturalist vision and for measuring light and space with

138 WILMERDING
perfect luminist precision. Thus to some degree the scientific ideals and technical underpinnings of the medium helped to produce a body of luminist images

that carried the style to the end of the nineteenth century, well after the

movement in painting had lost its coherence and appeal.

In the person of William Bradford we have the one individual who produced

luminist works in all the mediums of oil, pencil, wash, and photography. With

his assistants he began taking photographs on his Arctic voyages in the i86os

and in later years often used them like preliminary sketches as the basis for

subsequent studio paintings. He also eventually became proficient in photographing his own canvases and making lantern slides for lecture purposes. A

large number of his best pictures stand up as complete strong images in their

own right. Using "the sun-given powers of the camera," he explored "Nature

under the terrible aspects of the Frigid Zone."53 Like Church following

Thoreau to Katahdin or Humboldt to the Andes, Bradford went to the north

in the steps of Elisha Kent Kane and others on expeditions in search of the lost

English explorer, Sir John Franklin.

On his own several voyages Bradford took large numbers of photographs

(see fig. 159), and the well-documented excursion of 1863 resulted in the subsequent publication of The Arctic Regions. This last was the result of Bradford's

work as well as that of an assistant, John Dunmore. Bradford was ecstatic and

acutely observant. He would be alternately conjuring metaphors for the

exotic mutations of icebergs or diligently recording each nuance of light. On

reaching their farthest point north at latitude 75 degrees, Bradford determined,

This period I proposed to devote to ice studies. I certainly could have found no place

better adapted for the purpose. The icebergs were innumerable, of every possible form

and shape, and ever-changing. As the sun in his circuit fell upon different parts of the

same berg, it developed continually new phases. On one side would be a towering mass

in shadow, on the other a majestic berg glistened in sunlight; so that without leaving the

vessel's deck I could study every variety of light and shade.54

The iconography of Bradford's photographs was in keeping with that in

luminist painting: geologically interesting walls of rock or ice, sharp silhouettes, contrasting shapes and tones, glassy reflections, near-empty horizontal

fields punctuated by astutely placed vertical details. His earlier training as a

methodical draftsman influenced his photographic sensitivity to exacting records of texture, line, and surface. As for Church, the Arctic region all the while

was a sublime experience of a timeless natural history unfolding around him.

Meanwhile, during the same years the American West was luring other

photographers, often in company with painters, on government-sponsored

expeditions to survey the uncharted meridians of the country's newly acquired

states and territories. Among the best known of these are Timothy O'Sullivan

(recently turned from taking some of the most unforgettable images of the

Civil War battlefields), A. J. Russell, William H. Jackson, Jack Hillers, Eadweard Muybridge, and Carleton Watkins. Again, a review of their photographic images reveals frequent luminist themes, though the work in its

159. William Bradford. Schooner. Albumen photograph from Photographs of Arctic Ice

(1864). 0.216 x 0.165 (S% x 6% in). The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

WILMERDING 139
160

. Timothy H. O'Sullivan. Alkaline Lake, Carson Desert, Nevada, 1868. Albumen

photograph. 0.200 x 0.267 (7% x 10% in). Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Libraries, Cambridge (upper left)

161. William Henry Jackson. The Upper Twin Lake, Colorado (no. ion), c. 1880. Albumen

photograph. 0.426 x 0.540 (16% x 21% in). Private collection, New York. Photo: The

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (upper right)

162. John K. Killers. Mouth ofZion Park, c. 1872-1873. Albumen photograph. 0.206 x

0.352 (8y

8 x i3

7

/

8 in)

. The Denver Public Library, Western History Department (at left)

entirety was by no means consistently a part of the movement. Frequently, for

example, devices of Hudson River landscape composition are apparent in their

siting and framing of views. But selected works by these individuals do reveal

remarkable counterparts to familiarly painted prospects in the East.

O'Sullivan's Pyramid and Tufa Domes (1868; fig. 317) makes a stunning parallel

to Lane's Bracks Rock in its stark lateral silhouetting of the rock formations,

while his mirrored water surfaces elsewhere (see fig. 160), along with those

pictured by Russell, Jackson (see fig. 161), and Hillers, recall any number of

similar scenes on canvas. Hillers and Muybridge were also interested in seeking

the high vantage point surveying a deep valley to the horizon (witness the

former's Mouth ofZion Park [c. 1873; fig. 162] and the latter^ Valley of the Tosemite

from Glacier Point [1872; fig. 93]); in their format as well as pervading hazy light

140 WILMERDING
163. Carleton E. Watkins. North Dome, Yosemite, c. 1861. Albumen photograph. 0.387 x 0.515 (i$l

/4 x 2ol/4 in). Daniel Wolf

WILMERDING 141
164. Carleton E. Watkins. Half Domes., Yosemite, c. 1866. Albumen photograph. 0.413 x

0.521 (i6y4 x 20% in). The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

165. Carleton E. Watkins. Merced River, ICosemite Valley, c. 1861. Albumen photograph.

0.387 x 0.521 (i$l/4 x 20% in). Daniel Wolf

they compare well with such standard luminist oils as Gifford's views of

Kaaterskill Clove.

But the most imaginative and compelling figure in Western photography is

Carleton Watkins, whose large wet-plate views in the Yosemite Valley (figs.

163-165) are sublime images of daring and fresh talent. Aside from his meticulous technical accomplishments, occasionally stunning choices of viewpoint,

and classic luminist themes of still water, breathtaking vistas, and calculated

spatial recession, he above all made pure, ineffable light his object of attention.

Indeed, more than the clear capturing of geology, he seemed to treat intangible

air itself as truly objective—ultimately worthy of praise and affection—

independent of the physical earth. Yet another important contribution of his

photography in the Yosemite is his conscious effort to take views through the

valley that he could arrange in calculated serial fashion. In a proto-cinematic

manner he shifted his lens across the given quadrant of his view and moved

from point to point through it, slicing off, as it were, frames of space and light.

This procedure resulted in a set of pictures which both describe comprehensively the physical environment and recreate its perceived total harmony.

Comparable to Watkins as a photographer in the East is the insufficiently

known figure of Seneca Ray Stoddard. Born in upstate New York, he began

taking stereo views of scenery in the upper Hudson valley during the i86os and,

by the end of that decade, was making extended trips through the Adirondacks

region to map and photograph the terrain. Beginning in the seventies and

continuing through the nineties, he returned more than anywhere else to the

beautiful lake regions of New York and Vermont. A restless and peripatetic

adventurer, he also sailed the full New England coast to Canada in the

mid-eighties and made other trips to Alaska, Europe, and the American West.

Working around the Lake George area about the time the first large tourist

hotels were opening, contemporaneous with the arrival of Kensett, Heade, and

other painters, Stoddard sailed about the lake in his sloop Wanderer in search of

views he might sell to local hotels or visitors. Here he took some of the purest

luminist photographs we might find.

His view ofTheHoricon Sketching Club (1882; fig. 286) is typical of his work

through the 18705 and early eighties. Despite the charming inclusion of the

ladies at their leisurely recreation, the image has the stillness of mood and flat

balanced order of a luminist vision and, in fact, is very close to the drawings and

paintings David Johnson did nearby during the same years. Other photo142 WILMERDING
167. Seneca Ray Stoddard. Lake George, 1902. Silverprint photograph. 0.078 x 0.200

(3Vi6 * 77/8 in). The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (above)

166. Seneca Ray Stoddard. "The Giant," Keene Valley, Adirondack*, 1888. Silverprint

photograph. 0.162 x 0.213 (6% x 8% in). The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

graphs at Lake George, Upper Saranac Lake, and Little Tupper Lake display

various luminist qualities: horizontal order, balanced tonal contrasts, open

surfaces of silvery water, and low sunlight faced centrally across the view, its

reflection a vertical bar perfectly intersecting the shorelines9 horizontals. At

Lake Champlain three limpid photographs draw our attention to infinitely

subtle variations of hillside reflections in near-motionless water. Their balancing of silhouetted shapes, both vertically and horizontally, immediately calls to

mind the oils of Lane and Kensett. Stoddard understood the ideals of recording such scenery, as shared by his generation:

All who love the sublime and majestic in nature or the dainty and beautiful scenery of

lake and woodland will find here, within easy reach, a variety which is charming and a

peaceful grandeur which must soothe and elevate their weary minds.55

Elsewhere, he makes us think of the sloping meadows painted by Kensett and

William Hart (see his "The Giant," Keene Valley, Adirondack, 1888, fig. 166), or

of Heade, as in the amusing but lovely anagrammatic The Letter "S"Ray Brook

(1890; fig. 8). Lastly, his grainy, elevated view Lake George (Tongue Mountain

from Shelving Rock) in 1902 (fig. 167) brings the luminist format into another

WILMERDING 143
i68. Louise Deshong Woodbridge. Pontoosuc Lake, Pittsfield, 1885. Albumen photograph. 0.117 x 0.198 (47

/i6 x 713/i6 in). Private collection. Photo: Scott Hyde

170. Louise Deshong Woodbridge. The "Carry," Lake Placid to Whiteface, 1885. Albumen photograph. o.n6 x 0.199 (4-% x 713/i6 in)- Private collection. Photo: Scott Hyde

world altogether, that of Alfred Stieglitz's photogravures and "equivalents."

Two other unknown photographers deserve notice here, the Philadelphian

Louise Woodbridge and Henry L. Rand of Boston. Little is known about the

former, but besides her various scenic views around Philadelphia there are

some typical luminist efforts from her camera, taken in familiar areas of the

Adirondacks and New England (see figs. 168-170). Rand is also a recent redis169. Louise Deshong Woodbridge. Pontoosuc Lake, Showing Greylock, 1885. Albumen

photograph. 0.115 x 0.196 (4% x 7n/16 in). Private collection. Photo: Scott Hyde

covery and substantial artistic personality. A Boston businessman, he spent

many leisure hours with his avocation of photography in some of the favorite

corners of the luminist world, including Gloucester, Massachusetts, and Mt.

Desert, Maine. In fact, he was one of the first to build a summer cottage at

Southwest Harbor in 1884. A partial listing of places he photographed, many

with a luminist eye, is almost a directory of territory intimately associated with

Lane and Heade: Rye Beach, the marshes of Little River and Rowley, Brace's

Cove, Rockland Harbor, Owl's Head, and Mt. Desert Island. But he went as

well to the glaciers of Scandinavia and the shores of the Mediterranean,

recalling Bradford and Bierstadt respectively. His subjects at home included

woodland tunnels, valley vistas, hillsides overlooking water, and haystacks on

Cape Ann. (One seemingly anomalous print—Cherokee roses on a clothcovered table—suggests a direct indebtedness to another Heade subject.)

The body of Rand's work, known primarily from a large collection deposited

in the Southwest Harbor, Maine, Public Library, dates from the 18908 and just

after the turn of the century. Technically very able and inventive, almost

certainly familiar with his luminist predecessors, Rand presents us, in a representative selection of his prints with sharp rock forms and complementary

reflections (Cloisters and Isolated Rock, Sutton's Island, 1890-1891; fig. 171), worthy

of Haseltine and Richards. Others—Off Sandy Hook (1896-1897; fig. 172),

Moonlight on the Upper Saranac (c. 1897; fig. 339) and Beach, Fox Dens Point and

Norwood Cove (1907; fig. 173)—are remarkable experiments with moonlight,

illuminated clouds above vast seascapes and effects of the setting sunlight.

Island House Slip., Thick Fog (1892; fig. 338), taken at Southwest Harbor, bears

the typical marks of luminist vision. It is a totally reflective image in its intended

144 WILMERDING
r/i. Henry L. Rand. Cloisters and Isolated Rock, Sutton's Island, 1890-1891. Platinum

photograph. o.n4 x 0.168 (4-l/2 x 6% in). Southwest Harbor Public Library, Southwest

Harbor, Maine. Photos: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

r/4. Henry L. Rand. Bass Harbor Marsh, 1909. Platinum photograph. 0.061 x 0.168 (27/16

x 6% in). Southwest Harbor Public Library, Southwest Harbor, Maine.

173. Henry L. Rand. Beach, Fox Dens Point and Norwood Cove, 1907. Platinum photograph. 0.120 x 0.170 (4%

 x 6n

/i6 in)- Southwest Harbor Public Library, Southwest

Harbor, Maine.

172. Henry L. Rand. Off Sandy Hook, c. 1897. Platinum photograph. 0.114 x 0.159 (4% x

6y4 in). Southwest Harbor Public Library, Southwest Harbor, Maine.

ambience of calm and its effort to elicit a response of thoughtfulness. But the

photograph further carries characteristic luminist notations, for Rand recorded about this, as he did others, his precisely descriptive title, followed by

other fixative details ("F 16,1/5 [second], 11:40 A.M., August 13,1892"). In yet

three other images (Bass Harbor Marsh, 1909, fig. 174; Somes Sound, Looking

South, 1893, fig. 337; and Across the Bay, Gloucester, 1892, fig. 336), we come to

scenes haunting in their evocation of Heade and Lane. Indebted to but not

derivative of their predecessors, these elegaic images form a final deja vu of the

luminist landscape.

WILMERDING 145
175- Eastman Johnson. Lambs, Nantucket, 1874. Oil on board. 0.483 x 0.397 (19 x 15% in).

Inscribed, l.r.: E. Johnson I Aug. 29-74- From the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul

Mellon, Upperville, Virginia. Photo: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (see

plate 32)

The Successors to Luminism

When does luminism end?

Although we have seen that its photography attenuated the vision through

the later nineteenth century, essentially the movement loses its coherence and

impact during the 18705. Lane had died in 1865; Church had largely given up

painting by 1870 to design his house Olana; Kensett's death came in 1872 and

Giffbrd's six years later; Heade turned to more painterly methods and still-life

subjects in the seventies and after. Beyond these personal circumstances, the

mood of America and tastes in art at large were changing. Much of the

optimism of the pre-Civil War years had been shattered. Expansion to the west

increasingly faced contentions in rising regionalism; technology, at first a

thrilling agent in the romance of science, now was a disquieting invader of

nature's paradise. Gradually, the raison d'etre underpinning luminism crumbled, and with it came the escape of some to final frontiers.

The decade of the 18705 is one of the most interesting and complex in

American art, for during this period the luminist style still held favor with

many, though the intensity of its light and color in retrospect seem more often

than not the fevers of expiration. At the same time clearly newer and different

styles of realism were emerging, some even carrying modified aspects of

luminism into their changed environment of art and thought. Broadly speaking, we may discern two general tendencies in American painting which

developed in replacement of luminism. The first might be described as psychological realism, seen foremost in the hands of Eastman Johnson, Winslow

Homer, and Thomas Eakins. The second can be given a comprehensive term

like romantic impressionism, and this would include figures as individually

diverse as Homer Martin, George Inness, James Whistler, and Ralph

Blakelock. Collectively, both of these groups transformed landscape painting

with modes of brush work, composition, subject matter, handling of light and

detail, that were no longer luminist.

If we look at Johnson's work in the 18705, contemporaneous with the last

phase of luminism, we find him occasionally making use of clear luminist light,

its sense of distant space and ruler-sharp horizon, even the markedly lateral

format. Nonetheless, in both Lambs, Nantucket (1874; fig. 175) and The Cranberry Harvest, Nantucket Island (1880; fig. 46) there is the decisively new

element of figures again dominating our attention in the foreground. While

the air of both is meditative, we are now aware of figures poised in thought

rather than the quiet order of a landscape serving as a vehicle for our own

contemplation. Johnson was a New Englander by birth, and his early training

was as a printmaker; but his mature style owed something of its cosmopolitan

quality to Dutch seventeenth-century and German and French nineteenthcentury art, to which he had been exposed while abroad in the 18505. Thus his

146 WILMERDING
176

. Winslow Homer. Long Branch, New Jersey, 1869. Oil on canvas.

0.406 x 0.552 (16 x 21% in). Inscribed, l.r.: Winslow Homer/'1869. Museum

of Fine Arts, Boston; Charles Henry Hayden Fund

177- Winslow Homer. Dad's Coming, 1873. Oil on panel. 0.229 x 0.350

(9 x 13% in). Inscribed, 1.1.: WINSLOW HOMER 11873. From the Collec-

tion of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, Uppervilk, Virginia (below)

subsequent interest in the narrative presence of the human figure emerged

from a tradition outside luminism and ultimately became primary in his later

work.

Homer also belonged strongly to New England and to the American graphic

tradition. Like Lane before him, he apprenticed as a lithographer and brought

to his painting a solid grounding in drawing and tonal organization. Although

his two trips to Europe in 1869 and 1881-1882 had less definable effects on his style

than the European influences on others, he too reintroduced the human figure

into the foreground stage of his paintings. Surely, however, luminist light and

space are present in such oils of his early maturity as Long Branch, New Jersey

(1869; fig. 176) and An Adirondack Lake (1870; fig. 44). There is even a stillness

of mood suggested in these pictures and others of the early seventies, notably

High Tide: the Bathers (1870; fig. 298) and Dad>s Coming (1873; fig-177), but what

is new here is the powerful sense of human drama. Where for the classic

luminist nature's mutability was the high issue, this successor generation

addressed instead the mortality of man. In this new light one can acknowledge

the hidden human tensions present in Homer's paintings: the central shadows

and barking dog disturbing The Bathers or the vacuum of steely light and stoic

isolation lending an uneasy expectation to the title ofDad^s Coming.

WILMERDING 147
178. Winslo

w Homer. Promenade on the Beach, 1880. Oil on canvas.

0.508 x 0.765 (20 x 3oV

8 in)

. Inscribed, l.r.: Winslow Homer 1880.

Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts; Gift of the Misses

Emily and Elizabeth Mills, in Memory of their Parents

179. Thomas Eakins. Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, 1871. Oil on

canvas. 0.819 x 1.175 (32% x 46% in). Inscribed, on scull in back-

ground: Eakins I 1871; on scull in foreground :/0w>. The Metropolitan

Museum of Art, New York; Purchase, 1934, Alfred N. Punnett Fund

and Gift of George D. Pratt (not in exhibition; below)

We need only compare such beach scenes with those of Kensett and Whit-

tredge to perceive the transformation of luminism at this time. Indeed, Homer

paints an even fuller suggestion of meteorological and psychological turbu-

lence in Promenade on the Beach of 1880 (fig. 178), where the structure of

luminism remains without its tranquil serenity of air or light. He provides us

with a final coda to luminism in his later work with The Artist's Studio in an

Afternoon Fog (1894; fig. 348). The golden haze of the centrally seen sun fixes the

scene much like earlier examples by Church, Haseltine, or Lane. It is probably

even indirectly indebted to Turner, but the incipient qualities of aestheticism

and even abstraction in the expressive paint surface and formal patterns are far

removed from the luminist's self-effacing presence previously along this coast.

Likewise, the oils and watercolors of Thomas Eakins from the decade of the

seventies give us a seriousness of mood quite advanced from the exhilarated

pantheism of luminism. Max Schmitt in a Single Scull (1871; fig. 179) has all the

luminist properties of calculated charting of pictorial space, machine precision

in rendering details and atmosphere. Yet its total feeling is an elegiac, almost

melancholy one: this is an afternoon of Indian summer light, sad and sere with

reminders of time passing, not stopped in ideal perfection. Even as Eakins

draws our eye across broad passages of water to the far horizon, he returns us to

148 WILMERDING
180. Thomas Eakins. Sailing, c. 1875. Oil on canvas. 0.810 x 1.175 (3i7

/s x 46% in). Inscribed, l.r.: 7Z> his

friend/William M. Chase/Eakins. Philadelphia Museum of Art; Alexander Simpson, Jr. Collection

WILMERDING 149
i8i. George Inness. The Lackawanna Valley, 1855. Oil on canvas. 0.861 x 1.276 (337

/8 x $0%

in). Inscribed, 1.1.: G. Inness. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Gift of Mrs.

Huttleston Rogers, 1945

183. Homer Dodge Martin. On the Upper Hudson, i86os. Oil on canvas. 0.686 x 1.022

(27 x 4oV4 in). Inscribed, l.r.: H.Martin. Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska; Mr.

and Mrs. Edwin S. Miller Bequest Fund

182. George Inness. Lake Nemi, 1872. Oil on canvas. 0.762 x 1.143 (30 x 45 in). Inscribed,

l.r.: Inness Nemi 1872. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Gift of the Misses Hersey

individuals seriously engaged in work or the disciplines of exercise. He made

his own trip to Europe for study in the late i86os, acquiring a taste for the direct

realism of Velazquez and Rembrandt. One result was that his art moved

steadily away from concern with the condition of nature to that of man. His

masterful early outdoor views on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia and

along Delaware Bay pay unconscious homage to a light that was irrevocably

fading in American art, while setting forth the sober themes for an unsettled

national state of mind in the later nineteenth century (see fig. 180).

Concurrently, another broad redirection in American painting was occurring in the hands of George Inness and Homer Dodge Martin. Inness' early

masterpiece, The Lackawanna Valley (1855; fig. 181), is bathed in the cool light

and shaped in the receding horizontal zones of luminism. The nostalgic

contemplation of a foreground dotted by tree stumps summons up the image

made so poignant later by Sanford Gifford in Twilight on Hunter Mountain

(1866; fig. 85). But Inness' inspiration here derives as much from Durand's

American tradition as from the Barbizon school in France. The Close of Day

(1863; fig. 24) similarly employs the hot cadmiums of a luminist sunset, but with

a more painterly brushwork and framed composition coming from French

sources. Even the spacious and restful ambience of Lake Nemi (1872; fig. 182)

finds Inness in the early 18705 recalling luminist practices but introducing an

150 WILMERDING
184

. James Abbott McNeill

Whisder. The Sea, c. 1865. Oil on

canvas. 0.527 x 0.959 (20% x 37%

in). Montclair Art Museum,

Montclair, New Jersey

185. Ralph Albert Blakelock.

The Sun, Serene, Sinks into the

Slumberous Sea, i88os. Oil on

canvas. 0.406 x 0.610 (16 x 24 in).

Inscribed, 1.1.: R. A. Blakelock.

Museum of Fine Arts, Spring-

field, Massachusetts; The

Horace P. Wright Collection

(below; see also plate 29)

altogether personal substructure of Swedenborgian spiritualism. Martin, for

his part, steadily moved away from his artistic initiation in Hudson River art as

exemplified in Kensett toward a dramatic and romantic manner tempered by

Barbizon precedents and French impressionism. His airy view On the Upper

Hudson (fig. 183) seems to hint of these diverse elements, as luminism in this

instance fades over the border into an alternate vision.

While he was in Europe, Martin became a friend of James A. M. Whistler,

whose The Sea of about 1865 (fig. 184) looks out on a severe and almost empty

horizon. Novak and others have noted how close this is to Courbet's marines.

Now the structure only approximates that of luminism, but the advanced

abstraction of design, subjectivity, and exploitation of brushwork in an express-

ive more than representational role belong almost wholly within a European

tradition moving toward modernism. Finally, the introspective personality and

art of Ralph A. Blakelock provides a concluding elegy for luminism. The

hermetic and symbolic vision of his The Sun, Serene, Sinks into the Slumberous

Sea (i88os; fig. 185) glimpses that low horizon, axial sunlight, and radiant aura of

a style once as classically balanced and full as high noon. But now the luminist

day languishes, as Blakelock's poetic tide intones, into the inevitable twilight of

another artistic day.

WILMERDING 151
Notes

1. Thoreau: The Major Essays, ed. Jeffrey L. Duncan

(New York, 1972), 205.

2. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, Art and

Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London

and New York, 1941), vii, x.

3. R. W. Emerson, "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England," quoted in Matthiessen, American

Renaissance, 6.

4. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 243, 275, 281,

351-

5. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, quoted in

Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 262; see also 273-274.

6. Matthiessen, A merican Renaissance, 355; see also 255.

7. Emerson, "Nature" in The Complete Essays and

Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Modern Library

(New York, 1950), 6.

8. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 29; see also

15-17.

9. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 31, 40, 47, 68.

10. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 51, 62; and

Emerson, Complete Essays, 5-7,10, 20, 47, 413.

n. Quoted in Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 95;

see also 88, 91-92.

12. Thoreau: Major Essays, 26.

13. H. D. Thoreau, A Writer's Journal, ed. Laurence

Stapleton (New York, 1960), 38.

14. Thoreau, Journal, 103.

15. Herman Melville, Moby Dick, or, The Whale,

Modern Library (New York, 1950), 2.

16. Melville, Moby Dick, 166. See also Matthiessen,

American Renaissance, 286-289, 408.

17. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Mentor (New York,

1954), 255. See also "Thou Orb Aloft Full-Dazzling," 355,

and "Song at Sunset," 377.

18. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 400.

19. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 517, 565, 599,

652.

20. Quoted in John I. H. Baur, "American Luminism,

A Neglected Aspect of the Realist Movement in Nineteenth-Century American Painting," Perspectives USA, 8

(Autumn 1954): 93-

21. Baur, "American Luminism," 91.

22. Quoted in John McCoubrey, American Art, 1700-

1960, Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,

1965), 58.

23. See John Wilmerding, A History of American

Marine Painting (Boston and Salem, Mass., 1968), 144-

150.

24. Quoted in Alfred Frankenstein, Painter of Rural

America, William Sidney Mount, 1807-1868 [exh. cat., National Gallery of Art] (Washington, D.C., 1969), 37-

25. Barbara Novak, American Painting of the

Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American

Experience (New York, 1969), 159.

26. Quoted in McCoubrey, American An, 100.

27. McCoubrey, American Art, 109.

28. McCoubrcy, American Art, 103.

29. McCoubrey, American Art, 104,107.

3 o. Emerson, Complete Essays, 407.

31. Emerson, Complete Essays, 406.

32. McCoubrey, American Art, 108.

33. John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing; in Three

Letters to Beginners (London and New York, 1857), 164;

and McCoubrey, American Art, m.

34. McCoubrey, American An, 112; and Ruskin, Elements of Drawing, 289, 291.

3 5. Ruskin, Elements of Drawing, 189, 240.

3 6. Quoted in John I. H. Baur, "Early Studies in Light

and Air by American Painters," Brooklyn Museum Bulletin, 9, no. 2 (Winter 1948): 6.

37. Novak, American Painting, chap. 6; and Theodore

E. Stebbins, The Life and Works of Martin Johnson Heade

(New Haven and London, 1975), 108.

38. John Wilmerding, Fitz Hugh Lane (New York,

i97i), 50.

39. Ruskin, Elements of Drawing, r/8.

40. Ruskin, Elements of Drawing, 226-227.

41. See Wilmerding, Lane, figs. 40-43, 61-62, 88-89.

42. Ruskin, Elements of Drawing, 257-258.

43. Ruskin, Elements of Drawing, 182-183.

44. Quoted in Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., Sanford Robinson

Gifford (1823-1880) [exh. cat., University of Texas Art

Museum] (Austin, 1970), 31.

45. John Ferguson Weir, "Address, Sanford R. Gifford Memorial Meeting, The Century" (New York,

November 19,1880); quoted in Cikovsky, Gifford, 16.

46. Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods, Apollo

(New York, 1966), 93.

47. Louis L. Noble, After Icebergs with a Painter, A

Summer Voyage to Labrador and Around Newfoundland

(New York, 1861), 223. See also the discussion of Church

in Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., Close Observation: Selected

Oil Sketches by Frederic E. Church [Cooper-Hewitt

Museum of Decorative Arts and Design] (New York,

1978).

48. Fitz Hugh Ludlow, The Heart of the Continent: A

Record of Travel Across the Plains and in Oregon with an

Examination of the Mormon Principle (Cambridge, Mass.,

1870), 412, 426.

49. Ludlow, Heart of the Continent, 431-432.

50. John I. H. Baur, ed., The Autobiography ofWorthington Whittredge (rpt. ed., New York, 1969), 31, 46.

51. Ruskin, Elements of Drawing, 198.

52. This point is more fully argued in John Wilmerding, "Fire and Ice in American Art: Polarities from

Luminism to Abstract Expressionism" in The Natural

Paradise, Painting in America, 1800-1950, ed. Kynaston

McShine [Museum of Modern Art] (New York, 1976),

47-52.

5 3. William Bradford, The Arctic Regions, Illustrated

with Photographs Taken on an An Expedition to Greenland,

with Descriptive Narrative by the Artist (London, 1873), 12.

54. Bradford, Arctic Regions, 74.

5 5. Maitland C. De Sormo, Seneca Ray Stoddard, Versatile Camera-Artist (Saranac Lake, N.Y., 1972), 80.

152 WILMERDING
II Oppositions & Balances: Collateral Views ofLuminism
ipo. Frederic Edwin Church. Aurora Borealis, 1865. Oil on canvas. 1.423 x 2.122 (56y8 x &•$% in). Inscribed, 1.1.: FC 6s.

The National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Gift of Eleanor Blodgett

186. Frederic Edwin Church. Andes of Ecuador, 1855. Oil on canvas. 1.229 x 1.905 (48 x 75 in). Inscribed, I.e.: E E. Church/i8s$.

Reynolda House, Inc., Winston-Salem, North Carolina (previous page)

154
Church and Luminism: Light for Americas Elect

David C. Huntington

And then they will see the Son of man coming in clouds with great power and glory.

And then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from

the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven. [Mark 13:26-27]

"CHURCH EXHIBITS THE NEW ENGLAND MIND PICTORIALLY DEVELOPED."1

These are the words of the Reverend Henry Theodore Tuckerman, spoken in

1867, and indeed the roots of Frederic Edwin Church's art do go back to

seventeenth-century New England. Intriguingly his art is a sort of latter-day

Puritan baroque, the Protestant Reformation's delayed response to the art of

the Counter-Reformation. And, as the papacy shaped the art of Bernini and

Borromini, so in a sense did the Massachusetts theocracy shape—even though

it took two hundred years—the art of Frederic Church. Though his landscape

paintings were fit icons for the American Adam of the nineteenth century, they

were, more profoundly, cogent parables for God's Chosen People, and while

their appeal was manifold, they were painted primarily for "those who have

eyes to see and a mind to understand." These words, quoted or paraphrased

time and again in the presence of Church's canvases, resonate with Scripture.2

They are banner words of the would-be Elect, and words which have more to

do with John Calvin than with Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David

Thoreau. Those today who would fathom Church's art must also look at his

canvases with eyes that "will to see and a mind that wills to understand." We

need to view his work through the spirit of his age, or—to be more exact—

through the Puritan spirit of his age.

In 1867 luminism would have been at high tide, though the term itself is one

that Tuckerman as the author of American Artists Life did not employ. It is a

term coined by modern scholars to denote a sensibility toward light that

appears to distinguish almost a whole generation of landscape painters. That

Tuckerman did not perceive that unifying sensibility is of some significance to

this study, for in a curious way the accessibility of Emerson and Thoreau to our

understanding has served to confer, in hindsight, a spiritual consistency upon

the vision of the period. Indeed, from the vantage point of the present a

luminist sensibility would seem to fit transcendentalism with almost elegant

precision.3 However, there may be less spiritual consistency than scholars had

supposed.4 Provoked on this occasion by the question, "What is Church's

relationship to luminism?" I have taken a fresh look at "the New England mind

pictorially developed." The question and the quest will lead in this essay to the

conclusion that the Almighty has significantly more to do with Church's art

than the Over-Soul, that atmosphere has more to do with Church's light than

luminism.

Wonderful Hazy ridges of mountain-peaks, flooded with tropical sunlight. Sharp

pinnacles, just tipped with eternal snow, soaring like white birds to heaven. Vast

torrents, dashing over rocky ledges into bottomless ravines that gape for the silver

waters. Faint gleams of tropical vegetation reddening the foreground, with all detail, all

shape, lost in the neutral bloom over lonely places. Grandeur, isolation, serenity! Here

there is room to breathe. One feels the muscles grow tense gazing over that great Alpine

panorama.

[On Andes of Ecuador, Harper's Magazine, i} May 30,1857, 339]

Prejudice of every kind, like the mists of the lowlands, should lie far beneath us; for it is

our privilege, if we deserve the name, to breathe a clear, refined atmosphere, where no

exhalations of earth come between us and the sunlight. From these heights we have a

wide circuit of vision. The past opens to us its experience, the great present is spread out

before us, and, so far as they can be inferred from the comparison of the past with the

present, we discern the contingencies of the future. If it be possible not to feel the

influences of sect, part, or vicinage, let us not be in bondage to either. Christianity is

more than sect, patriotism more than part, our country than the section where we live.

[George Washington Bethune, An Oration Before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard

Universityy July 19,1849 (Cambridge, 1849)]

God is light, [i John 1:5]

155
ehold, I make all things new. [Revelations 21:5]

If there is one single canvas by Church which first declares the distinctive

nity of light and faith that characterizes his mature work it would surely be

ndes of Ecuador (fig. 186) painted in 1855. With this inspirational tour de force of

adiant atmosphere the claim for a "luminist Church" can be made on sure

round—or rather, sure air. "Here," exclaimed one of its first viewers, a critic

or H,arperi Magazine, "there is room to breathe. One feels the muscles grow

ense . . ., gazing over that great Alpine panorama." In the eyes of Church's

ontemporaries the painting had "caught and conveyed a new feeling to the

mind."5 None of the luminist painters at this date or at any date would, on their

ght-filled canvases, ever catch and convey that same new feeling. It was a new

eeling caught and conveyed more readily by words than in images painted at

he easel. That Andes of Ecuador could inspire comments that might just as well

e spoken in a church or lecture hall as in a gallery is a telltale clue to the

niqueness of Church's vision; for the words of the Harper's critic might

lmost have preceded or followed the passage from the Reverend George

Washington Bethune's Harvard address quoted above.

We can be sure that the tenor of Bethune's Phi Beta Kappa oration carried

over into his sermons. The oration itself is a masterpiece of American liberal

Calvinist typology, charged with the nationalist mystique of Manifest Destiny,

mbued with the ideals of New England's Elect. Bethune's fifty-two-page text is

a synthesis of mid-century patriotism, science, and religion and, as such, seems

a virtual prescription for the ideology of Church's art. Interestingly, Bethune at

hat date occupied the pulpit of the Central Reformed Church of Brooklyn

("the Church on the Heights"), and it was to hear his sermons on Sundays that

Church as a young man took the ferry from Manhattan across the East River.6

Consider the susceptible mind of the youthful painter, bred in Connecticut

Congregationalism, listening to this admonition from the pulpit:

Neither the law of our Creator, nor the urgencies of the times, permit . . . luxurious

self-indulgence. Thought, truthful, clear, and augmentative of good deeds, is an oracle

from heaven; eloquence, whether of the voice or of the pen, comes from a divine

fflatus; and woe, woe, in this world and in the next, to the man that God has thus

ordained his prophet, if he utters not, or if he perverts, the revelation!7

These words would have been no less applicable for the man whose God-given

talent was the brush, as for the man whose talent was the voice or the pen.

Moreover, the two quotations exemplify Bethune's mode of discourse. Biblical, if not oracular, the Oration is replete with the hyperbole of a mythology

which is all but extinct in post-Watergate America. To us it is at once arcane and

archaic. But to the self-appointed elite of Manifest Destiny "the claims of our

country on its literary men"—claims that applied equally to its artists—were

imperatives dutifully, willingly obeyed, obeyed, that is, if one felt himself thus

called by God.

Judging by what we know of other American landscapists of his generation,

186. Frederic Edwin Church. Andes of Ecuador, 1855. Oil on canvas. 1.229 x 1.905 (48 x 75

in). Inscribed, I.e.: E E. Church/i8ss- Reynolda House, Inc., Winston-Salem, North

Carolina

certainly none, it would seem, was so flawlessly qualified as Church to conceive

of himself as preordained "prophet." Church grew up in an atmosphere

redolent of the spirit of New England Puritanism. Five generations earlier his

first ancestor on this continent landed at Plymouth. This was Richard Church,

who in 1636 migrated with the Reverend Thomas Hooker from Braintree to

Hartford. Richard's descendant Frederic, born 190 years later, grew up attending Hartford's Central Congregational Church. In the painter's formative years

religious controversy raged in the city, focused on the personalities of his

family's pastor, the conservative evangelical Joel Hawes, and the pastor of the

North Congregational Church, the liberal yet staunchly Calvinist Horace

Bushnell. That the painter was, in his manhood, to draw close to the controversial Bushnell and away from the conservative affiliation of his childhood is a

critical point as Church in his mature years seems to have been inspired by the

same latter-day Puritan faith that Bushnell so vigorously defended against

Unitarianism and transcendentalism.8 The writings of Hartford's would-be

prophet of liberal nineteenth-century New England Calvinism, especially

Nature and the Supernatural and Sermons for the New Life (a copy of which the

painter owned), have a decided application to our understanding of Church.9

Dominating these texts is the author's steadfast belief in the divinity of Christ,

the triune nature of God, and the presence of God in the operations of human

and natural history. One conviction of Bushnell's that would be of especial

pertinence to the visual arts was that religious symbols are necessary to man156 HUNTINGTON
187. After Frederic Edwin Church. The Heart of the Andes, 1859. Watercolor on paper

mounted on cardboard. 0.502 x 0.918 (19% x $6% in). Inscribed, 1.1.: on tree trunk: FE

CHURCH/i8s?. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Gift of Robert H. and

Clarice Smith, 625809. Scholars are uncertain whether this is by Church's own hand or a

copy by an English watercolorist

kind. A reading of these and others of his works goes far to point up the

importance of the distinction between liberal Calvinism and Unitarian transcendentalism. (Hartford was both socially and religiously Church's home at

the very time that luminism was taking form as an aesthetic discipline. True

luminists would have been more at home in Concord, at least religiously.)

While science was repeatedly to be invoked by Bushnell and by Bethune,

science would in no way absorb their minds as it did the mind of the Reverend

James McCosh, the Scots theologian who was, in Church's time, to become

one of the principal luminaries of American Presbyterianism. (He was president of the College of New Jersey, i.e. Princeton University, for twenty years.)

In the library at Olana, Church's former home in New York State, is a copy of

the 1881 edition of McCosh's Typical Forms and Special Ends in Creation, a treatise

first published in i856.10 For those who will have remarked the visible absence of

an explicitly Christian context in the Personal Narratives and Cosmos of Alexander von Humboldt, works which inspired Church twice to visit South

America, McCosh's treatise would seem to provide a missing link between

Church's religious and Humboldfs secular approach to natural history. Typical

forms and Special Ends in Creation is a dedicated Calvinist's guide to the

"Science of Design."11 Geology is viewed as a Bible in stone, infallibly inscribed

with the story of creation. Like the verbal Bible, known to the generations who

lived without the benefit of the new dispensation of science, the physical world

is as much, so McCosh tells us, the word of God as is the word recorded by the

prophets and the apostles. And as the Old Testament prefigures the new, so

does the life of one geological era prefigure that of the next. Ceaselessly, the

mantle of the planet has been preparing the way for ever higher forms in the

chain of animal being. McCosh's God needs millions of years to accomplish his

purposes. (The Scottish-born Presbyterian is liberal enough to be unembarrassed by the chronology of a Bishop Ussher who dated the creation as

occurring in 4004 B.C.) All creatures, of course, have in "the womb of time"

been created to fulfill some end in the great design of things envisaged by the

Almighty ere time began:

The Supreme could foresee that which was to come, and which He had pre-ordained;

the revelations of geology enable us to take a retrospective view. But they do more; they

afford us the means of exercising a reflex faculty; we can examine the first figure in the

vertebrate series, and from that point look down the long vistas that are opened, to the

188. Unidentified photograph of the Apollo

Belvedere. 0.362 x 0.235

(i4y4 x 9% in). Olana

State Historic Site,

Taconic Region, New

York State Office of

Parks and Recreation,

Hudson, New York.

Copy photo: Tony

Novak (not in exhibition)

HUNTINGTON 157
iod when man appears as the final and foreseen product of one mighty plan—the last

ime, but the first in the contemplation of Him who called them all into being.

t us behold this creature "which had so long been prepared":

e consummation of the earthly type comes out—in a goodly frame, with gait erect; in

s to contemplate, and mental faculties to appreciate, the beauty of the objects around

m. . . . Doubtless the structure of his body binds him to the earth's surface, but he has

ntal powers which enable him to soar from earth to heaven, to penetrate far into the

ions of space, and throw back a reflective glance upon the remotest points of time.12

hile Church's photograph of the Apollo Belvedere (fig. 188) might envision

s divine creature, the Andes of Ecuador (fig. 186) is a scene fit to be viewed by

e God of Light himself. So, too, before the painting would the spectator of

5 discover himself to be the "consummation of the earthly type," for the first

me beholding Creation. No wonder Andes of Ecuador "conveyed a new

ling to the mind." Like Adam at the dawn of human consciousness the

holder awakens to the beauty of the earth which has been so long preparing

 him. Yet this first awakening is, in effect, the type for a reawakening into a

gher consciousness, which is the consciousness of a soul reborn in Christ, as

th fresh eyes he "sees all things new." The old dispensation is manifest in the

ise of the church and wayside shrine, each marked by a cross. The new

spensation is manifest in the guise of a heavenly cross whose all-pervasive

diant light blesses and hallows all nature. As the crosses made by human

nds adumbrate the cross made by divine hands, so has the sequel of ever

gher orders of life through aeons adumbrated the mind-spirit which now, for

e first time, contemplates Creation with "Intelligence." As he "soars" sus

nded between earth and heaven in the presence of Andes of Ecuador and looks

t upon the world's divinity, the spectator becomes a "demi-god."13

It is the newly apprehended spiritual dimension of light perceived in a

oment of revelation which causes Church to play the luminist here. But even

e material dimension of light is the object of reverent contemplation. "Our

rth," writes McCosh,

s . . ., on the one hand, powerful fires to heat it and on the other hand, an extensive

ervoir of cold to keep it cool; its surface is warmed by the internal heat, and by the

at of the sun; and its temperature being thus rendered higher than that of the vault of

aven, it is ever radiating heat towards the regions of space, according to the beautiful

w of the universe, whereby all things tend towards an equilibrium.14

he very atmosphere of the earth itself was testimony to the beneficence of the

reator. Through generations of landscape painters the atmosphere had been

garded as an agent of sentiment, by many painters, the chief agent of

ntiment. But for Church's generation the atmosphere signified even more;

r without a layer of air and water surrounding the earth, man's home would

e uninhabitable. Thus Church portrays on canvas the blend of air and water

at makes life possible, that inspires his spectator to "breathe." There is

verence in his painted atmosphere, as well as mood and drama. How to

create the earth's envelope modified by latitude and season would be second

189. Frederic Edwin Church. Mt. Desert, Moonlight, c. 1860. Oil on lightweight

cardboard. 0.140 x 0.304 (5% x 13% in). Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York, The

Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Design, 1917-4-1355

to none among Church's concerns as both scientific and religious landscape

painter. This concern would draw him close to the luminists. Yet Church's eye

reached out still farther into the atmosphere than was characteristic of his

luminist associates—indeed, even beyond the atmosphere into the celestial

order.

Andes of Ecuador was Church's first painting to project a sense of the

"cosmic," the cosmic both in its Humboldtian comprehensiveness and its

almost God-like scope of time and space. The scale of the scene, suggesting the

length and breadth of the doublespined backbone of South America, connotes

a whole continent which in turn represents a portion of the globe's surface.

And the luminous axis emanating from the life-giving sun links the earth to the

anchor of the solar system, bonding the equilibrium of a designed cosmos. In

other works, too, Church looked about the planet and beyond for sublimities

distant and near. In 1860 Church intercepted on a small canvas a passing

incident in the cycle of the universe: the large meteor that arced for a few nights

through the earth's atmosphere giving to viewers a few minutes' pause for

thoughts of the infinite. A gem of nocturnal luminism, The Meteor (1860;

private collection) is as much a portrayal of the darkness of outer space as it is a

portrayal of a missile shimmering for an instant on a path measured in lightyears. Closer to earth and almost familiarly cosmic is a night-luminous study of

the moon (fig. 189); but as sheer natural spectacle, perhaps no painting by

Church provokes thoughts of the cosmos more dramatically than his Aurora

Borealis of 1865 (fig. 190; see also figs. 191-192). Overhead, flashing, waving,

vibrating sheets of electric hues speak at once of the very outer limits of the

stratosphere and the mutual attraction of the earth's poles. Such phenomena as

these could have been assimilated in Puritan cosmology.

Church was not to be dependent upon any one source of inspiration for the

8 HUNTINGTON
i9i. Frederic Edwin Church. Aurora Borealis, c. 1860-1870. Oil on lightweight

cardboard. 0.162 x 0.252 (6% x 915/i6 in). Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York, The

Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Design, 1917-4-1376

typology of natural history. Andes of Ecuador, which so compellingly evokes

McCosh's text, was nonetheless painted a year before the publication of Typical

Forms and Special Ends in Creation. Church was simply portraying what was in

the air of i855.15 He had assimilated the typology of science very naturally—one

might even say, instinctively. He had grown up in a tradition which would have

prepared him to look for parable and prophecy in nature.

Within the past dozen or so years scholars of Puritanism have been delineating the contours of seventeenth-century New England Calvinist thought and

its legacy in American intellectual life. In The Puritan Origins of the American

Self, Sacvan Bercovitch examines the rigorously articulated rationale which

served so effectively to shape the social structure and set in motion the divine

revolution of the Massachusetts theocracy. His characterization of Puritan

typology alerts us to the potential application of that system in both historical

and geographical guise:

In its original form, typology was a hermeneutical mode connecting the Old Testament

to the New in terms of the life of Jesus. It interpreted the Israelite saints, individually,

and the progress of Israel, collectively, as a foreshadowing of the gospel revelation. . . .

With the development of hermeneutics, the Church Fathers extended typology to post

scriptural persons and events. Sacred history did not end, after all, with the Bible; it

became the task of typology to define the course of the church ("Spiritual Israel") and of

the exemplary Christian life. In this view Christ, the "anti-type," stood at the center of

history, casting His shadow forward to the end of time as well as backward across the

192. Frederic Edwin Church. Aurora Borecdis, c. 1860-1870. Oil and pencil on lightweight cardboard. 0.227 x 0.336 (815/16 x 13% in). Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York,

The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Design, 1917-4-1261

Old Testament. Every believer was a typus orfigumChristitZnd the church's peregrination, like that of old Israel, was at once recapitulative and adumbrative. In temporal

terms, the perspective changed from anticipation to hindsight. But in the eye of eternity,

the Incarnation enclosed everything that preceded and followed it in the everlasting

present.16

The Puritan community was one whose identity was defined typologically, a

community prefigured in the Old Testament. Of the community's leaders, one

after another was perceived as a Nehemiah, a Jacob, a Moses, a David, a

Solomon—as a prophet among the serf-styled New Israelites who had, in

crossing the Atlantic, made their exodus to a new world. On these wilderness

shores God's Chosen People might erect a "New Jerusalem," build "the City of

God."

As scrupulous Calvinists the Puritans of course submitted themselves to the

discipline of the community, presumably, but not assuredly, the community of

the Elect. As members of this holy nation, they were the world's Saving

Remnant. While the reign of Christ was the ultimate goal of history, the

individual was not to model himself directly after the Son of God. It would be

presumptive so to identify oneself with Jesus, the anti-type. Rather, the individual would seek to emulate the prophet of old, the type who had himself

prefigured Jesus. Integral to this spiritual code was the subordination of the

self to the community of the church and the anticipation of the ultimate

HUNTINGTON 159
93- Frederic Edwin Church. Moses Viewing the Promised Land, 1846. Oil on academy

oard. 0.241 x 0.311 (9% x i2!/4 in). Collection of Dr. Sheldon and Jessie Stern. Photo:

Kennedy Galleries (not in exhibition)

ulfillment of history with the advent of the Kingdom of God. Subjectivism

and self-indulgence were constrained through subservience to Old Testament

ypology and the mode of discourse of the prophets. The regimen demanded

of the individual a watchful eye toward the peculiar symptoms of his time and

place. Rather than fossilizing and becoming irrelevant, the Puritan ethos

proved to be extraordinarily responsive to circumstances of the moment and

capable of assimilating the new. The historical process was itself the revolution

by means of which the world would be redeemed. In his mysterious ways God

directed his Elect to accomplish his ends. For "those with eyes to see, and ears

o hear" the divine revelation was ever immanent.

Bethune, Bushnell, McCosh—each in his writings exemplifies the discipline

and the dynamic of the Puritan principle. And so, too, does Church. Note the

tides of his early subjects, drawn from the Bible and Pilgrim's Progress: Moses

Viewing the Promised Lund (1846; fig. 193), The Deluge (one in 1846, another in

1851; locations unknown), Christian on the Borders of the Valley of the Shadow of

Death (1847; Olana, Hudson, New York), Christian and his Companion by the

River of the Water of Life (1848; location unknown), The Plague of Darkness

(1849; location unknown). Promise, purgation, pilgrimage reflect the prophetic typology of Puritanism, but expressly New World subjects also fit the

typology with significant frequency: Quebec Viewed from the Chaudfere (c. 1845;

Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut), The Reverend Thomas Hooker

and his Party on their Journey Through the Wilderness., 1636 (1846; Wadsworth

Atheneum), The Charter Oak (1846; Olana, Hudson, New York), West Rock,

New Haven (1849; New Britain Institute of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut). These represented the scene of General Wolfe's martyrdom to the

cause of Anglo-Saxon hegemony in North America; a band of exiles destined

to found a "chosen Israel" on the banks of the Connecticut; the tree in which

the most "democratic" charter of any colony was securely hid; the hill in a cave

of which the three regicides found safety in 1661—more than a century before

the symbolic regicide of George III. To a reader of George Bancroft's History of

the United States (1844), the epic history of the period, all these sites would have

been hallowed by associations which prefigured the Revolution and American

independence.

The artist carried the typology into his own day. West Rock stands as a

reminder of the past while it guards the pristine pastoral scene before it,

sanctifying Connecticut's present. New England Scenery (1851; George Walter

Vincent Smith Museum, Springfield, Massachusetts), is a manifesto of the

ideals which are to set the type for the nation's expansion. The youth at the foot

of the tree in Mt. Ktaadn (1853; fig. 194) envisages Maine's interior as it will be in

his manhood, a "middle ground" (to quote Leo Marx) between the city and the

wilderness. Even now a glorious sky seems to herald that dreamed-of future.17

Later in the decade, Church's horizons would reach out beyond such parochially Puritan confines in time and space, as his imagination came to be

nourished by a larger typology of national and natural history.

That so many subjects painted in his youth could be thus informed connotes

the origins of Church's own self-identity, an identity that gave direction to his

entire career. "A nineteenth century type of the Puritan," his friend Charles

Dudley Warner characterized the painter. Church "followed the Trinitarian

Congregational worship of his parents."18 The ethos of New England was in

his blood. While we are primarily concerned with how that identity affected his

work, it was also to exhibit itself in nonpictorial terms. This is literally the case

in his avoidance of sketching and painting on the Sabbath. And in that fateful

last winter before the Civil War the painter would stay up into the night with

Theodore Winthrop discussing, while others slept, the signs of the conflict that

would soon engulf the nation. Within only months Church's companion of

those wakeful nights would fall a martyr to the great cause of freedom.

Humorously rather than tragically symptomatic of the depth of the painter's

Calvinism is Jervis McEntee's mournful reflection: "I think one trouble with

Church and the Osborns, too, perhaps, is that they are too heavily weighted

with their Presbyterian strictures to have a very good time."19 Nineteenthcentury Puritanism would have a profound bearing on both the content and

the style of Church's art. One cannot separate what he painted from what he

believed.

160 HUNTINGTON
194. Frederic Edwin Church. Mt. Ktaadn, 1853. Oil on canvas. 0.921 x 1.403 (36% x ss% in). Inscribed, I.e.:

E E. Church—t8s3. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; Stanley B. Resor, B.A. 1901,'Fund

HUNTINGTON l6l
96. Thomas Cole. The Cross in the Wilderness, c. 1844. Pencil; white, gray-green, and

reenish brown chalk on gray illustration board. Inscribed, 1.1.: T. Cole. Diameter: 0.186

75/16 in). John Davis Hatch Collection. Photo: National Gallery of Art, Washington

95. Thomas Cole. The Pilgrim of the Cross (The Vision), c. 1846-1847. Oil on canvas.

0.365 x 0.518 (14% x 20% in). The Brooklyn Museum, New York; Gift of Misses Cornelia

and Jennie Donnellon (not in exhibition)

As a consideration of Church's beliefs clarifies his work and helps us to qualify

his relationship to luminism, so too will a consideration of his artistic milieu

help us further to qualify that relationship. A close look at the work and world

views of two very dissimilar landscape painters, for example, each resembling

Church in some ways, contrasting with him in others, should serve as touch

stones to his art. One is Church's teacher, Thomas Cole; the other, John F.

Kensett. Religiously and aesthetically Church stands between the two. Interestingly, it is in his picturing of the atmosphere, the arena of light-action,

that the similarities and differences between Church and these two painters

come into sharpest focus.

Cole's attitude toward light is substantially different from the attitude

toward light exemplified by Kensett. From the very outset of his career Cole's

interest in light seems to have been conditioned by his absorption in chiaroscuro. For him light and dark were interdependent; within a composition they

acted in concert to produce the desired emotional affect. They were indispensible to his primary pictorial concern, which was "expression." Light and its

concomitant dark were instruments of mood, protagonists in the painted

drama. Gradations of light-dark were disposed strategically between poles—

calm and excitement, repose and agitation, death and life. Light, in effect, was

an actor on the stage of the artist's soul. Its absence could personify evil; its

presence, good. Indeed, as Cole in his later years became the evermore devout

churchman, he focused with increasing deliberateness on the soul's ordeal in its

lonely pilgrimage on earth. It was at this period that Cole embarked on his

series, the Cross and the World. In the fifth and last of the series, The Pilgrim of

the Cross at the End of His Journey (c. 1846-1847), illustrated here by the oil sketch

for it, the association of light with Christ is made explicit through the form of a

radiant silvery white cross (fig. 195; see also fig. 196). Whether we are looking at

Cole's Pilgrim, his Home in the Woods (c. 1846; Reynold House Museum of

American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina), or his Schroon Mountain

(1838; Cleveland Museum of Art), the painter's stance in the landscape is neither

that of the Puritan or the transcendentalism Instead, it is the stance of a soul

nurtured in the tradition of the English dissenters of Lancashire.20 Cole's God,

Cole's Savior, has more to do with the next world than with this world. For

him, life on earth was essentially a striving for purity of spirit, a preparation for

the life after death. Virtually nothing, it would seem, of the ideology of New

England's Elect surfaces on the pages of his soul-searching journals. Cole stood

alone in nature, looking for intimations of immortality.

While in his last years the painting of religious allegories was to become the

consuming interest of Cole, he was at the same time making progress in his

portrayal of the visible world about him. By the mid-i84os a change was clearly

taking place in Cole's procedures and perceptions. Sketching in oil from nature

was becoming a more frequent practice with him. There is a vividness of

62 HUNTINGTON
197- Frederic Edwin Church. The Catskill Creek, c. 1845. Oil on panel. 0.299 x 0.406

(n% x 16 in). Olana State Historic Site, Taconic Region, New York State Office of Parks

and Recreation, Hudson, New York. Photo: Frick Art Reference Library (not in

exhibition)

198. Thomas Cole. Home in the Woods, c. 1846. Oil on canvas. i.n8 x 1.676 (44 x 66 in).

Reynolda House, Inc., Winston-Salem, North Carolina (not in exhibition)

perception in the studies which Church, coming to Catskill, New York in 1844

at age eighteen, was straightway, to emulate. Interestingly, none of Cole's oil

sketches from nature quite match the perceptual snap of Church's transcript of

the Catskill Creek (fig. 197), which probably dates from the pupil's second

summer with the teacher. Even by this early date it could be that the pupil was

pressing the teacher to look more sharply. A performance, such as the one

illustrated by this panel, could well have prompted Cole's remark: "Church has

the finest eye for drawing in the world." Influences could easily have gone both

ways at Catskill. Certainly, a fresh visual intensity marks Cole's work of the

time. It shows not only in oil sketches but also in other media. This is especially

noticeable in pencil sketches, which, aided by Chinese white, convey the

illusion of light. Alongside these, Cole's pencilled impressions recorded in the

sketchbooks of earlier years look like linear neoclassical abstractions—tracings

rather than perceptions.

Cole's visual breakthrough of the mid-i84os was almost immediately registered on canvas. With Home in the Woods (c. 1846; fig. 198), for example, no

earlier Cole quite compares in vividness. Yet the painting is not a celebration of

the act of perception. The painter has not taken the tack that his luminist

successors in the 18508 and sixties would pursue. Rather, Cole has incorporated

into the old system of his art the new sense of reality seized first in his sketches.

Vivid perception is used to make a dream—the scene is an imaginary composition—appear real. Cole has simply extended his range of expression to attain an

unprecedented degree of freshness, purity, newness. Home in the Woods is a

vision suspended at the threshold of the virgin wilderness. Here the virtuous

pioneer and his family live in harmony in a pristine American Eden. The

concept and the structure of the painting are conventional, for the composition

harks back to a formula institutionalized in the eighteenth century. A plate

from a book published by the English connoisseur of landscape, the Reverend

William Gilpin (fig. 199), illustrates those precepts which are known to have

played a role in the genesis of Cole's style some twenty years before.21 However,

Cole has burdened the formulaic composition with a narrative—he would have

considered it "historical"—content that goes beyond mere landscape connoisseurship. Home in the Woods is redolent with effects and details that conspire to

illustrate a moral. The "expression" of the light, of the color, of the form, is

pregnant with the spirit of a new start in civilization: eagerness, enthusiasm,

energy, elation. Like the evergreens within it, the vision partakes of eternal life.

Home in the Woods can, if considered in isolation from the rest of Cole's

oeuvre, be deceiving, in that it may invite inference that the artist was

wholeheartedly endorsing a popular vision of the self-reliant pioneer, the

archetypal hero of American expansionism. However, hidden in the scene, as

HUNTINGTON 163
9- William Gilpin. Lake Windermere, 1808. Aquatint, o.ioo x 0.165

15

/i6

 x 6!

/2 in). Plate IX, Observations on . . . Cumberland and

Westmoreland (London, 1808), i (not in exhibition)

0. Thomas Cole. Schroon Mountain) 1838. Oil on canvas, i.oio x

600 (39% x 63 in). The Cleveland Museum of Art; The Hinman B.

urbut Collection (not in exhibition; at right)

Gray Sweeney has pointed out, is a cross, effected by a post and beam at the

ngle of the cabin, signaling a commitment that supercedes Jacksonian notions

f Manifest Destiny and American perfectibility.22 To view the painting in a

roper context it should be considered alongside the artist's Schroon Mountain

f 1838 (fig. 200).

Schroon Mountain is a virtual transcript from an Adirondack sight, a sight

deally made by nature for Cole. In the foreground, all is portrayed as struggle,

trife, and suffering. Forms are blasted; colors are fiery. Further into the scene a

torm drenches flaming autumn foliage, seemingly to quench fire. In the

distance to the right, undulating contours of the mountain's shoulder suggest

muscles gathering superhuman strength. Over the whole looms a pyramid, its

hrust animated by a spirit that wills to break free of the world of gravity into

he pure, ethereal sky. To the poet-painter Thomas Cole this ready-made

natural drama proffered release from "this vale of tears," which it is man's sad

ate to endure throughout his fleshly existence. Schroon Mountain presented a

vision perfectly attuned to a mind burdened by a sense of man's fallen state.

Here, nature for a moment might solace the individual pursuing his lonely

pilgrimage through a sinful world. Poetically, Schroon Mountain spoke to the

afflicted of a realm beyond the physical and the temporal, pointed to the soul's

mmortality. No wonder the painter considered the scene "our grandest view."

Cole's conception of time seems, for all practical purposes, to have been

defined with reference to recorded human history. The above two works would

mark the outer limits of time in his schema. To Cole the region of Schroon

Mountain had the aspect of nature "unchanged," an aspect which "the scene

has worn for thousands of years." The Indians in their canoe on the lake or

hidden amidst the forest trees of the foregound exist outside of history. They

are simply part of nature. In the presence of this scene Cole's thirst to transcend

the world of historical time, and hence of sin and suffering, could be slaked. In

the poem by the painter that Noble, his biographer, links with the scene, Cole

fancies himself ascending an "ever-lasting throne," there on "the vast mountain

peak" to wear "a spirit's form."23

Home in the Woods would seem to represent Cole's turn from a sight that has

not changed in time to a sight that has not been in time. It is a vision of things

beyond the horizon, belonging to a moment that history cannot corrupt; it is

the paradise of a yeoman and his family living in an eternal present that will

never be more real than a beautiful idea. Home in the Woods reflects a bright

nostalgia for an ever-elusive future. It is the dream of hope.

Cole's yearning to transcend symbolically the time of a fallen world may have

been answered in Schroon Mountain, because the scene appears intrinsically

endowed with a structure of transcendence already implanted in the artist's

64 HUNTINGTON
mind. That structure, I suggest, would have been that of The Transfiguration by

Raphael, illustrated here by an engraving which—not insignificantly—was

once in Church's possession (fig. 201). Perhaps no single easel painting was

more revered by the romantic generation than this late work by Raphael, a

work alive with the spirit of religion, redolent of the sublimity of

Michelangelo, premonitory of the drama of the baroque, rich in its gradations

of expression. Indeed, to Cole, expression was "the soul of this picture."

Expression animated the whole. The painter of historical landscape—that

landscape that enacts a drama—would have appreciated the breath-taking

dynamics of Raphael's composition, powerfully generated by varying reciprocities of centrifugal and centripetal force. Resolving the drama of the

whole, and foil to the supergravity of the figures in the lower foreground, is the

weightless figure of Christ, "lifted from the earth," as Cole put it, "like a bright

exhalation."24 The depressed foreground of Schroon Mountain, peopled by its

shattered trees, and the lifting pyramid beyond and above are the analogous

poles of the Adirondack scene. To the romantic Thomas Cole Schroon

Mountain must have appeared a natural transfiguration.

Cole's art is pervasively anthropomorphic. Even the way he applies paint to

the canvas is emotionally expressive. In Home in the Woods the pigment varies

from smooth (as the glass of a mirror) to sharp (as the resin of pine). His

handling itself helps make the dream seem real. In Schroon Mountain the

pigment first appears to writhe in the torment of metaphorical flames, then to

float in the balm of ether. Cole's sensuous touch is as personal as is his vision.

The subjectivism of Cole reflects an orientation to nature very distant from

that of the man who in 1859 painted Shrewsbury River (fig. 202), John F. Kensett.

The contrast between this masterpiece of luminism and the two Coles just

considered becomes more apparent if one compares Shrewsbury River to other

canvases by Kensett which date from earlier in the decade. His Sunset, Camels

Hump, Vermont (c. 1851; fig. 80), for example, is typical of the artist at this date

and quite emphatically brings Cole to mind as its composition reflects those

principles laid down by Gilpin and followed by Cole (cf. fig. 203). In one sense,

in fact, Camel's Hump is nearer to the aesthetic of Gilpin than are Schroon

Mountain and Home in the Woods, for, in contrast to Cole, neither the English

connoisseur's nor Kensett's landscapes was "historical." Still, Cole normally

observed Gilpin's prescriptions, departing from them principally when expression demanded forms which the landscape connoisseur had counseled against.

Thus, for example, the carefully fashioned mountain range in Home in the

Woods abides by the advice that accompanies the plate from Observations on the

Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland illustrated in figure 203.

Cole is careful to see to it that the silhouettes of the various masses do not run

exactly parallel to one another, and thus he avoids an effect which Gilpin would

have deemed "disgusting." On the other hand, in Schroon Mountain Cole

ignored the connoisseur's counsel and focused—for reasons which are well

apparent to us—on a wedge-shaped peak that Gilpin would doubtless have

considered not quite graceful enough to please.25

Shrewsbury River must have been a very daring sight for Kensett to have put

onto canvas in 1859. Its boldly flat and empty composition seems a quiet

rejection of both Gilpin and Cole; its message seems to be that less is more.

There is not a hint of the narrative or drama of Cole. Gilpin's precepts are

almost willfully violated. Consider the mountain. Its profile, which would

impress Gilpin as "disgusting," would impress Cole as inexpressive. Contrast it

with the mountain labeled the "easy line" in Gilpin's engraving, a line so

suggestive of the draped arms and shoulders of the Apollo Belvedere (see fig.

188) that one cannot help but suspect a conscious human bias on Gilpin's part.

How far, indeed, from that classic paradigm of grace is Kensett's stolid and

inert lump! Yet, for Kensett, this immobilized and ungainly mountain mass is

201. After

Raphael, The

Transfiguration,

1517. Engraved

by H. Robinson; entitled:

He was Transftgured before

Them. 0.157 x

o.no (63/16 x 45/i6

in). Olana State

Historic Site,

Taconic Region, New York

State Office of

Parks and Recreation, Hudson, New York.

Photo: Tony

Novak (not in

exhibition)

HUNTINGTON 165
202. John Frederick Kensett. Shrewsbury River, 1859. Oil on canvas. 0.457 x 0.762 (18 x 30 in). Inscribed, \.\.:JFK's9. The

New-York Historical Society, New York

203. William Gilpin. An Explanation of the Shapes and Lines of Mountains, 1808. Line engraving. 0.210 x 0.146 (8y4 x 5%

in), sheet size. Plate III, Observations on. . . Cumberland and Westmoreland (London, 1808), i (not in exhibition; at right)

just what he required to grasp the unconscious in matter and to confer upon

the earth that gravity and permanence necessary as foil to the human ephemera

of sailboats flitting over nature's surface. The still, spare monumentality of

Shrewsbury River appears almost to mock the earnest, intensely personal histrionics of Thomas Cole. And Kensetfs handling, so self-effacing that it is

almost invisible, seems a tacit admonishment to the demonstrative pigment of

his predecessor. Through negation and stasis he was effecting a hushed exit

from the stale conventions of Gilpin, the sentimental anthropomorphisms of

Cole, the clutter of both.26

The implied space and time of Shrewsbury River are, seemingly, no longer

limited by the parochial scale of man's recorded history. Unobtrusively this

painting brings the spectator in touch with a universe that is superhuman.

Barbara Novak's invocation of Emerson's words comes automatically to mind:

"I become a transparent eyeball: I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the

Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God."27 It was out

of New England Unitarianism that the Concord philosopher fashioned transcendentalism. Shrewsbury River resonates with Emerson's dictum: the image's

all but anonymous creator inadvertently becomes a visual spokesman for His

emotion.

He has attained the distinction—that rarest distinction—of being a painter without a

manner, almost without a style. His pictures are not tinged with his own personality. He

paints, not nature according to Mr. Church, but simply nature. His eye, like every other

man's, is a camera with a brain behind it; but his brain gives him the power to transfer to

166 HUNTINGTON
204- Frederic Edwin Church. Twilight in the Wilderness, 1860. Oil on canvas. 1.016 x 1.625 (40 x 64 in). Inscribed,

l.r.: EE. Church 60. The Cleveland Museum of Art; Purchase, Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund

canvas the vanishing forms and tints and shadows thrown upon his eye, unaffected by

the medium through which they have passed, except by selection, combination, and

unification. It is this absence of any signs of mood or manner in his works that we

attribute the charm of a deficiency in feeling which is sometimes brought against him.

[Unidentified review of Twilight in the Wilderness, Church scrapbook, Olana]

These words of 1860, on first reading, appear to apply just as well to

Shrewsbury River as to Twilight in the Wilderness (fig. 204), Church's great

challenge of that year to his fellow-landscapists. The characterization of

Church's non-manner, almost non-style, does indeed suggest Kensett. But,

whereas Kensett would seem in his masterpiece of 1859 to reject Cole's concept

of anthromorphic landscape, Church was to adapt that very concept with a

sense of detachment that parallels the sense of detachment of the luminist. The

dissemblance of art has so enthralled the critic that the mood, the feeling of

Twilight in the Wilderness elude his recognition. Still, there is as much poetry

and drama to be discovered here as there is in Home in the Woods or Schroon

Mountain.

HUNTINGTON 167
05- Frederic Edwin Church. Twilight, "Short Arbiter Twixt Day and Night," 1850. Oil

n canvas. 0.813 x 1.219 (32 x 48 in). Inscribed, I.e.: E E. Church yso. Collection of the

Newark Museum, New Jersey (see plate 3)

Though Church's mastery over the representation of atmosphere came only

fter the experience and study of years, the prospect of that mastery was

ntimated at least as early as his The Ox-Bow (fig. 19) and Moses Viewing the

Promised Land (fig. 193), works dating from his days of tutelage under Thomas

Cole. Moses is especially suggestive, for Church's depiction of the subject

demonstrates how he, like the prophet within the scene, was compelled to gaze

directly into the light of the sun. Probably it was no later than 1845 that Church

attempted to paint his first twilight. Dawn and dusk were soon to become his

favorite subjects, subjects which of course directed his attention to the prob

ems of painting air and vapor. By 1850, the year that he exhibited Twilight,

"Short Arbiter Twixt Day and Night" (fig. 205), Church had become associated

with the painting of splendid skies. In the years that followed, one sensational

wilight after another—sometimes a sunrise, more often a sunset—proceeded

from his easel in a parade of celestial displays that climaxed in the early i86os

with Twilight in the Wilderness (figs. 204, 206-207) and Our Banner in the Sky

(1861; private collection).28

What is of especial interest here, however, is not the cataloguing of those

celestial landmarks, but the examination of Church's technique in capturing

the illusion of atmosphere on the two-dimensional surface. There is, for

example, a marked difference between sketches which date from around 1850

and those which were made some five or ten years later. The Mt. Desert study

206. & 207. Frederic Edwin Church. Twilight in the Wilderness, 1860. Details, fig. 204.

The Cleveland Museum of Art

168 HUNTINGTON
208. Frederic Edwin Church. Landscape) Sunset, c. 1850. Oil on lightweight cardboard.

0.203 x 0.318 (8 x T2% in). Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York, The Smithsonian

Institution's National Museum of Design, I9I7-4-5O5A

210. Unidentified photograph of clouds, c. 1855-1860. Olana State Historic Site,

Taconic Region, New York State Office of Parks and Recreation, Hudson, New York

(not in exhibition)

209. Frederic Edwin Church. Sunset, Hudson, New York, c. 1855-1860. Oil on lightweight cardboard. 0.215 x 0.312 (87

/i6 x n% in). Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York, The

Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Design, 1917-4-1313

(c. 1850; fig. 87), undoubtedly the basis for the sky in Beacon OffMt. Desert (1851;

fig. 88), reveals the essential points to be noted about the earlier sketches. Here

there is an edginess, a paintiness, that causes the cloud bars overhead to look

unnaturally solid. The brushstrokes recall Cole's taste for thick pigment, which

he had found suitable to expressive treatment.

It should be observed that it was not Cole's practice to make oil studies

which focused primarily on the sky. When he did study the sky it would be

through the medium of a pencil or ink drawing, accompanied by word

notations. Seldom, if ever, in the rendering of skies, did he manage to get away

completely from the linearity of his draftsmanship. Soft, for example, as the

clouds of Cole's View Across Frenchman's Bay from Mt. Desert Island, After a

Squall (fig. 107) of 1845 may appear, there is an edge, still, that separates their

substance just a little too crisply from the surrounding air. Sketching directly

from the sky in oil, with the first-hand evidence of nature as his imperative,

Church persisted until he had purged the artificiality of the line from his vision.

By the mid 18505 his clouds are no longer disturbed by the jarring opacity

remarked in Beacon OffMt. Desert and the study used for that painting. There is

no surfeit of pigment; no unnatural border inadvertently solidifies the cloud

vapors in a twilight study which probably dates from the later 18508 (fig. 208).

In Twilight in the Wilderness the discipline of careful study achieved its consummation.

HUNTINGTON 169
2n. Frederic Edwin Church. Icebergs, Newfoundland, 1859. Pencil and white gouache on brown paper. 0.275 x 0.454 (io13/16 x i77

/8

in). Inscribed (and underscored), I.e.: 2. Beautiful luminous reflected light; u.r. and c.r.ijuly 4th /$<>; andl.r.: Cape Johns and Gull

Island July 4th/sp. Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York, The

Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Design, 1917-4-

293

If there is still less of Church in Twilight in the Wilderness than in the study, it

would be due, in part, to meticulous execution in the studio as compared to the

haste of the out-of-doors. Also, at the easel, the painter could have had

available, for study, photographs such as the one illustrated in figure 210. With

heaven's light penciled on the spot with the brush, and heaven's light penciled

through the camera lens onto the plate, Church was readied to "transfer to

canvas the vanishing forms and tints and shadows thrown upon his eye,

unaffected by the medium through which they have passed." As he subordinated his hand to the hand of the Creator, Church's painting became the type

for nature's Bible. As his Puritan forebears had emulated the manner of the

prophets of the Old Testament, the artist was emulating the manner of nature.

By the end of the 18508 all the obtrusive qualities of Cole's treatment of the

pigment had vanished. Church had willingly surrendered himself in the

process of recording nature's truth. Oil studies of the aurora borealis and of

moonlight, with cloudless skies—almost brushlessly—recreate the earth's atmosphere (figs. 189,191,192). But even without the benefit of color Church's

observation of an Arctic scene executed in pencil and Chinese white (fig. 2n)

stardes us with its saturation of light and air.

No account of Church's feats of representation of atmospheric phenomena

would be complete without reference to the artist with whom and to whom he

was repeatedly compared, both at home and abroad. Americans must have

derived the keenest satisfaction from reading British reviews equating

Church's "aerial perspective" with J. M. W. Turner's and proclaiming the New

Englander the heir of "England's great Raphael of landscape."29 At Olana there

is a large (14 x 2iy4 inches) engraving by T. A. Prior after J. M. W. Turner's Tower

and Castle ofHeidelberg (fig. 212). If we compare this print with another print at

Olana, a small engraving after Claude Lorraine's Embarcation of the Queen of

Sheba (fig. 213), we can see mirrored in the two prints the difference between

the mature and the immature Frederic Church. The engraving after Claude is

as linear and edgy as any work by Church painted at age eighteen or twenty; in

the engraving after Turner line and edge are effaced as in works painted by

Church at age thirty-six or forty. Between painting Moses Viewing the Promised

Land (fig. 193) and Sunrise Off the Maine Coast (1863; fig. 214) Church had

become an "atmospherist."

170 HUNTINGTON
212. After James Mallord William

Turner. The Town & Castle of Heidelberg.

Engraved, 1849, by T. A. Prior. 0.368 x

0.539 (14 x 21% in). Olana State Historic

Site, Taconic Region, New York State Office of Parks and Recreation, Hudson,

New York (not in exhibition; below, at

left)

213. After Claude Lorraine. Embarcation

of the Queen ofSheba. Engraved by J. C.

Varrall. 0.012x 0.016 (4n/i6x 6% in). Olana

State Historic Site, Taconic Region, New

York State Office of Parks and Recreation,

Hudson, New York (not in exhibition;

below, at right)

214. Frederic Edwin Church. Sunrise Off

the Maine Coast, 1863. Oil on canvas. 0.915 x

1.220 (36 x 48y8 in). Inscribed, l.r.c.: E E.

Church 1863. Wadsworth Atheneum,

Hartford, Connecticut; Bequest of Mrs.

Clara Hinton Gould. Photo: E. Irving

Blomstrann (at left)

HUNTINGTON 171
215. Frederic Edwin Church. Labrador, 1859. Oil on paper. 0.095 x 0.302 (3% x n7

/8 in). Cooper-Hewitt Museum,

New York, The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Design, I9I7-4-745A

In Church's early works the various parts tend to be separately perceived,

itemized feature by feature. This is particularly noticeable in the oil on panel

transcript of about 1845 which is reproduced in figure 197. This Catskill scene,

already familiar to the reader, echoes perceptual habits of the young painter's

mentor. Cole's Home in the Woods (fig. 198) comes to mind as an example. The

tendency is to particularize distinctly the several features of the landscape.

While fading blues signify "aerial perspective" there seems, all the same, to be

no air. Such airlessness might be attributed to the peculiarities of atmosphere

which happened to prevail at the moment: broad daylight in North America.

But the same airlessness might prevail in a Cole at any other time of day and in

any other latitude or longitude indicated in his painting. To think of the

wholeness of atmosphere was in keeping neither with Cole's habits of perception, nor with his habits of conception. To him trees, mountains, clouds,

bodies of water were autonomous characters to be incorporated into a poetical

or dramatic—but not natural—harmony. Light, even, was thus autonomous,

still another landscape character with a role to play. Nature supplied the parts

for the whole, but the whole itself was formed by the artist's will. The unity of a

landscape by Cole resided in its creator's temperament, and not in nature's

atmosphere.

In his oil studies Cole was more concerned with the local hue and tone, and

he habitually chose to paint from nature in broad daylight as did his pupil—

witness Church's The Catskill Creek (fig. 197). What catches one's eye in

comparing this early transcript executed under Cole's supervision with one

executed barely five years later at Mt. Desert is the shift in Church's objectives

in sketching out-of-doors (see fig. 87).30 He was becoming more concerned

with nature's whole than with nature's parts, recording in oil as best he could

the influence of light on sky, earth, and water. His eyes were already set on a

course that would lead him on to climes, warm, humid, and verdant, as in

Jamaica, to climes hot, dry, and arid, as in the Holy Land—a course that would

lead him indeed to any clime he could get to, even the Arctic.

Studies Church made off the coast of Labrador (figs. 215-217) parallel his

verbal observations about the skies of northern latitudes in a broadside for The

Icebergs (The North) (plate 19):

THE SEA. From the brightness of an iceberg the eye is so affected that the sea appears

very dark. Accordingly the beholder here looks out through a gradually widening

avenue to the broad water, and finds it a very dark purple or violet. . . .

THE SKY. From the same optical causes that the sea is dark, the sky is sombre, rather

than a luminous azure. . . .

31

As the painter rid his atmosphere of traces of his self and submitted his will to

the will of God a new "unity" appeared on the canvas, not a unity imposed

upon nature by a temperament, as we saw with Cole, but nature's own unity. In

the mind of the critic of Twilight in the Wilderness "the absence of any signs of

mood or manner" had "the charm of a deficiency in feeling" for which some

viewers reproached the painter. Yet without the whole of nature's truth before

172 HUNTINGTON
2i6. Frederic Edwin Church. Labrador, 1859. Oil on paper. 0.203 x 0.302 (8 x n7

/8 in). Cooper-Hewitt Museum,

New lfork, The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Design, 1917-4-818

HUNTINGTON 173
2iy. Frederic Edwin Church. Labrador, 1859. Oil on paper. 0.109 x 0.303 (4.% x n7

/8 in). Cooper-Hewitt Museum,

New York, The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Design, 1917-4-802

him on the canvas the spectator could not discern the hand and mind of the

Creator.

Light and the elements were effectively united on Church's canvas. The

painted part was fused with the painted whole. All, thus, was "of a piece,"

nature's piece.32 And so spectators before Twilight in the Wilderness would

forget that they were looking at an easel painting hanging on the wall of a

Broadway gallery—not the reality itself, as in the Adirondacks, the White

Mountains, or the interior of Maine.

How that representation of nature, which marks the work of Church's

maturity, was achieved brings the discussion back to the engraving of Heidelberg (fig. 212). It could easily be that Church's acquiring a fine print after Turner

was occasioned by the reading of Modern Painters, especially the inspired

chapters in volume 4 on

 ccTurnerian Mystery."33

 An engraving of the caliber of

the one illustrated here would have been an invaluable adjunct to John Ruskin's text. Every form is seen through a layer of air. There are, in contrast with

the print after Claude (fig. 213), no sharp lines to deprive space of air, atmosphere of life. Surely it must have been as much with the help of prints after

Turner as with photographs of skies that Church—always, of course, consulting his own studies—accomplished his goal of recreating nature on the canvas.

One wonders, too, if knowledge of Turner's sketching on white ground

motivated Church's gradual abandonment, in the early 18508, of the ochre- or

salmon-colored ground that had been standard with him as long as he was

under Cole's sway. Sketching in oil, rather than in watercolor as did Turner,

Church could all the same do better with a lighter ground in his pursuit of

atmospheric truth. Whether or not Turner's example encouraged this particular move by Church, the English master's great triumphs in the representation

of light bear directly upon similar triumphs on the part of his American heir.

That Church could have painted the Andes of Ecuador had he not by 1855 seen an

engraving after Turner seems almost unthinkable. This painting and another

Turneresque triumph, Morning in the Tropics (1877; fig. 128), bracket Church's

greatest years. And between them are still other triumphs that visibly lay

tribute to the English genius, among them Cotopaxi (fig. 225), Aurora Borealis

(1865; fig. 190), Sunrise Off the Maine Coast (fig. 214).

In Sunrise Off the Maine Coast the effect of the sun burning through the

mist-filled atmosphere leaves nothing to be desired of Turner, though in

painting it Church may have specifically taken up the gauntlet thrown before

him the very year, 1863, that the picture was painted: "Mr. Church seems to

disdain commonplace themes [while Turner] needed only a craggy inlet and a

174 HUNTINGTON
roaring chaos of surf and one wild sea-bird for a theme."34

 The most telling

distinction to be made between the Englishman's stance in nature and that of

his American emulator is suggested by the well-known story behind Turner's

painting of The Snowstorm. Turner had himself lashed to the mast of a ship

where for four hours he lived, figuratively as well as literally, in the eye of a

storm.35 Such a physically subjective immersion in the elements would be a rite

too sensuous for the Calvinist conscience. Yet there is a sense of rite observed in

Church's Sunrise,, albeit one more of the spirit than of the flesh: on the virgin,

unpeopled shore of the New World, the painter for a moment experiences an

epiphany.

Alongside this elemental revelation of 1863, Church's juvenile Grand Manan

Island, Bay ofFundy (fig. 53), painted eleven years before, carries the spectator's

eye back into a more static, less immediate dispensation of nature. We seem to

stand outside the scene, looking not, to be sure, at the Queen of Sheba and her

entourage but, still, at someone who might have migrated from that classic

arcadian port to the Bay ofFundy. There is much of Claude to be remembered

in Grand Manan Island. Here we cannot "breathe" as we can before "the living"

scene of Mt. Desert painted hardly a decade later. Sunrise Off the Maine Coast

speaks of more than just the inspiration of Ruskin and his hero. It speaks of the

maturing of an American painter's world view. In a word, it speaks of the hand

of the Creator, just now lifted from the freshly formed face of his new world, a

"stern and rockbound coast," designed to temper the spirit of his Chosen

People.

I suppose [the] heavens to mean that part of creation which holds equal companionship

with our globe,... [a] heavenly plain of. . . waters, as it were, glorified in their nature,

no longer quenching the fire, but now bearing fire in their own bosoms; no longer

murmuring only when the winds raise them or rocks divide, but answering each other

with their own voices from pole to pole; no longer restrained by established shores, and

guided through unchanging channels, but going forth at their pleasure like the armies

of angels; no longer hurried downwards for ever, moving but to fall, nor lost in the

lightless accumulation of the abyss, but covering the east and west with the waving of

their wings, and robing the gloom of the farther infinite with a vesture of divers colors,

of which the threads are purple and scarlet, and the embroideries flame. This, I believe,

is the ordinance of the firmament; and it seems to me that in the midst of the material

nearness of these heavens God means us to acknowledge His own immediate presence

as visiting, judging, and blessing us. "The earth shook, the heavens also dropped, at the

presence of God." [John Ruskin, Modern Painters, 4, pt. 5, chap. 6, sect. 8-9]

One feature of the discussion of atmosphere in the fourth volume of Modern

Painters is particularly germane to the topic of Church's relationship to

luminism. It is Ruskin's insistence upon the express spirituality of atmospheric

phenomena. He cites passages from the Bible which illustrate how the Deity

literally has revealed himself in the visible heavens to his prophets and his

people. And he insists that the Deity continues right into the present so to

reveal himself. The God of Modern Painters is a God who is not abstract and

aloof from man but is human and close at hand. Ruskin's God understands the

need of common people for signs. And so the artist is summoned to stand in

nature, poised to discern the revelation from on high. Clouds, "spirits of the

air,"36 will bear tidings of the divine will which, visible to all, are first perceived

by prophet eyes. The Creator of Ruskin's world is democratic; he is equally

mindful of the clay of mankind and of his chosen leaders.

How Ruskin himself might implement his preaching is a matter of immediate interest here. The most apt illustration is to be found in volume 3 of

Modern Painters. Here plates after the author's own studies of cloud effects

compel thoughts of the supernatural. One, in particular, The Lombard Apennine, would appear to be intended, though Ruskin does not so specify, as the

very illustration of his prescriptions.37 At one point in the text he advises the

artist to behold the heavens as would a prophet of the Old Testament. At

another point he advises the artist to paint landscape as Michelangelo would,

had the divinely inspired genius lived in the nineteenth century. While the

manifestations of Puritan self-denial were beyond Ruskin's discernment (he

never recognized the spirituality mirrored on Church's canvases), that selfdenial only meant that the Puritan painter would eschew the Anglican's

over-explicit evocation of the Sistine ceiling in the alpine sky.

The archetypes of art were as much imprinted on Church's mind as was

Michelangelo on Ruskin's, or Raphael on Cole's. He had assimilated them into

the subtleties of Calvinist thought. In the great temple of nature the typological mind of New England would have watched the clouds—and, for that

matter the mountains—for configurations of Genesis (cf. figs. 218, 219). That

there is a kinship between the sublime rush and sweep of forms in Michelangelo's Creation of the Sun and Moon and Church's sketch is not the result of

pure chance. The attraction to the numinous in nature issues from a susceptibility of mind. Ruskin was simply confirming habits of religious imagination that

were ingrained in romantic Christian consciousness. While Church himself,

out of Puritan prudence or out of Puritan discipline, disdained comment on

the meaning of his art, his associates, conveniently for us, reflect in their words

the suggestiveness of nature's wonders. So, for example, Church's companion

of 1859 in the North Atlantic, the Reverend Louis Noble, with Bible in hand

and mind, revels in Arctic revelations. In the realm of icebergs and midnight

twilights he beholds "Solomon in all his glory," "the lion lying down with the

Lamb," "The City of God." The clergyman stands amidst "the glorious visions

of St. John," while the painter sketches the "Power and the Beauty" of the

white iceberg, "bathing in the bosom of Purity." Then:

As I sit and look at this broken work of the Divine fingers,—only a shred broken from

the edge of a glacier, as it is—whisper these words of Revelation: "and hath washed their

robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb." It hangs before us, with the sea

and the sky behind it, like some great robe made in heaven.

In this realm of "endless grace of form and outline!—Endless, endless

HUNTINGTON 175
i8. Michelangelo. Creation of the Sun and Moon, 1508-1512. Fresco. Sistine Chapel,

Vatican, Rome. Photo: Alinari (not in exhibition)

Beauty!"38 Noble's mind is free—free to associate form and idea. He is a

astor-poet spontaneously sanctifying his holiday. "Strange, supernatural":

Church jotted these words on paper alongside an iceberg sketched in pencil

nd white gouache.39 Church's sketch and Noble's whisper are religious im

ressions, impressions which tacitly reaffirm Ruskin's assertion that the Deity

ontinued to reveal himself in nature.

Such a sunrise! The giant Alps seemed literally to rise from their purple beds, and

putting on their crowns of gold to send up a hallelujah almost audible.

Washington Allston, Letters]TM

While they do not describe a particular painting, Washington Allston's

words of 1803—not unlike the exclamations of Louis Noble—are informed

with an eye for the supernatural. It is interesting that Church owned an

engraving, Moonlight (fig. 220), after Allston's Moonlit Landscape (fig. 13), a

painting of some significance for the study of luminism. John Wilmerding has

noted the extraordinariness of this modest canvas of 1819, so "acutely prophetic

of the luministic painting" of the mid-century, so charged with "evocative"

silhouettes, so reminiscent of that "sense of the sublime and magical" that

distinguishes the artist's earlier work.41

219. Frederic Edwin Church. Study of Landscape and Sky, c. 1855-1860. Oil on paper.

0.229 x 0.305 (9 x 12 in). Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York, The Smithsonian

Institution's National Museum of Design, 1917-4-3^ (not in exhibition)

Why might Church have had the engraving!1 Some of his nightscapes evoke

it. Certainly its expression of suspense and mystery are echoed in features of

Twilight in the Wilderness and Cotopaxi (Allston said that even the vapors of the

atmosphere might speak to the human soul). Both men shared a concern with

the spiritual. Yet they were hardly kindred spirits. Allston sought for the divine

in things not fully material, in events not wholly of this earth. He painted the

miracles of the Bible. But his God, unlike the God of Church, could suspend

the laws of the material world if he so chose. Allston's God would have seemed

vague, distant, and inaccessible to Church, if Bushnell's thoughts about the

relationship of God to his creation and his creature are any guide. For the

mid-century theologian God was always immanent: the material and immaterial, the flesh and the spirit, the natural and the divine had become one in

Christ. God manifested his will through the laws of nature and the forces of

history. Bushnell's faith was more practical, more down to earth, more democratic. He said that "every man is sanctified according to his faith; for it is by

this trusting of himself to Christ that he becomes invested, exalted, irradiated,

and finally glorified in Christ." The individual soul is "flooded" with "a

wondrously luminous joy." As "the light of God is revealed within," spirit and

flesh become one in a holy incandescence.42

In the Cooper-Hewitt Museum there is an extraordinary oil study by

176 HUNTINGTON
Church, extraordinary because it seems graphically to embody the very words

of Bushnell (fig. 221). Above, a dazzling white sun "irradiates" mist-filled air in

a glory of silvery gold. Below, a dashing, sparkling rapids reflects the gentle

heavenly light beheld so near at hand. As was the theologian in thought, so is

the painter in sight thrilled by the immanence of God and the Son of God.

Church's study betokens an experience of the holy far removed from the vague

abstractions, the unnatural miracles of Allston. Indeed the study reveals spontaneously what Andes of Ecuador reveals by design (fig. 186).

The immediacy of the divine manifestation that distinguishes midnineteenth-century liberal Calvinism, suited as it is to the capacities of the

common person, echoes in a curious way the baroque of the CounterReformation. Comparison of the natural sunburst of Church's sketch with the

contrived sunburst of Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Theresa (1645-1652) becomes irresistible (fig. 222). How Protestant is the one, how Catholic the other! For

Church, and for Bushnell, no priest, no saint, is called upon to mediate

between the individual and his God. No sensate paroxysm of ecstasy is needed

to wed spirit and flesh. Just words and light. Out of the Protestant Reformation comes belatedly the Puritan baroque, or better—in reference to the

nineteenth century—the "natural baroque." Indeed, the latter characterization

is hardly amiss, as Church's viewers were given to comparing his landscapes to

cathedrals. Pure nature would not tolerate the sensuous distortions that rendered the churches of Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini, or even more so those of

Borromini, abhorrent to Protestant sensibilities.

Such sensibilities doubtless have to do with Church's ignoring of baroque

Rome. Fascinatingly, however, he became enamoured of a more congenial

derivative of the style in Mexico, the Churrigueresque, a style distinguished by

its dissolving—hence dematerialized—surfaces. At Olana is a watercolor (not

by Church) of the interior of the Dominican Chapel of the Rosary in Puebla,

Mexico (fig. 223) .

43

 Alongside the watercolor Church's study of early morning

in the wilderness (fig. 221) itself becomes suggestive of an out-of-doors

sanctuary. Equally close in spirit to that study is a gilded cloth "collage" at

Olana of an Annunciation (fig. 224). This charming tourist souvenir, presumably a copy after a late-medieval northern, or possible Sienese, prototype, is

undoubtedly an object with which Church would have been more at home

than Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Theresa. Dematerialized in shining, almost luminous embroidery, its sunburst, angel Gabriel, dove, and Virgin belong to the

painter's world of spiritualized light.

But as we stand gazing on our ascending Lord, a cloud wraps Him from our view, and

we hear, as it were, a voice saying, "why stand ye here, gazing?" and bidding us return to

the observations of things clearly within range of our vision.

[James McCosh, Typical Forms and Special Ends in Creation, i856]44

Church's luminous transcript of the natural sunburst is compellingly re220. After Washington Allston, Moonlit Landscape. Engraved by George B. Ellis; tided

Moonlight. 0.070 x o.no (2% x 43/ie in)- Olana State Historic Site, Taconic Region, New

York State Office of Parks and Recreation, Hudson, New York (not in exhibition)

miniscent of the fifth scene of Cole's Cross and World series, in which the

Christian pilgrim, about to depart his earthly life, is confronted in the heavens

by a glowing, silvery white cross (compare figs. 195 and 221). The comparison is

significant as it serves to illustrate the distinction between allegory and typology. Cole's image is explicit; Church's, implicit. The latter's reticence about

interpreting his own meaning points to the Calvinist precept that one must

never assume that he is unmistakably of the Elect nor that he has directly,

unequivocally, received assurance of his salvation or redemption. Even Moses,

standing on the mount, did not with his eyes behold God (fig. 193). In the New

Dispensation of divine light intimated in the study of morning atmosphere

there is a sense of the immediacy of the divine presence as spirit and matter

become one. Yet Church, the new Israelite, like Moses the old Israelite, does

not behold his God directly.

The language of Noble, Church's companion in the North Atlantic, the

language of Ruskin, the language of the painter's admirers reflects this Protestant diffidence toward the overt recognition of the divine. Noble speaks of

effects that are "almost supernatural." Ruskin proposes that the landscape

painter look at nature "as if or "as though" he were one of the prophets of the

Old Testament. Critics would commend Church for getting "the suggestion of

the scene." The artist himself said that it was "the effect suggested" by a sunset

that inspired him to paint Our Banner in the Sky. It was under the duress of the

Civil War that Church responded thus to nature, and his sharing of the

HUNTINGTON 177
21. Frederic Edwin Church.

tudy of a Sunrise, c. 1855-1860. Oil on

aper. 0.210 x 0.143 (%% x 5% in).

Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New

York, The Smithsonian Insti-

ution's National Museum of De-

ign, 1917-4-1364 (not in exhibition;

bove)

22. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, The

cstasy of St. Theresa, 1645-1652.

Marble. Santa Maria delle Vittoria,

Cornaro Chapel, Rome. Photo:

ourtesy Bernard S. Myers, Art and

Civilization (New York and Lon-

on, 1967) (not in exhibition)

perception with compatriots through the medium of a chromolithograph

published in the early weeks of conflict was done more out of zeal for the

national cause than out of desire for profits. Church, addressing himself to the

country at large, perhaps felt a peculiar necessity to be explicit on this occasion.

Church would have been alone in nature when heaven favored him as seer

with its sign of promise for the Union. It was quite otherwise on the night of

December 23,1864, when he and millions in the north together witnessed a

spectacular display of northern lights. Herman Melville was only one among

the many who interpreted the phenomenon as a portent of imminent victory

for the Union. Spectators before Church's Aurora Eorealis (fig. 190) would, in

1865, have remembered that terrestrial halo of a "million blades that glowed the

muster and disbanding."

45

One reason for the intense interest in atmosphere on Church's part is that the

atmosphere was at once incomparably expressive and incomparably ductile. In

the presence of the hushed beauty of a perfect sunrise, sketched in the privacy

of nature, one might hear "the still small voice of calm" of his Maker. In the

presence of the sublime beauty of a twilight translated from the actual into the

ideal on canvas, one might, with the multitude, behold the heavens declare the

glory of the Almighty. Such celestial superlatives seemed the very voice of

prophecy speaking, in a moment, of things past, present, and to come. For an

age fascinated by time, and a people conscious of linear advancement toward a

culmination of history, the atmosphere could appear as time compressed,

distilled, charged. Nowhere else in nature did so much change so fast. To Louis

Noble icebergs seemingly telescoped the processes of nature. In one he fancied

a whole "age of ruin" recorded by the action of a single summer. But with a

twilight even a change of minutes could be detected. Church's atmospheres, as

we have seen, are fraught with suggestiveness for the mind poised to con-

template in wonder upon Creation. The air enveloped the earth in mystery,

hinting at nature's infinity, so Ruskin told his readers. The sky, as the passage

quoted above from Modern Painters declares, can speak at once to the common

man and to the seer of things ultimate.

46

But the main point for us now is to get ourselves ready for the grand struggle we are in,

by duly conceiving the meaning of it, and receiving those settled convictions that will

stay by us in all the changing moods we are to pass, and the discouragements we are to

encounter. This immense enthusiasm, bursting forth spontaneous, in a day, and fusing

us into a complete unity—how great and thrilling a surprise has it been to us! I know of

nothing in the whole compass of human history at all comparable to it in sublimity. It

verily seems to be, in some sense, an inspiration of God; and it is even difficult to shut

away the suggestion that innumerable sacrifices and prayers laid up for us by the patriot

fathers of the past ages, were being mixed in now with our feeling, and, by God's will,

heaving now in our bosom.

[Horace Bushnell, Reverses Needed, i86i]

47

78 HUNTINGTON
Church's readiness to espy the spirit of the hour in the phenomena of the

atmosphere was matched by an equal readiness to espy that spirit wherever on

the globe's surface it might be encountered. Viewers thanked the painter for

catching the "soul" of Niagara in his great canvas of 1857 (Corcoran Gallery of

Art, Washington, D.C.). Two years later Church portrayed for those same

viewers the "spirit" of the Ecuadorian uplands in The Heart of the Andes

(Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; see also fig. 187). A painting would

be received as a "revelation of tropical landscape," a "revelation of a new phase

of God's creation." Happily for his public Church was "endowed with a power

to translate great subjects greatly." The Andes of Ecuador (fig. 186) would be a

case in point. In the painting the artist imaged the union of nature and

typology: "A vast unrolling, apocalyptic vision of nature opened by the

pioneers of science," so Edgar Richardson once characterized it, though it was

a generalized vision, one not readily joined to a nation's crisis of the hour.48

223. Jesus Martinez Carrion, Interior of the Dominican Chapel of the Rosary, Puebla, Mexico, 1894. Lithograph

with watercolor. 0.600 x

0.432 (23% x 17). Olana State

Historic Site, Taconic Region, New York State Office

of Parks and Recreation,

Hudson, New York (not in

exhibition; at left)

224. Annunciation, ipth

century. Collage of embroidered cloth. Olana State Historic Site, Taconic Region,

New York State Office of

Parks and Recreation, Hudson, New York (not in exhibition)

Quite different from Andes of Ecuador and more acutely cogent in its typology is Church's Cotopaxi (1862; Detroit Institute of Arts), a small version of

which is shown here (1863; fig. 225). The public's commentary on Cotopaxi in

1863 constitutes an extraordinary historical document. It is remarkable how

consistently the words of the painting's first viewers are imbued with the spirit

of a nation caught up in the throes of a heroic struggle for survival, running

parallel to Bushnell's words of 1861. Reverses Needed was delivered as a response

to the altogether unexpected Union defeat at Bull Run in the first summer of

the Civil War. Bushnell's discourse is a feat of inspirational typology. Commencing with a verse from Proverbs, "If thou faint in the day of adversity, thy

strength is small," the minister proceeds through some twenty-seven pages to

lace together, out of the Bible and American history, an impassioned summons

to all his compatriots to suffer and to sacrifice in the blood and fire of war that

the nation may fulfill its holy destiny. "We are born into government as we are

into atmosphere," he writes. But the nation has been only once born, out of the

mind of man. It must now be reborn, in the spirit of God that it and its people

may be regenerated.

Pervading the discourse is the thrilling sense of the immanence of history's

great contest between the forces of darkness and the forces of light, of an

Armageddon in one's own time. Actually, Bushnell does not name the battle

envisioned by the evangelist. Bushnell remains cautious about how much he

may presume. "If I were a prophet, I would dare . . . ," he starts a sentence

whose conclusion is left to the listener. As with Church, Bushnell's typology

remains implicit, subject to the discipline expected of the Elect.

HUNTINGTON 179
That Church and Bushnell breathed the same atmosphere of patriotic zeal

 can be sure. Each suspecting the preordained prophet in himself, addressed

mself, in accordance with his talents, to a common perception of the war's

vine significance. Painting an Andean scene, Church would speak of the war

ly in the form of parable. Hardly a clue is offered in his printed sheet for

topaxfs viewers. The text reveals that Church knows his geology as well—it

ould be noted—as Bushnell knows his Bible. One phrase stands out: "the

wly risen sun." For an artist who loved puns (he even signed letters with a

cture of a church, an object which appears, interestingly, in many of his

intings), indulgence in a sanctified pun need not have been sacreligious.

deed, the characterization, "the newly risen sun," is respectfully reiterated in

y number of descriptions of Cotopaxi. Critics repeatedly stressed the point

at the painting was a challenge to the mind of the beholder. In keeping with

e reticence of the Puritan, Church made no prescription as to how Cotopaxi

ight be interpreted. The picture might suggest nothing; it might suggest

ything. One scripture-minded viewer associated the lofty height of a volcano

th "the City of God." Volcanoes, he continued, were "crested with the pillar

 cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night,. . . pillars of warning rather than

 guidance, like those which led the Israelites out of the land of bondage."49

Just the fact that a spectator could be prompted in the presence of the

inting to invoke Genesis is itself indicative of the presence of the biblical type

 the thinking of the age. One need only turn to BushnelPs discourse to see

ow the sacred word informed his perceptions of the historical moment. But it

ill be less with the Bible in print than with the Bible in stone that we are

ncerned, for of more consequence to our understanding of Cotopaxi is, I

ink, its "natural" typology. Cotopaxi made an enormous impression on the

ew York art public of 1863, probably for the very reason that the painting

nvisaged the great national drama then in progress. It mirrored the present

deal; it prophesied its outcome. In the painting are reflected the emotional

mper, the moral urgency, the collective will of the present and the promise of

timate peace. Even a French visitor responded in kind. He saw the painting

 a struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness: "la lumiere

. . et les tenebres."

The tension of a heroic contest of elements and the signs of resolution to

ollow are perceived in the words of countless spectators: "presiding and

anscendent" amidst the "warring elements" looms the "monarch" of the

andscape, the "beautiful" yet "terrible" volcano. As the principal "personage"

n the drama, Cotopaxi "asserts itself" as the agent to which all else in the scene

 "subordinate." It spews forth a "lurid" canopy of smoke across the sky,

preads a "sulphurous" veil before "the god of day." The heat which issues from

he "rumbling nether fires" of the earth melts the murky white snow which has

mantled the great "pyramid." Innumerable streamlets pour across the plains,

oining to flood a great "new chasm."

"Gray" Cotopaxi flaunting its lofty black "plume" is "the demon" of the

landscape, the analogue of BushnelPs divinely ordained war, the evil necessary

to waken the people from spiritual complacency and test their readiness to

suffer in the struggle for the world's redemption.50 The hero of God's universe

in this metaphysical drama is "the newly risen sun," whose glaring "red disc"

"burns" with "portentous heat," illuminating the smokey mist, and plunging

its "dull fire" like an "inextinguishable torch" upon the glinting "metallic"

surface of the lake. In the waters of this "coppery" reservoir are gathered, as

though in a crucible, the spirits of a united people whose common will is now

to be fired, fused, and forged as the instrument of God.

The imagery of flame and sword pervades the descriptions. Yet, no one

mentions, though it is there for all to see, the luminous, almost molten cross,

which, uniting sun and earth, air, water, and land, consecrates the hour. Out of

the heat of battling elements, out of the cosmic baptism of fire and shedding of

blood, will come redemption. Emerging from the lake rapids "capriciously55

descend into a cool, bluish mist, where the eye detects "the faintest suspicion of

a rainbow." Here, and in the "vivid, emerald greens" of the "whispering"

paramo grass, just now "refreshed" by water and by light, is reflected the "clear

translucent" sky to the windward side of the volcano far in the distance.

"Gloom," finally, is purged by "Heaven's fair light." On Church's great canvas

"power, beauty, sublimity and pathos" become "blended in one harmonious

whole."

Cotopaxi is a geological parable, a proverb drawn from the sacred "volume in

stone." The canvas is as charged with the spirit of prophecy as is Bushnell's

discourse. "The word, the meaning and the expression" of the great Andean

volcano becomes a "revelation" to "those who have eyes to see and a mind to

understand."51 Cotopaxi is nature's type for the regeneration of America.

As with the Bible itself there are many different perceptions of Cotopaxi.

Some deemed the painting "cold." An art form, addressed primarily to a mind

nurtured in Calvinism, would inevitably strike some as forbiddingly "intellectual," "deficient in feeling." Yet one spectator was moved to exclaim:

"'Cotopaxi' is The Heart of the Andes' throbbing with fire and tremulous with

life."52 Bushnell's text was seething with fire and life, but the seething was

reined in by the spirit of the Puritan. Indeed, some applauded the restraint and

dignity with which Church had portrayed a subject that others might have

treated melodramatically. Just as the hour of national crisis called for personal

discipline, for subordination of the self to the community, and for obedience of

the community to the ordinance of God, so the stern volcano on the canvas

demands a steeling of the national will. To those who would heed the word of

nature, Church's Cotopaxi declares: first resolution, then consecration, finally,

redemption.

What a contrast with the Andes ofEcua,dor\ That earlier painting is a joyous

paean to a divine universe. The very composition appears to soar in exultation.

All, as it were, becomes a resurrection. The light of the sun expands without

effort to touch and bless the whole earth. The atmosphere itself bears the

SO HUNTINGTON
225. Frederic Edwin Church.

Cotopaxi, 1863. Oil on canvas. 0.889

x 1.524 (35 x 60 in). Reading Public

Museum and Art Gallery, Reading,

Pennsylvania (see plate 18)

higher message of the painting. In Cotopaxi, however, the sun must suffer for

the evils of this world. To one viewer its light seemed "scarce" able to "pierce

the war-clouds" that would eclipse it. To another, "the volcanic vapors" seemed

"transfigured and infused with light into a thousand delicate and fitful tones of

color." How the mood of the sun might be interpreted depends upon whose

gospel we are reading—a troubled Mark's or a serene John's. The atmosphere

of a single painting could be viewed in differing religious lights, as we have

seen in Cotopaxi. Or the religious tenor of the atmosphere could vary among

works. Bound to the earth in the spirit of sacrifice, as in Cotopaxi, or ascending

from the earth in the spirit of transcendence, as in Andes of Ecuador, the cross of

light shone upon God's people, both in the hour of trial and in the hour of

triumph.

No lover of nature on this continent, no one who has bivouacked in the Adirondacks,

explored the hills of New Hampshire or the forests of Maine, will but imagine he has

beheld the very scene. The time is about ten minutes after the disappearance of the sun

behind the hill-tops. The air is clear and cool; the whole of the landscape below the

horizon lies in transparent shadow; but the heavens are a-blaze. A-blaze, except the

horizon gradually varying [in] tint, which passes from the silvery white to the faintest

blue and the tenderest apple green; and into which the distant mountains thrust their

broad, rich purple wedges. From this clear zone of tender light the clouds sweep up in

flaming arcs, broadening and breaking toward the zenith, where they fret the deep azure

with the dark golden glory. The pines show here and there their sharp black points

against the sky; the stream gives back a softened vague reflection of the splendor which

glows above it; the stillness of the twilight, and the solemnity of undisturbed primeval

nature brood upon the scene; and that is all the picture.

[Review of Twilight in the Wilderness, in New Tork Albion]TM

Pregnant with beauty, not a leaf is stirred,

Nature seems hushed in silent prayer,

No sound of man, or beast, or hum of bird,

Breaks on the magic stillness of the air.

[J.I. Y.(>), "Church's Twilight." Unidentified clipping, from Church's scrapbook, Olana]

HUNTINGTON l8l
t were easier to untwist all the beams of light in the sky, separating and expunging one

f the colors, than to get the character of Jesus, which is the real gospel, out of the world.

Horace Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural}TM

Our fathers brought forth . . . ." Just what does that mean? Not simply that they

ntroduced something onto this continent. If so, where was it before they brought it in>

And how could it be called a new nation if merely transferred? No, "Bring forth" cannot

mean anything like "introduce from abroad." Lincoln is talking about generation on the

pot. The nation is rightly called new because it is brought forth maieutically, by

midwifery; it is not only new, but newborn. The suggested image is, throughout, of a

hieros, gamos, a marriage of male heaven ("our fathers") and female earth ("this

ontinent"). And it is a miraculous conception, a virgin birth. The nation is conceived

by a mental act, in the spirit of liberty and dedicated (as Jesus was in the temple) to a

proposition."

Gary Wills, Inventing America]TM

In the discussion of Cotopaxi I have been mindful of two studies of the

sanctifying American mind of the Civil War era. One is Ernest Tuveson's

Redeemer Nation (Chicago, 1968). In an analysis of "The Battle Hymn of the

Republic" Tuveson demonstrates how, almost stanza by stanza, the phrasing of

Julia Ward Howe's Union anthem is stoked with the imagery of the Book of

Revelation. It is an imagery that goes beyond metaphor to become reality. "The

Battle Hymn of the Republic" is, in effect, a transposed Apocalypse. The other

study is the "Prologue" to Gary Wills' Inventing America. The quotation given

above encapsules the essence of his theme: that Abraham Lincoln, through

evoking the cadence and phraseology of the Bible, sanctified for his age a

profoundly secular document of the eighteenth century, the Declaration of

Independence.

A painting such as Cotopaxi or Twilight in the Wilderness accomplishes in

pictorial terms what "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "The Gettysburg

Address" accomplish in song and speech. Cotopaxi, painted in 1862, abounds in

the purgative imagery of the apocalyptic. The "demon" volcano brings war, the

"newly risen sun" brings peace. And, although painted a year before Bull Run,

Twilight in the Wilderness in its pictorial language resonates, too, with the

written language of John the Evangelist. Indeed, the description of the painting quoted above seems almost a translation into natural history from the Book

of Revelation. Church's great twilight of 1860 is a wilderness Apocalypse.

Standing before the painting a new Adam could witness the second beginning

of history in his New World.56 Curiously though, in keeping with Adamic

innocence, it is a benign issuing in of the millennium, one not precipitated by

demon elements, for Twilight in the Wilderness connotes also birth as well as

purgation. It is in this regard that Wills' study becomes particularly illuminating for the student of Church's paintings, not only in view of what he might

learn from the content but also from the style of the painting. Church, I will

propose, sanctifies America—and does so with as much style as Lincoln.

Twilight in the Wilderness (figs. 204,206-207) is vibrant in the expressiveness

of its parts, rich in the suggestiveness of its features. It fuses the unity of nature

with the unity of art, fuses the actual with the ideal. The reality of a wilderness

spectacle is seized upon the canvas. Each feature is acting in accordance with

the other, each, in its own way, is expressive. So the pines, in the words of the

critic for the New York Albion, "show here and there their sharp black points

against the sky." There is alertness here. "The stream gives back a softened

vague reflection of the splendor which glows above it." The water on the earth

is responding appropriately to the action in the sky, where "clouds sweep up in

flaming arcs, broadening and breaking towards the zenith," there to "fret the

deep azure with dark golden glory." Like a heavenly chorus, the clouds sing a

silent "Hallelujah!" They play a major role in this cosmic drama. The role of the

stilled air is more passive; it is to be "clear," "cool," "transparent": quietly

indispensible to the whole.

All features will thus have their parts to play. Note how Church seems to

have invested features with the expressiveness and meaning of art as well as of

nature. "The distant mountains thrust their broad, rich purple wedges" against

the distant sky. We may think of these thrusting wedges as so many Schroon

Mountains brought down to earth, where they now hold fast to the continental

bend (cf fig. 200). In their accelerated undulation may be perceived Gilpin's

Apollonian grace (figs. 188,203) joined to the power of the Sistine ceiling (fig.

218). Low to the horizon from the left, the God of Light would seem to propel

the arrow from his bow. In this region of the sky's cloud vapors suggest a mystic

genesis of superhuman energy, worthy of a Michelangelo. A cloudlet, transfigured in luminous gold by a sun unseen beyond the earth, races low across the

heavens: it is the mystic dove in vapor, the holy spirit of a twilight annunciation, racing through the heavens (cf. fig. 224).57

 If we follow the implied

trajectory of this "spirit of the air," we behold in the right foreground three

trees "interlacing their boughs," as an observer in 1860 chose to note. One of the

arboreal company reaches up aspiringly, posturing more stiffly than its cousins

in Cole's Home in the Woods (fig. 198). Another tree is poised ecstatically. A third

seems to bow in reverence as though it were the recipient of heaven's grace.

"Pregnant with beauty, . . . Nature seems hushed in silent prayer." Is this

untenanted wilderness the mythic virgin continent:1 The new nation "brought

forth" by the marriage of heaven and earth?

Church, like others of his day, instinctively sanctified. The impulse was

second nature. On his Arctic holiday, it will be recalled, Noble christened his

vision. Icebergs could be anything and everything the imagination chose. But

in the Old Testament, skies, not icebergs, spoke of God. And, as the author of

Modern Painters reminded his readers, God speaks in the present as well.

(Bushnell, for one, would have agreed.) Ruskin and Church might recognize

the Sistine ceiling in the heavens or, better, the heavens in the Sistine ceiling.

And so, too, might Church have recognized Raphael's Transfiguration in his

conception of Twilight in the Wilderness (fig. 204). As we have observed, the

dynamics of Raphael's composition were animated by the reciprocal interac182 HUNTINGTON
don of centrifugal and centripetal forces that are ultimately resolved in the

figure of the ascending Christ. Cole did not object, as many did, to the

separation in the composition between upper and lower. Indeed, in his own

Transfiguration, Schroon Mountain, that separation corresponded to the implicit meaning for him of the scene: redemption is of the next world, not of

this. Interestingly, Bushnell, who did believe in redemption within this world,

felt that Raphael had, in the figures of Christ and the Apostles, clothed the

"supernatural" in the "natural." But he saw "no bond of union" between the

heavenly and the earthly scenes.58 In effect The Transfiguration was "really two

pictures." Twilight in the Wilderness compellingly evokes the powerful structure

of Raphael's sublime painting, but Church's composition is unified. And in

contrast with the mountains and skyline of Cole's painting, Church's

mountains and skyline are low rather than high. Unlike his teacher, Church

binds his aspirations to this world. Indeed, what makes Twilight in the Wilderness so different from Schroon Mountain is the liberal Calvinist theology of the

nineteenth century that, in effect, composes it. On the canvas of the Protestant

Frederic Church—in contrast to that of the Catholic Raphael Sanzio—the

celestial and the terrestrial are united.59 A Puritan transfiguration joins heaven

and earth, as the triune God of history and nature enters time and space to

create his Holy Nation. Twilight in the Wilderness was a vision of the Second

Coming of the Son of man, inspiring America's Elect in 1860.

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in

life,—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair.

Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into

infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am

nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or

parcel of God.

[Emerson, Nature}TM

Who is a finer master of English than Mr. Emerson? Who offers fresher thoughts in

shapes of beauty more fascinating? Intoxicated by his brilliant creations, the reader

thinks, for the time, that he is getting inspired. And yet grazing in the field of nature

is not enough for a being whose deepest affinities lay hold of the supernatural, and reach

after God. Airy and beautiful the field may be, shown by so great a master; full of goodly

prospects and fascinating images; but, without a living God, and objects of faith, and

terms of duty, it is a pasture only—nothing more. Hence the unreadiness, the almost

aching incapacity felt to undertake any thing, by one who has taken lessons at this

school. Nature is the all, and nature will do every thing, whether we will or no.

[Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural]TM

In his spirit, his heroic cheerfulness, he was still young, hopeful of the world, [and] as

clear and sweet in his Christian character as he was decided in his luminous rendition of

the atmosphere of the distant mountains of his great picture. He saw and felt the

divinity of both worlds.

[Charles Dudley Warner, "Frederic Edwin Church," ipoo]62

The words of Emerson and Bushnell, juxtaposed as they are in the company

of Warner's tribute to his late friend, may serve to bring into focus the contrast

between the world view that a masterpiece of luminism can so cogently suggest

and the world view which appears to inform Church's vision. A few comparisons between Church's work and works representative of various norms of

luminist sensibility serve to place Church both visually and spiritually on the

luminist chart. But needed first, as preparation for the conclusions which will

be drawn in this essay, are a few remarks about how Church's relationship to

luminism has been taken note of—or not taken note of—by students of the

movement.

In his pioneer studies of luminism, written at a time that the phenomenon

was just being identified, John I. H. Baur made no mention of Church. Yet

there was one tantalizing observation in his article of 1948 which is pregnant in

its implications: "Thomas Cole seems often to have painted in an atmospheric

vacuum."63 From the vantage point of contemporary scholarship it is easy

enough to recognize in the teacher's deficiency the opportunity for the pupil

whose career was dawning simultaneously with luminism. Both Cole's style

and his death left a vacuum which Church would fill in the decades ahead.

These circumstances have much to do with the distinctiveness of Church's

relationship to luminism. First Baur and subsequently Barbara Novak in her

landmark work of 1969 identified the luminist sensibility as one of passivity,

quiescence, timelessness, effected on the canvas through monotones.64 It is a

sensibility indeed far removed from the assertive, active atmospheres in which

light habitually appeared on Church's canvases. Theodore Stebbins was the

first to take note of the higher-keyed regions of luminist sensibility and

recognized the critical role played by Church in the formative years of the

movement. Stebbins noted the seminal influence of Twilight in the Wilderness in

the i86os. That archetype of American sunsets brought to fruition a series of

brilliant sunsets—and sunrises—that date back to the later 18405 at a moment,

he points out, when no other major Hudson River school painter was exhibiting a comparable interest in effects of light. In that same early phase in Church's

development John Wilmerding has remarked affinities between Church and

Lane that suggest the possibility of the latter's influence as early as 1849 and the

likely chance that the paths of the two men would have crossed at Mt. Desert in

i85o.65

Stebbins, Wilmerding, and William Gerdts, all detect light effects which are

prescientiy luminist at dates even as early as Church's months of instruction

under Cole. At the present there appears to be considerable consensus that

Church, especially through the medium of twilight atmospheres, was gravitating toward luminism in the years leading up to 1860. There is less consensus

about Church's relationship to luminism after that date. Stebbins views

Twilight in the Wilderness as signaling the conclusion to Church's involvement

with this aesthetic, after which Church "went his own way." Wilmerding

HUNTINGTON 183
egards Church's bold use of pigments newly introduced in the 18508, especially

he manipulation of cadmium reds and yellows, as the painter's "singular

ontribution to luminism"; but he adds that Church's "handling of composi

ion and paint only peripherally borders on luminism." Wilmerding sees

mportant affinities with the luminist canon continuing in Church's work as

ate as the radiant Morning in the Tropics of 1876-1877 (fig. 128) ,

66

 This effectively

would carry luminism in Church down to the end of the movement itself. It

eems altogether inevitable that opinions on Church would vary as the nature

of luminism is still in the process of being defined.

Does the sensibility of luminism constitute the guiding principle of American landscape painting in the quarter century after 1855? Or, is that sensibility

one of several that run parallel through the period? Certainly in Church's case it

would appear that luminism is most satisfactorily viewed as only part, though

an important part, of the picture. At the very heart of the distinction would

appear to be the contrast between Church's and the luminist's attitude toward

gradation." In luminist atmosphere the concept of gradation seems to apply

primarily to the objective, essentially optical perception of nuances of tone.

Though with Church the perception may be no less objective, the concern is

for nuances of expression. With his teacher the concept of gradation was

nseparable from human feeling; and as Cole marvelled at the gradations of

expression in Raphael's Transfiguration, so Church marvelled at the gradations

of expression throughout nature. The atmosphere offered perhaps the richest,

surely the most spiritually quickened, repertoire of emotive effects. Unlike

George Ellis' engraving (fig. 220) after Allston's Moonlit Landscape (though

it too is in Church's collection), an oil-spattered engraving after James

Suydam's Long Island Sound (fig. 226) exemplifies the understatement that

marks the classic luminist with a scene whose composition would doubtless

have scandalized Gilpin. Suydam, one of the most rarefied spirits of the

luminist school, consistently dealt with effects of relative calm and repose. It

would be unthinkable for him to have attempted the suspense and excitement

of Allston's vision. Each scene is enveloped in an aura of silence; but in the one,

nature has been hushed to attend a human mood. In the other, a nature that

does not wait upon man needs no voice. As the sun retires the lighthouse

awakens to illuminate the night. With Suydam the cosmic cycle is the occasion

of tranquil reverie and wonder. To limit one's range to the visual realm of a

Suydam is virtually to preclude the suggestion of the supernatural.

In evoking the Almighty Church might be prompted by the supernaturalism

of Allston. But with Suydam there is too little with which to evoke the

Almighty—only enough to evoke the Over-Soul. Of the convinced luminists,

Heade alone would venture close to the realms frequented by Allston's imagination. The painter of Thunderstorm Over Narragansett Bay (fig. 63) presents us

with a special case within the ordinance of the school. Ingeniously, in this

suspenseful spectacle, the religiously equivocal Heade would seem to have

caught the Almighty unprepared to manifest himself.

226. After James Suydam. Long Island, Sound. Engraved, 1863, by S. V. Hunt. 0.146 x

0.228 (5% x 9 in). Olana State Historic Site, Taconic Region, New York State Office of

Parks and Recreation, Hudson, New York (not in exhibition)

The polar opposites in the expressions of the two copy engravings illuminate

the principle of gradation in Church's art. For example, the MoonlitLandscape',

a composition that is as tense as Suydam's is relaxed, actually exaggerates the

wakeftilness of Allston's original oil (cf. fig. 13). The animated expression is

echoed in several features on the right side ofCotopaxi: the surface of the water,

the distant hills, the disk of light. To the left of the volcano, however, the

atmosphere bears a visage as tranquil, almost, as that of Suydam's sky.67 And the

water that brings the gentle light directly to the foreground in Long Island

Sound is reminiscent of the serenity of the river's surface in Twilight in the

Wilderness. Yet in the latter instance, the body of water is responding to a sky

very different from Suydam's, for Church's sky is every bit as spell-binding as is

Allston's. The luminous, thrusting shapes of the latter's clouds, so primed to

reveal the wondrous, may indeed have been on Church's mind in 1860 as,

painting his twilight miracle, he sought to portray the supernatural. To complete this cycle of comparison and contrast between the two engravings and

Church's work, it should finally be noted that the sun hovering over the sound

in Suydam's scene is as much in harmony with the elements as the sun hovering

over the lake in Church's Andean scene is at strife with the elements. Church

inherited Cole's mastery of the gradations of expression. Painting in the era of

luminism it was the perceptual and spiritual comprehensiveness of his atmosphere, the urge to encompass every last atom, every last word of the firmament

of nature's Bible—indeed, the instinct to see all of God's "Design55 with

184 HUNTINGTON
"Intelligence"—which makes Church unique. The eye of the classic luminist,

of a Suydam, a Fitz Hugh Lane, a Kensett, looks not to interpret God's

handiwork, but to merge with a nature which is itself God. For Emerson,

gradation exemplified the self-contained system of the universe. For Church

gradation articulated the typology of Creation. The one accords with the ways

of the Over-Soul, the other with the ways of the Almighty.

There is a passivity about luminist vision which connotes a stance before

nature significantly different from Church's. The luminist paints the scene

offered by nature. He is more editor than composer. Cotopaxi, for example,

though it depicts an actual landmark, is not a transcript of any one view of the

volcano. In the painting a whole region has been characterized. What the

spectator sees is the artist's interpretation of a chapter in the book of nature.

One passage alone, that of the sun and the lake, might be compared to the

whole of Long Island Sound. In the Suydam print there is the luminousness

which anyone might see while standing by the shore. In Cotopaxi there is a

luminous cross that only the eyes of the would-be Elect might see; Church on

his canvas forges nature's parts to shape a spiritual whole. In contrast to the

passive luminist, Church conceives of light as an expressive character, or a

suggestion, or sometimes, as we have seen in Cotopaxi, a sign of the supernatural.

Such conceptions of light evoke the example of Cole. At the same time, we

realize that Cole never mastered atmosphere as did his pupil. Church's interest

in atmosphere compares more closely as a feat of observation to the interest in

atmosphere of Lane, Martin Johnson Heade, Sanford GifFord, and Kensett.

But in each case there is a distinction to be made between Church and

whichever luminist one chooses to compare with him. Lane's genius in catching subtleties in the gradation of light and hue was never subordinated to the

religious discipline that is endemic in Church's vision. No viewer, anxious for

some intimation that he may be of the Elect, will find any hint of a divine

earnest in the presence of, say, Brace's Rock (fig. 91). Here there is no Creator

with "still small voice of calm" speaking to his creature, no separation between

self and site. Brace's Rock is more ocular trance than natural epiphany, more the

vision of a home-made transcendentalist seer than of a self-styled Israelite

prophet.

While for decades Church and Heade were close friends the subject of

religion must have been passed over in relative silence, conveniently eclipsed by

their constant exchanges of shop talk and wit. Not in any way an establishment

type, the unorthodox, somewhat alienated Heade seems to have had no

inclination to picture the hopes of believers in the myths of the age. The

features of his landscapes seem to eschew any suspicion of the anthropomorphic. Certainly his doggedly horizontal canvases will not admit of the theatrics

of a Twilight in the Wilderness. There can be plenty of mystery in Heade's

atmospheres, but the effect is more unearthly than supernatural. With Church

he could probably have discussed the science of Humboldt more comfortably

than the science of McCosh, and the drama that Heade would paint portrays a

nature which would seem to be concerned only with itself. In Thunderstorm

Over Narragansett Bay (fig. 63) he captured a moment of almost unbearable

suspense. We wait for the eerie silence to be shattered by the thunderclap, wait

for the tension of the elements to be resolved. But the resolution will be one

solely of material forces. The storm will break and elements will be returned to

equilibrium. Nature will go on, heedless of man, offering him no sensible

parable. The strife of the elements in Church's Cotopaxi was witnessed in safety

at a great distance (fifty miles according to the broadside), where the contemplating viewer might "interpret the lesson of things that the sun shines on

as well as of the shining itself."68 Heade's spectator sees humanity engulfed in

the strife of the elements and is offered no sure refuge. Perhaps the religiously

equivocal, aesthetically esoteric Heade is better attuned to the spirit of our time

than the spirit of his.

In 1880 the author of Sanford Gifford's obituary in the An Journal complained, "It had long been the wish of his admirers that he would give the

world some large and 'important' picture that would do for his reputation what

the 'Heart of the Andes' did for Church's." Any number of Church's large

paintings would do as well to make the same point. GifFord's Twilight on

Hunter Mountain (1866; fig. 85) is no such clarion call as Twilight in the

Wilderness. Indeed, Gray Sweeney has interpreted the painting as a disturbingly

eloquent indictment of man's invasion of virgin nature. Hunter Mountain may

well be one of luminism's most urgent and timely statements, rare as it is

powerful. Superficially, at least, GifFord's October in the Catskills (1880; fig. 4)

resembles Andes of Ecuador, but the only symptom of reverence, aside from a

vague sense of the "divinity of light" on GifFord's part, is the posture of the tree

to the left leaning eagerly forward. Neither the drama of the soul, to recall

Cole, nor the revelation of prophecy, to recall Church, moved GifFord to paint

this canvas. Light-suffused air against a barely visible Catskill backdrop is the

subject here. The same governing interest in light would claim his attention on

the Acropolis. There, GifFord, according to his own words, chose to paint "not

a picture of a building," namely the Parthenon, "but a picture of a day" (cf. fig.

30).69 How different from Church's picture! From Athens in April of 1869 the

latter wrote, "The Greeks gave a God-like air to all they did." As GifFord's

shimmering Ruins of the Parthenon captured the air of the present, Church's

firm Parthenon (fig. 29) captured the air of those "God-like" Greeks of the

past—captured the type of classic form. On his canvas the elate and virile

splendor of the columns, at once solid and luminous in the golden-red light of

sunset, endures from civilization's genesis. The Parthenon seems no less tangible than the fluted Doric fragment which Church had at hand two years later in

his studio when he painted the monument.70 Church was only the luminist

when it served his purposes to be so. He looked at the Parthenon for inspiration, not for light.

At an early point in this essay a discussion of Cole and Kensett was introHUNTINGTON 185
duced to prepare the way to locate Church's place in the discipline of luminist

vision. Outside that visual discipline would be Schroon Mountain, Home in the

Woods, and The Pilgrim of the Cross. Inside, as its very exemplar would be

Shrewsbury River. Church's place is between these extremes. While he with

Puritan reserve, discarded his teacher's overt literalism, he did not, in contrast

to Kensett, discard Cole's concept of historical, dramatic landscape. But instead of locating his aspirations in ideal landscapes, actual or imagined, and

removed from history's imperatives of the present, Church, as would-be

member of the Elect located his aspirations according to those very same

imperatives. Like Cole's, Church's God was personal. Unlike Cole's, his God

was immanent in the processes of human and natural history. While Cole's

Home in the Woods was to be a solace for the spectator, Church's Twilight in the

Wilderness was to be a promise to the spectator. Cole's scene is a happy vision of

a sanctified home. It is a pleasant dream, a respite from reality. Church's scene is

a wondrous vision of a sanctified nation. It is a thrilling revelation which

"enraptures" the beholder, inspires him to go forward into the world.

Church transforms the pictured poem of his teacher into a realized miracle.

Cole's nature speaks of God. Church's nature speaks as God, directing man, the

divine creature, and agent of His will. Without man this world has no purpose,

for the world was created to be man's home. But, given free will, man fell, and

with his fall began historical time and the necessity for the divine revolution

which must be carried ever forward by the world's Saving Remnant, the Elect.

Church's art is thus guided by a sense of progression and ultimate destiny.

Before his canvas the spectator, as one of the Chosen People of God's nation,

becomes protagonist.

With Cole, Church shared a sense of Christian concern. With Kensett,

Church shared a sense of geological—cosmic—time and space. Like Cole,

Church responded to the human in nature. Like Kensett, Church did not

display his person in the handling of paint. But where Church and Kensett

resemble one another the motivations differ. Church was praised for "the

sublime repression of himself." The painter's hand did not intrude between the

viewer and God's nature.71 As a Cotton Mather was bound to the mode of

speech and discourse of the type of the Old Testament prophet, so the

nineteenth-century Puritan painter found himself morally bound to the type of

nature. It would have been the concern to paint in the manner of the Elect that

converted Church into a human camera. No such Calvinist discipline is intimated in Kensett's handling of his medium. There is discernable in Kensett no

will to self-expression which must be subjugated. Kensett, like his prototype,

indeed his type, Emerson, does not appear to conceive of himself as a fallen

being, with a will to rebel, with a need for redemption. Like Thoreau, Kensett

seems never to have "quarrelled" with his creator. He is indeed become "part

and parcel of nature." As "transparent eyeball" the self evaporates. Kensett does

not stand before nature as protagonist. He is not God's agent; there is no sense

of separation between seer and seen. He does not, like the type of Church, say,

Moses, stand apart from nature, looking as a separate being upon the landscape, interpreting the divine meaning of the scene before his eyes.72

 With

Kensett, in contrast to Church, there is no message behind the face of nature to

be "seen by those who have eyes to see and a mind to understand."

Unlike Twilight in the Wilderness, Shrewsbury River is eventless (cf. figs. 204

and 202). The moment is not, as in Church's painting, "about ten minutes

before the disappearance of the sun." Time is not fleeting; there is no aura of

suspense, no sense of tension, no anticipation of resolution. Twilight in the

Wilderness captures the moment one has been waiting for, the day's exquisite

climax: for an instant one glimpses the supernatural in the natural. Church's

spectator, as it were, finds himself in a divine universe, Kensett's loses himself in

a divine universe. The God of the one is personal; the God of the other,

impersonal.

"Truly 'there is an evangel in art as well as books,' and Church is among the

prophets."73 No Lane, no Heade, no Gifford, no Kensett, no painter of an

essentially luminist vision could have provoked such a declaration—because no

painter whose primary concern was the gradation of light in the earth's

atmosphere could have spoken so to the spectator whose primary concern was

with the revelation of God's action in nature and in history. The luminist's God

would appear to be a God of being rather than a God of action. And, unless

God acts there is nothing to prophesy. But if God does act, he must do so by

temporal means to achieve his great object: to bring forth the Kingdom of

Heaven. That great object for a Bushnell, a McCosh, a Bethune could only be

effected through the incarnation of God in the world of relative time and space.

And so God manifested himself on earth in the form of his Son, Christ, born of

the Holy Spirit, Redeemer of mankind. If God is thus perceived in human

terms, then history and nature will be perceived in human terms; for God is

all-powerful, all-pervasive. Hence the anthropocentrism of Church's art.

Hence the Apocalypse, Virgin Birth, Transfiguration, Second Coming in the

guise of the American wilderness. Hence the cross of a redeeming or a

resurrected Christ burning or glowing in the guise of Andean air.

Church's is a Trinitarian universe. And Kensett, as the very picturer of the

transcendentalist eye, portrays a universe that must, at least in spirit, have been

Unitarian. And certainly the God in whom his paintings would seem to glory is

no more human in form than Emerson's Over-Soul. No wonder, the luminist's

trees, mountains, water, and clouds do not gesture, do not posture.

A critic once in the mid-iSsos called for the American artist to portray the

"unconsciousness" of nature. Did Kensett know that he had done this when he

painted Shrewsbury River? Whether he knew so or not, Shrewsbury River was, in

1859, a stroke of transcendentalist genius, just as, a year later, Twilight in the

Wilderness was a stroke of Calvinist genius. If Kensett may be identified as a

Unitarian luminist, then Church may be identified as a Trinitarian luminist or,

rather, a luminist Trinitarian. For he was, as the luminist was not, "a nineteenth

century type of the Puritan." And so Church's landscape, unlike the landscape of

186 HUNTINGTON
the luminist, was the "type" of nature's Bible; his light, unlike the light of the

luminist, the "type" of God. As Kensett, the "transparent eyeball," looked

innocently at nature, Church, the watchful would-be prophet of the Elect,

searched nature intently for the revelation behind the fact. Rather than a

transcendentalist luminist, Church was a Christian atmospherist, who "saw and

felt the divinity of both worlds."

But to picture Church for the late-twentieth-century mind in the light of

Warner's memorial to him is to emphasize the painter's difference from us or

almost to reassign him to the oblivion where in 1900 his reputation languished.

Our understanding and his reputation are better served if we remember that in

his prime his contemporaries went in droves to see, and wrote reams about, his

paintings; that he could not walk the streets of New York without being

embarrassed by the attention of passersby; that he was applauded when he

appeared in his box at the opera. We do him and ourselves justice if we think of

Church as a man who portrayed the great visions of his day on canvas. To think

ofCotopaxi as the Guernica of our Civil War is to be close to the mark. Better still,

perhaps, we might view it as the Oath of the Horatii of its time and place. As

Jacques-Louis David's great picture galvanized the ideals of Frenchmen in 1784

and 1785, so Church's great picture galvanized the ideals of Americans in 1862 and

1863.

With each people there was in the public mind a configuration of thought

ready to be symbolized. That configuration for an Andes of Ecuador, a Twilight in

the Wilderness, a Cotopoxi was shaped by America's typology of the hour. As the

artist's vision was readied by the type of the Apollo, the Sistine ceiling, The

Transfiguration, so was the public's vision readied by the type, say, of I John 1:5,

Proverbs 24:10, Mark 13:26-27. On his great canvases Church caught the atmosphere of the hour—for a moment illuminated the world. And the world thanked

him for it: "He shows us in the splendid play of light, and air, and clouds that

which we do not see, or seeing do not perceive."74

HUNTINGTON 187
Notes

Henry Theodore Tuckerman, Book of the Artists:

merican Artist Life (New York, 1867), 375.

 Cf. Matthew 13:1-17.

 Cf. Barbara Novak, American Painting of the

ineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American

xperience (New York, 1969), passim.

 See David C. Huntington, The Landscapes of Frederic

dwin Church: Vision of an American Era (New York,

966); Art and the Excited Spirit: America in the Romantic

eriod [University of Michigan Museum of Art] (Ann

rbor, Mich., 1972).

 The sources of these and the majority of quotations

ted briefly in the essay are (unless otherwise indicated)

o be traced either in my Landscapes of Frederic Edwin

hurch or my "Frederic Edwin Church, 1826-1900:

ainter of the Adamic New World Myth" (Ph.D. diss.,

ale University, 1960). Some additional unidentified

uotations are to be found in the F. E. Church clippings

le of the New York Public Library or in the xerox copy,

t Olana in Hudson, New York, of Church's scrapbook,

which, alas, disappeared during or right after the cam

aign to preserve Olana, between 1964 and 1968.

. Charles Dudley Warner, "Frederic Edwin Church"

1900), chap. 5. A copy of this manuscript is at Olana.

This is the best source of information about the painter's

arly years. Warner did not live to complete the biog

aphy. He writes that Church developed an intimate

riendship with Bethune.

. Bethune, An Oration Before the Phi Beta Kappa Soci

ty of Harvard University (Cambridge, 1849), 40-41, 27.

. In my monograph of 1966 I erroneously gave

Bushnell's first name as Asa and his religious affiliation as

Unitarian. For discussions of Bushnell's theology and

he religious controversies at Hartford, see: William

Alexander Johnson, Nature and the Supernatural in the

Theology of Horace Bushnell (Lund, Sweden, 1963); Barbara M. Cross, Horace Bushnell, Minister to a Changing

merican (Chicago, 1958); H. Shelton Smith, cd.^ Horace

Bushnell (New York, 1965). While Warner does not men

ion Bushnell, he remarks that Church, while "adhering

o the lines laid down in his inherited faith, . . . was

essentially liberal in his belief; see Warner, "Church,"

chap. 5.

9. Horace Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural

(New York, 1858) and Sermons for the New Life (New York,

1858).

10. James McCosh, Typical Forms and Special Ends in

Creation (Edinburgh, 1856; New York, 1881). The first

American edition was published in 1857; the edition followed here is the one of 1881. It is interesting to note that

Church's edition was published at a date when McCosh

was endeavoring to accommodate Darwinism to

Calvinism—or vice versa.

n. An invaluable resource for the student of American

art who may be interested in pursuing the application of

typology to landscape painting is James Moore, "The

Storm and the Harvest: the Image of Nature in MidNineteenth Century American Landscape" (Ph.D. diss.,

Indiana University, 1974). The implication of the differences in orientation to geology between Church and his

teacher Cole is a provocative topic which cannot be

considered in discussions of the two painters in this

essay. Ellwood Parry is currently pursuing a study of the

role of the science of geology in Cole's art.

12. McCosh, Typical Forms, 322,331-332.

13. Theodore Winthrop, "The Heart of the Andes" in

Life in the Open Air and Other Papers (Boston, 1863), 344;

Winthrop describes the spectator as a "demi-god."

14. McCosh, Typical Forms, 409.

15. In a way that complements the approach taken in

this essay, Barbara Novak examines the relationship between religion and landscape in "American Landscape

and the Nationalist Garden and the Holy Book," An in

America, 60, no. i (1972): 46-57.

16. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the

American Self (New Haven, 1975), 35~36; I am especially

grateful for the stimulation of Sacvan Bercovitch, one of

my colleagues at the National Humanities Institute, Yale

University, during 1975-1976. I take this occasion to express my deep appreciation to the National Endowment

for the Humanities and the organizers and fellows of the

institute for providing me with that invaluable experience. This essay is essentially an outgrowth of that year.

17. The significance of the "middle ground" to American experience is explored by Leo Marx in The Machine

in the Garden (New York, 1964). The mountain in

Church's painting is adapted from studies of Katahdin

but the intervening landscape is fictional.

18. Warner, "Church," chap. 5.

19. Jervis McEntee, "Diary," May 19,1885; Archives of

American Art, Washington, D.C. I am indebted to Garnett McCoy for calling this passage to my attention.

William H. Osborn was the owner of a number of works

by Church, among them Beacon OffMt. Desert and Andes

of Ecuador.

20. The subject of Cole's religious background and his

own religious life is examined in Alan Peter Wallach,

"The Ideal American Artist and the Dissenting Tradition: A Study of Thomas Cole's Popular Reputation"

(Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1973).

21. For an extended discussion of the subject of the

relationship of Gilpin's principles to the development of

Cole's style, see Earl Alexander Powell, "English Influences in the Art of Thomas Cole (1801-1848)" (Ph.D. diss.,

Harvard University, 1974), chap. 2; also Powell's three

articles, "Thomas Cole and the American Landscape

Tradition," Arts Magazine, $2, no. 6 (Feb. 1978): 114-123;

no. 7 (Mar. 1978): 110-07; no. 8 (Apr. 1978): 113-117. Cole's

correspondence with Robert Gilmore abounds in references to Gilpin; see Howard S. Merritt, "Correspondence between Thomas Cole and Robert Gilmore, Jr.,"

Baltimore Museum of An Annual, 2 (1967): Appendix I,

44-8i.

22. J. Gray Sweeney, Themes in American Painting

[Grand Rapids Art Museum] (Grand Rapids, Mich.,

1977), 73-74-

23. For references to Schroon Mountain see: Louis

LeGrand Noble, The Life and Works of Thomas Cole (1853;

rev. ed., Cambridge, Mass., 1964), 177-179,185. The season,

the sky, and the foreground and high vantage point

depart from the artist's on-the-spot pencil study, but the

painting is essentially a transcript of the scene, if a poetic

one; cf. Howard S. Merritt, Thomas Cole [exh. cat.,

Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester]

(Rochester, N.Y., 1969), no. 35.

24. Noble, Cole, 118.

25. William Gilpin, Observations on Several Pans of England, Particularly the Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland

and Westmoreland, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty,

Made in the Tear 1772 (London, 1808), 1:88-90. Cole obviously regarded one of the mountain configurations proscribed by Gilpin as expressively versatile: that one designated "Alps" in fig. 203. In a sketch for The Expulsion

Cole appears to suggest a tormented alpine Laocoon; in

Touth of the Voyage of Life series, alpine peaks express

the buoyant spirit of his subject: see Merritt, Thomas

Cole, nos. 16 and 42.

88 HUNTINGTON
26. That Kensett was not always so radical in his compositions at this date or in the years that followed goes

without saying. But even his more conventional compositions are chastened by the freshness of his vision.

27. Barbara Novak, American Painting of the

Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American

Experience (New York, 1969), no. See also Selections from

Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston,

1957), 24-

28. A color reproduction of Our Banner in the Sky may

be found in American Painting, Drawings and Sculpture

oftheioth and zoth Centuries (New York, 1978).

29. The characterization appears in W. P. Bayley "Mr.

Church's Pictures—Cotopaxi, Chimborazo and the Aurora Borealis," Art Journal (London), 17 (Sept. 1865):

265-267.

30. That Cole conceived of the role of the oil study,

made outdoors, quite differently from the mature

Church is betrayed by his complaint that "the glare of

light destroys the true effect of colour and tone of Nature"; Theodore Stebbins, Jr., Close Observation: Selected

Oil Sketches by Frederic E. Church (Washington, 1978), 6.

31. "The North" Painted by E E. Church from Studies of

Icebergs Made in the Northern Seas in the Summer of 1859.

The broadside was printed for the exhibition of the

painting The Icebergs (The North) in Boston in 1861. Recently rediscovered, the painting sold at auction in New

York October 25,1979 (see plate 19).

32. That the whole be "of a piece" was a concept basic

to academic theory. See, for example, the comments of

Sir Joshua Reynolds on Rubens and Poussin in

Reynolds' Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (San

Marino, Calif., 1959), 86-87 (Discourse V).

33. The writings of Ruskin, including volumes from

editions of 1852 and 1856 of Modern Painters are solidly

represented on the shelves of Olana's library.

34. Any number of engravings after Turner are suggested in this challenge; the comment appears in an

unidentified review of Cotopaxi.

35. Cf. A. J. Finberg, The Life ofj. M. W. Turner, 2nd

ed. rev. with supplement by Hilda F. Finberg (Oxford,

1961), 390.

36. Winthrop, "Heart of the Andes," 256; Winthrop's

pamphlet, impregnated with Ruskins' ideas and with

typology, reads almost as a manifesto of Church's art.

37. PI. 14. It is reproduced in Huntington, Landscapes

of Frederic Edwin Church, fig. 62.

38. Louis LeGrand Noble, After Icebergs with a Painter,

A Summer Voyage to Labrador and Around Newfoundland

(New York, 1861), 251, 223,158,177, 262.

39. Cooper-Hewitt Museum, no. 1917-4. 298.

40. In Jared B. Flagg, The Life and Letters of Washington Allston (1892; New York, 1969), 58-59.

41. John Wilmerding, A History of American Marine

Painting (Boston, 1968), 58.

42. Bushnell, Sermons, 104,121.

43. The watercolor by Jesus Martinez Carrion of this

sanctuary is surprisingly suggestive of the atmospheric

effects of Olana's court hall. Church's concern for effects

of light in his house is reflected in a comment once made

to a visitor there: "Fortunately the soft golden atmosphere glorified everything the day you called"; Frederic

E. Church to Charles F. Olney, Nov. 30,1896 (Archives of

American Art).

44. See p. 532 in the 1881 edition (see n. 10 above). These,

the final lines of the book, are discussed in Moore, "The

Storm and the Harvest," io2ff.

45. Herman Melville, "Aurora Borealis Commemorative of the Dissolution of Armies at the Peace" (May

1865).

46. Modern Painters, 4, pt. 5, chap. 6, sect. 8-9.

47. Horace Bushnell, Reverses Needed: A Discourse Delivered on the Sunday after the Disaster of Bull Run in the

North Church, Hartford (Hartford, 1861), 8.

48. See Edgar Richardson, Painting in America: The

Story of 450 Tears (New York, 1956), 223.

49. New York Tribune, Mar. 24,1863.

50. In Moore, "The Storm and the Harvest," chap. 7,

there is a discussion of the typology of hardship and trial.

51. New York Times, Mar. 17,1863.

52. New York Times, Mar. 17,1863.

53. F. E. Church clipping file, New York Public

Library.

54. Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 331-332, as

quoted in Johnson, Bushnell, 104.

55. Gary Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (New York, 1978), xv-xvi.

56. For a discussion of Twilight in the Wilderness as a

natural apocalypse see my Landscapes of Frederic Edwin

Church, 78-83.

57. Though the context is different a London viewer of

Church's Chimborazo likened a cloud in the painting to

"some dove-winged messenger of peace coming once

more, perhaps—who knows? for the last time"; as

quoted in a clipping from the Eclectic Magazine (Dec.

1865), 689, pasted in Church's scrapbook. The original

source was W. P. Bayley, "Mr. Church's Pictures," An

Journal, 27 (Sept. 1865): 265-266.

58. Mary Bushnell Cheney, Life and Letters of Horace

Bushnell (New York, 1880), 156.

59. The same essential point is to be made about

Church's Niagara (1857; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington) in my Art and the Excited Spirit, 14; the painting

may be considered a sidewise Transfiguration. Roger

Stein in an investigation of the typological dimensions of

Copley's Watson and the Shark has noted a similarly

Protestant adaptation of Raphael's Transfiguration; cf.

Stein, Copley's <(Watson and the Shark" and Aesthetics in the

IT/OS (State University of New York, 1976).

60. Whicher, ed., Emerson, 24.

61. Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 68-69, as

quoted in Cross, Bushnell, 109.

62. Warner, "Church," chap. 5.

63. John I. H. Baur, "Early Studies in Light and Air by

American Landscape Painters," Brooklyn Museum Bulletin, p, no. 2 (Winter 1948): 3.

64. Novak, American Painting, passim.

65. Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., The Life and Works of

Martin Johnson Heade (New Haven and London, 1975),

107-108, and Luminous Landscape: The American Study of

Light, 1860-1875 [Fogg Art Museum] (Cambridge, Mass.,

1966); John Wilmerding, American Marine Painting, 170,

and "Fire and Ice in American Art" in The Natural

Paradise, ed. Kynaston McShine [Museum of Modern

Art] (New York, 1976).

66. Stebbins, Heade, 107-108; William H. Gerdts, "On

the Nature of Luminism" in American Luminism (New

York, 1978); and Wilmerding, A merican Marine Painting,

170, and "Fire and Ice," passim, as well as his essay "The

Luminist Movement: Some Reflections," 120-121 herein.

67. The balance of sun and lighthouse in Long Island

Sound is a quiet parallel to the balance of sun and volcano

in Cotopaxi. The peacefulness of the Suydam print may

have been on Church's mind when he painted a serene

twilight scene (paired with an equally serene moonlit

scene) in 1865 as a memorial to his two infant children

who died that year. The two paintings are at Olana.

68. "Church's Cotopaxi," New York Times, Mar. 17,1863.

69. The quotations pertaining to Gifford are to be

found in Nicolai Cikovsky, "Introduction" in Sanford

Robinson Gifford, 1823-1880 [University of Texas Art

Museum] (Austin, 1970), 14 and n. 19.

70. This "relic" of civilization is at Olana today; it

measures nine inches from arris to arris.

HUNTINGTON 189
The entire quotation reads: "It seems to me the

 is in the artist's earnestness and modesty,—in the

me repression of himself.' He seems to display the

s beauty, and not his own skill: his flowers bloom,

immers, and waterfalls weave their rainbows, to the

e of nature, the glory of God,—not Church. There

machinery visible, no rehearsal-work: no one ob

s how the paint is spread; you would as soon stretch

our hand to feel the texture of an angel's wing; you

ot think of texture. It is a vision." ("Church's Picture

he North'"; unidentified clipping in Church's

book, Olana.)

Intriguingly suggestive of Church's Moses Viewing

romised Land is Kensetfs Berkeley Rocks, Newport

 Vassar College Art Gallery Poughkeepsie, N.Y.),

h is reproduced in John K. Howat,/0/;w Frederick

ett [exh. cat., American Federation of Arts] (1968),

2. A figure on a bluff wearing, it would appear, the

al garb of the eighteenth century, looks out upon an

nse of sea presided over by a dramatic sky filled with

ht red clouds. Here for a moment Kensett evokes

and Church, but the subject is quite atypical for the

.

"Church's Picture of The North'" (unidentified

ce in Church's scrapbook, Olana).

Unidentified source, Church clipping file, New

 Public Library.

HUNTINGTON


Plate 17. Martin Johnson Headc. Thunderstorm Over Narragansett Bay, 1868.

Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. Photo: Linda Lorenz (see fig. 63)

193
Plate 18. Frederic Edwin Church. Cotopaxi, 1863.

Reading Public Museum and Art Gallery, Reading, Pennsylvania (see fig. 225)

194
Plate 19. Frederic Edwin Church. The Icebergs (The North), 1861. Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Anonymous gift

Photo: Sotheby Parke Bernet (see fig. 18)

195
ate 20. William Bradford. Ice Dwellers Watching the Invaders^ c. 1870.

ew Bedford Whaling Museum, New Bedford, Massachusetts;

ft of William F. Havemeyer, 1910 (see fig. 56)

6
Plate 21. William Bradford. Labrador Coast, c. 1860.

The Cleveland Museum of Art; Purchase, Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund (see fig. 138)

197
Plate 22. Sanford Robinson Gifford. On the Nile, 1872.

Eugene B. Sydnor, Jr. Photo: Herbert P. Vose (see fig. 39)

198
Plate 23. Francis A. Silva. Schooner Passing Castle Island, Boston Harbor, 1874.

The Bostonian Society, Old State House, Boston; Gift of Mrs. Vernon A. Wright, 1939.

Photo: Richard Cheek (see fig. 347)

199
ate 24. William Trost Richards. Lighthouse on Cape Cod^ 1865.

rs. James H. Dempsey. Photo: The Cleveland Museum of Art (see fig. 60)

00
Plate 25. William Trost Richards. Paradise, Newport, 1877.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.;

Adolph Caspar Miller Fund and Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund, 1979 (see fig. 155)

201
late 26. Frederick DeBourg Richards. Across the Marshes, c. 1877.

rivate collection. Photo: Helga Photo Studio (see fig. 149)

02
Plate 27. William Hart. Upland Meadow, 1872. Private collection.

Photo: Helga Photo Studio (see fig. 31)

203
Plate 28. Albert Bierstadt. Buffaloes on the Pmirie, 1881.

Collection of Dr. and Mrs. M. S. Mickiewicz.

Photo: Vose Galleries (see fig. 133)

204
Plate 29. Ralph Albert Blakelock. The Sun, Serene, Sinks into the Slumberous Sea, i88os.

Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts;

The Horace P. Wright Collection. Photo: David Stansbury (see fig. 185)

205
late 30. Alfred Thompson B richer, Time and Tide^ c. 1873.

Dallas Museum of Fine Arts; Foundation for the Arts Collection,

ift of Mr. and Mrs. Frederick M. Mayer (see fig. 144)

06
Plate 31. Winslow Homer. The Artist's Studio in an Afternoon Fog, 1894. Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York; R. T. Miller Fund (see fig. 348)

207
Plat

e 32. Eastman Johnson. Lambs, Nantucket^ 1874.

From the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, Upperville,

Virginia. Photo: Hirschl and Adler Galleries (see fig. 175)

208

33- Sanford Robinson Gifford. A Winter Twilight, 1862. Oil on canvas.

.394 x 0.804 (15% x 3Ou/i6 in). Private collection. Photo: Ken Strothman

10
Luminism in Context: A New View

Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr.

Introduction

ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS, NOTABLY ON THE PRESENT OCCASION, it has been

shown that after 1850 a small number of American painters—most of whom

knew one another—began to paint tonal, realistic landscapes that were often

horizontal in form and quiet in mood.1 These paintings tend to minimize

human subjects or associations in favor of land, water, and sky. Brushwork is

subtle, the palette restricted, and there are few signs of the artist3s presence.

These are windows on a world that is empty and generally serene, where time

moves slowly.

The concept of luminism has been a useful one: through the "discovery" of

this type of painting, we have come to see qualitative and stylistic relationships

between the work of recognized artists such as John E Kensett and Sanford

Gifford and that of others whose work had once been virtually lost, particularly

Martin Johnson Heade and Fitz Hugh Lane. However, the term also carries

with it certain risks, chief among them being the temptation it offers to take the

luminist paintings out of context. These paintings are part of the artistic

production of an extraordinary era in America and in the world. In studying

them as products of American culture, we dare not overlook their crucially

important relationship to European history and to European painting.

Luminism as we define it is largely the product of two decades, and two

rather distinct modes can be distinguished even in this limited period. The

early style, which flourished between 1855 and 1864, primarily in the hands of

Kensett and Lane, is seen at its best in compelling, realistic views with water

and reflections such as Kensett's Shrewsbury River (1859; fig. 202), and Lane's

Owfc Head, Penobscot Bay, Maine (1862; fig. 113). During the next decade,

1865-1875, many more artists took up this mode, and the style became more

varied: in general one sees an increasingly romantic, introspective mood.

Gifford achieved this through the gentle and evocative depiction of heat and

humidity in the Egyptian desert or on Claverack Creek; Heade, by creating a

sense of slowly changing, palpable light and shade; and the late Kensett,

through simplified, abstracted compositions. The early luminist paintings look

for their source more to traditional marine painting (and to the early work of

Frederic Edwin Church as seen in West Rock, New Haven, 1849; New Britain

Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut), whereas the later style,

especially in Gifford's hands, evidences an admiration of J. M. W. Turner's

effects (as well as those of the later, tropical Church).

Changing Critical Views

This volume is based upon the premise that luminism is important, that it is

worth seeing and deserves our attention. Yet each generation of art historians

since the i86os has written intelligent surveys of American painting that largely

or totally overlook the phenomenon. The paintings were there for them to see,

but the works somehow seemed unimportant. The leading critic of the sixties,

Henry T. Tuckerman, writing in 1867, did not know of Lane, who had been

isolated in Gloucester; yet Tuckerman knew all the other landscape painters

well and admired their work. Heade, for example, received only a short notice

in Tuckerman's history; his luminous qualities were singled out for praise, the

critic writing that Heade "especially succeeds in representing marsh-lands,

with hay-ricks, and the peculiar atmospheric effects thereof," but then going on

to give his primary attention to Heade's still lifes and tropical pictures. Of the

luminists, Tuckerman particularly admired Kensett, whom he thought to have

a claim to being "one of the three foremost men of our landscape art" (with

Church and Albert Bierstadt).2 He honored Kensett's thoughtful, kind personality; his ability to "locate" a landscape, making it geographically recognizable; and his "fidelity to detail." Considering Kensett's subjects he admired

211
227. John Frederick Kensett. Landscape, 1852. Oil on canvas. 0.914 x 1.270 (36 x 50 in).

Richard Manoogian. Photo: Brenwasser (not in exhibition)

equally the mountain views, the waterfalls, the rivers, and the coastal scenes.

Tuckerman saw Kensett's works as "strong, clear, and true" but remarked on

the artist's abilities with light only in an offhand way3 In fact, Kensett's

concentrated interest in light stems from the fifties, when he made a dramatic

conversion to a luminist style. This can be demonstrated clearly in the comparison of his view of Lake George (fig. 227) of 1852 with a painting of the same

subject executed just a few years later (fig. 228): the earlier picture is a rugged,

picturesque view of the lake painted with vigorous brushwork, a broad range

of hues, and energetic trees and clouds, whereas the later one is calm, the

brushwork invisible, and the range of color narrowed as a pervasive bluish hue

unifies and flattens the whole. The earlier Lake George looks to Thomas Cole,

while the later one experiments with a new direction and foretells the luminist

style which Kensett was mastering at that time. Interestingly, however, the

work of the sixties (which is what Tuckerman would have known best) was

actually less "luminous" in terms of the artist's concern with light; many of the

late paintings of the shore such as Beach at Newport (1850-1860; fig. 2) or Eaton's

Neck} Long Island (1872; fig. 83) are well drawn and powerfully composed but

have little sense of real light. In fact, Kensett's most telling treatment of light

occurs in interior woodland scenes, for example Catskill Waterfall (1859; Yale

University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut), and in traditionally com228. John Frederick Kensett. Lake George, 1858. Oil on canvas. 0.613 x 0.921 (24% x 36%

in). Collection of Jo Ann and Julian Ganz, Jr., Los Angeles (not in exhibition)

posed mountain and lake views such as the Lake George of 1869 (fig. 229), with

its superb, tonal depiction of water, distant mountains, and dramatic clearing

sky, which can hardly be called "luminist."

Gifford is treated quite differently by Tuckerman. For one thing, the critic

comments that his paintings are "often destitute of exceptional picturesqueness," which is quite true in traditional terms. It has not been recognized how

anti-picturesque luminism was, how the style in fact rejected the rules of

landscape art that had prevailed in the English-speaking world, and beyond,

since the late eighteenth century. British theorists such as Price and William

Gilpin would have found Gifford's work to be unacceptable: it lacked the

required "abrupt and rugged forms," the "broken touches" of brushwork, the

variation of line and topography, even the blasted trees or stumps that were

often "the very capital sources of picturesque beauty." Church, Bierstadt, and

much of the rest of the Hudson River school continued to operate within a

traditional picturesque canon, while Gifford and Kensett in their luminist

paintings simply rejected it.

Tuckerman speaks of one of Gifford's paintings as "photographing in color a

foggy day in early autumn on the Bronx River with its pale sunlight, leafless

trees, and still water," and of another as "depicting only sea and sky... with no

accessories—bare, solitary, vast, elemental nature."4 The critic here recognizes

212 STEBBINS
229. John Frederick Kensett. Lake George, 1869. Oil on canvas. 1.121 x 1.686 (44% x 66%

in). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Maria DeWitt Jesup, 1915

(not in exhibition)

the qualities of luminism in Gifford's work, though of course he coins no term

for the style. He even notes that other painters were involved ("Gifford has also

been successful in the experiment which, of late, has been tried by several American landscape-painters, to reproduce the effects of a misty atmosphere . . .") and he saw in these paintings what we see and admire today "a

flood of that peculiar yellow light born of mist and sunshine."5

The other major critic of the period was James Jackson Jarves, the pioneer

collector of Italian primitives, whose book The Art-Idea first appeared in 1864.

If Tuckerman recognized the luminists and their style (though not quite

ranking them with William Page, Charles L. Elliot, Daniel Huntington,

Emanuel Leutze, George Loring Brown, Church, and Bierstadt as the best of

their time), then Jarves—much more the voice of the future—rejected them

outright. Kensetfs art was considered "a little sad and monotonous," while

Gifford's tone was "artificial and strained," his work "conventional and untrue."6

 Jasper Francis Cropsey, Heade, and others were "realistic to a disagreeable degree, Heade only by color affording any sensuous gratification or relief

from the dreamy intellectuality of the others."7

Jarves stood at an opposite pole to Tuckerman: he believed in the painting of

ideas rather than facts, in spiritualism rather than materialism. His heart lay in

France and Italy, and he rejected England, to which Tuckerman and so many

others had looked for aesthetic leadership since Benjamin West's time. Anything English was anathema to Jarvis: "There is as little affinity between the art

of England and that of America as between their politics"; rather, he proclaimed, it was "French art [which is] the natural friend and instructor of

American art.... We cannot have too much of it."8 The young painters whom

Jarves admired were the French-trained men whose style supplanted that of the

Hudson River school and luminism during the 18708, and whose reputations

rose accordingly. Jarves was as optimistic about the future of our painting as

Tuckerman had been, but for quite different reasons, as he wrote: "On looking

at Allston, Babcock, Hunt, LaFarge, Inness, and Vedder, it really seems as if the

mantle of Venice had fallen upon America. . . ."9

It is always tempting to consider a school or style that one admires to be

"progressive," but to do this with luminism would be misleading indeed.

Luminism may better be seen as a last-ditch attempt to make the Hudson River

school style of Asher B. Durand and Church serve the complex psychic and

aesthetic needs of post-Civil War America. In the hands of Gifford and Heade,

some of the most intelligent and poignant of American paintings were created,

but the attempt to make it a lasting style could not succeed. The mode was too

fragile, too English, too subtle to survive. Its heyday lasted for little more than

a decade, and by 1875 or 1880 it was as surely finished as the Hudson River

school, out of which it had grown.

In one sense luminism in America can be seen as resulting from a literal

reading of the great English critic John Ruskin, whose Modern Painters had

been widely read here during the 1850$. Ruskin was immensely gifted and

equally inconsistent, and his writings can be used to prove nearly anything. But

two of his favorite causes over a long career were the work of J. M. W.

Turner—with its warm yellows and reds, its dramatic effects of storm and

sunset at sea, its rich brushwork and simple compositions—and the very

different paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites—with their literary, sentimental

subjects, bright jarring colors, and ever-detailed and careful brushwork.

Painters like Gifford unite Ruskin's two loves in a way that few English

painters did, literally combining the tightly realistic technique of the PreRaphaelites with the atmospheric effects and the palette of Turner.

The years during which the best luminist pictures were made, from 1855 to

1875, were exactly those which saw the rise of a small group of Americans

working in something close to the Pre-Raphaelite style. These men—J. W.

Hill, N. A. Moore, W. T. Richards, Henry and Thomas Farrer—were also New

Yorkers; like the luminists, they were closely allied to the Hudson River school,

they exhibited at the National Academy of Design, and they also were carrying

on a quintessentially British style in the face of increasing French influence.

They were primarily watercolorists, whereas the luminists were more oil

painters, but there were close links: one thinks of Heade's Lake George (1862;

fig. 75) with its astonishingly taut realism or of Kensetfs woodland interiors'

both so close in conception to Hill's art.

STEBBINS 213
By 1880 it was clear to nearly everyone that the "English" styles—luminism,

Pre-Raphaelitism, and the conventional Hudson River manner as well—had

become old-fashioned and had gone out of favor. George Sheldon's Hours with

Art and Artists (1882) sums up the new tendency, praising the French-trained

eachers at the new Art Students League and noting the present availability of

he works of Jean-Francois Millet, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, "and other

eading lights of modern aesthetic inspiration." George Inness5 criticism of

Pre-Raphaelite work ("the most frightful conglomerations") was cited, as was

his statement of the proper end of art, now seen to be the painting "not of an

outer fact but of an inner life."10 Sheldon discussed the leaders among the

French (Gustave Boulanger, Charles Frere, Jean Baptiste Detaille, Fortuny,

Jean Meissonier) as well as the most progressive Americans whom they had

influenced (Winslow Homer, William Merritt Chase, Abbott Thayer). In

addition, he recognized that certain of the Hudson River school realists of the

sixties (such as George Smillie) were properly developing a new Barbizon

mode in the seventies ("this change was in the direction of breadth of treatment").11

Indeed, the change which Sheldon notes was a sudden and dramatic one for

a number of younger landscape painters, including Smillie, Alexander Wyant,

Homer Dodge Martin, and David Johnson. Each of these men had worked

successfully in a tight, conventional Hudson River format during the i86os, but

in the years 1872-1874 each one of them developed a radically altered style which

came to satisfy the new taste for looser brushwork, generalized, nontopographical subjects, and emphasized breadth and mood. Then and for years

after, this new style was called impressionism, though it looked to the earlier

Barbizon style rather than to French impressionism (which style was reaching

maturity at exactly this time) for its roots.

Sadakichi Hartmann's influential History of American An of 1902 reflects

critical judgment at the turn of the century. Lane was unmentioned, as ever,

and by this point Heade was thought unworthy of more than passing notice.

Kensett is discussed briefly, it being noted that he was technically deficient

despite his years in Europe ("his pictures were so thinly painted that they

almost appear 'flat5 to us").12 But luminism was discussed implicitly: "He

[Kensett] and Sanford R. Gifford were the first to strive for more pleasing

colour harmonies and a more careful observation of atmospheric changes, the

play of sunlight in the clouds and misty distances."13 The author goes on to

make a case for the progressive nature of this work, declaring that "these lyrical

attempts were really forerunners of the modern school, as it was not so much

things as feelings that they tried to suggest."14 As in much of the criticism of the

past, there are important clues in Hartmann's book, particularly in his suggestion that if the luminist style does look ahead at all, it is not to Thomas Eakins

and Winslow Homer nearly so much as to the later George Inness and to

D wight Tryon.

E. P. Richardson's admirable American Romantic Painting of 1944, the first

modern survey, fails to take note of the rediscovery of Heade or Lane, which

was just then occurring as Maxim Karolik was beginning to collect their work.

Only one of Gifford's works (the very late Tivoli, 1879; Metropolitan Museum of

Art, New York) is reproduced in Richardson's book, although it illustrates five

paintings by Kensett, including three river and shore scenes. Looking through

the book as a whole, one would never divine the existence of luminism. The

same thing can be said of the pioneering exhibition of the following year, The

Hudson River School, organized by Frederick A. Sweet.15 Though there were

two paintings by Heade, including Thunderstorm Over Narrangansett Bay

(1868; fig. 63), one by Gifford, and eight by Kensett (including four luminous

coast scenes), one could only conclude from the exhibition as a whole that in

fact the painting of water, skies, and light in horizontal formats was of very

little interest to the American school even during the i86os and 18708.

A careful student of the field would have had to change this view in 1948,

with the publication of the Karolik Collection catalogue by the Museum of

Fine Arts, Boston.16 Here for the first time a large number of paintings by

Heade and Lane were published together, along with several by Kensett and

other luminist painters. Popular and scholarly interst in the phenomenon of

luminism dates from this point, especially from John I. H. Baur's introduction

to this catalogue and from his subsequent essays on the subject.

Several points may be made from all this. First, we are inclined to overlook

the degree of selectivity which the art historian inevitably employs. There are a

number of traditional bases for selecting certain pictures or certain types for

exhibition or scholarly investigation: the basis may be historical, the paintings

being ones which contemporary critics or popular opinion of the period of

execution thought most important; or it may be "art historical," the objects

being ones which can be shown to have been most influential upon their times,

or on later work, or most reflective of earlier tradition; or it may be cultural, in

the sense that a given group of objects gives clearest insight into the history,

economics, or some other aspect of the culture which produced them; or the

paintings may be seen simply as typical examples of the artistic production of

the period. None of these reasons—and there are obviously other possibilities—have been presented with much conviction as underlying the discovery of

the luminist phenomenon. Rather, two other justifications have been given for

our attention: first, that the paintings and the phenomenon of a group of

related works are "important" (e.g. beautiful) and have been mistakenly overlooked by earlier scholars; and secondly (as has been recently proposed by

Barbara Novak), that the works are significant because they are seen as part of

the indigenous American cultural and artistic mainstream (the latter being

conceived as tonal, linear, nonpainterly, lucid, and conceptual) ,

17

 If we are truly

to come to grips with luminism, some difficult questions pertaining to the style

must be asked: How typical is it of the art of the period? How reflective of the

national culture? How American, how "native," is the style? And how is it that

our time is the first to see its beauties fully?

214 STEBBINS
The Luminist Minority

In answer to the first question, it may be noted that luminist paintings are

rare, and they surely are far from typical of the art of their time in America.

Even if we consider only Heade, Lane, Gifford, and Kensett, we find more

nonluminist pictures than luminist ones. Only about half of Heade's oeuvre,

for example, consists of landscape paintings, and there are many of these—including the early ones, many of the South American, and most of the later

Florida scenes—that do not deal with light in luminist fashion. Much the same

is true of Lane and Kensett. Though their oeuvres consist mainly of landscape

and seascapes (including marine views), Lane did many topographical scenes,

ship portraits, and storm pictures—all nonluminist—and Kensett frequently

depicted waterfalls, lakes, and interior woodland scenes in the traditional

Hudson River school manner. Gifford, however, presents a different case.

Though he frequently did nonluminist pictures—his early work and his woodland scenes and architectural views—most of his finished paintings are consistent with luminism as we have defined it. Among the major painters (that is,

excluding A. T. Bricher, Francis A. Silva, and such), he is the most consistent

luminist; and as we have seen, critics since his own time have recognized the

special qualities of color and light in his work.

Indeed, to take another view, most of the major painters of the period did no

luminist pictures at all, or very few. Among the Hudson River school, Church,

who can be considered the spiritual father of the luminist style, did few

paintings which would qualify; Bierstadt did a handful only, primarily in the

early sixties; and Thomas Moran none at all—each preferred to do great aerial

topographical views. Asher B. Durand did none, W. T. Richards a few only,

and Worthington Whittredge practically none. Inness, Alexander Wyant, and

Homer Dodge Martin, as we have seen, worked in a very different, nonluminist style. Similarly, the landscapes of John LaFarge, Elihu Vedder, and

William Morris Hunt developed along French lines. Whistler's did also; his

compositions bear superficial similarities to luminist ones, but with entirely

different intention and effect. There are brief, nearly luminist moments in the

works of Winslow Homer, such as An Adirondack Lake (1870; fig. 44), and

Thomas Eakins, particularly in Max Sckmitt in a Single Scull (1871; fig. 179). But

both paintings are figurative compositions, not landscapes per se\ both painters

worked with rich surfaces and strong complex compositions in a style far closer

to the "French" mainstream in America than to luminism. This is also true of

Ralph Blakelock and Albert Pinkham Ryder, two landscapists coming to

maturity at this time: there is what might be thought a fleeting and rather

painterly "luminist" moment in each man's oeuvre during the early seventies,

but again a close comparison shows a superficial resemblance only.

It is also possible to take a broader view of the art scene at the time, to try to

ascertain how many landscapes were being painted and the extent to which

these landscapes were luminist. There is no doubt that New York's National

Academy of Design held the leading exhibition in America each year, and here,

if anywhere, one would expect luminism to dominate. Taking the 1867 exhibit

as an example, one finds in fact that less than a third of the paintings were

landscapes at all (about 30 percent), with an equal number of genre scenes.

Portraits and ideal figure pieces make up another 30 percent, with a small

representation of still lifes, animal pictures, architectural studies, and history

paintings. Judging from the artists and titles, we may deduce that there may

have been about 30 luminist pictures among the 600 shown, or about 5 percent

of the total.

A smaller National Academy exhibit in 1874 contained about the same

proportion of landscape—under a third—with figure, portrait, and still-life

categories all reduced but genre increased to almost 40 percent of the show.

Luminist landscapes number about twenty, again some 5 percent.

The first annual exhibition at the Yale School of Fine Arts, held in 1867 and

directed by Daniel Huntington, was a conservative reflection of the New York

pattern of that year. A number of European paintings were included (by

Verboeckhoven, Spitzweg, Kobell, Calame, Achenbach, and others), and there

was less genre and more history painting (by Rossiter, Read, White, and Gray).

More landscapes were shown in New Haven, however—about 40 percent of

the American paintings—and the relative number of luminist views seems also

to have been higher than in New York. These calculations are of course

imperfect as they are based on tides alone; and, we have included as "luminist"

in the Yale show Claverack Creek by Frederick Y. Chubb and J. C. Wiggin's Late

Afternoon: Paltz Point, Shawangunk Mountains, for example, without knowing

the paintings themselves. Nonetheless, it is clear that the new Barbizon style

had not yet been felt in New Haven. The foreign pictures were primarily

German, and considerable numbers of drawings and watercolors by the Farrers, J. W. Hill, Henry Roderick Newman, and C. H. Moore must have added

to both the luminist and British tone of the exhibition.

The situation in Boston was quite different, and a look at the Boston

Athenaeum exhibitions suggests again how much a localized, New York

phenomenon luminism was. Landscapes accounted for only 16 percent of

Boston's 1867 exhibition, with historical and religious pictures, genre, and

portraiture each being seen in equal amounts. There were many copies after old

masters and relatively few contemporary Americans. Of the latter, only Edward

Moran was shown in depth, and there were practically no luminist landscapes.

Moreover, this pattern continued in Boston. At the 1873 exhibition, for example, historical and religious subjects accounted for a third of the show; figurative and portrait paintings accounted for nearly as many; landscape was the

third-ranking category, with about 20 percent, with genre just behind. Here at

least one finds Martin Johnson Heade's Newport Sunset, but again a paucity of

other luminist pictures.

All this suggests that luminism was never dominant, in terms of numbers of

paintings, influence, or impact on the public or the critics. It surely was never a

STEBBINS 215
movement"; rather it can be identified as a stylistic phenomenon: one of the

divergent courses the Hudson River school took late in its life. And far from

being the progressive "mainstream," it actually represented a deadend—and a

retrogressive, British-oriented one at that.

As we have noted, luminism occurred primarily during two decades, of

which the second—from 1865 to 1875—was the most productive. Heade, Gifford, and Kensett (until his death in 1872) were working at the very peak of their

capacities, as can be seen from numerous examples mentioned here. And they

were not alone, for this decade appears now to have been an extraordinarily

creative one for American artists, for the luminists and many others as well. It

was during this decade that Bierstadt and Thomas Moran produced the most

powerful of their great western panoramas. Church was slightly past his prime

as we see it, but still painted his two major Jamaican views Rainy Season in the

Tropics (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) and The Vale of St. Thomas

(Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut) at the start of the decade, and

of course climaxed his success with the building of his home Olana in 1871. And

among the realists, Worthington Whittredge did the best of his richly painted

woodland scenes during this time; and W. T Richards, many of his tautly

realistic, close-up nature studies. Cropsey and James and William Hart carried

on Durand's realistic pastoral tradition, as did David Johnson, Wyant, and

Martin, with the latter group making a creative and generally successful

transition to a Barbizon-influenced style around 1873 as has been seen.

Perhaps the key landscape specialist of the post-Civil War era was George

Inness, who represents the generation after Church's even though the two

artists were nearly exact contemporaries. Church's realistic art v/as at its best

during the fifties; as has been often said, it bore the optimistic spirit of Manifest

Destiny, though it became irrelevant and empty in the post-war years, when the

nation and its tastes changed so much. Inness, on the other hand, uniquely

succeeded in evolving from a pure Hudson River style in the late forties to a

clear panoramic one in the fifties, then gaining increasing richness and sophistication during the sixties and seventies before reaching a final style—abstract,

subjective, and painterly—during the eighties. He was never better than

during the "luminist decade," which for him ranged from Peace and Plenty

(1865; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)—a warm yet heroic celebration of the war's end—to The Monk (1873; Addison Gallery, Andover, Massachusetts), where symbolic shapes and colors dominate. Church's style was

"native" (and English) in that he had never been abroad to study but was

trained by the British-born Cole, and he was not equipped to absorb or

understand the new French styles ("those baleful foreign influences," as he

called them). Inness, on the other hand, was comfortable with European and

especially French art, having been to Italy in 1850, France in 1853-1854, and both

countries from 1870 to 1874, and this must have aided his own evolution

immensely.

Equally important to Inness for the introduction of the Barbizon style to

America was William Morris Hunt, who worked with Thomas Couture and

Jean-Francois Millet before returning in 1855 to head the Boston school, though

his finest work lies not in landscape but in the early portraits of women

executed in a style stemming from Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Hunt's

most successful student was John LaFarge, who became a figure of great

importance. It was LaFarge who, with his decorations for Trinity Church,

Boston, in 1875 began the American mural tradition. He was an innovator in

stained glass, in which work he reached real heights; and during this decade he

produced powerful landscapes such as Paradise Valley (private collection) and

still lifes, including Flowers on a Window Ledge (c. 1862; Corcoran Gallery of Art,

Washington, D.C.) and Vase of Flowers (1864; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

There were other significant talents working in still life as well, notably Heade

(whose finest traditional flower pictures date from 1865-1870, with the best of

the orchid and hummingbird paintings coming in 1875), George Lambdin, and

G. H. Hall.

As we have seen, during this decade interest was swinging away from

landscape toward figurative painting of various kinds. Portraitists remained

active with G. P. A. Healy, Daniel Huntington, and Charles Elliott being

Eakins' ablest contemporaries. History painting in the tradition of Benjamin

West was still carried on, as seen in the Yale exhibition, and Hunt, LaFarge,

Hall, and others worked in more modern styles. Robert Weir's Taking the Veil

(1863; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut) represents the old

style and was one of the popular pictures of the period, as it was widely

reproduced and then exhibited at Philadelphia in 1876. His son John F. Weir

painted two of the major history pictures of that time: Gun Foundry (1866;

Putnam County Historical Society, Cold Spring, New York) and Forging the

Shaft (1877; Metropolitan Museum of Art); both were also rare celebrations in

paint of America's new industrial might. William Rimmer was at the height of

his career, with Flight and Pursuit (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) being

executed in 1872. Frank Currier, Thomas S. Noble, and Frank Duveneck (one

thinks of his Turkish Page, 1876, Pennsylvania Academy, Philadelphia) brought

back from Munich a strong painterly style in keeping with the times.

Genre painting regained its popularity in this decade, largely through the

preeminent work of Eastman Johnson and Winslow Homer. Johnson was at

his height during this period, producing fine interior scenes such as Not at

Home (c. 1872-1880; Brooklyn Museum, New York), and family portraits including The Hatch Family, 1871 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), as well as

his outstanding series of maple sugaring and cranberry harvest scenes. His style

was a sophisticated, painterly one, resulting, as was the case with so many

American artists, from long years of study abroad. Much the same is true of

Homer, who reached maturity as a painter just as the decade began, with

Prisoners from the Front (1866; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), then

went on after his French trip to paint The Bridle Path (1868; Sterling and

Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts)—with its superb

216 STEBBINS
light effects and completely convincing forms—Snap the Whip in 1872 (Butler

Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio) and Breezing Up in 1874 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Homer's work has everything to do

with light, but one has to strain to see any connection with luminism.

This was the climax of American genre as we understand the term—the

painting of plain, rural folk celebrating their own simple virtues and those of

their land. Like much landscape painting, this was a reminiscent, idealized art.

It was taken up by many others—J. G. Brown, Thomas Hovenden, E. L.

Henry, and Seymour Guy, for example—all of whom did their outstanding

work during this brief period. And closely related was the work of the leading

animal painters, A. F. Tait and James and William Beard. Tait painted heroic

visions of the hunter and his quarry for an urban clientele, and the Beards—as

in James5 Parson's Pets (1875; private collection)—skillfully made fun of society's

foibles by depiciting animals playing human roles.

A whimsical strain runs through the painting of the 18708, and, in certain

isolated pictures, one finds a visionary, magical quality that is not repeated

again. In William Beard's The Wreckers (1874; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston),"

Thomas Moran's Scene from Hiawatha (Baltimore Museum of Art), John F.

Weir's Christmas Bell (1865; private collection), and—best known—in Elihu

Vedder's Lair of the Sea Serpent (1864; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) one senses

a belief in witches and fairies, in mysterious dreamlike animals and wondrous

taut visions that would soon fade. The same magical spirit exists in Heade's

Gremlins in the Studio (private collection) and in his Thunderstorm Over Narragansett Bay (1868; fig. 63).

Thomas Eakins was eight years younger than Homer, but—perhaps owing

to his extensive travels in Europe and his training under Jean Leon Gerome and

Leon Bonnat in Paris—he reached artistic maturity during these same years.

His was a French style, adapted to American subjects and American taste. In

the five years after his return from abroad in 1870, he did the great series of

hunting scenes, the boating pictures, William Rush Carving His Allegorical

Figure of the Schuylkill River (Philadelphia Museum of Art), and a number of

superb portraits including his masterpiece, The Gross Clinic (1875; Jefferson

Medical College, Philadelphia).

The Cultural Context

Thus, a great deal besides luminism happened in American painting during

the decade after the Civil War. The period is not only one of the richest in our

art history but is also extraordinarily complex in the variety of styles and

subjects. It was a time of disparate, competing manners and has proved to be,

for the historian of taste, particularly fecund, in the dramatic changes that

occurred in the early seventies. Other arts blossomed as well. The American

Society of Painters in Water Colors was founded in 1866, and its exhibits over

the next decade demonstrate the creative and popular growth in this medium.

Henry Hobson Richardson, who went to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in

1860, returning in 1865, not only gained recognition as an architect with his

Brattle Square Church in 1872 but also established the modern idiom

"Richardson Romanesque" with Trinity Church, also in Boston, in 1872-1876.

With such contemporaries as Frank Furness in Philadelphia and, in New

York, Richard Morris Hunt, brother of the painter, he firmly established

architecture as a profession in America. Their work was based directly on

French models, and it constituted a rejection of English Gothic which had been

so popular during the previous decades. Much the same thing happened in

sculpture: William Rimmer replaced the traditional neoclassic mode with a

modern French style and produced his masterpiece, The Dying Centaur

(Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), in 1871. And surely the period's immense

enthusiasm for art is seen in the founding in 1870 of the first two great public art

museums in America, the Metropolitan in New York and the Museum of Fine

Arts in Boston, followed by Washington's Corcoran Gallery in 1874, and the

Philadelphia Museum in 1876. Indeed, what happened during this decade in the

visual arts was akin to the flowering of American literature in the works of

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt

Whitman between 1850 and 1855 that F. O. Matthiessen described in his book

American Renaissance. After a long, innocent Jeffersonian era, when the frontier was open and the future seemed limitless (and Europe unnecessary, for the

society or for its artists), the nation in her imperfect maturity after the war now

turned again to Europe. Henry Adams received much of his education there;

and Mark Twain (who called this "The Gilded Era") searched there in Innocents

Abroad (1869), as Henry James did in The Madonna of the Future (1873) and

Roderick Hudson (1876). And the painters of this generation—unlike Mount,

George Caleb Bingham, and Church—relied on European and particularly on

French training. American painters in France during 1866 included Homer and

Eakins, James McNeill Whistler and Vedder, Mary Cassatt and W. T. Richards;

and Church passed through on his long trip of 1867-1868. Of the luminists,

Gifford made extensive trips in 1855-1857, then again in 1868-1869, while Kensett

had worked abroad from 1840 to 1847, and Heade had made one or perhaps two

European trips, also during the forties.

This period, which has drawn the attention primarily of political and economic historians, has been studied mainly in reference to the debilitating,

radical Reconstruction (which the historian Claude Bowers called "The Tragic

Era"), followed by the panic of 1873 and the ensuing depression. This was the

time that modern America was born, and the old Emersonian dreams were

given up forever: the nation would now be urban, not agricultural, with

industrialism dominant and the slums accepted as permanent fixtures. The sail

was supplanted by steam, and Darwinism came to replace a traditional belief in

humanitarian reform. Great new fortunes were made, speculators prospered,

and corruption invaded every corner of society. The nation was divided politically, torn by racism, and had suffered from the shattering trauma of a bloody

STEBBINS 217
230. John Brett. The British Channel Seen from the Dorsetshire Cliffi, 1871. Oil on canvas.

1.061 x 2.127 (4i%

 x 833A in

)- The Tate Gallery, London (not in exhibition)

231. Edward Lear. Khanea, Crete, 1864. Watercolor and pen on paper, o.r/8 x 0.533 (7 x

21 in). The Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio (not in exhibition; above)

war which had wounded or killed so many young men, North and South.

Walt Whitman summed up the era best in an essay of 1871 called "Democratic

Vistas": "Society, in the states, is cankered, crude, superstitious and rotten....

Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present.... The

depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been

supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national,

state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary,

are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, maladministration, and the

judiciary is tainted.5518 Modern historians have echoed Whitman, Allan Nevins

discussing the period under the title, "The Moral Collapse,5519 and George M.

Frederickson in his useful study of intellectual life in the period concluding:

"Instead of purging the nation once and for all of self-seeking, materialism, and

corruption, the war opened the floodgates for the greatest tide of personal and

political selfishness the nation had ever seen.5520

The post-war era would seem an unlikely time for a great flowering in the

arts. A literary historian wrote of the war: "The nation was unified, but at

terrible cultural expense.5521 This was apparently true, if by "culture55 we mean

literature, for not a single important novel appeared in the four years following

the war;22 even after that, notwithstanding the work of Twain and James, Bret

Harte and William Dean Howells, there was still no literary renaissance.

(Interestingly, literary taste at the time was strongly British, and Charles

Dickens, William Thackerary, and Walter Scott were widely read.) But in

painting there occurred an era of enormous vitality and accomplishment, of

stylistic experimentation and diversity, and, as we have seen, luminist landscapes represented only one of many paths. Numerous exhibitions were held

throughout the country, with artists roaming more and more widely in search

of picturesque subjects. Dealers became established in the larger cities, and

patronage was plentiful for both Europeans and American pictures as vast new

fortunes were being quickly made.

No one has seriously studied this period5s culture with its seeming anomaly

of high artistic productivity in the face of moral depravity. It may be that art has

little to do with morality, as one thinks of the Renaissance popes or the

aristocracy of eighteenth-century France or the sudden maturation of abstract

expressionism in 1946-1947 following a world war. The knowledge that the

Reconstruction era coincided with great artistic productivity may lead us, in

turn, to a revised view of America at the time. For this was, after all, a time of

great growth. Every section prospered, except for the South, and there were

boom years from 1869 to 1873. The West was settled, with the transcontinental

railroad uniting East and West in 1869. A uniform national currency, a modern

communications system, and the best railway in the world were established,

and many industries—including oil, steel, and meat—matured and prospered.

Prosperity and patronage encourage the artist as nothing else does, yet they

do not necessarily coopt the painter. Most, or perhaps all, of the art of this

complex period in fact seems distinctly nostalgic in mood. This is clearly the

case for Eakins, with his moody, withdrawn women seated in old-fashioned

chairs in their aged dresses, as it is for Homer, with his preoccupation with the

ideal, virtuous women and children of America's rural past. Tait memorialized

a world where men had to hunt and fish to survive, and E. L. Henry evoked

specific historical places and events. The Hudson River school celebrated the

vanishing wilderness of the West or pastoral places closer to home which

progress somehow had spared. And the luminists went even further to a pure

and untroubled world indeed, where there is no sign of modern developments.

Here a farmer stands quietly in the hayfield with his small son, and the worst

possible worry is a quick, warm shower. Rivers and harbors contain only

sailboats, gliding or drifting along; there are no steamboats, no cities, no

factories—only the hush of a fragile moment suspended in time.

218 STEBBINS
232. Edward Lear. Sunset on the Nile, i86os. Oil on canvas. 0.241 x 0.463 (9% x i8y4 in).

Private collection (not in exhibition)

Luminism in Europe

Recent scholars have come to consider luminism as quintessentially American. It has been seen as part of a native tradition that can be traced back at least

to Copley, whose work is objective, realistic, linear, and nonpainterly. One

writer contends that "luminism is one of the most truly indigenous styles in the

history of American art."23The question of national style is not irrelevant, of

course; the problem is not so much that the old question "What is American

about American art?" has been asked too often, but rather that it has been so

frequently answered wrongly. To discuss luminism, for example, as if the only

contemporaneous European painting was French impressionism is misleading. Luminism may in fact be "indigenous" to some extent, but it is impossible

to discuss this at all without consideration of the highly realistic and frequently

luminous romantic landscape paintings that were being made all over Europe

during the mid-nineteenth century.

If we are right in considering luminism to be a "British" style in America,

then we naturally look to English and Scottish painting for homegrown

parallels. Particularly among the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates, there are

frequent paintings and watercolors that recall our luminist pictures. The

exhibition of British art held in New York and Boston in 1857-1858 included

many works of the Pre-Raphaelites as well as The Glacier of Rosenlani, 1866, by

John Brett (1831-1902) and View on the Campagna of Rome by Edward Lear

(1812-1888); both of the latter worked in a manner close to luminism. Brett's

233. Sanford Robinson Gifford. A Winter Twilight, 1862. Oil on canvas. 0.394 x 0.804

(iS% x 3On/16 in). Private collection. Photo: Ken Strothman

highly detailed views of the fifties gave way to broad, luminous seascapes, and

his British Channel Seen from the Dorsetshire Cliffs (1871; fig. 230), shares the

luminist view in its abstract, horizontal composition—simply a band of water

and a band of sky—its empty foreground, and its concern with evanescent light

effects. The style was carried on with little variation for the next two decades,

and Brett's great panoramic view, The Norman Archipelago (1885; City Art

Gallery, Manchester, England), is still luminous and tightly handled, now with

delicate pinks and greens prevailing.

Edward Lear, better known in his own day for his nonsense verse, was an

indefatigable traveler and watercolorist, who worked more consistently in a

luminist mode than any of his countrymen. In watercolor after watercolor

(there are 3400 at Harvard alone) he employed a long horizontal format, a

foreground defined only by rocks or shore, and a distant view consisting

largely of sky and water (see, for example, Khanea, Crete ^ 1864; fig. 231). The

rarer oils follow the same format and are even closer to American luminism in

their coloration and handling. In Sunset on the Nile (fig. 232) dating from the

sixties, the tones of the sky are very close to those of Gifford's^l Winter Twilight

(1862; fig. 233), in the imperceptible transition from blue at the top to lemon

yellow and then a dramatic band of clear deep red on the horizon. Lear's work

is luminist in its hues and its careful brushwork, though it can be distinguished

from the Americans' work in its greater emphasis on foreground figures and in

the unnaturally great sense of clarity in the depiction of distant rocks and shore.

Much the same can be said of William Dyce's PegwellBay, Kent—A Recollection of October $th, 1858 (1860; fig. 234) with its luminist colors, format, and

handling and greater detail and concern with the foreground figures. Other

British painters of the same generation worked in modes even closer to

STEBBINS 219
235- E. B. Cooke. On the Nile, 1862. Oil on paper on canvas. 0.196 x 0.282 (7% x ny8 in).

City Art Gallery, Manchester, England (not in exhibition)

234. William Dyce. Peppvell Bay, Kent—A Recollection of October sth, 1858, 1860. Oil on

canvas. 0.635 x 0.890 (25 x 35 in). The Tate Gallery, London (not in exhibition; below)

236. J. W. Inchbold. The Certosa, Venice, from the Public Gardens, i86os. Oil on canvas.

0.381 x O.TH (15 x 28 in). City Art Gallery, Leeds, England (not in exhibition)

237. Caspar David Friedrich. Mist, 1807. Oil on canvas. 0.390 x 0.510 (15% x 2oyi6 in).

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (not in exhibition)

luminism: Edward W. Cooke in On theNile (1862; fig. 235), for example, depicts

the clear, dramatic twilight colors reflecting off the water much as Gifford or

Church would, and J. W. Inchbold frequently turned to luminism, as in The

Certosa, Venice, from the Public Gardens (i86os; fig. 236), where a luminous view

220 STEBBINS
of sea and sky is broken only by a drifting sailboat. In addition, mention should

be made of Lord Leighton and the "Etruscan School,33 a group made up largely

of Englishmen whose landscape studies are usually horizontal, architectonic,

and "marked .. . by a very precise sense of tonal relationships,5524 thus closely

related to the luminist style.

Of the English, Brett and Lear are closest to the luminists; their work relates

to the international style of the period in its high realism, its frequent horizontality, and its tonalism, though it varies from the American manner in its typical

narrative content. However, the English at this time seldom concentrate on the

land itself, and they do not search pantheistically for meaning and mood in

nature's shapes and tones in the way the contemporary Germans, and sometimes the Americans, do.

Robert Rosenblum has written of the northern romantic tradition, suggesting its continuity from Friedrich to Mark Rothko, and it is indeed in the work

of Caspar David Friedrich and other German artists that one can find both

precursors and close parallels to American luminism.25 To be sure, most of

Friedrich's paintings are closer to Washington Allston or Thomas Cole in

purpose than to the luminists; typically a human figure, a tree, or a boat plays

both an important compositional role and a psycho-symbolic one, and his

landscapes are far less accessible and more foreboding than those of the

Americans. However, a few of the most "neutral55 of his compositions bear a

marked resemblance to Lane and Heade. Mist (1807; fig. 237) recalls both

Americans5 work in composition and shape, in the softly painted band of

foreground rocks, and in the treatment of ships approaching out of the fog in a

calm sea—one particularly thinks of Heade5s The Stranded Boat (1863; fig. 120).

Similarly, Friedrich's View of a Harbor (c. 1815; fig. 238) resembles Lane's Boston

Harbor (1850-1855; fig. 239). Though the former's vertical composition condenses the scene, both depict a calm harbor at sunset with men at work on the

huge, quiet ships, and both make use of a foreground rowboat that leads into

the composition.

Among the Germans of this generation should also be mentioned K. F.

Schinkel (1781-1841). His Landscape Near Pichelswerder of 1814 (Folkwang

Museum, Essen, West Germany) is an extraordinarily subtle study of light,

with pale blues, yellows, and pinks of the morning sky above the green field

238. Caspar David Friedrich. View of a Harbor, c. 1815. Oil on canvas. 0.900 x 0.710 (355/16 x 28 in). Staatliche

Schlosser und Garten, Schloss Charlottenhof, Potsdam, German Democratic Republic (not in exhibition)

239. Fitz Hugh Lane. Boston Harbor, c. 1850-1855. Oil on canvas. 0.668 x 1.067 (26% x 32 in). Museum of Fine Arts,

Boston; M. and M. Karolik Collection, by exchange (below)

STEBBINS 221
24O. Friedrich J. E. Preller. Norwegian Coast at Scudesnaes. Pencil, 0.154 x 0.253 (6Vi6 x 10

in). Graphit Staatl, Kunstsammlungen, Dresden. Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

(not in exhibition)

with its winding river. In keeping with its early date, this is still a classical

landscape to some extent, with an emphasis on the foreground foliage and

figures; but its treatment of light and simplicity of composition relate closely

both to Friedrich and to luminism.

Friedrich influenced a number of his contemporaries in Dresden, including

Carl Gustav Cams (1789-1869) and the Norwegian J. C. Dahl (1788-1857). The

latter's collection, including several Friedrich oils, formed the basis of the

National Gallery in Oslo. Much of DahPs own work is equally "luminist,"

particularly the highly detailed Kronborg by Moonlight', 1828 (National Gallery,

Oslo), and Sailing Ship at Copenhagen, 1830 (Thorwaldsen Museum,

Copenhagen)—the latter a study of a single ship with a rowboat on a calm sea,

which also resembles Lane's work.

Another major Dresden figure of the period was Friedrich J. E. Preller

(1804-1878), who is best known for his classical landscapes and for his portraits,

but who also created a series of pencil drawings of the Norwegian coast (for

instance, Norwegian Coast at Scudesnaes, fig. 240) which precisely parallel the

Newport drawings and watercolors of W. T. Richards and William S. Haseltine

dating from the i86os and early seventies. Preller's touch is lucid and sharp as he

outlines the short and the large rock in the central middle ground—recalling

Brace's Rock (see figs, n, 71, 94)—and then lifts his eyes to the flat horizon with

its distant ship. Both his technique and aesthetic seem virtually indistinguishable from those of the luminists.

241. Louis Gurlitt. Coast Near Molle, July 1833. Pencil. 0.223 x 0.343 (8% x I3y2 in).

Location unknown

A number of German painters of the ninteenth century traveled abroad to

seek suitable landscape subjects, and the forests and seashore of Norway

became popular in a way that the White Mountains and the Newport coast did

for Americans. Louis Gurlitt (1812-1897), for example, who had been influenced

by Dahl and by Christian Morgenstern, studied under Christian Eckersberg in

Copenhagen. While there, he made a series of coastal drawings very similar to

Preller's: his Coast Near Molle of July 1833 (fig. 241) depicts a point of land that

resembles Owl's Head, in a strong hatched style that suggests Kensett or

Casilear.

Georg Saal (1818-1870) also traveled to Norway, where he painted a wide

range of subjects in a style very like that of the Hudson River school. His View

of Trondhjem in Norway (fig. 242) with its high vantage point, its detailed

handling, its composition with distant ships to the left and the landscape

stretching out to the right, and its concern with sky and light recalls Kensett's

View Near Cozzens Hotel, West Point (1863; fig. 243). Other of his paintings are

closer to Bierstadt in subject, though Nordkap—the subject of a lithograph—in

its use of light on high cliffs and surf relates to Church's Grand Manan Island.,

Bay ofFundy (1852; fig. 53) and to W. T. Richard's watercolors and oils of the

cliffs of the same island.

Luminous paintings appear frequently in German art up to about 1875, after

which the German style generally becomes more painterly and expressive, as it

does in America. The Hamburg painter Julius Prommel (c. 1805-?), for exam222 STEBBINS
242. Georg Saal. View ofTrondhjem in Norway. Oil on

canvas. 0.475 x 0.672 (18% x 26% in). Kunsthalle,

Karlsruhe, Federal Republic of Germany (not in exhibition)

243. John Frederick Kensett. View Near Cozzens

Hotel, West Point, 1863. Oil on canvas. 0.508 x 0.864 (20 x

34 in). Inscribed, l.c.:/F#'<&. The New-York Historical Society, New York

STEBBINS 223
244- Julius Prommel. Copenhagen Harbor, 1817. Oil on canvas. 0.600 x 0.760 (23% x

3oyi6 in). Kunsthistorisk Plodearkiv, Copenhagen. Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (not in exhibition; at left)

245. Jacob Gensler. Beach at Laboe, 1842. Oil on paper. 0.210 x 0.463 (8y4 x i8y4 in).

Kunsthalle, Hamburg. Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (not in exhibition)

246. Maximilian Haushofer. View of the Mountains, 1855. Oil on canvas. 0.279 x 0.413 (n

x i6V4 in). Private collection (not in exhibition; opposite page)

pie, studied both in Copenhagen and later in Italy; his view of Copenhagen

Harbor (1817; fig. 244) is very close to Lane's harbor views in composition but

recalls works by slightly later painters, such as Silva, in its glossy, hard handling.

Another Hamburg man of the same period, Jacob Gensler (1808-1845), studied

in Munich and Vienna and in 1841 journeyed to Holland and Belgium. On his

return he executed a series of luminist oil sketches on paper, many of which are

at the Kunsthalle, Hamburg. These are very close stylistically and technically to

the oil sketches which Gifford and Whittredge made on their western trips, and

they are all but indistinguishable from Heade's work in the same medium.

Gensler's Beach at Laboe (1842; fig. 245) is remarkably like Heade's Rye Beach

(1863; William Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, Storrs):

both depict empty beach scenes in a nearly monochromatic manner using an

extremely horizontal format, a flat horizon where dark sea meets the light sky, a

brushy depiction of storm clouds—and even the form of incised inscription is

the same. Similarly, there are German equivalents to the more colorful and

painterly oil sketches of Church and Bierstadt in the subtle works of Christian

Morgenstern (1805-1867), who also lived in Hamburg.

German luminism appears in many centers besides Dresden and Hamburg.

It is seen in the work of Maximilian Haushofer (i8n-i866), an influential and

popular Munich painter whose View of the Mountains (1855; fig. 246), makes a

telling comparison with the work of the Americans, and particularly with

GifFord. Haushofer's palette is similar to Gifford's, favoring browns, with a

subtle transition to lighter tones in the distant mountains and then to a pale

orange sky which gradually becomes blue overhead. Brushwork is even less

visible than in GifFord's work—in fact, Heade and GifFord look almost

painterly in comparison to much northern romantic art. Yet one would not

mistake this for an American picture, despite similarities of subject, composition, color, and handling; for a more ominous mood prevails here, and the

scene is less penetrable: the trees are dense, the shadows forbidding, and there

is no easy access for the viewer. In the paintings of the Americans, particularly

GifFord and Heade, there is always a rationally ordered recession into space,

and the viewer's eye zig-zags from left to right, from the foreground to one

point of interest then another, as it gains the far horizon. This quality is not, of

course, exclusively American. There are some pictures from England, Germany, Denmark, and Russia that simply cannot be distinguished from American work on formal or stylistic grounds, for example Marsh Scene, Evening

(Museum Folkwang, Essen, West Germany) by Adolf Lier (1826-1882). Lier had

studied successively in Dresden, Munich, and Paris and then in 1865 traveled to

England—and this painting, with its close similarity in composition and color

to the work of Brett and Cooke, may well date from after the latter trip.

Some of the connections between Germany and Denmark in this era have

already been suggested, and as one would expect, there was a strong group of

224 STEBBINS
Danish luminist painters. In fact, Danish work at times resembles American

luminism more than German art does, as it is more objective and less emotionally wrought. This can be seen at the beginning of the Danish school in the

work of Christian W. Eckersberg (1783-1853), the so-called "father of Danish

painting."26 After studying in Paris under Jacques-Louis David and then in

Rome (where so many of the northern romantics went), he returned to

Copenhagen in 1818 an accomplished master of portraiture—as evidenced by

the superb Portrait of Thorwaldsen (1814; Royal Academy of Arts, Copenhagen)—as well as of history and religious paintings, genre, and still life. His

marine paintings such as the American Sailing Ship, 1831, or Russian Ship at

Anchor, 1829 (both Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen; see fig. 247), are

as crisp and luminous as anything Robert Salmon ever did. Like much of

Salmon's work, Russian Ship is still a somewhat classical painting, with each of

the complex groups of ships of various sizes in perfect balance with the others

while the blues and grays of the water, hulls, and sky are interwoven with equal

care. One finds none of the emotional intensity or mystery of Friedrich's View of

a Harbor: for the Danish artist, as for the American, nature is a pleasant place.

D. H. Anton Melbye (1818-1875), a much-honored and most successful student of Eckersberg, painted more truly luminous marine views than his teacher.

In his Marine (Copenhagen) or in .A Frigate and a Brig Under Sail (1844; fig.

248) one finds the same softness of light, the slight blurring of detail in favor of

an overall tonal unity, that one sees in Kensett's Shrewsbury River (1859; fig. 202),

or Heade's Becalmed, Long Island Sound (1876; fig. 249).

247. Christian Ekersberg. Russian Ship at Anchor, 1829. Oil on canvas. 0.631 x 0.510

(2413/16 x 2oyi6 in). Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. Photo: Museum of Fine

Arts, Boston (not in exhibition)

STEBBINS 225
249

. Martin Johnson Heade. Be-

calmed, Long Island Sound, 1876. Oil on

canvas. 0.381 x 0.762 (15 x 30 in). In-

scribed, l.r.: MJ. Heade 1876. Private

collection. Photo: Herbert P. Vose

248. D. H. Anton Melbye. A Frigate

and a Brig Under Sail, 1844. Oil on

canvas. 0.471 x 0.575 (i8

9

/ie x 22% in).

Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen

(not in exhibition; at left, below)

Other major Danish landscapists of this generation were Christian Kpbke

(1810-1848) and Johan T. Lundbye (1818-1848), both of whom made numerous

luminous landscapes. Kpbke was particularly prolific,and one series of views

including View from Kastelsvolden (18405; fig. 250) and Shore Scene (c. 1836; fig.

251) remind one of Kensett's carefully composed coastal views: the latter

painting is particularly close, with tall trees and shoreline to the left, and the

quiet river stretching far into the distance on the right. Lundbye, unlike

Kflbke, painted landscape exclusively. His Danish Coast also recalls Kensett in

composition, and the Zealand Landscape, 1840 (both Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek,

Copenhagen), again parallels luminism in its horizontality, its interest in light,

and its attention to detail.

In addition, Dankvart Dreyer (1816-1852) made very subtle atmospheric

studies on the Jutland heaths; and his View ofAssens (18308; Fyens Stiftmuseum,

Odense, Denmark) recalls Whittredge's Newport views in its flat horizon with

sea beyond. Better known in his own day was Dreyer's contemporary Martinus

Rorbye (1803-1848), a Norwegian-born student of Lorentzen and Eckersberg.

After travels to Paris, Italy, Greece, and Turkey, he was elected a" member of the

Copenhagen Academy in 1838 and, in the decade before his early death, became

well known as an innovative stylist in portraiture, genre, and landscape. His

Beach atBlokhusene (1848; fig. 252), a finished painting remarkably like the oil

sketches of Gensler and Heade discussed above, depicts beach, sea, and sky

226 STEBBINS
250. Christian K0bke. View ofKastelsvolden, 18405. Private collection. Photo: Museum

of Fine Arts, Boston (not in exhibition)

within a simple horizontal format and studies both the vastness of nature and

the quality of changing light effects. Related coastal and heath views, all

depicting empty, stark landscapes with dramatic, flat horizons and great skies

above, were painted by Hans Gabriel Friis (1839-1892), Peter W. C. Kyhn

(1819-1903), and J. A. B. La Cour (1837-1909): the latter's Sen Scene with Rocky

Coast (fig. 253) is typical of this school. Finally, mention should be made of the

very different but equally luminous landscapes of Christian Zacho (1843-1913),

another product of the Copenhagen Academy, who later studied with Bonnat

m Paris. His Summer's Day on the Banks of the Rivulet in Saebygaard Wood

(Jutland) (fig. 254)27 depicts an interior forest scene with the same delicacy of

touch, subtlety of sunlight and reflection, and warm palette that one finds in

Gilford's Indian Summer on Claverack Creek (1868; fig. 127) and that typify the

latter's work.

Luminism, or something very like it, can be found everywhere in Europe. In

France one would cite the landscapes of Emile Foubert (>-i9io/n) or Alexandre

Calame (1810-1864), and in Italy the works of the Florentine Macchiaioli, as

William Gerdts has pointed out;28 but the tradition weakens significantly as

one moves south. The strongest parallels are found, not surprisingly, in northern countries whose cultures were most like America's. There are close parallels

in England, Germany, and especially Denmark, with its youthful and largely

imported artistic tradition.

251. Christian K0bke, Shore Scene, c. 1836. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

(not in exhibition)

STEBBINS 227

252. Martinus Rorbye. Beach at Blokhusene, 1848. Oil on canvas. 0.206 x 0.484 (gy, x

i9Vi6 in). Art Museum of Sor0, Denmark. Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (not in

exhibition)
253. Janus Andreas Bartholin La Cour. Sea Scene with Rocky Coast. Location unknown

254. Christian Zacho. Summer's Day on the Banks of the Rivulet in Saebygaard Wood

(Jutland). Location unknown

255. Grigory Soroka. The Fisherfolk, c. 1845-1850. Oil on canvas. 0.670 x 1.020 (26% x

4oy8 in). Russian Museum, Leningrad. Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (not in

exhibition)

Most closely related of all is the work of Russian painters, who were about

the same distance from the art centers of Paris and Rome, London and

Hamburg, as were their American counterparts. While in most European

countries the luminist variants predate their American counterparts, this is not

the case in Russia. There, the parallel between styles appears to be nearly exact.

For example, the forerunner of "Russian luminism" is The Fisherfolk (c. 1845-

1850; fig. 255) by Grigory Soroka (1823-1864), who was himself a student of the

great Alexey Venetsianov. Soroka's painting corresponds precisely in mood,

construction, and style to William Sidney Mount's Eel Spearing at

Setauket (184.5, fig- 256). In shape and in the perfect balance of the composition,

in the pervading calm of the view across the water to an inhabited shore, and

even to the simple boat with its standing figure and the diagonals of oar and

pole, the pictures echo one another. The critic Smirnov points out that The

Fisherfolk was a masterpiece in Soroka's oeuvre, that it "embodies the very

essence of.. . the artist's native place,"29 that it is harmonious, tranquil, yet

deeply emotional—all true also of Mount's work.

Two studies of the Pontine Marshes by A. A. Ivanov (i8n-i868) date from 1838:

they are fine luminous pictures, empty, atmospheric, tenderly colored in a

manner reminiscent of Friedrich, and extremely horizontal (see fig. 257). They

are exceptions (paralleling Cole's Lake Scene, 1844; Detroit Institute of Arts)

that predate the main body of Russian luminism. IvanoVs advanced work must

be due, at least in part, to his thorough training and his extensive travels: after a

228 STEBBINS
decade at the academy, St. Petersburg, he went to Italy in 1830 on a grant from

the Institute for the Encouragement of Art, also visiting Germany and Austria;

he then moved to Rome permanently in 1831.

Liev Felixovitch Lagorio (1826-1905) received his education at St. Petersburg

and traveled widely in France and Italy. His seascapes of the 1870$, such as Skip

at Sea (Aivazovsky Gallery, Feodosia, U.S.S.R.), depict old-fashioned square

riggers on dark seas, much in the manner of James Hamilton, and their flat

horizons and dramatic light effects also recall the work of the Philadelphia

painter. Quite different, but also nearly identical in spirit and style to American

painting is Lagorio's Crossing the Terek (fig. 258) which so much recalls Worthington Whittredge's Crossing the Ford, Platte River, Colorado (1870; fig. 259).

The most important group in mid-nineteenth-century Russian art was the

Peredvizhniki ("the Itinerants") whose members, encouraged by the political

reforms of the i86os, developed a "brilliant and distinct national style."30 Even

before the group's founding in 1870, many of the painters involved exhibited

regularly at the Tretyakov Gallery, founded in Moscow in 1856. In the early

years, history and genre paintings of popular and "democratic" subjects dominated; however, some of the founding members were landscape specialists

256. William Sidney Mount. Eel Spearing at Setauket, 1845. Oil on canvas.

0.737 x 0.915 (29 x 36 in). Inscribed, in shadow under boat: Wm. S. Mount.

New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown

whose work of the sixties and later relates closely to luminism. For example, a

founding member of the group was Lev Lvovich Kamenev (1833-1886), who

studied in Moscow and then traveled in Germany and Switzerland. His

Landscape (1871; Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow), recalls Gifford and McEntee in its

horizontality and its hazy light effects. And in the following year he made

several vertical woodland views, which are close to Whittredge's. His style is

related to that of Aleksey Petrovich Bogolyubov (1824-1896), also an "Itinerant," who studied in St. Petersburg at the academy, was influenced by Ivan

Aivazovsky, then traveled on a grant (1854-1860) to study in Paris with Jean

Baptiste Isabey and in Diisseldorf with Andreas Achenbach. In the years just

before settling in Paris for good (1873), he executed fine, warm woodland

scenes reminiscent of Gifford and calm, empty harbor views as well.

Another founder was M. K. Klodt von Jurgensburg (1832-1902), a St.

Petersburg man who won a traveling grant from the Academy of Arts, like so

many of the best Russian painters, and between 1858 and 1861 worked in

Switzerland and France. As director of the academy's landscape class beginning

in 1871, Jurgensburg was an influential figure whose stylistic development

typifies the "mainstream" of the Russian school. Highway in Autumn (1863;

STEBBINS 229
257. A. A. Ivanov. Pontine Marshes, 1838. Oil on canvas. 0.315 x 0.944 (12% x 373

/16 in).

Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (not in exhibition)

Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow) like Bierstadt's Sunset on the Prairie (1861; fig. 134),

depicts a dramatic sunset sky above a flat horizon. Both paintings have a sense

of great space: they speak to the power and drama of nature through striking

colors and a stark composition. In the early seventies, the work becomes more

domestic in scale: his Ploughing (1872; fig. 260) recalls Homer and especially

Eakins in the sharp lighting of a single figure in a field. His dramatic placement

of the farmer and his horse in the middle ground recalls Eakins' similar

compositions (of exactly these years) that depict hunters in the same flat fields;

both painters had an exquisite ability to make the commonplace moving and

memorable. Then, for a last example, in Timbered Landscape at Noon (1876;

Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow) one finds a change both in style and subject: forms

are now blurred, light more diffuse, and a sense of loss pervades the scene as a

single tall tree to the left anchors a simple horizontal composition.

There are many coincidences of style and subject between Russian and

American landscape. The early landscapes of Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindji (1841-

1910), who was self-taught before studying at the St. Petersburg Academy in

1868, are comparable to American works. His very horizontal landscapes of c.

1872-1873 recall Wyant and Martin, while the many views after 1880 that depict a

winding river in a marsh inevitably bring Heade to mind. Kuindji's Morning on

the Dnieper (1881; fig. 261) is typical in its emptiness, its low, flat horizon with

emphasis on light and sky, and the details of foreground grasses and flowers.

His later work continues the same themes, but with increasingly strident light

effects (again, like Heade); and the paintings after 1890, like those of his great

contemporaries Levitan and Savrasov, are quite different in mood as they

become more symbolist than luminist.

However, of all of the Russians, in fact of all European painters, the one

whose work consistently relates to American developments and particularly to

luminism is Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky (1817-1900). He studied at the

academy, St. Petersburg, and with the French marine specialist, Philippe

Tanneur, who had come at the request of the Czar in 1835. He then traveled on

258. Liev Felixovitch Lagorio. Crossing the Terek. Aivazovsky Gallery, Feodosia,

U.S.S.R. (not in exhibition)

260. M. K. Klodt von Jurgensburg. Ploughing, 1872. Oil on canvas. Tretyakov Gallery,

Moscow. Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (not in exhibition)

an academy grant through Europe, to England, France, Holland, and Italy In

1844 he returned and immediately gained an important place in the Russian art

world, as he was quickly appointed painter to the naval general staff. Making

his home in Feodosia between extensive voyages, Aivazovsky founded an art

230 STEBBINS
259. Thomas Worthington Whittredge.

Crossing the Ford, Platte River, Colorado, 1870.

Oil on canvas. 1.023 x 1.756 (4-0% x 69% in).

Inscribed, l.r.: W. Whittredge. The Century

Association, New York. Photo: Frick Art

Reference Library

school there in 1865 and a gallery in 1880, and by the end of his long career he had

produced over six thousand paintings.

The very early works, such as View of the Coast Near St. Petersburg (1835;

Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow), are moody and symbolic and suggest Friedrich's

influence. However, his vision and his sense of light were enlarged through his

travels, as seen in The Coast at Amalfi (1841; Russian Museum, Leningrad). The

following years find his style matured in the marvelously luminous Bay of

Naples by Moonlight (1842; Aivazovsky Art Gallery, Feodosia, U.S.S.R.), a study

in dark blues of sea and sky contrasting with the bright orange moonlight, and

especially in Seashore: Calm (1843; fig. 262). The latter retains a classical element

in the figure group to the right but otherwise is a pure study of calm green and

yellow sea and the warm, hazy sky, broken by the verticals of the standing figure

to the right and the masts of a becalmed ship to the left. Both of these pictures

parallel Lane's achievements a few years later, and the closeness of the two

painters is made even clearer by Keval (Tallinn) also 1844 (fig. 263). Composition, mood, light, the glassy, calm sea, foreground rowboats, sagging sails—all

remind one of Lane's harbor scenes. The shape of the painting, the large area of

sky, and the distant city view relate especially to Lane's Boston Harbor (fig. 239).

261. Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindji. Morning on the Dnieper, 1881. Oil on canvas. 1.050 x 1.670

(4i5/16 x 65% in). Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (not in exhibition)

STEBBINS 231
262. Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky. Seashore: Calm, 1843. Oil on canvas. 1.140 x

1.870 (447/8

 x 735

/i« in)- Russian Museum, Leningrad, (not in exhibition)

Aivazovsky's work becomes increasingly expressive, and it calls to mind first

one American painter and then another. The Ninth Wave (1850; Russian

Museum, Leningrad), with its huge, transparent cresting green wave is a

powerful romantic image, executed as Bierstadt did on several occasions, as in

Seal Rocks, San Francisco (c. 1872; collection of Sandra and Jacob Y. Terner,

Beverly Hills, California). Icebergs (Aivazovsky Art Gallery, Feodosia,

U.S.S.R.) echoes Bradford's characteristic composition, with the dark ship

outlined against the greens, blues, and pinks of the iceberg. A Beach Scene at

Sunset (fig. 264)31 with its flat sea and central becalmed strip recalls Heade's

Becalmed, Long Island Sound (fig. 249), while The Black Sea (1881; fig. 265), with

its simple composition of dark, foaming waves below and luminous sky above,

brings to mind Heade's Off Shore: After the Storm (c. 1865; Museum of Fine

Arts, Boston). And the dramatic Rainbow, with shipwreck and survivors5

lifeboat in the mist, recalls several of Winslow Homer's pictures, particularly

the watercolor The Ship's Boat, 1883, at the New Britain Museum of American

Art, New Britain, Connecticut.

One additional figure should be mentioned, the Russian-born painter and

watercolorist Eugen Ducker (1841-1916), as his career gives additional

evidence—if any is needed—of the extraordinary internationalism of the

luminist style. Ducker was trained at the St. Petersburg Academy, 1858-1863,

then received a major travel grant which enabled him to journey to Germany,

France, Belgium, Holland, and Italy. He was elected a member of the

academies at St. Petersburg, Berlin, and Stockholm, and he taught for a

263. Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky. Reval (Tallinn), 1844. Oil on canvas. 1.180 x

1.880 (467/16 x 74 in). Central Naval Museum, Leningrad, (not in exhibition)

number of years at Diisseldorf. His paintings of restful, flat seas in a luminist

style (for example, Evening at Sea^ 1876; fig. 266) were influential at the time in

providing an alternative to the "rougher, romantic marine views" of Andreas

Achenbach.32

From all of this discussion we should not conclude that there is no American

style, for there surely is—just as there are Russian, Danish, and French styles.

However, it should be clear that nineteenth-century romantic art grew in

similar ways throughout the Western world, and for the moment the parallels

and similarities among the arts of various nations may be as important as any

distinctions. The Americans, after all, were in the same position as the Danes

and the Russians in their distance from the great art centers and in their

reception of so much style and direction through artists' travel, from books and

engravings, and from the importation of foreign artists and ideas. This does

not mean that Aivazovsky's art should not be considered "indigenous" (e.g.

originating or produced naturally in a particular land or region) to Russia, or

Lane's to America, so long as the qualities of either man's art or style are not

thought to be uniquely Russian or American.

We surely have much research to do in the analysis of style and influence. We

have been so busy with our pro-French bias, trying to understand how GifFord

could have missed Courbet in Paris, or whether Homer saw Monet, that we

have not fully investigated what he and the other Americans did see and how it

affected them. Similarly, we know now that the visual diet at home was far

more eclectic than has been supposed, that modern painters of every national232 STEBBINS
264. Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky. A Beach Scene at Sunset. Oil on canvas. Location unknown. Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

ity were exhibiting regularly in New York, Boston, and elsewhere. We know

that Church collected Melbye drawings (given the group at Olana); that

Aivazovsky traveled to America at least once; that a "Lane55 and a "Gifford"

and, indeed, a luminist style are found in virtually every country. The style was

an international one, with local variation, and there was certainly far more

contact among the individual national schools than has been suspected. Almost

all of the Americans traveled widely, and a great many contemporary European

pictures were also being exhibited here. Almost every painter mentioned here,

for example, was represented at the Philadelphia fair of 1876 (Aivazovsky by

seven paintings), and most had been seen here before that.

Thus, American painters seem to have been no more derivative than the

painters of England, Denmark, or Russia. To examine the context in which

they worked, to understand the limited role of landscape and of luminism

within American painting in the years 1855-1875, to explore the anomaly of great

artistic productivity in this time of supposed moral and cultural collapse, and to

seek European parallels and precursors for our artists—as I have tried to do

here—by no means denigrates the remarkable achievements of American

luminists; rather, it may help us to understand those achievements better.

266. Eugen Diicker. Evening at Sea, 1876. Oil on canvas. 0.580 x 0.960 (227/8 x 37% in).

Galerie G. Paffrath, Dusseldorf. Photo: Helena Paffrath (not in exhibition)

265. Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky. The Black Sea, 1881. Oil on canvas. 1.490 x 2.080

(58% x 8i7/8 in). Iretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (not in

exhibition)

STEBBINS 233
Notes

nspired by the work of William

ritten only with the skillful and

d of Elizabeth Prelinger, National

Arts intern in the Paintings De

Fine Arts, Boston. Our necessarily

h made extensive use of the ex

of the Fine Arts Library at Har

um, and we are most grateful for

of its staff, as we are to the Photog

he Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

man, Book of the Artists (New York,

s, 512.

s, 525.

s, 527.

rves, The Art-Idea (1864; Cam

93.

82.

208.

don, Hours with Art and Artists

170.

ann, History of American Art (Bos

ricanArt, 55.

rican Art, 56.

eet, The Hudson River School [exh.

Chicago and Whitney Museum of

go and New York, 1945).

Introduction in M. and M. Karolik

aintings 1815-1865 (Boston, 1949).

k, American Painting of the

ealism, Idealism, and the American

, 1969).

"Democratic Vistas" in The Port

New York, 1978), 325-326.

he Emergence of Modern America,

27), chap. 3: "The Moral Collapse."

derickson, The Inner Civil War:

Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New

York, 1965), 183.

21. James D. Hart, The Popular Book: A History of

America's Literary Taste (Berkeley, Calif., 1963), 157.

22. Nevins, Modern America, 229.

23. Novak, American Painting, 95.

24. The Etruscan School [exh. cat., Fine Art Society,

Ltd.] (London, 1976). On English landscape in general

see also Allen Staley, The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape (Oxford, 1973) and Leslie Parris, Landscape in Britain, c.

1750-1850 (London, 1973).

25. Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the

Northern Romantic Tradition (London, 1975). See also

Kermit S. Champa, German Painting oftheioth Century

[Yale University Art Gallery] (New Haven, 1970) and

Caspar David Friedrich, 1774-1840: Romantic Landscape

Painting in Dresden [Tate Gallery] (London, 1972). For

Germans in Scandinavia see Olaf Klose and Lilli Martius,

Skandinavische Landschaftsbilder, Deutsche Kunstlerreisen

von 1780 bis 1864 (Neumunster, 1975).

26. See Henrik Bramsen, Danske Marinemalere

(Copenhagen, 1962); Vagn Poulsen, Danish Painting and

Sculpture (Copenhagen); Mario Krohn, Maleren Christen K^bkes (Copenhagen, 1955); Danische Maler (Leipzig,

1924).

27. Location unknown; see The World's Columbian Exposition, official catalogue, Royal Danish Commission,

1893, no. 157.

28. William H. Gerdts, "On the Nature of Luminism"

in American Luminism [exh. cat., Coe Kerr Gallery]

(New York, 1978).

29. G. Smirnov, Venetsianov and His School (Leningrad,

1973), 22.

30. A. Lebedev, The Itinerants (Leningrad, 1974), 7-

See also N. Novouspcnsky^Aivazovsky (Leningrad, 1972);

Barsamov, Aivazovsky in the Crimea (1972); E. Korotkevich, "Introduction" in Landscape Masterpieces from

Soviet Museums [exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts and

Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum] (London, 1975); John

E. Bowlt, "A Russian Luminist School? Arkhip

Kuindzhi's Red Sunset on the Dnepr," Metropolitan

Museum Journal) 10 (1975), 119-129; and The Art of Russia

1800-1850 [exh. cat., University of Minnesota Gallery]

(Minneapolis, 1978).

31. Present location unknown; sold at Sotheby, London, Oct. 16,1974, cat. no. 131.

32. Ulrich Thieme-Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon derBildenden Kiinstler (Leipzig, 1914), "Eugen Ducker" 10: 52.

268. Sanford Robinson Gifford. Logo d'Orta, 1868. Pencil on pair of sketchbook pages. 0.121 x 0.451 (4%

 x J73

/4 in). Inscribed,

l.r.: Isold san Julio—Logo d'Orta—-Julio 2ist—1868—. The Brooklyn Museum, New York; Gift of Miss Jennie Brownscomb

236
Luminist Drawings

Linda S. Ferber

IN HIS IMPORTANT ARTICLE OF 1948, "Early Studies in Light and Air by

American Landscape Painters," John I. H. Baur observed that much American

landscape painting at mid-century "shows an extraordinary generic similiarity"1

 The same may be said of many of the landscape drawings of the period,

which share with the paintings that "peculiar clarity, spaciousness and feeling

for palpable air."2 While drawings have not been considered in previous

investigations of luminist style, it does seem logical to hope to discover in the

landscape draftsmanship of the period a style or approach to composition and

light that might parallel some of those particular characteristics in oil paintings

related to the luminist vision. In fact, drawings, being the private documents

that they are, often reveal much about the processes of picture making and may

therefore yield some further insight into the pervasive yet elusive phenomenon

of luminism.

The drawings discussed here parallel in date those paintings representing the

high-water mark of luminist style, from about 1850 to 1876. These same years

saw the rise of interest in watercolor and a sharp increase in the use of the

medium by American artists. We will refer from time to time to these related

works on paper but will concentrate primarily upon an examination of black

and white drawings, since these required only the simplest equipment—a

pencil and a sheet of paper—easily obtained and eminently portable, thus

perfectly suited to the landscape painter's roving search for subjects. The

predominance of pencil work here is an accurate reflection of both its universal

use as a medium and the great range of effects attainable with such simple

means. The generally modest dimensions of most landscape drawings offered

no impediment to generosity and even grandeur of vision. The widest and

deepest of vistas, such as Sanford Gifford's Logo Giardini (1868; fig. 267—see

also fig. 268) might be successfully captured in the smallest of pocket sketchbooks.

The drawings these painters produced are as varied in subject and approach

as their paintings—in size, medium, technique, and degree of finish. They are

firmly united, however, in the commitment to the examination of landscape, to

the recording of terrain and topography, as well as to the more fugitive

phenomena of light, atmosphere, and weather. It is particularly fascinating to

observe both the contrasts and the parallels in the way these phenomena were

recorded by different hands. Gifford and John F. Kensett, for example, are

fluent draftsmen in their closely comparable records of a rolling vista of hills

and fields (see figs. 269-270)—in the quick, sure manner with which their

pencils seek out the major lines defining the terrain, assign areas of light and

shadow, erupt into lively calligraphics denoting the complexities of foliage.

Contrast this energetic manner with the slow-moving hand of Fitz Hugh Lane,

carefully, deliberately—even somewhat haltingly—tracing the profile of the

Cape Ann coast like a mapmaker (see fig. 271). Compare the way Gifford in his

drawing of an Adirondack lake (fig. 272) is primarily interested in the bare

mountain wall as a foil for the play of light and shadow over broad planes,

while William Haseltine seeks out every fissure and surface irregularity of the

boulders comprising the rocky coasts of Nahant and Mt. Desert (figs. 273,280).

Gifford, Aaron Draper Shattuck, David Johnson, and William Hart realize

their landscape vistas almost wholly in outline. Delicate and often quite

minimal modulations of tone within those outlines suffice to suggest detail and

texture. In their drawings of Lake George, Johnson, Shattuck, and Gifford

(figs. 274-276) allow the untouched surface of the sheet to function both as the

broad planar surface of the lake and the sky above. An anonymous Gloucester,

Massachusetts, draftsman, on the other hand, chose to present an elaborate

array of surface detail and texture, thoroughly articulating foliage, rocks, and

water in an impressive display of ability to manipulate the pencil point (fig.

277). W. T. Richards, at the height of his enthusiasm for the English critic John

237
67. Sanford Robinson Gifford. Logo Giardini, 1868. Pencil on pair of sketchbook pages. 0.121 x 0.451 (4% x 17% in). Inscribed,

.e.: Giardini—Sette Ltfh; l.r.: x city. The Brooklyn Museum, New York; Gift of Miss Jennie Brownscomb

Ruskin, was capable of tours de force of such detailed and essentially linear

pencil work. In another mood at a later date, however, he might sacrifice detail

o pure tone to capture the atmospheric glow that pervades his small work

Coastal Scene (c. 1882; fig. 154).

The range of internal modeling and texture might be further enriched by the

use of washes over a line drawing. The nearly monochromatic washes in the

harbor views by Albert Van Beest (see fig. 279) and William Bradford serve to

articulate lights and shadows in the sky and to enliven the reflective water

urfaces, as well as to strengthen the silhouetted shapes of sailing vessels.

Transparent polychrome washes might be applied to annotate color or the fall

of light as in Haseltine's Mt. Desert (c. 1860; fig. 280) or C. H. Moore's

Landscape (Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachussetts). While removed from the realm of strict black and white, these works

nevertheless remain tinted drawings rather than watercolor paintings since

ine, not color, remains their dominant feature. Even in more richly painted

examples such as Richards' Moonlight on Mt. Lafayette, New Hampshire (1873;

fig. 281) and D. J. Kennedy's Moonrise in a Fog (1886; fig. 282) we might note that

the improvisatory nature of watercolor is never exploited. Rather the medium

is consistently handled with delicacy and precision of touch to record the

subtlest nuances of light and reflection. This touch is thoroughly consistent

with the luminist approach in the black and white media as well as painting in

oils. Even in a limited survey we can see how strong landscape draftsmanship

was in mid-century America. For example, the drawings by Gifford show

relatively little development from a strong early style. Comparison of his early

and late work in pencil suggests that within a few years of embarking on his

career, Gifford was already a highly competent landscape draftsman—a pattern

repeated in the development of Richards, Jasper Francis Cropsey, and Kensett

among others.

Although drawings are even more subject to the vicissitudes of fate than

paintings, impressive numbers of them have survived. There are sizable deposits in public collections by Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederic

Church, Lane, Richards, Haseltine, Kensett, and John W. Casilear.3 The names

of the latter two artists have both been tentatively assigned to a group of over

two hundred drawings acquired by the Detroit Institute of Arts in I949-4 The

long-standing confusion between the hands of these two artists reflects the

strong stylistic parallels we recognize in many of the landscape drawings of the

period and points up how little is really known about the development of that

common style. While the materials for a study of American works on paper

exist in some abundance, as we have seen, American drawings in general have

only recently begun to be examined systematically and in depth. Monographic

studies often include representative graphic work but generally demonstrate a

viewpoint that considers it primarily in relation and as accessory to oil paintings. Relatively little attention has been directed toward drawings as independent works.

The publication in 1962 of the two-volume catalogue of the M. and M.

Karolik collection of American drawings and watercolors did much to reveal

the great range and richness of American works on paper. A number of

exhibitions have also offered glimpses of the high quality of American draw238 FERBER
269. Sanford Robinson Gifford. Palmer Hill, Catskill Mountains, September

26, 1849. Pencil on white paper. 0.146 x 0.222 (5% x 8% in). Inscribed, 1.1.:

Palmer Hill—CatskillMts. Sept. 26th. Vassar College Art Gallery, Poughkeepsie, New York (above)

270. John Frederick Kensett. New England Landscape, 1848-1850. Pencil on

beige paper. 0.203 x 0.286 (8 x n

1

^ in). Lyman Allyn Museum, New London

ings. Knowledgeable collectors such as John Davis Hatch and Paul Magriel

have generously allowed selections from their private collections to be shown

(see, for example, fig. 283). In the area of landscape in particular, the Brooklyn

Museum in 1969 organized an important exhibition, Drawings of the Hudson

River School, which represented the first attempt to survey the graphic work of

the native landscape school. In his recent ambitious book, Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., undertook the first major effort to investigate and establish a historical

framework for the development of works of art on paper in America, from

earliest times to the present. The program of inquiry outlined by Stebbins in

this study will undoubtedly guide those who will approach narrower aspects of

the subject in the future. In a survey of the scope of American Master Drawings

and Watercolors, Stebbins' treatment of the landscape drawings of the period

under consideration here is necessarily brief. He makes clear, however, that

these artists 'Viewed drawing and sketching as valuable in themselves."5

The large numbers in which the drawings have survived corroborates this

observation, suggesting that the regular practice of drawing from nature was

very much a part of the American landscape painter's routine. Casilear advised

Kensett in a letter of 1832: "Attend closely to your drawing as you know 'tis the

very essence of our art. . . ."6 The very preservation of these drawings by the

artists (most drawing caches are found still in family hands) offers evidence that

they were, indeed, valued beyond an immediate practical use. The artists

themselves not only preserved their own drawings but on occasion collected

those of their fellows as well. Drawings were often presented as tokens of

respect and friendship.7 Cropsey, for instance, compiled an album (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) in which drawings and watercolors by contemporaries and associates were carefully preserved.8

As these albums might imply, the practice of drawing itself was associated

not only with study but also with a certain informal sense of congenial

fraternity among artists. The various sketch clubs founded by artists during the

first half of the century were formed both "for the promotion of mutual

intercourse and improvement in impromptu sketching."9 These gatherings

provided occasions for social activity among professional artists and an opportunity to practice drawing from memory. While eventually sketching was

abandoned and social activity prevailed, the sketch clubs were, for a time, active

forums in which to exchange criticisms and absorb influences. Cole, Durand,

and Casilear were all sketch club members and perhaps might in some way have

been instrumental in transplanting this congenial practice into the open air.

Outdoor sketching forays to favored spots were often made in concert and

were—to judge from contemporary reports—highly convivial in nature.

Durand's own trip with Cole to Schroon Mountain in 1837 (in company with

Mrs. Cole and Mrs. Durand) seems to have been a turning point in his decision

to concentrate upon landscape painting.10 While apparently without such

FERBER 239
27i. Fitz Hugh Lane. Western Shore of Gloucester Outer Harbor, 1857. Pencil on paper. 0.229 x 0.70 (9 x 28 in).

Inscribed, I.e.: EH. Lane del. Cape Ann Historical Association, Gloucester, Massachusetts

inspiring company, Gifford, nevertheless, recorded the importance of such

outdoor sketching forays in turning him to landscape painting: "Having once

enjoyed the absolute freedom of the Landscape painter's life, I was unable to

return to portrait painting. From this time my direction in art was determined."11

 Durand himself on his own summer sketching excursions was often

in company with other artists including Casilear, Kensett, Samuel Colman,

Alvan Fisher, and the Hart brothers.12 Kensett's sketching companions at

various times included—besides Durand and Casilear—Cropsey, Benjamin

Champney, and Frederic Church.13

The columns of The Crayon regularly recorded the summer and fall peregrinations of landscape painters. An exchange of humorous letters in the 1856 issue

debated the merits of West Campton and North Conway—both favorite

sketching grounds in the White Mountains. They draw a vivid picture for us of

these excursions and suggest how close-knit a group both the older and

younger generations of landscape painters seem to have been. "Poppy Oil,"

anonymous defender of West Campton, noted that he found among the artists

there on his arrival "Mr. Durand and his family, Messrs. Gerry, Pope and

Williams of Boston, and Mr. Thorndyke and Mr. Richards of New York. Mr.

Ordway of Boston had just left. Since then two other Boston artists have

returned homewards, and their places are at present filled by ... Messrs. Gay

and Wheelock."14 "Mummy" (Alvan Fisher), advocate for North Conway,

counted among his fellow painters at that spot, "the scholarly and thoughtful

Huntington," Hubbard, Stillman, Post, Suydam, Colman, Shattuck, Hotchkiss, and Champney.15

 Such lists lend weight to "Poppy Oil's" claim that should

anyone "make any allusion to a 'room,' you will be at once told that it can't be

thought of,—that every corner is occupied by 'the artists'." He goes on to

outline what must have been a fairly regular routine: "At half-past six we

breakfast, and afterwards if the weather is bad,. . . we chat, or read, or write, or

go out into the barn and make studies of the cattle.. . . When the day is fair, we

sally out with our traps, in twos or threes, or perhaps a committee of the whole

for the morning study." He recorded that in "the evenings .. . we assemble in

gay gossip about the hearth,"16 undoubtedly exchanging ideas and perhaps

comparing sketches. "Flake White," another pseudonymous artistcorrespondent from North Conway the summer before, had noted, in fact, that

"the artists here are in the habit of calling on each other, and discussing the

merits of various studies."17

Such convivial outings continued into later decades. A page from a Gifford

sketchbook of 1877 (fig. 285) records not only the scenery of Maine's Mt.

Katahdin but the fellow members of what he playfully dubbed "The Katadin

Tea Party." Among the "Landscape Painters" present were Robbins, De Forest,

and Church along with "Holly: Engineer and Metalurgist [sic]; Laurson:

Architect" and Gifford who listed himself simply as "Fisherman." It is likely

that Gifford's nonartist friends not only fished but might have produced

sketches of their own as well. Drawing from nature was central to the landscape

experience not only of professional painters but of the amateur as well. On his

first visit to Gloucester in the summer of 1871, W. T. Richards wrote of being

24O FERBER
272. Sanford Robinson Gifford. Adirondack, August-September 1866. Pencil on paper.

0.146 x 0.229 (5% x 9 in). Vassar College Art Gallery, Poughkeepsie, New York

273. William Stanley Haseltine. E^ Rock,

Nahant, i86os. Pencil and watercolor on paper.

0.347 x 0.556 (13% x 21% in). Permanent Collection of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Gift

of Helen H. Plowden, 52.20. Photo: Jerome

Drown

FERBER 241
guided locally by an individual sounding very much like a serious amateur: "a

gentleman of Gloucester, whose native taste and former experiments in scenery

had given him a good knowledge of the picturesque parts of the country"18

One wonders whether the fine pencil drawing of 1872, recording in detail a

Gloucester inlet by an unknown but clearly trained hand, might be an "experiment in scenery" by just such a gentleman. In 1867, Henry Tuckerman counted

among the accomplishments of a cultured person the ability "to sketch a little

from nature.5519 This is undoubtedly what the ladies of the Horicon Sketch

Club are doing in S. R. Stoddard's photograph of 1882 (fig. 286). Seated on one

of the islands in Lake George, they are sketching one of the favorite vistas of the

nineteenth century: the broad surface of the lake ringed by heavily wooded

mountains also seen in drawings by Casilear, Shattuck, Johnson, and Gifford.

Stoddard's charming photographic record of the informal communal pleasures

of outdoor sketching acquires a slightly ironic tinge when we recollect that it

was to be the camera of today's ubiquitous shutterbug that would ultimately

275. Aaron Draper Shattuck. Lake

George, 1858. Pencil on paper. 0.308 x

0.473 (i^Vs x 18% in). Inscribed, l.r.:

Lake George. Oct. z

d

 1858. Private collection. Photo: Helga Photo Studio

replace the amateur pausing to "sketch a little from nature.55

In the earlier years of the nineteenth century able draftsmanship was seen as a

very important element in the education of the American citizen. This belief

was embodied in the instruction books—the so-called drawing manuals—

which were published in great numbers during the nineteenth century. There

seems little doubt that young artists made ready use of the basic instruction in

these books, as we will see. The major audience to which the manuals addressed

themselves, however, was the general public, the fledgling amateur draftsman.

In his recent thorough study, Peter Marzio has established the importance of

the American drawing books published before the Civil War: "They represent

the first serious attempt by professional artists to educate the untrained

populace. . . . Enchanted by the rise of a political democracy, the drawing

promoters sought to build an artist democracy of citizen artists: a nation of

draftsmen.5520

This sanguine view of the possibilities of such training was explicitly stated

242 FERBER
276. Sanford Robinson Gifford. View at Lake George, August 29,1848. Pencil on paper.

0.146 x 0.232 ($% x 9l/8 in). Inscribed, on opposite page at lower edge: From the Pinocle

(illegible)—Narrows—Black Mt.—Shelving Rock, Lake George Aug zgth, 1848. Vassar

College Art Gallery, Poughkeepsie, New York (below)

274. David Johnson. Tongue Mountain, Lake George, 1872. Pencil on paper.

0.305 x 0.470 (12 x i8V2 in). Inscribed, on rock, c.l.: DJ .72 (DJ is in

monogram); and underscored 1.1.: Tongue Mountain. Lake George. Private

collection

in The Cmyon in 1856: "when a good knowledge of elementary drawing shall

become a part of every common school education, the true milennium [sic] of

Art will be inaugurated."21 While the manuals dealt with all branches of subject

matter, the drawing promoters, whom Marzio has dubbed the art crusaders,

viewed nature—particularly American nature—as the strongest potential

"source for a democratic art."22 A good deal of instruction is to be found,

therefore, in the general practice of landscape drawing and a number of

manuals devoted their entire attention to the depiction of scenery. The choice

of American scenery to serve as illustration and model in such manuals was

"intended to give the reader a sense of pride in America and an art which could

capture its natural beauty"23 For example, Fessenden Nott Otis in his Easy

Lessons in Landscape (1851) informed his student-reader that the "complicated

character of Foliage . . . place [s] a faithful representation of it among the most

difficult of the works of Art."24 He offered in his illustrations examples not of a

general tree type, but of specific native species: the birch, ash, oak, maple, and

beech. The similarity of the "stenographic methods" he advocated for each type

of foliage with that found in early sketches by Kensett and Richards suggests

that as young students they consulted similar manuals for basic instruction in

drawing.25 Marzio goes on to observe that "a sectionalism characterized most

manuals. .. . In short, the landscape imagery of the northeastern section of

America became the dominant imagery of the drawing books and it came to

FERBER 243
symbolize American subject matter for a democratic art."26

 The amateur, or for

that matter the young Kensett or Richards, might then not only learn how to

draw a tree but also which tree to draw; their taste in landscape was molded

even as their hand was trained.

The famous books and portfolios of American landscape prints based on

drawings and watercolors by English topographers such as William Birch's The

Country Seats of the United States (1808), William Guy Wall's Hudson River

Portfolio (1820-1828), and William Bartlett's American Scenery (1840)—skillfully

blending topographical record and picturesque interest—have long been recognized as having played an essential role in the development of interest in

landscape in the United States and in establishing a repertoire of subjects for

painters. It is clear from recent research like Marzio's that the focus upon local

scenery in American drawing manuals must also have played a significant role

in this development. There seems little question that these popular publications not only reflected the strong native bias for landscape subjects but

probably also did much to establish and influence that taste as well. Moreover,

it does not seem at all farfetched to trace an element of the genuine popularity

of landscape as a subject in American painting—with both artist and patron—

to the common experience of drawing from nature as a kind of patriotic gesture

by both professional artist and devoted amateur.

As commendable as it might have been, drawing from nature was by no

means to be learned or practiced only as an end in itself, as an article on

"Elementary Drawing" in an 1855 issue of The Crayon makes clear: "We generally look at drawing as an accomplishment, something complete in itself

rather than what it truly is, a means for becoming better acquainted with

Nature."27 The practice was thought to develop both perceptual and spiritual

acuity. Gifford testified in this vein that his sketching forays into the Catskills

and Berkshires in 1846 "opened my eyes to a keener perception and more

intelligent enjoyment of Nature."28 The Crayon continued, emphasizing the

particular benefits of approaching nature, sketchbook in hand: "The habit of

fixing the mind intently on Nature to draw her minuter traits, enables us to see

many things which are lost entirely in a first impression; it would be worth the

while to every lover of Nature to set determinedly at drawing portions of

landscape. .. . It would repay the most laborious exertion."29 While he does

not offer instruction in sketching, William Cullen Bryant's remarks to the

"lover of Nature" in the oft-quoted lines from "Thanatopsis" run parallel: "To

him who in the love/of nature holds communion/with her visible forms,

she/speaks a various language." In an essay of about 1850, W. T. Richards

described his own "solitary walks . . . mid wild tangled woods" where his

companions were "some spirit stirring poem or some modest sketch book,"

244 FERBER

277- Anonymous. View of Gloucester, 1872. Pencil heightened

with Chinese white on paper. 0.254 x 0.435 (10 x 17% in).

Inscribed, 1.1.: Gloucester, July zfd ^2/M.L.B. Private collection. Photo: Helga Photo Studio.
278. William Trost Richards. A Rocky Coast, 1877.

Watercolor on paper. 0.563 x 0.915 (223/16 x 36 in).

Inscribed, l.r.: W". T. Richards 1877. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Bequest of

Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, 1887

both of which added a dimension of "heartfelt spiritual enjoyment5' to his

experience of nature.30 Drawing, like poetry, was plainly perceived as an

important means of "holding communion55 with nature's "visible forms55 and

was—like poetry—very much a part of the ritual of landscape appreciation.

Developing out of the eighteenth-century taste for the picturesque, such

appreciation was influenced by English and American nature poetry and, after

1843, by the English critic John Ruskin5s ideas about landscape as well and

became an act of religious devotion for the romantics of the nineteenth century.

This ideal union of painter and poet is celebrated and commemorated in

Durand's Kindred Spirits of 1849 (New York Public Library) where Bryant

himself and the recently deceased Thomas Cole—sketch portfolio in hand—

are shown gazing together upon the hallowed vista of Kaaterskill Clove.

While the intention of the authors of the drawing manuals was to offer a

practical course of self-instruction, they were not insensible to the ultimate

purpose of this exercise for the true romantic—be he artist or amateur. Not

only were "the beauties of Nature55 to be recorded, but the lessons of nature

were to be learned. In the preface to Easy Lessons in Landscape, Otis noted that

his "series of lessons in landscape drawing55 would guide the learner in an easy,

systematic, and intelligent manner ... to the lessons which nature on every

hand has presented to her loving students.5531 Just what these lessons might

have been is not difficult to discern. A year before Otis, Richards, just beginning his career as a landscape painter, wrote: "Purest and most holy lessons may

be learned from Nature. Lessons . . . stamped with such gigantic impress as if

God's own hand had drawn them there.5532 His remarks present a remarkably

close parallel to those of Asher B. Durand writing five years later in the "Letters

on Landscape Painting55 that "the external appearance of this our dwelling

place .. . is fraught with lessons of high and holy meaning only surpassed by

the light of Revelation.5533

The purpose here is not to rehearse the well-known religious reverence for

nature that was shared by Americans of the middle quarters of the nineteenth

century and that was a touchstone of the native landscape school of that period,

but rather to point out how central the act of drawing from nature was to this

landscape experience. Drawing itself was perceived as a form of revelation. "In

learning to draw,55 wrote The Crayon in 1855, "he learns also to see; and it may

FERBER 245
279- Albeit Van Beest. New Bedford from Fairhaven, c. 1855. Pen, brown and gray wash on paper. 0.319 x 0.721 (i29

/i6 x 28%

in). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; M. and M. Karolik Collection

280. William Stanley Haseltine. Mt. Desert, c. 1860. Pencil and wash on paper. 0.559 x 0.379 (22 x I415/i6 in). Inscribed, 1.1.:

Mt Desert/July 2$. Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York, The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Design (at

right)

safely be said that no one sees Nature but an artist."34 Nowhere was the

importance of drawing from nature as both ritual and pedagogical exercise to

be more explicitly stated than in Durand's "Letters" published in The Crayon

that same year.

When Durand wrote the "Letters" he had been president of the National

Academy of Design since 1845 and would serve until 1861, thus standing for over

fifteen years at the formal head of the nation's major art establishment. That a

landscape painter might attain such a lofty rank indicates the prestige and

popularity of the landscape as a subject in mid-century America. It is even

tempting to consider the "Letters" Durand's own presidential addresses in the

tradition of Reynolds' Discourses. As early as 1867, Tuckerman acknowledged

the importance of these documents as illustrations of Durand's "theory," and he

referred to them as "some pleasing and precious written testimony in the shape

of a few letters on landscape-painting."35 Their importance for us lies in their

value as a compendium of practical advice and philosophical observation by the

acknowledged leader of a cohesive group of landscape painters to which most

of the artists mentioned here belonged. We are justified, therefore, in accepting

the "Letters" as an outline and statement of current practice addressed most

particularly to the student desiring to "devote your whole time and energies to

the study of Landscape Art."36

While the "Letters" have long been known especially for their advocacy of

plein-air painting, their equally consistent stress upon the importance of

drawing has not generally been discussed. For Durand, the veritable "alphabet" of art was to be found "in the practice of drawing."37

 This practice

forms the main topic of his second letter in which he wrote, "A moment's

reflection will convince you of the vital importance of drawing," and he

instructed the student of landscape (in traditional academic pedagogical procedure) to forego painting and "practice drawing with the pencil till you are

sure of your hand."38 The seriousness of this initial step is underscored in the

following paragraphs, in which Durand casts the student of landscape painting

quite literally as a novice undertaking a kind of trial by ordeal; the novice learns

through the acquisition of drawing skills the first steps in the ritual of nature

worship, which for Durand and his contemporaries constituted "the true

Religion of Art."

You will say that I impose on you a difficult and painful task: difficult it is, but not

painful nor ungrateful, and let me assure you that its faithful performance is accompanied by many enjoyments that experience only can enable you to appreciate. Every

246 FERBER
282. David Johnston Kennedy.

Moonrise in a Fog, 1886. Pencil,

watercolor, and Chinese white

on gray paper. 0.248 x 0.556 (9%

x 2i7/8 in). Inscribed, 1.1.:

Philadelphia; l.r.: D.J.Kennedy,

1886.—; on original mount:

Moonrise in a Fog. Private collection. Photo: Helga Photo

Studio

281. William Trost Richards. Moonlight on Mt. Lafayette, New Hampshire, 1873. Watercolor on paper.

0.213 x 0.359 (8% x 14% in). Inscribed, 1.1.: Wm T. Richards 73- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New

York; Gift of Rev. E. L. Magoon, 1880

FERBER 247
step of conscious progress that you make [in drawing], every successful transcript of the

chosen subject, will send a thrill of pleasure to your heart, that you will acknowledge to

give you the full measure of compensation. As a motive to meet with courage and

perseverance every difficulty in the progress of your studies, and patiently to endure the

frequent discouragements attending upon your failures and imperfect efforts, so long as

your love for Nature is strong and earnest, keeping steadily in view the high mission of

the Art you have chosen, I can promise you that the time will come when you will recall

the period of these faithful struggles with a more vivid enjoyment than that which

accompanies the old man's recollections of happy childhood. The humblest scenes of

your successful labors will become hallowed ground to which, in memory at least, you

will make many a joyous pilgrimage and . . . kiss the very earth that bore the print of

your oft-repeated footsteps.39

It is important to keep in mind that these lines refer not to painting but to

learning to draw landscape. We have already encountered in the drawing

manuals the notion of sketching as an element in the appreciation and even

veneration of natural beauty. For Durand, addressing himself not to the

amateur but to the serious student of landscape, the practice assumed an even

loftier and overtly religious purpose. The lessons of nature learned through

drawing would exert an "influence on the heart and mind" and would be "of

high and holy meaning." The true purpose of art, for Durand and his contemporaries, was "impressing the mind through the visible forms of material

beauty, with a deep sense of the invisible and immaterial."40 The key to

knowledge of these "visible forms of material beauty" was drawing.

Durand was not alone at mid-century in urging a dedicated and rigorous

program of drawing and study from nature as essential to the artistic and

spiritual education of the landscape painter. In his Elements of Drawing (1857),

one of the most popular drawing books published during the second half of the

nineteenth century,41 John Ruskin also recommended a concentrated regime of

drawing, not from patterns in manuals, but directly from nature. The student,

Ruskin wrote, "will find, on the whole, that the best answerer of questions is

perserverance; and the best drawing-masters are the woods and hills."42 Ruskin's influence in America, first established in the early 18408 with the publication of the volumes of Modern Painters, was widespread and enthusiastic. An

important key to this enthusiastic reception was that Ruskin's ideas about

nature and landscape reinforced and corroborated already existing ideas and

attitudes. Roger Stein mjohn Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840-1900

writes that the fundamental importance of Ruskin's writings in America in the

years before the Civil War 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

intertwined."43 Such an aesthetic struck a responsive chord in America, where a

domestic Wordsworthian tradition, an attitude of reverence toward nature,

especially American nature, already existed. While his writings appealed to a

broad popular audience, Ruskin's ideas held a special appeal for American

landscape artists. Even established figures like Durand and Church responded

283. Frederic Edwin Church. Magdalena River, New Granada (Ecuador), 1853. Pencil,

touched with white on ivory wove paper. 0.179 x 0.272 (7V16 x 10% in). Inscribed, l.r.: F. E.

Church. John Davis Hatch Collection. Photo: National Gallery of Art, Washington,

D.C.

to his influence and his demand for complete fidelity to nature in art.44 In fact,

much of Durand's insistence in the "Letters" upon careful and devoted study

from nature in both pencil and in oils reflects his familiarity with and belief in

Ruskin's eloquent discourses on truth to nature. In the Elements of Drawing

Ruskin delivered his familiar message concentrating upon the drawing

medium. The "chief aim and bent of the following system," he wrote, "is to

obtain .. . a perfectly patient and . . . delicate method of work, such as may

ensure . . . seeing truly. For I am nearly convinced, that when once we see

keenly enough, there is very little difficulty in drawing what we see."45 Like

Durand, he also stressed the practice of detailed drawing from nature as a

means of heightening perception: "I believe that the sight is a more important

thing than the drawing; and I would rather teach drawing that my pupils may

learn to love Nature, than teach the looking at Nature that they may learn to

draw."46

There were a number of artists in America, most of them younger men, upon

whose method and style Ruskin's exhortations to complete fidelity to nature

had a great impact during the 18508 and i86os.47 Early in 1863 in New York, T. C.

Farrer founded the short-lived Association for the Advancement of the Cause

of Truth in Art, which also included W. T. Richards and C. H. Moore as

members.48 Its philosophy concerning truth to nature in art was drawn from

Ruskin, and the association's official organ The New Path placed particular

248 FERBER
284. John William Casilear. Hudson Highlands, i86os. Pencil, touched with white on

buff wove paper. 0.232 \ 0.352 (93/16 x i37/8 in). John Davis Hatch Collection. Photo:

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

value and emphasis upon draftsmanship echoing and even surpassing Durand

in stressing its importance: "Drawing is the business of a true artist's life; it is

the foundation of everything good in Art; without it there is nothing, and with

a thorough knowledge of it everything is possible. No man can ever give too

much time and effort to its study, or do too much work in simple light and

shade."49 In the "Articles of Organization," Ruskin's famous exhortation in the

conclusion of the first volume of Modern Painters, his demand for fidelity to

nature was wed to the association's demand for strong draftsmanship: "the

right course for young Artists is faithful and loving representation of Nature;

'selecting nothing and rejecting nothing,' seeking only to express the greatest

amount of fact. It is moreover, their duty to strive for the greatest attainable

power of drawing."50 The meticulous detail with which Henry Farrer depicted beached rowboats, dwelling upon the construction and weatherworn surface, must owe something to his Ruskinian training. The fact that

both Moore and Richards were members of the association is certainly of more

than coincidental interest when we compare the elaborate detail, accuracy, and

intense particularization with which they depict the species of boulders and

rocky ledges in Landscape and^l Rocky Coast (fig. 278; see also fig. 291). Both

were extraordinary draftsmen, clearly undertaking and mastering their duty as

ardent Ruskinians "to strive for the greatest attainable power of drawing."

While Durand stressed in the "Letters" the vital importance of drawing, he

was surprisingly casual in suggesting where this key to the "Studio of Nature"

might be acquired; he simply assumed of his student "that you possess the

necessary knowledge of drawing and readily express with the lead pencil the

forms and general character of real objects."51 This was not unusual. The

student seeking to study with an accomplished master was required to have

mastered certain basic skills, and drawing was one of these.52 To acquire and

perfect these fundamental skills, a student might turn to the several sources

which Durand suggested in his first "Letter": "books and the casual intercourse

with artists, accessible to every respectable young student, will furnish you

with all the essential mechanism of the art."53 The communal nature of landscape sketching expeditions is an example of the "casual intercourse with

artists," as is the habit among some artists of sharing and discussing sketches.

One "respectable young student" recorded just such an exchange at North

Conway with none other than Durand himself. Although he refers here

specifically to a plein-air oil sketch, the painting could as easily have been a

drawing:

Mr. Durand happened to call that day to see a brother-artist at the hotel, I ventured,

though I suffer extremely from diffidence, to call his attention to my big sketch of the

Conway Valley. He looked at it silently for a little time, and, after two or three good

whiffs of his cigar, remarked, "You will find it better to finish as you go on, and to pay

more attention to the careful drawing of the forms. ..." I felt a little sobered, but

grateful, for this candid advice, and resolved to go to work in earnest.54

Our ambitious young student then turned to "Mr. Champney" to "give me a

hint" about going on with another sketch. Durand himself stressed the continuing benefits of such exchanges, generously admitting "many an useful

lesson has been taught me by intercourse with professional brethren—even

often from the student and the tyro."55

A second useful source for the student was the instruction book—a category

which included the drawing manuals discussed above. On this subject Durand

wrote: "All that I might say on the various colors and mediums, tools, or what

not, necessary for your purpose, including dissertations on design, composition, effect, color and execution, would only be a repetition of what has been

already written and published throughout the land, and which you can readily

procure of the colorman and the bookseller."56 We have noted the importance

of the manuals in establishing a general taste for landscape subjects and in

encouraging the regular practice of sketching from nature. We should also say a

word here about the general style promulgated by the manuals and which

applied equally to figure and landscape subjects. That style can best be characterized as fundamentally linear.

Marzio quotes Bowen in The United States Drawing Book (1838): "begin with

those great lines which bound the principal masses, and from these. . . proceed

to the smaller ones."57 Durand shared this linear bias, instructing his student to

take "pencil and paper, . . . and draw with scrupulous fidelity the outline or

contour of such objects as you shall select," stressing "the continual demand for

. . . exercise in the practice of outline."58 American draftsmen of this period did

FERBER 249
think primarily and often solely in terms of line, a fact amply illustrated by the

drawings under discussion here. William Hart's White Mountain views, for

example, are enriched both with pencil shading and the application of Chinese

white (figs. 292-293). It is clear, however, that the artist first conceived of his

drawing in careful outline as did Johnson and Shattuck in their views of Lake

George. Some source for this common characteristic of the drawing (and even

much of the painting) of the period should be sought in the mode of instruction offered by the manuals.

We have already pointed to the similarity of early drawings by some artists to

illustrations in the manuals. Driscoll notes that while we do not know that

Kensett studied books such as Benjamin H. Coe's Drawing Book of Trees (1841),

there is, nevertheless, a marked similarity between Coe's plates and Kensetfs

early drawings.59 W. T. Richards may also have learned certain pictorial conventions from one of the many books available. His softly modeled, rather flat

rocks and his type of tree in the early drawings of the 18508 are close, for

instance, to conventional landscape models in Bowen's The United States

Drawing Book.60 Richards had also been a student at Philadelphia's Central

High School, where Rembrandt Peale, author of Graphics (1834)—one of the

most influential American drawing books of the first half of the century—had

established the curriculum and for years taught draftsmanship.61 It is interest286. Seneca Ray Stoddard. The Horicon Sketching Club, 1882. Silverprint photograph. 0.133 x 0.216 (5% x Sl

/2 in).

Collection of Maitland C. DeSormo

285. Sanford Robinson Gifford. The Katadin Tea Party, September 1877. Pencil on brown paper. 0.05 x 0.216 (4.% x 8% in).

Inscribed, at L, under top drawing: At the Inlet (west); at r.,

under bottom drawing: Church Robbins Deforest Landscape

Painters Holly Engineer & Metallurgist Laurson Architect Gifford Fisherman The Katadin Tea Party. Vassar College Art

Gallery, Poughkeepsie, New York

250 FERBER
288. John Frederick Kensett. North from Storm King, i86os. Pencil touched with white

on cream wove paper. 0.226 x 0.353 (915/16 x i415/16 in). John Davis Hatch Collection.

Photo: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

ing to note that years later Thomas Eakins was also a student at the high school

where the exercise in mechanical drawing and perspective undoubtedly influenced the formation of his mathematically precise, linear draftsmanship.62

A preliminary survey reveals that a number of artists represented here shared

some common sources of influence in the formation of their drawing styles—in

an indirect manner through the manuals, as in the case of Richards and

Kensett, and more directly through periods of tutelage under the same

teachers. Both Richards and Haseltine, for example, studied in the early 18508

with Paul Weber (1823-1916), Richards informally and Haseltine formally.63

German-born and trained, Weber brought with him to Philadelphia in 1848 the

meticulously detailed linear style characteristic of that school in both drawing

and painting, a style which we know Americans found particularly attractive,

judging from the success of the Diisseldorf Gallery in New York and the

number of Americans actually studying in Germany. Haseltine's biographer

recorded that Weber "grounded him thoroughly in the technique of drawing,

of which [Weber] was a past-master, inculcated accuracy and developed in him

that exceptional sense of values which was always to characterise [sic] [his]

works."64 The same characterization might apply to Richards' own drawings

and there are interesting parallels as well between their paintings of the i86os

and those of the 18705 which might be traced in part to this common early

instruction (see figs. 294-296).

It is also interesting to note that a number of important landscape painters

287. Jasper Francis Cropsey. The Hudson River at Hastings, 1885. Pencil on heavy buff

wove paper. 0.304 x 0.484 (12 x I9yi6 in). Inscribed, l.r.: The Hudson River at Hastings/}.EC.June 1885. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; John Davis Hatch

Collection

received their earliest instruction in drawing from the authors of the manuals

themselves. In the early 18408, before beginning study with Thomas Cole,

Church's parents "placed him" with Benjamin Coe to learn drawing.65 C. H.

Moore while in his teens also took drawing lessons from Coe where his fellow

pupils were William and Henry James.66 Sanford R. Gifford recalled his own

early training—probably typical of many young students—in a letter of 1874: "I

came to New York in 1845 and placed myself under the direction of John

Rubens Smith, an accomplished drawing master, with whom I studied drawing, perspective and anatomy. At the same time I drew from the Antique and

the life at the National Academy of Design, and attended the lectures on

anatomy at the Crosby St. Medical College."67 We recall that the following year

Giffbrd was to make the sketching expedition into the Catskills that opened his

"eyes to the beauties of nature" and determined him to forsake the antique,

anatomy, and the portrait for the "absolute freedom" of the landscape painter's

life. Even George Inness received his initial instruction in drawing according to

the methodical linear discipline of the drawing master, from one "Barker in

Newark, who gave him first a copy-card to work from, then a block of plaster

. . . to train the hand to make the form, to train the eye to see."68

All of these artists were, of course, to go beyond the pictorial conventions

and formulas by which they were first trained, to develop personal styles—

pushing beyond conventions of the picturesque and the drawing manuals to

their own landscape vision. However, William Morris Hunt—a major influFERBER 251
290. Alfred Thompson Bricher. 50#ft on the Shore, c. 1880-1900. Watercolor. 0.178 x 0.254

(7 x 10 in). The George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum, Springfield, Massachusetts.

Photo: Jill Gibbons Hammond

ence upon the drawing style of the later nineteenth century and spokesman in

his lectures for a vision and attitude to light antithetical to the philosophy of

luminism—testified to the lingering and powerful influence of such early

training and discipline in seeing nature in controlled linear terms. "We are all

cursed,55 he remarked, "by the nonsense of our early teachers. I took lessons like

the rest of you, with a pointed pencil and a measure; and to-day I feel the

restraint which that way of beginning imposed upon me—so strong is the

impression made by early lessons.5569 It is just such "measure55 and "restraint55

that, despite the variations of personal manner, seem to underlie the landscape

vision of mid-century drawings.

One must also seek some element of the strong bias for linear emphasis

among these American draftsmen and painters in the disciplined linear systems

pf engraving. The study of engravings themselves had, from the very beginning

of the practice of painting in America, provided an important source of models

and self-instruction. Continuing in this tradition, Durand reminded his student in the "Letters55

 "that a fine engraving gives us all the greatest essentials of

a fine picture.5570 Durand himself had enjoyed a first career as one of America5s

foremost engravers. Only in the late 18308 had he begun to concentrate upon

landscape painting,71 bringing to both his draftsmanship and his painting

technique the precision and emphasis upon clear outline born of his long

experience with the purely linear vision of the engraver.

The number of American painters who shared with Durand a background in

the craft of engraving is impressive. Casilear apprenticed in this trade under

Durand5s first master and partner Peter Maverick and also studied with Durand

himself. He made his fortune as a bank-note engraver and only ceased the

practice around i857.72 Kensett was the son of an engraver and began to learn

the trade as a child. In 1829 he went to work engraving bank notes, vignettes,

and maps, and according to a family source he did not turn his attention to

painting until 1840.73 Doubtlessly his close friendship with fellow engravers

and artists Durand and Casilear was to provide initial inspiration for his

landscape painting. W T. Richards5 earliest employment as an artist was as a

draftsman of ornamental metalwork for a Philadelphia manufacturer of chandeliers and lamps beginning about 1850. During this time he also studied wood

engraving.74 Lane began his formal career as an apprentice draftsman and

lithographer in the 18308 by working for the Boston firm of William S. Pendleton, where his fellow apprentice Benjamin Champney recalled, "He was very

accurate in his drawing, understood perspective and naval architecture perfectly, as well as the handling of vessels, and was a good, all-round

252 FERBER

289. Henry Farrer. Beached Boat, c. 1870-1875. Watercolor on paper. 0.203 x 0.268 (8 x

io15/16 in). Inscribed, on back: H. Farrer. Private collection. Photo: Helga Photo Studio
draughtsman."75

 It is also worth recalling that Eakins' father was a writing

master who schooled his son in an old-fashioned penmanship, whose lingering

influence might be traced not only in the manner in which that artist signed his

drawings and paintings but also in the fundamental linear discipline of his

style.76 Winslow Homer was an experienced draftsman in both lithography and

wood engraving before he began to paint in oils, and a number of his subjects

appear in more than one media. The contained, linear figures in both High

Tide: the Bathers (1870; fig. 298) and Dad's Coming (1873; fig. 177) appeared

contemporaneously as wood engravings in magazine illustrations;77 both

groups were silhouetted against a taut, luminist horizon. Whereas the artist

retained the classic clarities of composition in the oil version (Dad's Coming) of

Waiting For Dad (the title given the engraving), Homer altered both horizon

and placement of the figures in High Tide, introducing a spatial tension that

reinforces the peculiar ambiguities sensed in this interesting painting.

This early training in the methodical linear systems of drawing for various

reproductive methods—metal engraving, wood engraving, and lithography—as well as in topographical and ornamental draftsmanship produced in

many American artists a vision insistent upon accuracy of detail, achieved

through linear discipline, an emphasis on oudine and contour, and a mastery of

subtle tonal gradations. These same qualities are those often cited as components of the luminist style or vision. This shared vision, encouraged by the

influence of the drawing manuals and the drawing masters and reinforced by

the web of influences and cross-influences within the close-knit community of

the landscape painters, lies at the heart of the similarity in style noted by Baur

and evident in many mid-century drawings. An examination of the drawings

noted here reveals this common core and the subtle distinctions of personal

vision as well. While our artists may range in media, they do tend to use those

media in a manner consistent with a luminist vision.

Martin Johnson Heade's three drawings from the so-called Plum Island

River series of about 1867-1868 (figs. 41, 42, 78) offer the sole examples here of

work in charcoal—a medium that was rarely used by the artists under consideration.78

 The medium was hardly unknown, of course, but its use in landscape

was not encouraged. John Chapman neither explained nor advocated its use in

his very popular The American Drawing Book (1858) .

79

 Durand mentions the use

of charcoal as a supplementary excercise only in passing and stresses, as we have

seen, the use of the pencil instead.80 One gathers that charcoal lacked the sharp

point, fine line, and ease of control deemed so important to detailed midcentury landscape drawings. Charcoal's popularity as a medium was established, in fact, only with the rise in the 18708 of the less-detailed, suggestive

interpretation of landscape that was to mark the demise of the luminist vision.81

Heade's choice of such an unconventional medium for what is certainly an

unconventional group of drawings was in its way thoroughly characteristic of

this artist. Although a close intimate of a mainstream figure like Church,

Heade remained curiously apart in personality and practice from his more

291. William Trost Richards. Rocks by the Sea, i88os. Oil on paper. 0.305 x 0.229 (12 x 9 in).

The George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum, Springfield, Massachusetts

FERBER 253
292. William Hart. White Mountain Range from Jefferson

Hilly 1859. Pencil and white wash on brown paper. 0.312 x

0.480 (i2y4 x i87/8 in). Inscribed, l.r.: Wm Hart 1859; on

back: E.L.Magoon 1861. Vassar College Art Gallery,

Poughkeepsie, New York. Photo: Peter A. Juley & Son

convivial fellows. As Stebbins has noted, he was an exception among landscape

painters of the period in that he drew and sketched infrequently, seemingly not

placing much importance on a routine deemed by his contemporaries vital to

the landscape painter's creative process.82 His life-long obsessive treatment, in

what is recognized as a classic luminist style, of the salt marsh as a subject leads

one to speculate that Heade worked out the solutions to his pictorial problems

not in drawings but in the act of painting the long series itself. Certainly the

Plum Island River drawings should not be viewed as studies for translation

into another medium but, rather, as finished and complete works in

themselves—a parallel exploration in another material of a favorite theme. It is

particularly fascinating and revealing to trace in the series the progressive

simplification, the reduction and refinement of elements, into the distillation

of the final image where mast, cloud, and birds, moving ever closer, finally lock

into place—their physical convergence suggesting the carefully plotted relationships and balances which underlie the entire work.83

 Heade maintains

razor-sharp edges and a total, even rigid, control over transitions from light to

dark which become more subtle as the series progresses. Far from yielding to

the soft and suggestive possibilities of this tractable medium, rather, Heade

succeeds in bending it to his own peculiar vision.

In addition to the continuity of subject matter in these drawings, we note the

regular consistencies in Heade's choice of both the size and the shape of his

paper, factors which represent as important an expressive element in the artist's

vision as the pictorial motif itself. The shape of the sheet was more important

than its dimensions. In The American Drawing Book., Chapman urged his

reader-student to pay particular attention to this matter:

The peculiar shape of a picture, and its adaptation to a given place or purpose, may have

a very important influence on its composition; while, on the other hand, the character of

the subject may as well regulate the form of the picture.. . . The shape and composition

of a picture should as far as possible harmonize, not contrast with, one another, and the

selection of both should be consistent with the subject.84

In fact, the element of picture shape is one of the most important aspects of

classic luminist style: the decided preference for horizontal compositions, in

254 FERBER
293. William Hart. Moonlight on Mt. Carter, Gorham, 1859.

Pencil and white wash on brown paper. 0.312 x 0.480 (12% x

i87/8 in). Inscribed, I.e.: Wm Hart 1859. Vassar College Art

Gallery, Poughkeepsie, New York. Photo: Peter A. Juley &

Son

which landscape elements are compressed into a panoramic format and seem to

flow laterally rather than to converge neatly upon a single vanishing point as in

the more traditional rectangular landscape format. Heade's drawings—all

nearly the same size and precisely twice as long as they are high—offer the

ultimate demonstration of classic luminist composition. His format seems also

ideally suited to what Chapman referred to as "the character of the subject."

The horizontal, very nearly monotonous topography of Heade's characteristic

marsh subject is admirably suited to this shape, which the artist used in his

canvases as well.

An artist might choose to work upon a sheet already trimmed to such

proportions—as did Heade, along with Worthington Whittredge (see fig.

299), Van Beest, and Louis R. Mignot (see fig. 300)—or he might alter a

regular rectangle of paper by dividing his sheet into horizontal zones. Richards

compressed his drawing of breaking waves into a radically horizontal format

simply by isolating it on the rectangular page between lightly ruled pencil lines.

Shattuck neatly bisected his sheet, presenting two different panoramic views of

Lake George in an upper and a lower zone. While such an expedient certainly

allowed for additional sketching surface, one feels that expressive rather than

practical motives were of first consideration in these instances. Gifford's drawings of Giardini and other Italian coastal views, begun on one sketchbook leaf,

will consistently extend over a portion of the adjoining page; Gifford thus

exploited the panoramic format of the open sketchbook. In his pencil records

of the Gloucester coast, Lane actually joined separate sheets to form a kind of

topographical panorama.

The panoramic format is, in fact, intimately linked to the topographical

landscape tradition. The harbor views of New York, New Bedford, and

Gloucester by Mignot, Van Beest, and Lane hark back ultimately to seventeenth-century Dutch prototypes. Nor was the topographical tradition new to

America. One has only to recall early examples such as Lauren Bloch's View of

New Amsterdam, a wash drawing of 1650 (New-York Historical Society, New

York), William Burgis' six-foot panoramic engraving of New York City of 1721

(private collection), or Francis Guy's painting of about 1803, View of Baltimore

FERBER 255
94- William Trost Richards. East Hampton Beach, 1871-1874.

Watercolor on composition board. 0.457 x 0.812 (18 x 32 in).

nscribed, 1.1.: Wm. T. Richards; title on back in pencil. Collection

f the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Gift of Mr. and Mrs.

mory L. Cocke, 70.32. Photo: Jerome Drown

om Chapel Hill (Brooklyn Museum, New York), to realize that the

traightforward interest in recording the prosaic facts of topography and

man-made inroads on the new world reflected in these works long preceded the

omantic and emotional response to pure landscape, characteristic of the

ineteenth century. The format of the panorama, whose long axis echoes the

horizon itself, allowed an artist or draftsman ample latitude to trace, literally,

he lay of the land. The tradition, grounded in documentation, did not die with

he rise of landscape painting proper but continued as an alternate current,

ometimes mingling with the mainstream. Albert Bierstadt's The Bombardment

f Fort Sumter (c. 1863; fig. 301) with its startling bird's eye view is, for instance,

ctually cast quite firmly in this topographical mode—even to the elevated

viewpoint which allows us to read the coastline like a map in three dimensions.

Around mid-century, however, there may also be traced in paintings like

CropstfsBareford Mountains, WestMUJbrd, New Jersey (1850; fig. 302), Church's

Mt. Desert, Moonlight (c. 1860; fig. 189), Heade's Lake George (1862; fig. 75),

Bierstadt's Sunset on the Prairie (1861; fig. 134), and Gifford's Hook Mountain,

Hudson (1866; fig. 84) a preference among landscape painters for a panoramic

ormat that does not derive from topographical but, rather, from expressive

needs. Certainly by this time the earlier standard Claudian landscape composi

ion was perceived as old-fashioned. The panoramic shape, conforming to the

horizontally of the earth itself, undoubtedly offered a more natural framework

for landscape painters. Most important for the development of the classic

luminist composition was the gradual abandonment of even vestigial foreground framing elements that contained and controlled the view. Church's

Niagara (1857; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) is—as David

Huntington has eloquently written—the major monumental statement of this

mid-century adaptation of the panoramic format primarily for expressive

rather than topographical purposes.85 At first glance, Niagara might seem to

conform to a topographical model similar to Bierstadt's The Bombardment of

Fort Sumter. We hang suspended without a conventional foreground above the

falls while the eye is freed to travel—swift and unimpeded—deep into space. As

was his habit, Church studied the falls in numerous drawings and oil sketches

from many angles.86 From these multiple impressions and experiences he

synthesized in the final painting a radically simplified image which operates at

once as a convincing view of the falls themselves as well as a compelling vision

of their relentless power and energy. The monumental panoramic format

underscores the unending lateral flow of water. The open-ended composition

confirms the suggestion of a force that will not be contained. In a quiet manner

and on a radically different scale the panoramic drawings of Heade, Johnson,

Shattuck, and Gifford also suggest an unlimited space that belies their small

size.

We have noted the intimate link of the panoramic with the topographical,

56 FERBER
295. William Trost Richards. Shipwreck, 1872. Oil

on canvas. 0.610 x 1.167 (24 x 42 in). Inscribed, l.r.:

Wm. T. Richards 1872. The Pennsylvania Academy

of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia

296. William Stanley Haseltine. Rocks at Nahant, 1865. Oil on canvas.

0.542 x 0.875 (2i5/16 x 34

7

/16 in). Inscribed, l.r.: W. S. Haseltine 1865. The

Mariner's Museum, Newport News, Virginia

FERBER 257
297. Alfred Thompson Bricher. Rocks in Surf, 1871. Oil on canvas.

0.286 x 0.546 (ny4x 21% in). Inscribed, ll:ATBRICHER (ATB is

in monogram). Mr. H. Richard Dietrich, Jr., Philadelphia.

Photo: Helga Photo Studio

where the overriding interest in accuracy of landscape information may at

imes approach the cartographical, as with Bierstadt's painting and in several of

Lane's drawings. This emphasis upon factual precision led to the use by

draftsmen of various devices—some mechanical and others mathematical—

hat assured accuracy of detail and spatial relationship even beyond the artist's

equired attention to the laws of linear and aerial perspective. Common among

optical aids to accuracy were the camera obscura and camera lucida. Their main

function was to project the view by means of a lens onto a surface where it

might be traced by the artist. The part played by such optical devices in the

pictorial construction and design of American paintings has been investigated

and discussed at length by Lisa Andrus.87 Our major purpose here is to point

out that the medium to which these devices were applied and in which their

influence shows most plainly is drawing.

Lane was undoubtedly introduced to the use of a drawing machine in his

early career as a topographer, and he continued to make use of the device in his

later drawings as well. Andrus recognizes the traces of the drawing machine in

Lane's work in "the slight bow in the horizon distorted by refraction through a

lens" as well as in the general style. This style is characterized by compression

into a very long, narrow format, an emphatically clear definition of spatial

zones, and the recording of objects in almost pristine outline (see fig. 303). The

two latter characteristics were also promoted by the drawing manuals as

Andrus has pointed out.88 These distinctive features may be found in many of

Lane's drawings. They may be said, in fact, to characterize his general approach

to draftsmanship, whether or not a drawing machine was directly involved in

the creative process. Moreover, a number of drawings by other hands may also

be described in these same terms: GifFord, Johnson, Shattuck, Casilear,

Durand. While these artists probably did use drawing machines on occasion,

what seems more intriguing is Andrus' suggestion of what might be termed a

kind of drawing machine aesthetic or approach in the style of their topographical drawings: that tendency to refine the vista to a pure linear profile.89

In his study of Durand, David Lawall has noted parallel characteristics in the

development of that artist's drawing style. He points out "the greater measure

of abstractness" in the panoramic drawings, suggesting a kind of topographical

throwback "indicative of their function as sources of information about the

disposition of land at a particular geographical location."90 He notes further

the general stylistic progression in Durand's drawings to a "more dominantly

linear" style; in Durand's latest panoramic drawings, Lawall says, "nearly

everything that is transitory in nature has been omitted in favor of the large,

simple relationships of earth, water, and sky."91 Although none of these drawings exhibit the "definite mechanical quality" that Andrus sees as the result of

the use of such tools,92 they do share that strong ordering in planes and

controlled linear outlines that we have called a kind of drawing machine

aesthetic and that Lawall, in the case of Durand, calls "a highly intellectual and

linear austerity."93 A very different approach to the panorama is seen, for

instance, in the drawing by Van Beest, whose fussy detail, lively movement,

flicker of light and shadow, and breezy atmosphere are in sharp contrast to the

258 FERBER
drawings of Durand, Lane, Gifford, Shattuck, and Johnson, in which all

extraneous detail of object and meteorological phenomena has been distilled to

a pristine outline with minimal, or no suggestion of, shadow. These images

seem to capture through that very linear austerity the stillness, the timelessness,

the balance associated with the luminist vision. The intriguing links of such

vision with the character of mechanical vision invite continuing investigation.

Optical devices such as the camera obscura and camera lucida were not the

only aids to accuracy to which the draftsman might resort in his efforts to

define and measure space. He might use something as simple as Hunt's

maligned "pointed pencil and measure'1 or something as complex as one of

Eakins' elaborate perspective studies. The former is evident in Richards' drawing, Waves (c. 1870; fig. 304), in which he experimented at the upper margin

with several lines—plainly ruled—as if seeking the most effective proportion of

sky above to sea below his horizon line—also ruled. An emphasis upon both

horizon and horizontality is natural to the coast, where the meeting of earth

and sky is unobscured by the irregularities of terrestrial features. Nonetheless,

it is clear in a number of the paintings as well as the drawings here that many of

these artists imposed a very emphatic horizon line—razor sharp and taut,

unobscured by clouds or aerial mist—and even resorted to the ruled line. Still,

where the use of the ruler or straight edge is not as obvious as in the Richards,

one feels it operating in the clear demonstration of the horizon—as in the

marine watercolors of D. J. Kennedy and even in panoramic vistas of large

inland bodies of water, such as Shattuck's and Johnson's views of Lake George.

In these two works, subtle but repetitive tiny vertical accents are set up by faint

reflections along the distant shore of the lake; they march with regularity across

the broad expanse of bare paper that is the water, measuring off spatial intervals

like the marks on a ruler. In this way, unobtrusive controls established by the

balance of horizontal and vertical accents are incorporated into the pictorial

structure of these drawings of Lake George. One senses the control but does

not readily perceive the means, as in the finished paintings of strict luminists

such as Heade and Lane. Whereas Heade appears to have worked out his

compositions on the canvas, Lane depended upon careful preliminary pencil

studies. A precisely plotted and ruled grid is superimposed on a number of the

panoramic drawings, not just for use in transfer but as a kind of framework or

298. Winslow Homer. High Tide: the Bathers, 1870. Oil on canvas.

0.660 x 0.965 (26 x 38 in). Inscribed, 1.1.: WmslowHomer—-1870—.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Gift of Mrs.

William F. Milton, 1923

FERBER 259
Thomas Worthington Whittredge. View from Mr. Field's Farm at Newport, c. 1859. Pencil on buff paper.

 x 0.238 (35/16 x 9% in). Vassar College Art Gallery, Poughkeepsie, New York

Louis Remy Mignot. New York at the Entrance of the Hudson from Hoboken, 1846. Graphite on cream wove paper. 0.106 x 0.264

x 10% in). Inscribed, 1.1.: New York et l}entree de PHudsonfrom Hoboken/tf. Private collection

FERBER
30i. Albert Bierstadt. The Bombardment of Fort Sumter, 1861. Oil on canvas. 0.606 x 1.727 (26 x 68 in)

The Art Collection of The Union League of Philadelphia

armature. This purely conceptual geometrical framework expresses frankly the

principal means by which Lane imposed an overriding sense of order upon his

view of nature, maintained control of his design, and assured its correct

transfer to the canvas.94

A careful comparison of the paintings Norman's Woe (1862; fig. 32) and the

Eabson and Elkry Houses, Gloucester (1863; fig. 37) with their ruled preparatory

drawings (figs. 33,38) is highly instructive. Lane generally followed the configuration of the drawings closely in establishing the profile of the land and

disposition of objects in space. In subde adjustments of contour, edge, and

spatial interval, however, the artist tightened, compressed, and concentrated

his image on the canvas, introducing into each painting the peculiar clarity of

his atmospheric light, which is barely, if at all, indicated in the drawings. The

major alteration from drawing to painting is, of course, the radical increase in

the expanse of sky, the source of this hyper-clear and effective light. Water, left

simply as reserved areas of paper in the drawings, is transmuted in both

paintings into a polished surface that not only mirrors but intensifies aerial

light. The grid, as Andrus has noted, becomes largely invisible in the finished

paintings, its influence felt rather than seen, a mystery which only heightens

each work's expressive power.95

A variation upon Lane's straightforward grid is the barely visible network of

ruled lines that underlies Richards' seemingly casual drawing of a favorite

motif: waves breaking upon a flat sandy beach. We have already noted the

parallel ruled lines in this drawing isolating the motif into a narrow strip on the

rectangular page. Close examination also reveals a ruled diagonal marking the

junction of surf and sand and a fanlike pattern of straight lines radiating from a

point on the horizon. Each line acts as a coordinate beneath the irregular crest

of a breaking wave, thus imposing a linear perspective upon the restless moving

water. This ruled underpinning operating beneath the flux of water is explicit

here in this drawing. It is also felt in Richards' paintings of waves of this period

and in those of his contemporaries, Kensett, Alfred Bricher, James Suydam,

Heade, and Lane, who treated that most painterly of subjects—moving

water—in an essentially linear manner.

Drawings such as those reviewed above, which frankly reveal a linear or

geometrical framework, invisible beneath the polished surface of oil paintings,

offer particular insight into the mode of luminist composition. Whether the

drawing is made with the aid of machine, grid, or linear perspective, the

impulse is the same: a quest for some means to organize, measure, and control

the flux of nature.
3O2. Jasper Francis Cropsey. Bareford Mountains., West Milford, New Jersey, 1850. Oil on canvas. 0.591 x 1.020

(23*74 x 4oy8 in). Inscribed, \\.\J.E Cropsey/i8so. The Brooklyn Museum, New York

The other key to luminist style is, of course, found in a common preoccupation with effects of aerial light. In paintings, treatment of light may range from

the pristine clarity of Lane's Norman's Woe (1862) to the suffusing glow of

Kensett's ViewNear Cozzens Hotel, West Point (1863; fig. 243). While many of the

artists here engaged in plein-air painting by mid-century—capturing directly

in oils the effects of outdoor light and color—this did not diminish the key

position of drawing in recording the impact and experience of scenery and

meteorological effects. The modes of recording such phenomena were various.

As mentioned earlier the application of monochromatic or polychromatic

washes expanded the artist's means of recording effects of light and color to a

range nearly as broad as that found in painting with oils. Hart, working in

pencil on brown tinted paper, made effective use of Chinese white for those

areas in sky and water of most intense light—be it sun or moon. Eschewing

watercolor and white, many cultivated the habit of inscribing extensive verbal

notes about light and color on the line drawings themselves. Such notes may be

found on Cropsey's View from Mt. WUlard, N.H. (1852; Addison Gallery of

American Art, Andover, Massachusetts). Church, who regularly sketched in

oils on the spot, also produced scores of elaborately annotated drawings such

262 FERBER
as a pencil study of Cotopaxi dated June 26,1857 (Olana, Hudson, New York).

A number system superimposed on the image corresponds to a key in the lower

margin where effects of light and color were carefully noted. The series of

numbers in the sky, for instance, charts the successive bands of aerial color

created by the interaction of light and atmosphere with the smoke and gases

issuing from the volcano. In contrast to Church is Lane who neither painted in

plein air nor annotated his drawings.96 In fact, Lane, whose treatment of light

is among the most subtle and sensitive of mid-century landscape painters, was,

according to a contemporary source, prevented by "physical infirmity from

painting out of doors.97 His drawings are primarily conceived in outline

indicating that the subtle and convincing effects of light and color in the

paintings based upon these drawings originated in the mind and memory of

the artist.

While their interpretations of landscape were very different, the practice of

drawing was for Church and Lane, as well as for their contemporaries, central

to the realization of their personal vision. In the conclusion of his second

"Letter," Durand had proposed an artistic declaration of independence from

the "Old World": "why should not the American landscape painter, in accordance with the principle of self-government, boldly originate a high and independent style, based on his native resources?"98

 This survey of American

landscape painting and drawing suggests that there was, indeed, a thriving

native school and that luminism in its various manifestations was a central

element in this "high and independent style."

303. Fitz Hugh Lane. Looking Westerly from Eastern Side of Somes Sound Near the

Entrance, 1855. Pencil on paper. 0.222 x 0.667 (8% x 26% in). Inscribed, u.r.: by E H.

Lane,September 1855. Cape Ann Historical Association, Gloucester, Massachusetts

304. William Trost Richards. Waves, c. 1870. Pencil on paper. 0.254 x 0.356 (10 x 14 in).

The George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum, Springfield, Massachusetts (below)

FERBER 263
Notes

John I. H. Baur, "Early Studies in Light and Air by

merican Painters," The Brooklyn Museum Bulletin, 9, no.

1948): 7-

Baur, "Early Studies," 7.

Among the large and important deposits of draw

gs by American landscape painters to be found in

blic collections are those by Church in the Cooper

ewitt Museum, New York; Cole in the Detroit Insti

e of Arts; Durand in the New-York Historical Soci

y; Lane in the Cape Ann Historical Association in

oucester, Mass.; and W. T. Richards in both the

ooper-Hewitt and Brooklyn museums, New York.

John Paul Driscoll, John R Kensett Drawings [exh.

 Pennsylvania State University Museum of Art and

abcock Galleries] (University Park, Pa., and New York,

78), 17-20.

Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., American Master Draw

gs and Watercolors, A History of Works on Paper from

lonial Times to the Present (New York, 1976), 108.

John W. Casilear to John E Kensett, Nov. 19, 1832,

oted in Driscoll, Kensett Drawings, iii.

Stebbins, American Master Drawings, 113-114.

Album (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,

harles and Anita Blatt Fund 1970. 9.1-30).

Thomas S. Cummings, Historic Annals of the Na

nal Academy of Design (Philadelphia, 1865), in.

. David B. Lzw^Asher Brown Durand: His Art and

t Theory in Relation to His Times (New York, 1977), 5.

 S. R. Gifford to O. B. Frothingham, Hudson, Nov.

1874, quoted in Ila Weiss, Sanford Robinson Gifford

823-1880) (New York, 1977), 26.

 Lawall, Durand, 728-745 passim.

 Driscoll, Kensett Drawings, 5, 7.

. "Poppy Oil," "Letter from West Campton, Sep

mber 9, 1856," The Crayon, 3 (1856): 317.

 "Mummy," "Letter from North Conway, October,

56," The Crayon, 3 (1856): 348.

. "Poppy Oil," "Letter from West Campton," 317-

8.

. "Flake White," "Letter from North Conway, Sep

mber 25, 1855," The Crayon, 2 (1855): 217. While "Flake

White" in this passage refers specifically to studies in oil,

we may assume, I believe, that the same customs and

procedures applied to sketches in pencil.

18. W. T. Richards to George Whitney, Gloucester,

June 10,1871; in the collection of Edith B. Price, Virginia

Beach, Va., and Mrs. James B. Conant, New York.

19. Henry T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists (New York,

1867), 34-

20. Peter C. Marzio, "The Art Crusade: An Analysis of

American Drawing Manuals, 1820-1860," Smithsonian

Studies in History and Technology, 34 (1976): 70.

21. "Drawing Teachers," The Crayon, 3 (1856): 60.

22. Marzio, "The Art Crusade," 52.

23. Marzio, "The Art Crusade," 17.

24. Fessenden Nott Otis, Easy Lessons in Landscape

(New York, 1851), 6.

25. Driscoll, Kensett Drawings, 12; Linda S. Ferber,

William Trost Richards (1833-1905): American Landscape and

Marine Painter (New York, 1979), 7.

26. Marzio, "The Art Crusade," 17.

27. "Elementary Drawing," The Crayon, i (1855): 305.

28. S. R. Gifford to O. B. Frothingham, Hudson,

Nov. 6,1874, quoted in Ila Weiss, Gifford, 26.

29. "Elementary Drawing," 305.

30. W. T. Richards, "Lansdowne" (essay delivered before the Forensic and Literary Circle, Philadelphia, c.

1850-1851); in the collection of Edith B. Price, Virginia

Beach, Va. and Mrs. James B. Conant, New York.

31. Otis, Easy Lessons in Landscape, i.

32. W. T. Richards, "Flowers," (essay delivered before

the Forensic and Literary Circle, Philadelphia, October i,

1850); in the collection of Edith B. Price, Virginia Beach,

Va., and Mrs. James B. Conant, New York, quoted in

Ferber, William Trost Richards, 8.

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

2," The Crayon, i (1855): 34.

34. "Elementary Drawing," 305.

35. Tuckerman, Artists, 196.

36. Durand, "Letters on Landscape Painting, i," The

Crayon, i (1855): i.

37. Durand, "Letters on Landscape Painting, 3," The

Crayon, i (1855): 66. Stebbins has drawn attention to

Durand's emphasis on drawing in the "Letters" in American Master Drawings, 121.

38. Durand, "Letters, 2," 34.

39. Durand, "Letters, 2," 34.

40. Durand, "Letters on Landscape Painting, 4," The

Crayon,i (1855): 97-

41. Marzio, 'The Art Crusade," 57.

42. John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T.

Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London, 1904), is: 19.

43. Roger B. Stein John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought

in America, 1840-1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 41.

44. David B. Lawall, A. B. Durand: 1796-1886 [exh. cat.

Montclair Art Museum] (Montclair, N.J., 1971), 18. David

C. Huntington, The Landscapes of FredericEdwin Church:

Vision of an American Era (New York, 1966), 44-45.

45. Ruskin, Works, 15: 13.

46. Ruskin, Works, is: 13.

47. See: William E Gerdts, "The Influence of Ruskin

and Pre-Raphaelitism on American Still-Life Painting,"

American Art Journal, i (1969): 80-97 passim. Ferber,

William Trost Richards, chap. 4 passim.

48. Association for the Advancement of the Cause of

Truth in Art, unpublished minutes, Jan. 27, i863-Feb. 23,

1865, Ryerson Library, Art Institute of Chicago.

49. "Good Work in the Academy Exhibition," The

New Path, i (1863): 22.

50. "Association for the Advancement of Truth in

Art," The New Path, i (1863): n.

51. Durand, "Letters, i," 2.

52. For the basic skills, see Marzio, "The Art Crusade,"

69.

53. Durand, "Letters, i," 2.

54. "Flake White," "Letter from North Conway," 217.

55. Durand, "Letters, i," 2.

56. Durand, "Letters, 3," 66.

57. John T. Bowen, The United States Drawing Book

(Philadelphia, 1838), 9, 10, quoted in Marzio, "The Art

Crusade," 83, n. 17.

58. Durand, "Letters, 2," 34.

59. Driscoll, Kensett Drawings, 12.

60. Ferber, William Trost Richards, 7.

61. Ferber, William Trost Richards, 3. Marzio, "The Art

Crusade," 20, 21.

62. Charles E. Slatkin and Regina Schoolman, Treasury of American Drawings (New York, 1947), 24.

63. Ferber, William Trost Richards, 16. Helen Haseltine

Plowden, William Stanley Haseltine (London, 1947),

18-19.

64. Plowden, Haseltine, 28.

65. David C. Huntington, FredericEdwin Church [exh.

cat., National Collection of Fine Arts et al] (Washington,

D.C., 1966), 25.

66. Frank J. Mather, Jr., Charles Herbert Moore: Landscape Painter (Princeton, 1957), 4.

67. S. R. Gifford to O. B. Frothingham, Hudson,

4 FERBER
Nov

. 6,1874, quoted in Weiss, Gifford, 14.

68. George Inness, Jr., Life, Art and Letters of George

Inness (New York, 1917), 268, 271.

69. William Morris Hunt, Talks on Art, First Series

(Boston, 1896; rpt. ed., New York, 1976), 64.

70. Durand, "Letters, 3," 66.

71. Lawall, Durand: His Art and Art Theory, 5.

72. Daria Rigney, "John William Casilear" (seminar

report presented at Columbia University, New York,

Mar. 19,1979)-

73. Driscoll, Kensett Drawings, 9.

74. Ferber, William Trost Richards, 4.

75. John Wilmerding, Fitz Hugh Lane (New York,

1971), 19; Benjamin Champney, Sixty Years'Memories of Art

and Artists (Woburn, Mass., 1900), 10, quoted in Wil-

merding, Fitz Hugh Lane, 20.

76. Sylvan Schendler, Eakins (Boston, 1967), 6,13.

77. John Wilmerding, Winslow Homer (New York,

1972), 88. High Tide appeared in Every Saturday, Aug. 6,

1870,504 and Dad's Coming appeared as Waiting for Dad

in Harper's Weekly, Nov. i, 1873, 969.

78. Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., dates the drawings to

this period in his The Life and Works of Martin Johnson

Heade (New Haven and London, 1975), 56.

79. John G. Chapman, The A merican Drawing-Book: A

Manual for the Amateur and Basis of Study for The Professional Artist (New York, 1858).

80. Durand, "Letters, 3," 67, quoted in Stebbins,

Heade, 56.

81. William Morris Hunt, a key figure in the rise of that

more suggestive interpretation of landscape, was known

for introducing widespread use of charcoal among

American artists: "Once I was at Berville's shop in Paris,

and he wanted me to buy a box of materials for

charcoal-drawing.... I give you my word, that box was

the beginning of all the charcoal-drawing that's been

done in America; of my having any class, in fact"

(William Morris Hunt, Talks on An, Second Series [Bos-

ton, 1898; rpt. ed., New York, 1976], 87). While Hunt's

claim is, no doubt, exaggerated, Stebbins plausibly sug-

gests him as an important element in Heade's interest in

the charcoal medium (Stebbins, Heade, 56-57).

82. Stebbins, Heade, 48.

83. The sequence of drawings discussed here is that

established by Stebbins in Heade, 283-285, nos. 379-388.

84. Chapman, The American Drawing-Book, 291.

85. Huntington, Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church,

68-71. Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., Close Observation:

Selected Oil Sketches by Frederic E. Church (Washington,

D.C., 1978), 27-28.

86. Huntington, Church, 67.

87. Lisa Andrus, Measure and Design in American

Painting 1760-1860 (New York, 1977), chap. 6 passim.

88. Andrus, Measure and Design, 67, 210, 214.

89. Andrus, Measure and Design, 212.

90. Lawall, Durand: His Art and Art Theory, 322.

91. Lawall, Durand: His An and An Theory, 322-323.

92. Andrus, Measure and Design, 207.

93. Lawall, Durand: His An and An Theory, 324.

94. Wilmerding, Lane, 60. Andrus, Measure and De-

sign, 66-67.

95. Andrus, Measure and Design, 68.

96. Wilmerding, Lane, 52.

97. Joseph L. Stevens, Jr. to Samuel Mansfield, Bos-

ton, Oct. 17,1903, quoted in Wilmerding, Lane, 51.

98. Durand, "Letters, 2," 35.

FERBER 265
Seneca Ray Stoddard. Moonlight on Lake George (no. 1380), c. 1875-1880. Stereograph.

e collection. Photo: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
"New Eyes"—Luminism and Photography

Weston Naef

LIGHT IS CONNECTED TO PHOTOGRAPHY BY A CAUSE AND EFFECT relationship more immediate than the similar relationship between what a painter sees

(for which light is essential) and how that perception is finally translated into

shades of light and dark on paper or canvas. For light in photography acts in

the capacity of both the brush and the pigment. Though the painter's treatment

of light is slower, it is not necessarily any more conscious or deliberate an act

than that of the photographer. Moreover, no trace of light can be obscured in

the photograph as it is an extremely malleable medium. Indeed, light is such a

fundamental ingredient of the photograph that the style of its treatment by the

photographer is as readable as a fingerprint.

That the attention given to light by photographers in forming their compositions followed a parallel course of development to the emergence of the same

concern by luminist painters is perhaps demonstrated by the belief during the

18408 that photography, called "photogenic drawing," was thought to draw its

own image with light as the instrument. This archaic phase (1840-1859) is

represented by the Daguerrean picture, in which, because of limitations of the

process itself, treatment of outdoor light and space seldom occurred. The

classic phase of nineteenth-century photography (1860-1880) is reflected in

works that focused on scenes in nature and, correspondingly, on the use of light

as a resource, not merely as a condition. It was at this time that the undisputed

monuments of luminist photography were first created. The late phase, extending through 1900, grew out of the classic phase as photographers used new

materials which made possible more literal effects.

Between 1840 and 1850 photographers stationed themselves in their studios,

receiving customers off the street whom they photographed under skylights

designed for the soft, even light traditional to portraiture. Even the drama of

Rembrandtesque lighting was difficult to achieve because daguerreotype

plates could not absorb extremes of dark and light simultaneously. The great

majority of all photographs made before 1860 were portraits done either in the

studio or in portable, artificial environments created by itinerant portrait

photographers. On the rare occasions when a Daguerrean took his equipment

outsdoors the subjects were city views, rural occupational views, or natural

wonders such as Niagara. The rise of a class of professional landscape photographers was dependent on the introduction of negatives on glass that made

the pursuit commercially feasible as well as artistically satisfying.1 This, combined with a widespread interest in rendering moods of nature, encouraged

photographers to take their equipment outdoors and to focus on true wilderness settings. Indeed, the government in this instance acted as an unusually

effective patron of the arts by encouraging the transition from studio-oriented

works to outdoor scenes through its sponsorship of photography on the

post-Civil War western explorations. Much outdoor photography before 1865

was done by persons unaccustomed to the natural setting, including

portraitists taking a fling at landscape (though portraitists rarely had the

tenacity or incentive from a commercial point of view to produce such views)

and amateurs. The latter—many of them very talented—were among the most

active outdoor workers. Though they were otherwise untrained in either the

practice of art or its history, nonetheless their sense of subject and handling are

often rooted in the stylization, simplicity, and frontality that characterize

folk-art paintings, drawings, and lithographs. After 1885, photographers, like

their counterpart painters and sculptors, were better trained. The proliferation

of paper print views during the preceding decade had made high quality

images by master photographers obtainable in the world's major cities; Roger

Fenton, Gustave Le Gray, Edouard Baldus, Francis Frith, and such reputable

establishments as the London Stereoscopic Company and E. and H. T. Anthony in New York, all had sales agents in far-flung places. Just as painters and

engravers of the Renaissance and baroque periods often received part of their

visual education through paintings and engravings, so it was possible for a

photographer to perfect his craft by studying finely visualized photographs.

267
Moreover, the ascendance of art academies in the 18505 produced a body of

matriculants many of whom now chose to pursue photography instead of the

traditional studio disciplines.

The earliest extant body of American camera-art to demonstrate a systematic

concern for the outdoors and its attendant light was the production of the

partnership of Albert S. Southworth and Josiah J. Hawes of Boston. They

began making daguerreotypes after separately learning the process in 1840 from

J. B. F. Fauvel-Gouraud, the first American representative of the French

licensees of Daguerre's camera and instructional manual.2 The series of photographs they made in and about the Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge,

Massachusetts, are the earliest surviving American photographs whose major

motifs emerge from the surrounding environment through an orchestration of

the light falling on them. The most stunning of these compositions (fig. 305

shows several ranks of white tombstones that emerge from the dark background of grass and trees. The silvered-copper daguerreotype plate is here

unequalled at recording the luminescence of the stones flecked with variable

patterns of light falling through the trees. So it is also with the larger tombs of

W. Read and S. O. Mead (fig. 306)—whose coincidentally rhyming names are

echoed in the identical architecture of the structures. The play of light on stone

and the faithfulness with which it is captured are the elements in this representation that distinguish one tomb from the other.

In spirit, the Mt. Auburn Cemetery series relates to the paintings of Fitz

Hugh Lane and of Robert Salmon, both of whom favored a similar crystalline

light. Southworth and Hawes were exceptional in their time for attempting a

series of outdoor views. Because daguerreotype plates are unica and not easily

or faithfully replicated, there was little commercial incentive to produce landscape scenes for profit. They could not be sold for a price equal to the time and

effort expended to make a nonreplicable image.

No work from the early years of the Southworth and Hawes studio has been

conclusively identified, and the bulk of the surviving images dates from the

18508, thus denying us an opportunity to study the evolution of these men from

apprenticeship to a mature style as is fully possible with painters of their

generation. Nonetheless in their portraiture Southworth and Hawes may be

classed stylistically with the late phase of neoclassicism in the gentle light, erect

305. Albert S. Southworth and Josiah J. Hawes. Unidentified Plots, Mt. Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts, c. 1850. Whole-plate daguerreotype. International

Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York (not in

exhibition)

306. Albert S. Southworth and Josiah J. Hawes. W. Read andS. O. Mead, Mausolea, Mt.

Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts, c. 1850. Whole-plate daguerreotype. International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York

(not in exhibition)

268 NAEF
posing, and concern for rendering nuances of costume. There are, however, a

few exceptions such as Southworth's Self-Portrait (International Museum of

Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York, 74: 193:1127)

and Lemuel Shaw (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 38.38.34) where

the deep shadows of strongly focused light show more in common with French

romantic portraiture than with neoclassicism. Likewise, the Mt. Auburn Cemetery images share common elements with romantic landscape and fit stylistically with native American romantic realism. Nonetheless, while their roots are

in the romantic epoch, Southworth and Hawes constitute the first American

photographers to attempt a systematic treatment of light as the essential

ingredient of landscape.

There is no surviving body of daguerreotypes by one maker that completely

parallels the first generation of luminist painters typified by Fitz Hugh Lane,

with his seascapes of mirrorlike clarity of water and form, ruler-sharp horizon,

and filmy atmosphere. Southworth and Hawes touched on the style; but, since

they were obliged to spend most of their time in their portrait studio, they

spent relatively little time photographing outdoors, thus limiting their potential for producing a significant body of landscape work. Nonetheless, the

luminist character of the Mt. Auburn Cemetery studies stands out when

compared to the work of J. W. Black, a younger Boston contemporary of

Southworth and Hawes, who worked on the infant glass-plate process that

yielded paper prints. Black's White Mountain series of c. 1856 may hold the

distinction of being the earliest surviving series of full-plate American photographs that probe wilderness nature (fig. 307). In the flatness of light and

concern for chiaroscuro rather than optical precision, however, Black's views

are more closely related to the Hudson River school of painting and, indirectly,

to French Barbizon painting, than to the luminism of Southworth and Hawes.

Black was more concerned with the intertwined web of relationships among

the natural orders, rather than the flat, open spatial structure and serene light

that a slightly later generation of photographers saw as being of fundamental

beauty in nature.

The generation of painters who emerged in the 18505 and i86os had at their

disposal a new range of technical possibilities created by the introduction of

chemical dye colors—chrome and cobalt yellow, cobalt violet, and zinc

white—that changed the look of painting. Likewise the transition by photographers from daguerreotypes on silvered copper sheets to mammoth albumen

negatives on glass dramatically changed the look of photographs. The new

materials brought a new character to subjects that invited photographers to

work with a concentrated process of observation. The power of glass negatives

to resolve detail reduced the need for photographers to rely on literary associations in the choice of motifs. Indeed certain photographers began to see

nature as a temple deserving of thoughtful compositions and extremely faithful

rendering, a quality historian John Baur has called pantheistic realism. Others

have noticed the relationship of this nature-consciousness to Emersonian

transcendentalism, where light equated a divine presence. However, when

Ralph Waldo Emerson decreed that we see with "new eyes"*and declared,aOur

age is ocular," he heralded a new epoch for all visual arts. The philosophy of

* Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 4: 321; quoted in Hans Huth, Nature and the

American (Berkeley, 1957), 89.

307. James Wallace Black. Artists Falls, North Conway (New Hampshire), 1854. Salt print.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Promised Gift of Warner Communications, Inc. (not in exhibition)

NAEF 269
merson and his follower, Henry David Thoreau, is of particular pertinence to

hotography which was the medium best able to render the immediacy of

bserved phenomena, though there is no documentation that any of the

hotographers under consideration here actually read Emerson or Thoreau.

ew letters, diaries, or personal libraries have survived from photographers of

is period, and it is from our historical perspective that an association is

voked. Nonetheless, because photography made possible the full union of

e artist and his subject, it was a medium tailored to Thoreau's philosophy if

ot vice versa.

Carleton E. Watkins and Timothy H. O'Sullivan emerged simultaneously

ith the classic phase of luminist painting and stand parallel to Martin Johnson

eade, Sanford Gifford, and John E Kensett in their tendency to simplify

ompositions, their fondness for low horizon lines, their attraction to solid

orms in nature, their desire to model palpable space, and above all their belief

n the transcendent beauty of nature. Watkins emigrated to California from

Oneonta, New York in the backwash of the gold rush and in 1854 is listed as a

erk in the book and stationery emporium of G. W. Murray.3 As is typical of

most photographers of his epoch, little is known of Watkins' early years as a

hotographer other than that sometime in the mid-i85os he left clerking to

work in the San Jose branch studio of Robert Vance, San Francisco's legendary

Daguerrean portraitist. Daguerreotype portraits by Watkins have not been

dentified and his earliest photographs to survive are from his famous 1861

xpedition to Yosemite when the first mammoth-plate photographs of the site

were made, a series that was as advanced technically and aesthetically as any

European photographer, and much grander in scale than anything that had

een systematically produced in America before.

How or from whom Watkins learned the craft of the landscapist—fundamentally different in its requirements from portraiture—is not clear. A possible

ormative influence on Watkins' eye were photographs by master eastern and

European photographers whose work Watkins would certainly have seen at

Vance's establishment in the form of stereographs—photographs made with a

win-lensed camera that, when viewed through a stereoscope, gives the illusion

f three-dimensional space. Vance advertised that he stocked the largest inven

ory of stereoscopic photographs in San Francisco—over six hundred views,

ncluding scenes from Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean, the Orient, and

portions of the Eastern United States."4 Indeed, the best examples of land

cape photography being done anywhere in the world were in stereographs by

Europeans such as Roger Fenton, Francis Frith, Charles Soulier, and John

Soule and by the American, Frederick Langenheim. Watkins himself came to

be a master of stereographic photography, sales of which were the staple of his

ivelihood. It is not unreasonable to think that the most capable European and

American landscapists were Watkins' teachers through the best possible mode

of instruction, the photographs themselves.

Watkins' known work commences in 1861, the year he told his biographer that

308. Carleton E. Watkins. The Three Brothers—4480 Feet—Yosemite, 1861. Albumen print

from mammoth-plate negative. The American Geographical Society of New York (not

in exhibition)

he first visited Yosemite to photograph, using an enormous camera capable of

receiving eighteen-by-twenty-one-inch glass plates and a smaller twin-lensed

stereo camera. The dating of these mammoth plates is derived from a unique

set of glass stereographs in the National Park Service museum at Yosemite, a set

originally owned by Professor Spencer Baird of the Smithsonian Institution.

Through comparative analysis it is possible to deduce that The Three

Brothers—4480 Feet—Yosemite (1861; fig. 308) is from the first visit to Yosemite.

Typical of the style of picturesque romanticism in both painting and photography of this time is the combination in one view of deep shadow and bright

sunlight, as well as a composition closed at the edges by an enframement of

trees. Between 1861 and 1866 Watkins worked his way around Yosemite creating

the tightly composed studies that served to identify the key natural motifs and

the best points from which they might be viewed. Despite the traces of human

settlement in the valley, including a hotel and barns and corrals for beasts of

burden and farm animals, Watkins studiously omitted them from all but a few

of his Yosemite views. He sought to create the impression of Yosemite as an

Edenic paradise. Watkins consistently attempted to delimit the perimeters of

his compositions by the closure of trees and cliffs, while he simultaneously

7O NAEF
309. Carleton E. Watkins. Mirror View, El Capitan, Yosemite (no. 38), c. 1866.

Albumen photograph. 0.530 x 0.411 (2o7/8 x i63/16 in). Private collection,

New York. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

focused attention on three or four elements such as a tree and two enframing

rock formations in Down the Valley, Yosemite (no. 37) (1861:"; Boston Public

Library). Between 1861 and 1866 Watkins3 style evolved toward compositions

that were less and less delimited by artificial compositional devices. He began

to translate his visions into more specifically optical phenomenon with real and

implied light and space. Mirror View, El Capitan (no. 38) (c. 1866, fig. 309; see

also fig. 310) introduces a reflection that turns the world upside down since the

rendering of the cliff in the water is more detailed and stronger in definition

that the nonreflected cliff. The visual ambiguity between real world and

reflected world is very strong. The diagonally placed fallen log serves to expand

310. Carlton E. Watkins. Tu-Toch-Anula, or El Capitan, 3,600 Feet High, Yosemite, 1861. Albumen

photograph. 0.381 x 0.508 (15 x 20 in). Daniel Wolf. Photo: International Museum of Photography at

George Eastman House, Rochester, New York

the composition beyond the actual edge of the picture, thus psychologically

opening it up.

The evolution of Watkins5 style is exceptional in nineteenth-century photography To date such systematic growth has been identified in very few European

or American photographers. Few worked for a sufficiently long period—

oftentimes less than a decade—for stylistic change to occur, while others did

not leave a sufficiently well dated oeuvre to permit tracing of such evolution as

there might have been.

Watkins was apparently influenced during this period of stylistic change by

various outside influences that included Albert Bierstadt and Bierstadfs

writer-friend Fitz Hugh Ludlow, both of whom he met, and Clarence King,

who was perhaps the most important American Ruskinian after William

Stillman.5 In 1866 Watkins traveled about Yosemite in the company of King and

his associates on the California Geological Survey directed by Josiah Whitney,

for which Watkins was commissioned as photographer that season—the first

NAEF 271
3n. Carleton E. Watkins. A Storm on Lake Tahoe (California), c. 1880-

1885. Albumen photograph. 0.388 x 0.540 (i5!/4 x 21% in). Private collection, New York. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

photographer since the Civil War to be engaged in a government survey. The

changes in Watkins' style soon after this time can be ascribed at least in part to

the influence of a philosophical point of view such as King could have supplied.

Conversely, King had displayed no particular love of photographs before 1867;

and yet it can be speculated that Watkins and his photographs were formative

influences on King, who will turn up again in this narrative in the context of

O'Sullivan, who was commissioned by King to photograph on the fortieth

parallel survey beginning in 1867.

King graduated from Yale University's Sheffield Scientific School in 1862 and

spent the following year in New York, where he became involved with the

Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art, a group highly influenced by the

writing of John Ruskin.6 Ruskin had great admiration for photographs, as they

embodied many of the principles he valued in art; in turn the Ruskinians saw in

the photograph a medium capable of recording the minute aspects of nature,

like the texture of granite or a forest thicket, which resisted treatment with

brush or pencil. King had great respect for visual artists and was an occasional

collector of paintings and drawings, although he is not documented as having

had an active interest in photography until 1867. He moved in a circle of artists,

and his love of art remained for the rest of his life. Thus, when King arrived in

San Francisco in 1863 to work as a volunteer with Whitney's California Geological Survey, his head was filled with ideas far beyond the narrow field of applied

geology, and he was famous for camp-fire conversation about art and aesthetics. In addition to being a Ruskinian, King was also a pantheistic antiDarwinian, whose theory of catastrophism was framed to prove that evolution

could not have taken place because of all the sudden violent geological changes

that had occurred in earth's history. King was firmly opposed to the concept

that man evolved from primates and hoped to prove by geological evidence

that "if catastrophes extirpated all life at oft repeated intervals from the time of

its earliest introduction, then creation must necessarily have been oft repeated."7

 King invoked the cosmogony of Sanskrit, Hebrew, and Islam as well

as the Bible, when he quoted in a very fundamentalist way. King's natureoriented spiritualism can be traced directly to Emerson and Thoreau.

Watkins' style cannot be traced specifically prior to 1875, the year it appears

his entire collection of negatives up to that time was lost through bankruptcy to

his next-door-neighbor, Isaiah Tabor, who continued to print those negatives

with his own name in place of Watkins'. The loss necessitated Watkins making

272 NAEF
3i2. Carleton E. Watkins. Columbia River, 1868. Albumen photograph. 0.400

x 0.515 (15% x 2oy4 in). Daniel Wolf

an entirely new set of negatives. In remaking his original negatives Watkins

often did not prospect for new motifs or viewpoint, but rather set his camera

up on many of the identical sites of his earlier visits, to duplicate as closely as

possible the original perspective, especially in the Yosemite series. The new

negatives differed from the original set only in so far as the motifs themselves

had changed over the years: trees grew, others fell, riverbeds eroded, and

occasionally a structure was built where one had never existed before. Watkins

selected the identical season and time of day. However, for non-Yosemite

views, Watkins labeled the post-i875 work as his New Series, identified on paper

labels pasted onto the mounts. Between 1875 and 1880 Watkins ventured south

in California to the terminus of the Southern Pacific Railroad in Tucson,

Arizona, and north to Lake Tahoe using the privilege of a private Union Pacific

railroad car to haul his photographic wagon. Watkins' photographs after 1875

demonstrate an even greater degree of evolution away from tight, contained

compositions to broadly treated motifs typified by A Storm on Lake Tahoe (c.

1880-1885; fig. 311), which closely parallels the storm themes of Martin Johnson

Heade.

The rarity of the new series mammoth-plate prints suggests Watkins did not

sell enough to recover economically from his 1875 setback. During the later

years he retired into the role of a failed genius, having lost the national

importance he had in the i86os. Although he is listed in the business directories

of San Francisco as having a studio until 1906, the paucity of surviving work

from that period suggests he must have been very inactive. Winter View of Cape

Horn from Bridal Veil (fig. 313; see also fig. 314) can be attributed to Watkins'

18708 trip through the Pacific Northwest. In this photograph Watkins creates

an open, meditative composition by showing a section through the riverbank

that we are invited to extend horizontally in either direction beyond the edges

of the photograph. Compositionally it is related to Tosemite Valley from Sentinel

Dome (no. 93) of 1866 (private collection), which, however, is spatially more

complex. Thematically, Watkins has clearly abandoned an Edenic vision of wild

nature, and in a rare instance of the winter landscape evokes a Stygian barrenness that is new to his style.

Watkins' two most important late projects were commissions he undertook

to photograph the Kern County Land Company property near Bakersfield,

and to photograph the Phoebe Appleton Hearst hacienda, near Pleasanton.8

Many of those studies and similar ones such as the Berkshire Ranch of about 1885

NAEF 273
313. Carleton E. Watkins. Winter View of Cape Horn from Bridal Veil, c. 1875. Albumen

print from imperial-plate negative. Private collection. Photo: The Metropolitan

Museum of Art, New York (not in exhibition)

(private collection) rely entirely on optical effects such as the shimmering light

on the tree leaves and the random patterns formed by intersecting plots of land

and the shadows cast by features marking their perimeters. The completely

open quality of these compositions and their overriding concern for effects of

light indicate how deeply those elements were a part of Watkins' consciousness; they cannot be dismissed as fleeting affectation absorbed from the

outside. No other photographer of his generation so fully expressed an understanding of stylistic issues pioneered by painters of his generation.

Timothy H. O'Sullivan, born of an Irish immigrant family that settled in

Staten Island, New York, was a mere twenty-one years old when he photographed at the Battle of Bull Run for Brady's Photographic Corps. While

Watkins meditated on the paradise of Yosemite, O'Sullivan was mired in the

inferno of Civil War battlefields. Brady's Photographic Corps consisted of

perhaps two dozen individuals including such talented men as George Barnard, A. J. Russell (see fig. 315), and Alexander Gardner. Gardner was a

Scotsman who had been brought to this country by Brady in the 18508 to

manage the Washington portrait gallery about the time daguerreotypes, at

which Brady was a specialist, were being replaced by paper prints from

glass-plate negatives. After aiding Brady transform his operation from metal to

glass plates, Gardner, in association with his son James, established his own

314. Carleton E. Watkins. Cafe Horn, Oregon, 1868. Albumen photograph. 0.391 x 0.521

(15% x 20% in). Private collection, New York. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art,

New York

Washington studio and was soon advertising for sale a series entitled Photographic Incidents of the War published in competition with Brady's. Gardner's

task as an illustrator was somehow to encapsulate in single images the meaning

of battle statistics.

Forty-four of the one hundred photographs appearing in Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War (1865) were by O'Sullivan. The most often

reproduced image in the set of original mounted photographs in two volumes

was O'Sullivan's The Field Where General Reynolds Fell printed from a negative

made early in the morning of July 4, 1863 (fig. 316). Only hours before, a

three-day battle that pitted ninety thousand Union troops against seventy-five

thousand Confederates had ended in a Union victory with fifty-one thousand

dead on both sides. O'Sullivan created a flat, open composition bathed in

serene light not unlike the kind of composition that Heade, Gilford, or Kensett

might have applied to landscape alone. The out-of-focus background has a

purely photographic effect that flattens the space and permits full attention to

be concentrated on the corpses arranged like a still life. In framing his image so

it intersects the bodies at the extreme left and right edges, O'Sullivan invites us

to read the scene as a slice through a motif that is repeated beyond the

274 NAEF
315- Andrew Joseph Russell. Weber Valley, from Wilhelmina Pass, Utah, 1867-1868. Albumen photograph. 0.228 x 0.309 (9 x n% in). Private collection. Photo: Janet Lehr

perimeters of this photograph. The solution is not unlike that of Watkins'

Yosemite Valley from Sentinel Dome (no. 03) (c. 1866; private collection), where we

are invited to imagine the landscape repeated beyond what we actually see

represented. Watkins, however, worked untouched by the war and had the

comparative luxury of returning repeatedly to the Eden of Yosemite Valley to

sift out the ideal time of day and season for each view. Not only was O'Sullivan

confronted by motifs that resisted meditative treatment, but he was constantly

on the move with his darkroom installed in a horse-drawn wagon each day

confronting unfamiliar motifs. He could not return to contemplate subjects he

had seen many times before.

O'Sullivan's motifs changed dramatically when he became associated with

Clarence King's United States Geological Survey of the Fortieth Parallel, an

expedition that departed via sea from New York to San Francisco on May 8,

1867 for a two-year campaign of scientific exploration. As director of the survey,

King was a firm believer in the useful application of photography to the needs

of a topographic survey. This exploration along the fortieth parallel encompassed some of the most barren regions of Nevada, Utah, and Arizona that for

good reason had not heretofore been adequately charted. Once photographed

by O'Sullivan, moreover, few of the motifs entered the realm of national myth

as did the Yosemite of Watkins or the Yellowstone of Jackson, even though little

of the area had been photographed before.

During the survey, O'Sullivan was constantly on the move from one desolate

site to another, many of them unlike any landscape he had seen in his life.

Pyramid Lake, Nevada, for example, was named for its conical island (fig. 317),

that, like the nearby tufa formations, were the result of ancient volcanic activity.

James Wood has written of this series that

one senses that for O'Sullivan a photograph was equally an image chosen and organized

by the artist and a specimen of preexisting physical fact recorded by the technician. The

perfectly balanced tension between these subjective and objective concerns is a central

characteristic of his work.9

During the time he worked for King, O'Sullivan did not have great freedom of

choice over his subjects since they were selected to be photographed on the

basis of their scientific relevance by King or his associates. O'Sullivan's relationship to his subjects was, of necessity, not unlike that of the folk artist to his

subjects; in the latter case, the artist was often confined by certain limiting

parameters. Weathervanes and quilts must perform their appointed functions;

316. Timothy H. O'Sullivan. The Field Where General Reynolds Fell, July 4,1863. Albumen print from full-plate negative. International Museum of Photography at George

Eastman House, Rochester, New York (not in exhibition)

NAEF 275
7. Timothy H. O'Sullivan. Pyramid and Tufa Domes, 1868. Albumen photograph.

200 x 0.270 (7% x 10% in). The National Archives, Washington, D.C.

eir actual appearance emerges from the collective body of traditional patterns

nd designs. Very rarely did folk artists invent new functions or new designs;

ther they worked with what was given to them. O'Sullivan, who on the King

rvey was instructed as to his motifs, allowed his visual imagination to come

 bear in selecting the point of view from which the photograph would be

ade, the framing of the subject, the kind and intensity of light, and the choice

 including otherwise extraneous elements. Desert Sand Hills Near the Sink of

arson (1868; fig. 318) rises above its function as a geological document to

ecome a sublime work of art by virtue of the photographer's handling, not for

ny reason inherent in sand dunes. The deployment of the horse-drawn wagon

nd the compositional choices that resulted in the flanking of the white sand

ll by two darker shapes cause this to function simultaneously as geological

pecimen and fantasy landscape.

O'Sullivan returned to the West again in 1871, having spent the 1870 season on

e naval expedition to Panama's Isthmus of Darien conducted by Lt. Comdr.

homas O. Selfridge, who had been sent by the government to prospect for

ossible routes for a canal through Panama. Back in the continental United

tates O'Sullivan traveled west via the newly completed transcontinental rail

ad to participate in the Geological Surveys West of the One-Hundredth

Meridian conducted by Lt. George M. Wheeler of the Army Corps of En318. Timothy H. O'Sullivan. Desert Sand Hills Near the Sink of Carson, 1868. Albumen

print from full-plate negative. The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (not in

exhibition)

gineers. In contrast to King, Wheeler was a West Pointer and a career officer

with little interest in either the arts or the philosophical controversies that

surrounded contemporary science. O'Sullivan was sent out, accompanied by

an enlisted man from the main party for days at a time, when he had complete

freedom over the choice of his motifs. As a result, they become more topographical and pictorial than photographs made during the King survey.10

Canon of the Colorado River, Near Mouth of San Juan River, Arizona (1873;

Boston Public Library) is, on the surface, a spatially open composition orchestrating light and space at the expense of any dramatic intensification of the

canyon, though it is the primary motif. At the heart of this photograph is an

unstated subject, that of the enormity of geological time. Perhaps more so than

any other photographer of his epoch, O'Sullivan concerned himself with

pictorializing the passage of time. Time is the unstated subject of Rock Carved by

Drifting Sand (1871; fig. 319), just as it is m Ancient Ruins in the Canon De Chelle

(1873; fig. 320), both of which are composed with visual cues to help decipher

the overlay of the elements of time. The carved rock in the former becomes a

still-life arrangement, with a carefully placed bottle and tin cup to bridge the

gap between the modern era and the distant past. Likewise, the Canyon De

Chelle ruins are associated with O'Sullivan's day, represented in the posed

figures, a more distant human time represented in the ruins of a native

6 NAEF
American dwelling, as well as geological time, represented by the scars of

erosion on the cliff itself. O'Sullivan's treatment of Green River, Colorado

(18705; fig. 321) in a series of exposures from the same viewpoint establishes

beyond a doubt his intentional concern for time and how it can be expressed by

light. The evidence of geological time is represented in the eroded canyon,

while lunar time is expressed by the patterns of light and shadow that not only

differ from one image to the next but also transform the far side of the river

from an undulating sequence of ravines to a barely modulated bas-relief effect.

Textures, details, and entire formations metamorphose as the light changes.

O'Sullivan's series brings to mind Claude Monet's series of haystacks and his

varying facades of Rouen Cathedral; yet however similar to Monet in general

effect, the precise reasons for O'Sullivan's series remain unknown, while

Monet's "art for art's sake" motivation is beyond doubt.

O'Sullivan left historians with only circumstantial evidence for why and how

his concern for time and light grew to the point we see in 1873, the last year he

spent in the West. Like his contemporary Eadweard Muybridge, he was

diverted either by differing personal concerns and sometimes by events outside

his control from single-mindedly pursuing a track of homogeneous stylistic

evolution as did Watkins. O'Sullivan returned to Washington, D.C., where he

died prematurely leaving to other photographers the opportunity of germinat320. Timothy H. O'Sullivan. Ancient Ruins in the Canon De Chelle, New Mexico, 1873.

Albumen print from full-plate negative. Boston Public Library (not in exhibition)

319. Timothy H. O'Sullivan. Rock Carved by Drifting Sand, 1871. Albumen print from

full-plate negative. The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (not in exhibition)

NAEF 277
32i. Timoth

y H. O'Sullivan.

Green River, Colorado, 18705

(two of six exposures from

the same viewpoint at differ-

ent times of day). Albumen

prints from full-plate nega-

tives. The Library of Con-

gress, Washington, D.C.

(not in exhibition)

ing the seed he had fertilized.

The person who in 1880 would revolutionize the understanding of the

relationship between light, time, and motion in photography was the

English-born Eadweard Muybridge. It was he who found a final solution to

the problem of recording motion with a camera when he fused the principles of

landscape photography, to which light is the fundamental means by which

forms are articulated, with methods photographers had devised for stopping

motion in scenes of people moving through city streets. O'Sullivan showed

how the passage of time could be indicated by sequential exposures from the

same viewpoint made at sufficient intervals for the light to change and,

therefore, for the subject (as it is recorded by the camera) to change.

By the mid-i86os a symbiosis of the technical and aesthetic ingredients of

both painting and photography had begun, and investigations led to the

appreciation of photography as a medium of expression uniquely capable of

dealing with the passage of time. Painters and photographers wished to expand

the range of subjects through their materials. Fitz Hugh Lane, for example,

taped together sheets of paper from his sketch pad to create strongly horizontal

formats. Photographers had, from the earliest days of the medium in the 18405,

made sequential exposures that created a panoramic effect when placed side by

side. Watkins' three-part panorama of San Francisco was exhibited in the 1867

Paris Exposition, and Muybridge, perhaps motivated by the competitive in-

stinct, created in Watkins' footsteps a six-part panorama. Both Watkins and

Muybridge followed in the tracks of those as yet unidentified Daguerrean

photographers who in the 18408 had laid the foundations for making San

Francisco the most frequent subject of panoramic renderings of any city in the

world. Muybridge orchestrated his composition with careful attention to the

light reflected off buildings and its play against the dark earth, the silvery ocean,

and atmospheric distance. In an otherwise silent and uninhabited image, the

one suggestion of life (e.g., motion) is the trail of smoke left by a departing

steamship.

Between 1868 and 1872 Muybridge made numerous strictly landscape photo-

graphs treating many of the same subjects as Watkins but rendering them in a

decidedly more melodramatic style, whose references are to European pic-

turesque romanticism rather than the serene precision of Watkins or O'Sulli-

van. During the years Watkins and O'Sullivan spent most of their time in the

wilderness, Muybridge, who spent his share of time out of town, also made a

concerted campaign of reporting through photographs daily life in San Fran-

cisco and on the nearby ranches and small towns of northern California. Using

the small format twin-lensed stereo camera, Muybridge was able to probe the

waterfront and business district and even range to such fleeting subjects for

those times as prison work gangs, classrooms with students, and agricultural

fieldworkers. The thread unifying these subjects is that they are animate and

thus require the photographer to devise ways of stopping their motion or

creating the illusion that motion is stopped.

278 NAEF
The automatic shutter had yet to be perfected and photographers of the

i86os and 18705 made their exposures manually by removing the lens cap and

replacing it. Manual operation determined that the minimum exposure was

approximately 1/25 of a second, an interval insufficient to stop fast action. This

meant that until about 1880 the photographer had to choose his point of view

so the direction of motion was not parallel to the film plane and to keep

sufficiently distant from the subject to that the parallax effect diminished the

telltale blur of a subject in motion. Muybridge mastered these elementary

procedures and became confident that if he could devise a rapid shutter for a

stereo camera, he could capture the gait of a cantering horse, which he

succeeded in doing in 1878 (fig. 322).n By striving to stop the motion of the

horse Muybridge had clearly separated the issue of physical motion from the

echoed effect of motion as it is symbolized by light changing through lunar

motion.

About the same time that he had made the daily-life studies, Muybridge had

already tackled the rendering of pure light in a series of photographs of clouds

and backlighted coastal scenes using the same type of stereo cameras as he had

used for his urban and landscape views. At this time it was not possible to

record clouds and landscape on the same plate without sacrificing detail in one

subject or the other. Muybridge began experimenting with ways to combine

clouds from one negative with landscape from another. In certain cases he

322. Eadweard J. Muybridge. Horse and Rider in Motion, 1878. Multiple exposure

albumen photographs. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (not in exhibition)

realized an atmospheric stage set as in Volcan Queszaltenango, Guatemala

(private collection), where the illusion of steam is created by printing one

negative of clouds over another of rocks. Such experiments derive from the

romantic style that was being replaced and indicate how uncertain Muybridge

was over the artistic application of his experiments. Despite their enormous

historical importance, neither the cloud studies nor the first motion studies

show the concentrated power of observation that was so fundamental to the

compositions of Watkins and O'Sullivan and to the broader art styles of the

sixties and seventies. The photographs of Muybridge, however, proved indispensable for more than a generation of painters, including the likes of Eakins,

who flourished in the last quarter of the century.

Eastern photographers had begun experimenting with special effects obtainable with the stereographic camera three or four years before Muybridge in

the West pushed the issue of light and motion to its full conclusion. John Soule,

a Boston photographer who was an exact contemporary of Watkins, made the

earliest firmly dated photograph in America that addressed itself to the primary

subject of light and atmosphere. His Marine Study by Moonlight (1863; fig. 323)

focuses on two sailboats near the horizon that take their form from backlighting, an effect that photography renders better than any other visual medium.

The photograph is a piece of fine artifice resulting from an underexposed

negative made with the camera facing into the sun, a point of view that ensured

an effect of shimmering light upon the water. Simultaneously with Soule,

Watkins had begun to experiment with reflections of various kinds, one of

which was to use the water as a mirror to turn the world upside down and in

which light as a subject is subordinate to masses and space. He also made a

subtler series of reflections in which water is used as a lens to reflect light

through the lacework of foliage. His still-life composition of the Victoria Kegia

in San Francisco's Golden Gate botanical garden uses the water on which the

plant floats as both a lens and a mirror. It reflects light which gives form to the

plant and reflects a pattern from the greenhouse windows that introduces an

element of graphic design. Only the camera could render the out-of-kilter

overlaying of light and pattern convincingly, and in so doing Watkins proved

that luminism could extend to still life as well as landscape.

The stereo camera would prove to be the means by which the most sustained

and influential body of work dealing with light and atmosphere would be

produced.12 The users of this camera were primarily in the eastern United

States and adopted photographic luminism as a near trademark. However,

before light became a central issue in the vernacular photography of the East a

decade of photographs of the New England landscape were spun from the

mold of picturesque romanticism and were related to the White Mountain and

Hudson River schools of painting. Photographers and painters of the White

Mountains such as Benjamin Champney, John W. Casilear, and Asher B.

Durand were related stylistically to the Hudson River school in their quest for

environments of perfect intimacy, rather than those of Edenic grandeur. In this

NAEF 279
323. John P. Soule. Marine Study by Moonlight, 1863. Albumen stereograph. Private collection (not in exhibition)

style are the true roots of American landscape photography for the stereographs produced by Frederick and William Langenheim, G. Stacy, John

Moran, John Soule, Edward Anthony, E B. Gage, and the anonymous camera

operators working for the New York Stereoscopic Company, the Edinburgh

Stereoscopic Company of New York (two pioneer publishers of photographs),

and E. and H. T. Anthony. If one location must be cited as the birthplace of

American landscape photography, it is that of the White Mountains, which was

perhaps the first mountainous wilderness area to receive the attention of an

audience consisting primarily of city dwellers. J. W. Black's brief series of

photographs (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; see fig. 307) made in

the late 18505, besides being aesthetic and nondocumentary in spirit, are also

among the very few large-plate photographs of a region that were replaced

most frequently by small-format stereographs in the i86os and 18705.13 Among

the earliest systematic treatment in stereographs of the White Mountains was

that by John Soule done in August 1861. His images range from open, lyrical

compositions with deep atmospheric perspective, which, in keeping with the

tenets of picturesque romanticism, deal with the image of man and his works

dwarfed in nature (as in his North Conway and White Mountains—from Sunset

Hill (no. 78)} c. 1861-1865; fig. 324) and with genre subjects such as Haying Scene

(no. 147). The most successful photographs in Soule's White Mountain series

are tightly composed views of waterfalls, cascades, and pools that were named

after their discoverers and which he sometimes subtitled in personal ways such

as Thompson's Cascades—SoulfsDelight (no. 15) (1861-1865; fig. 325), subjects that

suggest his appreciation for the closed-in intimacy of certain natural motifs.

Soule did not by any means confine himself to the White Mountains. He

traveled the routes from Portland, Maine to New York City, occasionally

photographing landscape, but concentrating his attention on urban views. His

fine series of Boston and New York City are equalled by few other photographers, and it might be noted that he was also interested in instantaneous

effects such as the Marine Study by Moonlight (fig. 323). He photographed New

York Harbor capturing the South Ferry and other vessels moving full tilt

(stereo no. 289), maintaining about the same degree of interest in stoppedmotion effects as Watkins did, though both were far less experimental than

Muybridge in this regard.

Next to Soule in importance for White Mountains work stands Benjamin W.

Kilburn and his brother Edward Kilburn, who established Kilburn Brothers in

the White Mountain community of Littleton, New Hampshire, in 1865. Benjamin Kilburn photographed many of the same general sites as Soule, though

with a much stronger emphasis on routes of transportation, vehicles, buildings, and figures in landscape. Kilburn lacked Soule's understanding of the

rhythms and harmonies of nature, but he did have a fine sense for rendering its

most intimate details and capturing even the dynamic tensions of rocks in their

280 NAEF
324. John P. Souk. North Conway and White

Mountains—from Sunset Hill (no. 78), c. 1861-

1865. Stereograph. Private collection. Photo:

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

325. John P. Soule. Thompson's Cascades—

Souths Delight (no. is), 1861-1865. Stereograph.

Private collection. Photo: National Gallery of

Art, Washington, D.C.

NAEF 28l
nvironment such as Kilburn's Flume above the Boulder (no. 122) (c. 1865; fig.

26). He also pioneered the application of the close-up point of view as a visual

evice for rendering the character of a place. His studies of rock and ice

ormations required perseverance and considerable technical dexterity in

manipulating normally quite viscous wet collodion at temperatures that even

urther reduced its fluid quality and light sensitivity. His attention to the

articular in photos of the lichens on rocks (stereo no. 182) and to plant still-life

ompositions, as well as his sense of order in an arrangement he made of

egional butterfly specimens (stereo no. 89), has much in common with

O'Sullivan's objectivity as seen in the latter's geological studies made on the

King and Wheeler surveys. It is also related to the quasi-scientific rock studies

y the painters Haseltine (see figs. 146-147), Richards (see fig. 291), and Bricher

see fig. 297).

Effects of light and atmosphere are among the most attractive pictorial

ubjects in both painting and photography for the general public. It was

atural, therefore, that photographers who plied their craft near tourist attrac

ions would introduce such into their catalogues. Perhaps the most frequently

isited natural monument in the East was Niagara Falls, where two photog

aphers worth our attention flourished between about 1870 and about 1890:

George Barker and G. E. Curtis (no relative of Edward S. Curtis, photog

apher of the North American Indian). There is little specific biographical data

about Barker or Curtis; but if any two photographers who issued separate

bodies of work of the same region can be described as having a collective vision,

t is they. Both concentrated on the falls, ice formations, the city of Buffalo, and

he landscape surrounding the falls. Barker, who seems to have begun photographing Niagara in the mid-i86os (see fig. 327), wintered in Florida, and his

ravels are recorded in stereographs along the route south, as well as in some

NO. 122. Flame above the Boulder.

full- and mammoth-plate prints of Florida. Curtis, who commenced work at

Niagara before 1870, issued his stereographs on bright orange mounts nearly

identical with those used by Barker (see fig. 328). It cannot be ascertained

whether Barker and Curtis got their moonlight effects from a single negative

exposed in broad daylight that was altered at the printmaking stage or if three

negatives—one of the sun, another of the clouds, and the third of the

landscape—were made and superimposed. In any event the effects we see, like

those of Muybridge and Soule slightly earlier, are the result of manipulating the

photographic process and do not represent a natural rendering of any single

point in time. In spirit they violate the luminist principle of honesty to the

60S—Sucsc-t—Niagara River.

327. George Barker. Sunset—-Niagara, River (no. 608)y c. 1870-1875. Stereograph. Private

collection. Photo: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

326. Benjamin W. Kilburn. Flume Above the Boulder (no. uz)y c. 1865. Stereograph.

Private collection. Photo: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

328. G. E. Curtis. Horse Shoe Folly Moonlight (no. 79), 1870. Stereograph. Private collection. Photo: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

282 NAEF
subject in the medium of representation, but visually they are related to its

principles.

Seneca Ray Stoddard, a contemporary of Curtis and Barker, established

himself in Glens Falls, New York as a publisher of stereographs of upper

Hudson River tourist sites, many of which were favorite haunts of painters in

the luminist style (see fig. 329). His list of views includes Lake George (visited

by Heade and Kensett in the 18708), Saratoga, Luzerne, the Adirondacks,

Ticonderoga, Lake Champlain, and Au Sable Chasm (see, for example, figs.

330-334)—the latter motif having something in common with the grander

Arizona canyons photographed by O'Sullivan on the Wheeler Survey. Stoddard commenced work in the late i86os and by the mid-iSyos did moonlight

views of Lake George strongly influenced by Curtis and Barker (see fig. 329).

Like other photographers concerned with effects of light, he too held the

stopping of motion as a favorite motif. Among the instantaneous views he lists

are the Fireman's Tournament in Glens Falls of July 4, 1870, the decoration

ceremonies of the civil war monument there, and stop-motion views of Glens

Falls. Remarkable enough, Stoddard's views of this region are among the few

professional studies of landscape of the northeast in full-plate format before the

late i88os. The White Mountains were the subject primarily of the stereo

camera, and thus Stoddard occupies a singular position as the chief counterpart

of those working west of the Rocky Mountains (see, for example, figs. 9,96-97,

160-165, among others). The parallel between Stoddard's style of the eighties

and luminist painting has been lucidly described here (p. 142): "horizontal

order, balanced tonal contrasts, open surfaces of silvery water, and low sunlight

faced centrally across the view, its reflection a vertical bar perfectly intersecting

the shoreline's horizontals" make Stoddard's work a textbook example of the

parallel in photography to luminist painting.

Examples of luminist painting and photography were increasingly available

to the public; and when in the mid-i88os amateur photographers increased in

numbers, it was natural for a certain number of them to look toward accomplished image-makers as their models. The invention of factory-prepared dry

plates for negatives, more than any other invention, encouraged the rise of

serious amateur photography. A more general concern for effects of light and

atmosphere was made possible by the invention of panchromatism in film

plates, creating equal sensitivity to all colors. Thus was eliminated the camera's

color blindness for the sky, a major shortcoming of wet collodion plates which

were more sensitive to blue than to other colors.14 The widespread availability

of lenses with shutters and easily adjustable apertures was the third ingredient

that attracted amateurs to photography. This new technology, combined with

the panchromatic dry plates, made it possible to capture even the most fleeting

effects of light and atmosphere—such as those in Barker's sunset view of the

329. Seneca Ray Stoddard. Moonlight on Lake George (no. 1380), c. 1875-1880. Stereograph.

Private collection. Photo: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

330. Seneca Ray Stoddard. Little Tupper Lake, Adirondacks, 1888. Silverprint photograph. 0.163 x 0.216 (67

/16 x S% in). The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

NAEF 283
31
332. Senec

a Ray Stoddard. Twin Mountains, Lake George, Deer}s Leaf, Bloomer

Mountain, 1891. Silverprint photograph. 0.167 x 0.217 (6%; x 8

9/

16 in)

. The Library of

Congress, Washington, D.C.

331. Seneca Ray Stoddard. Split Rock Mountain, Lake Champlain, 1890. Silverprint

photograph. 0.165 x 0.216 (6% x &/2 in). The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

(opposite page)

333. Seneca Ray Stoddard. Lake George, Black Mountain from the Southwest, 1890.

Silverprint photograph. 0.165 x 0.219 (6% x 8% in). The Library of Congress, Washing-

ton, D.C. (above, at right)

334. Seneca Ray Stoddard. Lake George, French Point from South, 1890. Silverprint

photograph. 0.167 x 0.219 (6

9/

16 x 8

% in). The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

East River, New York (1888; fig. 335)—provided one had the vision and interest

to follow the idea through to its logical conclusion. It is not uncommon to find

a luminist-inspired photograph every now and then in family albums repre-

senting a momentary concern for that particular effect by the photographer. It

was very uncommon, however, to return to such motifs over a period of

months or years in a sustained pattern as was the case with Henry L. Rand, an

amateur whose familiarity with painters and possibly other photographers

undoubtedly formed the starting point for the rendering of his own percep-

tions.

15

Rand, who resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a person of indepen-

dent means who could be away from his office for extended periods. His

NAEF 285
36. Henry L. Rand. Across the Bay, Gloucester, 1892. Platinum photograph. 0.117 x 0.164

4% x 6% in). Southwest Harbor Public Library, Southwest Harbor, Maine. Photo:

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

39. Henry L. Rand. Moonlight on the Upper Samnac, c. 1897. Platinum photograph.

.122 x 0.172 (413/i6 x 6% in). Southwest Harbor Public Library, Southwest Harbor,

Maine. Photo: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (above, at right)

335. George Barker. New York—East River—Sunset, 1888. Stereograph. Private collec

ion. Photo: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

favorite haunts were Gloucester (fig. 336) and Mt. Desert Island where he

summered in Southwest Harbor (fig. 337). Following in the footsteps of his

master-artist predecessors Lane and Heade, he visited Rye Beach, Marblehead,

Rockport, Pigeon Cove, the marshes of Little River and Rowley, Braces Cove

Pond, Cow Island Pond, and the Penobscot Bay off Castine. He even visited

the upper Hudson River Valley to do a moonlight study of Saranac Lake that

suggests a familiarity with the photographs of Stoddard.

Rand built a summer cottage in Southwest Harbor on Mt. Desert Island,

christening it "Fox's Den," and was among the first rusticators to settle in that

village.16 What distinguishes Rand is that he worked in the same region as key

luminist painters and he pursued his work in a contemplative manner, in

methodical steps that led him from run-of-the-mill subjects to his concern for

atmospheric effects. Indeed the process of his evolution is documented in

carefully kept notebooks (Southwest Harbor, Maine, Library). At first he only

recorded the date and place of his exposures; but in the winter of 1891, after

producing some three hundred negatives on the new panchromatic dry plates,

he began to record the lens used and the exposure time. By late summer 1891 he

commenced to notice and record even the atmospheric conditions under which

the negatives were made. On August 21 he made exposure number 366 under

"very cloudy" conditions, and on October 4 he photographed a sunrise for the

first time. November brought him to a series of exposures on "very dull" and

"overcast" days, while the spring of 1892 leads to attempts to photograph late

afternoon rain. His experiments with rainy and cloudy day exposures did not

286 NAEF
337- Henry L. Rand. Somes Sound, Looking South, 1893. Platinum

photograph. 0.117 x 0.170 (4% x 6n/16 in). Southwest Harbor Public

Library, Southwest Harbor, Maine. Photo: National Gallery of Art,

Washington, D.C.

yield results of great visual interest because the atmosphere became a

homogeneous gray. The effects were too subtle for the materials available. In

the summer of 1892 in Southwest Harbor Rand began to work with the fog that

often enshrouds Maine coastal regions, and his Island House Slip, Thick Fog (fig.

338) is the most successful of the studies of heavy atmosphere. This composition gains its strength from the fine gradation of tone from rich foreground to

pearlescent fogbank. The outlined shapes of the boats actually give to the fog a

definition that without them is lacking.

A decade earlier Curtis, Barker, and Stoddard faked their "moonlight effects." These photos were actually made in broad daylight, producing an

artificial effect that is distinguished by a path of light reflected from the water

that extends from middle ground to the horizon. In unmanipulated photographs of sunset from this period light filters from above as in Rand's Moonlight

on the Upper Samnac (fig. 339) of about 1897. The most stunning of Rand's

atmospheric seascapes, Off Sandy Hook, from June 1897 (fig. 172), reduces sky

and water to a nearly homogeneous gray that nevertheless allows the special

character of both sky and water to remain. Rand was no doubt ignorant of

Gustave Le Gray's Brig Upon the Wetter of 1856/1857, a monumental work in the

history of photography that was faked to give the moonlight effect; it was

nevertheless the subject of great praise in its time. Le Gray would surely have

taken pleasure in knowing his idea had been pushed to its natural conclusion in.

such a fine way, and with a skill that equalled his in its unpretension.

The concern for light and atmosphere does not abruptly cease for photographers in the 19105; however, the attitude toward these elements changed

dramatically after 1900. The picture postcard was introduced in the mid-i89os

and with it the postcard aesthetic that has changed very little even until today.

Light and atmosphere are the raw ingredients of sentimentality, and, while

color photographs of luminist effects were not possible until the 19408, mechanically applied color became an accepted practice. The commercialized

results inevitably lack the dignity and conviction of true luminist works,

although they are not far removed from the manipulations of Barker, Curtis,

and Stoddard.

We also find in the early 18905 the emergence of psychological realism, a style

related to but distinct from luminism. In painting this is exemplified by

NAEF 287
8. Henry L. Rand. Island House Slip, Thick Fog, June 1892.

atinum photograph. 0.112 x 0.164 (4% x 6% in). Southwest Harbor

ublic Library, Southwest Harbor, Maine. Photo: National Gallery

f Art, Washington, D.C.

homas Eakins, who with the assistance of his wife, Susan Macdowell Eakins,

lso made photographs.17 The great majority of Eakins' photographs are

ortraits and figure studies that probe human character, physiognomy, and in

he most explicit of the nudes, the fundamentals of male and female sexuality. In

is few landscape photographs Eakins used landscape as a context for figures or

ther subjects. Sailboats on the Delaware River (Philadelphia Museum of Art) is

 vehicle for treating the interlocking geometries of the boat sails. Beach at

Manasquan, New Jersey exists in two examples, one (collection Gordon Hen

ricks, New York) significantly cropped in the area of the sky, has broad, open

uminist space not unlike the beach drawings of William Trost Richards (see

ig. 304), or Alfred T. Bricher's beach scene (see fig. 290). The footprints in the

and beginning at the bottom center edge leading off into the distance are a

sychological element, not a formal one. Possibly Eakins' most explicitly

uminist photograph is that of his two nephews by a tree reflected in the pool

near Avondale, Pennsylvania (collection Gordon Hendricks, New York). The

Huckleberry Finn aspect of the two boys gives this a literary association absent

n, for example, Watkins' reflection studies of the late i86os (fig. 309), that

oncern themselves completely with light and form to the exclusion of the

human subjects that Eakins so favored.

The question of whether luminism had its parallels in photography must be

answered in the affirmative so long as there is a consensus that luminism is a

style encompassing several general concerns in American landscape art. These

concerns include the use of crystalline light, love of atmospheric phenomena,

an appreciation for the transcendent spiritual beauty of nature, love of flat,

open, very palpable space, simplification of forms, and an affinity for the

scientific and an avoidance of literary associations. The work of more than a

dozen photographers—more will certainly be added to the list formed by this

exhibition—establish a thread stretching from the mid-i86os to the 19108. As

such, the concern by photographers with these formal and compositional

issues apparently emerged from the lead established by painters. Ironically,

photographs and not etchings or lithographs proved to be the most natural

graphic equivalent to painting. Photography perhaps even surpassed painting

in realizing some effects, such as rendering the immediacy of observed phenomena and in being the most direct possible expression of the artist's intense

concentration upon nature, resulting in the picture itself being an embodiment

of pure thought. As such the relationship between painting and photography

has never been so close or so honest.

88 NAEF
Notes

1. Weston J. Naef in collaboration with James N.

Wood, with an essay by Therese Thau Heyman, Era of

Exploration: The Rise of Landscape Photography in the

American West, 1860-1880 [exh. cat., Albright-Knox Art

Gallery and Metropolitan Museum of Art] (New York,

1975). This book concentrates on the photographs of

Carle ton E. Watkins, Timothy H. O'Sullivan, Andrew J.

Russell, William Henry Jackson, and Eadweard J. Muy-

b ridge.

2. Robert A. Sobieszek and Odette M. Appell, The

Spirit of Fact: The Daguerreotypes ofSouthworth & Howes,

184-3-1862 [exh. cat., International Museum of Photogra-

phy at the George Eastman House] (Boston, 1976). Of

the 107 images catalogued, only 2 are dated by the au-

thors to before 1850. 3. On Watkins see Naef,Er

a of Exploration, 79-124; Paul

Hickman, "Carleton E. Watkins, 1829-1916," Northlight, i

(Jan. 1977), entire issue; California History: Special Issue:

Carleton E. Watkins with the following contributions:

Richard Rudisill, "Watkins and the Historical Record,"

216-219; Pauline Grenbeaux, "Before Yosemite Art Gal-

lery: Watkins' Early Career," 220-242; Nanette Sexton,

"Watkins' Style and Technique in Early Photographs,"

242-251; Peter Palmquist, "Watkins—the Photographer

as Publisher," 252-257; Laverne Mau Dicker, "Watkins'

Photographs in the California Historical Society

Library," 266-267.

4. California Magazine and Mountaineer (Nov. 1861),

n.p.

5. Elizabeth Lindquist-Cock, "Stillman, Ruskin, and

Rossetti: The Struggle between Nature and Art "History

of Photography 3 (Jan. 1979): 1-14.

6. David H. Dickason, The Daring Toung Men: The

Story of the American Pre-Raphaelites (Bloomington,

Ind., 1953), 53-

7. Quoted in Naef, Era of Exploration, 73.

8. Hickman, "Watkins," 9.

9. Naef, Era of Exploration, 129.

10. The change in O'Sullivan's role is documented in

the records of the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth

Parallel, RG 57, The National Archives of the United

States, Washington, D.C.; records of the United States

Geographical Surveys West of the looth Meridian, RG

77, National Archives, and papers of that survey at West-

ern Americana Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and

Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.

11. Eadweard Muybridge: The Stanford Tears, 1872-1882

[exh. cat., Stanford University Museum of Art] (Stan-

ford, Calif, 1972), with essays by Robert Bartlett Haas,

Anita Ventura Mozley, and Francoise Forster-Hahn. In

this context see especially Mozley, "Photographs by

Muybridge 1872-1880: Catalog and Notes on the Work,"

on the Stanford experiments.

12. William Gulp Darrah, Stereo Views: A History of

Stereographs in America and their Collection (Gettysburg,

1964), and his The World of Stereographs (Gettysburg,

1977) are the standard introductions to the subject.

13. Thomas Southall, "White Mountains Stereographs

and the Development of a Collective Vision" in Points of

View: The Stereograph in American—A Cultural History, ed.

Edward W. Earle (Rochester, 1979).

14. Hermann W. Vogel (German, 1834-1898), the chief

inventor of panchromatic film plates, is discussed by

Josef Maria Eder, History of Photography, trans. Edward

Epstean (New York, 1945), "Chapter LXIV. Discovery of

Color-Sensitizing of Photographic Emulsions: In 1873

Professor H. W Vogel Discovers Optical Sensitizing,"

457-464.

15. The Henry L. Rand Collection is in the custody of

the Southwest Harbor (Maine) Library, in albums pre-

pared and annotated by him.

16. Rand's next-door neighbor was William Lyman

Underwood (see William Bagnall, William Lyman

Underwood: Photographer [Westwood, Mass., 1977]) who

was also an extremely serious and prolific amateur pho-

tographer of the day. Despite their friendship the two

had dramatically different styles, with Underwood con-

centrating on wild animals taken at night from his spe-

cially rigged canoe. The stylistic differences between

Rand and Underwood suggest how deliberate the un-

derlying aesthetic premises were.

17. Gordon N. Hendricks, The Photographs of Thomas

Eakins (New York, 1972).

NAEF 289
343- Albert Bierstadt. Sunrise, Yosemite Valley, c. 1870. Oil on canvas. 0.924 x 1.331 (36% x 52% in).

Inscribed, l.r.: ABierstadt. Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

290
White Light in the Wilderness

LANDSCAPE AND SELF IN NATURE'S NATION

Albert Gelpi

for Perry Miller 1905-1963

PERRY MILLER'S MONUMENTAL STUDIES of colonial and romantic American

culture comprise a magisterial argument that the distinctive and determining

experience of the New World was the confrontation between civilization and

nature.1 From the first, Americans were making clearings in the woods,

contriving a society in the wilderness; all of the social and religious assumptions which carried them across the heaving seas were put to the test, subjected

to a terrain and climate and elemental conditions which seemed indifferent to,

even opposed to, the structures of society and the monuments of culture.

William Bradford, the governor of the Plymouth colony, writing his account of

the first encounter with the New World barely a decade after the landing in

1620, interrupted his plain-spoken narrative with an editorial aside that

amounts to a prose poem, as he marveled at the courage of the Pilgrims under

the threat of that first winter, awed still at their resolute endurance in the face of

fear:2

But hear I cannot but stay and make a pause, and stand half amased at this poore peoples

presente condition; and so I thinke will the reader too, when he well considers the same.

Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before in their preparation (as

may be remembred by that which wente before), they had now no freinds to wellcome

them, nor inns to entertaine or refresh their weatherbeaten bodys, no houses or much

less townes to repaire too, to seeke for succoure. It is recorded in scripture as a mercie to

the apostle and his shipwraked company, that the barbarians shewed them no smale

kindnes in refreshing them, but these savage barbarians, when they mette with them (as

after will appeare) were readier to fill their sids full of arrows then otherwise. And for

the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that cuntrie know them to be

sharp and violent, and subjecte to cruell and feirce stormes, deangerous to travill to

known places, much more to serch an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but

a hidious and desolate wildnernes, full of wild beasts and willd men?3

The Puritans could cite Scripture in support of their perilous migration;

they could take heart by thinking of themselves as God's Chosen People,

fleeing the scourge of tyranny like the Israelites under Moses. But they found

no land of milk and honey, nor even a Pisgah whence they could "vew from this

willdernes a more goodly cuntrie." Indeed, "the whole countrie, full of woods

and thickets, represented a wild and savage heiw," and if "the hidious and

desolate wildernes" did not itself claim them, then the "wild beasts and willd

men" who inhabited it might.

Anne Bradstreet, the first published poet of the New World, was on the

flagship Arabella when it arrived at Massachusetts Bay in 1630; and she later

told her children that when "I changed my condition and was married, and

came into this country.... I found a new world and new manners, at which my

heart rose. But after I was convinced it was the way of God, I submitted to it

and joined to the church at Boston.5'

4

 Settlements like Boston and later

Andover raised a defense perimeter against the depredations of nature, and the

church safeguarded fallible human nature from the incursions of the devil; but

when she sought comfort or pleasure in landscape, she had to turn back to the

English pastoral scene she had left behind, bright with purling rivulets and

nightingale-song. There her imagination could rest secure—as it could not

with the woods outside her door.

However, even from the start the Puritans did not take nature as simply

demonic and threatening—creation fallen from grace. Since they believed that

nothing occurred except by Providence, they taught themselves to read daily

experience, and most especially momentous events, as revelations in which

"God discovered somewhat of his mind" and disposition toward them, both

individually and communally.5 It was this unshakable sense that everyday

occurrences might turn out to be "types" or symbols of divine wrath or favor

that impelled them to keep diaries and journals, write biographies and autobiographies and histories.

As the Puritans survived the rigors of the winters and other adversities, as

291

I
they learned to trust themselves to the stony land they were gradually domesticating, they even came at times to view the New World as their own Canaan:

Eden regained by God's regenerate nation. Construing the Book of Revelation, Samuel Sewall published in 1697 a little book entitled Phaenomena

quaedam Apocalyptica adAspectum Novi Orbis configurata, which he translated

in the subtitle as some few Lines towards a description of the New Heaven As It

makes to those who stand upon the New Earth. Rhapsodizing over the coastal

marshland near Newbury that Martin Johnson Heade would paint again and

again a century and a half later, Sewall envisioned his native ground as God's

kingdom revealed on earth in anticipation of the light of heaven:

As long as Plum Island shall faithfully keep the commanded Post; Notwithstanding

all the hectoring Words, and hard Blows of the proud and boisterous Ocean; As long as

any Salmon, or Sturgeon shall swim in the streams of Merrimack; or any Perch, or

Pickeril, in Crane-Pond; As long as the Sea-Fowl shall know the Time of their coming,

and not neglect seasonably to visit the Places of their Acquaintance: As long as any

Cattel shall be fed with the Grass growing in the Medows, which do humbly bow down

themselves before Turkie-Hill; As long as any Sheep shall walk upon Old Town Hills, and

shall from thence pleasantly look down upon the River Parker, and the fruitfullM^mte

lying beneath; As long as any free and harmless Doves shall find a White Oak, or other

Tree within the Township, to perch, or feed, or build a careless Nest upon; and shall

voluntarily present themselves to perform the office of Gleaners after Barley-Harvest;

As long as Nature shall not grow Old and dote; but shall constantly remember to give

the rows of Indian Corn their education, by Pairs: So long shall Christians be born

there; and being first made meet, shall from thence be Translated, to be made partakers

of the Inheritance of the Saints in Light.6

A notebook kept in the mid-eighteenth century by the greatest of New

England theologians, Jonathan Edwards, constitutes the most extended Puritan argument for a typological reading of nature. Edwards' entries, descriptive

and reflective, accumulated evidence of the providential plan by which "natural

things were ordered for types of spiritual things." And reigning over the whole

of the visible creation—rivers and trees, grasses and grain, creatures of the

earth and air—is the radiant sun; through the consistent association with

Christ, the sun becomes, almost by a pun, a manifestation of the divine Son,

God's light illuminating a darkened world. The reiteration of this theme

throughout Images or Shadows of Divine Things gathers to a tremendous paean

to the "Divine and Supernatural Light." The sun, in the "vast profusion" of its

"light and heat" is the "bright image of the all-sufficiency and ever-lastingness

of God's bounty and goodness"; the daily vanquishing of the dark oblivion of

night constituted the supreme "type of the death and resurrection of Christ."7

However, for Edwards as for the earlier Puritans, nature presented two

faces: "As thunder and thunder clouds ... have a shadow of the majesty of God,

so the blue skie, the green fields, and trees, and pleasant flowers have a shadow

of the mild attributes of God, viz., grace and love of God, as well as the

beauteuous rainbow." To fallible human beings in a darkened world the

light-process itself works both creatively and destructively: "The sun makes

plants to flourish when it shines after rain; otherwise it makes them wither";

"As the SUN is an image of Christ upon account of its pleasant light and

benefits, refreshing life-giving influences, so it is on account of its extraordinary fierce heat, it being a fire of vastly greater fierceness than any other in the

visible world, whereby is represented the wrath of the Lamb."8 Similarly, in

scriptural and in natural symbolism, "the beautifull variety of the colours of

light was designed as a type of the various beauties and graces of the spirit of

God," whereas "white, which comprehends all other colours, is made use of in

Scripture often to signify holiness, which comprehends all moral goodness and

virtue. . . ." Thus, "one and the same white light, though it seems to be an

exceeding simple thing, yet contains a great variety of rays. . . ."9 So to our

fallen senses the white light of God's spirit splinters into the color spectrum of

our piebald existence.

2

Edwards could still argue that "the book of Scripture is the interpreter of the

book of nature,"10 and Images and Shadows of Divine Things abounds in biblical

verses which validate as they extend a typology of nature. However, by the time

the new energies of romanticism began to enliven the literary scene in the new

Republic, the anagogic link between the Bible and nature had weakened to the

point where nature, even when still invoked as moral and religious in its import

and influence, need not, and generally did not, carry any strict doctrinal or

ecclesiastical signification. A high church Episcopalian New Yorker like James

Fenimore Cooper could join the Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Unitarians of New England in the romantic cult of nature. At the same time, the

shift of emphasis from Scripture to nature (the latter word now often elevated

to a capital letter) did signal a momentous and far-reaching psychological

change: from God's word to nature's "word," from the spirit-father to the

earth-mother, from a primary relation to and contention with the masculine

archetype to primary relation to and contention with the feminine archetype.

Edwards instinctively designated the sun with the masculine pronoun, because

it symbolized the son of the spirit-father, but just as instinctively later writers

used the feminine pronoun for the maternal matrix, the womb of nature from

which physical life in all its variety emerged and to which it in time returned.

Most especially male writers and artists experienced the natural scene as,

psychologically and imaginatively, the realm of earth, virgin and mother. As the

autobiographical and expository and polemical writings of the colonial and

revolutionary periods gave way to the new poetry and fiction and philosophy

of nature, so the portraits and historical canvases of the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries were displaced by a sudden interest in landscape painting.

Where previously there had been only cramped glimpses of nature through a

window or in the background in order to establish the profession or social

status of the individuals portrayed, now human figures were included in

paintings not as personalities but merely as small and anonymous witnesses to

292 GELPI
340. William Trost Richards. L0&£ Squamfrom RedHill^ 1874. Watercolor

on paper. 0.221 x 0.343 (8n/16 x 13% in). Inscribed, l.r.: W71 T. Richards. 1874.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Gift of Rev. E. L. Magoon,

1880

the encompassing scene. John Vanderlyn's Ariadne Asleep on the Isle ofNaxos

(1814; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia) can be seen as a

transitional painting. It is dominated by a human figure; in fact, it is the first

notable American painting of a nude woman. However, she is not historical

but mythic and symbolic. Classically chaste as she is, she foreshadows romantic

nature painting: a kind of Ingres nude in the wilderness. Her body is depicted

against the landscape, unconscious as nature itself; in fact, her body is presented as landscape, her contours repeating and paralleling the lines and masses

and shapes of the surrounding scene.

Moreover, the romantic viewed the mother with much the same ambivalence that the Puritan had felt toward the Father. She, like he, had a face of

blessing and a face of wrath. She could be the protective, nursing mother and

the devouring, emprisoning, castrating mother; and behind her unpredictable,

vacillating moods lay the inscrubability of the Father's white light. The two

faces of nature exemplified the distinction which Edmund Burke had made in

his vastly influential Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1754) and which

aestheticians like Uvedale Price, William Gilpin, and Archibald Alison elaborated in the 17905 for the romantics. In England, and a few decades later in

America, writers as well as painters would have conceived of and responded to

landscapes in terms of the categories of the beautiful, the sublime, and the

picturesque (which exhibited the features of the sublime in a less extreme

manner). Nature presented her nurturing aspect as the beautiful, characterized

by smooth, round, and regular shapes, uniform light, balance and proportion,

a sense of harmony and rest, and a scale more or less compatible with the

human. A beautiful landscape welcomed and sustained and included the

human presence and frequently developed into the pastoral and even the

agricultural scene. In sharp contrast, nature's threatening visage was the sublime landscape, characterized by irregular, jagged, and angular shapes, strong

contrast of dark and light, abrupt changes in proportion, dynamic tension

between contending forces, a repetition of elements to suggest infinite possibility, and a vastness of scale which dwarfed and overwhelmed the human. The

serenely beautiful face of nature as mother elicited loving trust and submission

from us as her "children"; her sublime aspect provoked a more complicated

response—a dual response, at once attraction and repulsion, fear of the force

that draws us on, apparently to our annihilation.

Thomas Cole's Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (1824; fig. 67) divides the

canvas neatly into contrasting halves: on the right, the paradisal world from

which Adam and Eve are being expelled into the sublime and savage wilderness

on the left. The streams of Eden drop off into dizzying waterfalls; the verdant

trees are juxtaposed with the twisted and torn trunks and branches outside,

blasted by the force of wind and thunderbolt; the smiling, sunny skies are

played off against storm clouds churning around a brighter but still obscured

GELPI 293
i. Sanford Robinson GifFord. Coming Rain, Lake George, 1879. Oil on canvas. 0.457 x 0.807 (18 x 31% in).

scribed, l.r.: S. R. Giffbrdity [p]. Private collection. Photo: Helga Photo Studio

94 GELPI

{9
center; the modest and harmonious proportions of Eden give way to declivities

of mountains, with rocks piled in a succession of heeding crags up to the vortex

of clouds which hides the mystery of light. And in the very center a rough

passageway in a towering rock formation, suggestive at once of a Gothic arch

and a vaginal opening, through which the diminutive figures of our first

parents have just been driven by God's messenger the archangel Gabriel. His

figure is invisible in the stone archway, but strong blades of light penetrate the

outer darkness, the longest angled directly at the figures fleeing in guilty terror.

In contrast, Asher Duic^n^s Kindred Spirits (1849; New York Public Library)

bespeaks in its very title a different attitude. Conceived as a tribute to Cole after

his death, the painting shows Cole and his friend William Cullen Bryant, larger

and more individual than figures usually are in landscape paintings, standing

together on a ledge and peacefully surveying the prospect of which they are a

part. A tree in full leaf arches over to enfold them in a restful bower with a

brook at their feet. The stream issues from a waterfall seen in the distance and

mountains rise up in the background, but a golden haze holds the entire scene

in its ambience, composing even the humped and rounded mountains into a

radiant concord. It is not just the poet and the painter who are kindred spirits;

they are kindred with the spirit of the scene. And it is generally true that within

the Hudson River school Durand was inclined to paint nature in her beautiful

aspects, where Cole alternated and contrasted the beautiful with the sublime.

The young Republic proclaimed itself nature's nation, a society created in

and of a wilderness unparalleled in beauty and sublimity—particularly the

daunting challenge of the sublime. Not even the Alps could compare with a

massive continent of unnamed mountains and streams and plains. Niagara

Falls and the Great Stone Bridge of Virginia, the Catskills and the Alleghenies

were but the harbingers of the land "vaguely realizing westward," as Robert

Frost would imagine it. Since the sublime, overpowering as it was to the

human spectator, represented a much deeper revelation of the spirit of nature,

the scale and variety of the sublime in the New World came to be felt as the

source of our unique character and opportunity as a developing people.

Perhaps the progress of the Republic, founded on the sustaining influence of

nature, might even allow us to break the cycle of rise and fall which turned

Europe into a graveyard of ruins and monuments. Such was the august theme

of George Bancroft's mammoth History of the United States (1834-1874).

But the challenge of the sublime presented a moral dilemma to the settlers

building nature's nation. What if, in clearing the wilderness to raise our cities,

we were thereby laying waste to the source of our moral character, thus

allowing egoistic acquisitiveness to squander our resources and our unique

historical opportunity? Was economic and social expansion inimical to nature?

Such was the lesson of Cole's series of paintings the Course of Empire (1836;

New-York Historical Society, New York) and of American romancers from

Cooper to Fitzgerald and Faulkner. Cole was Cooper's favorite painter, and the

Course of Empire helped to shape Cooper's later allegorical romance The

Crater (1847); in turn Cole showed his respect by painting The Last of the

Mohicans (1827; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford). Cooper and Cole inspired

each other with good reason; they shared the same fears for the American

future, and their tragic reading of history saw the seeds of downfall sown in the

greed and pride of the settlers. The Crater and the Course of Empire portray

human egotism violating the holism of nature, and both resolve the dilemma

through the triumph of nature over the self-destructiveness of society.

On the other hand, although neither Cole nor Cooper could find reassurance in Bancroft's sanguine expectations for American destiny, and although

their patrician status separated them from the lower classes who went out to

settle the land, they were still close enough to the real wilderness to know that

the opposition between nature and society could not be read simply in terms of

aggression against nature. They had to acknowledge the threat which nature

seemed to pose to the individual and society, no matter how loudly we exulted

about nature's nation. When the pathless forest closed us round, when sublime

heights beetled above and deeps yawned below, could we do otherwise than

fend for ourselves: open a way, subdue the wilds, fence a space where we could

be safe with our kind? Many felt the compulsion Anne Bradstreet had expressed: to withdraw into civilization and be "joined to the church at Boston."

Meantime, the pioneers carved up the land, spanned the distances, felled the

trees, reared protective walls, profiteered from earth's resources, driving before

them the Indians and wild beasts ever westward. Such a reading of American

destiny, just as tragic as Cole's and Cooper's lament for the wilderness violated

by human egoism, sees the doom of nature rooted in her challenge to the

vulnerable human ego.

From the challenge arose the myth of the pioneer: the version of the

universal hero indigenous to our historical situation and the archetype behind

our native brand of rugged individualism. Was the pioneer a man of the woods,

or against the woods? Did he go to the wilderness to draw his moral and

religious character from nature's breast, or did he venture out for the sake of the

community, to challenge her sovereignty, vindicate his manhood, and blaze a

trail through her thickets as the vanguard of patriarchal society? Did Cooper's

Natty Bumppo represent the type of the frontiersman, or an idealization

actually antithetical to the real frontiersmen? In the ambiguity of the answer, as

we shall see, lies the profundity of the Leatherstocking Tales.

Certainly Washington Irving's biography Christopher Columbus (1831) presented the first and archetypal American in contention with the natural and

psychological forces arrayed against him on his exploratory voyage. Lone

leader of a small band across the seemingly unbounded expanse of the ocean, he

proved his moral as well as physical mettle by holding them resolutely to their

westward course. In Irving's account it was the steady light of his mind and will

against the dark ocean and the fears of the craven crew. Unswervingly confident of providential favor, Columbus embodied the "masculine" control of

consciousness over physical nature and his own unconscious. No wonder that

GELPI 295
he appeared a hero to his men and a god to nature's children, the dark people of

the forest who come out to greet them on shore.* To them "the white men had

come from the skies." But even this noble Columbus stooped to pandering to

the gold lust of his crewmen: "He promised them land and riches, and

everything that could arouse their cupidity, or inflame their imaginations, nor

were these promises made for purposes of mere deception; he certainly believed that he could realize them all." And of course it was the forces of rapine

and plunder which won out; Columbus' exploit brought him poverty, rejection, imprisonment.11

Improbable as it may at first seem, "Rip Van Winkle" (1819) offers a complementary version of the encounter between man and nature. Irving's adaptation

of a German folktale to American circumstances is genuinely mythic, and like

most good comedy has a serious point. To begin with, the fable slyly undercuts

the Puritan-American work ethic. Rip is the first American folk-figure to stand

opposed to the model of Benjamin Franklin, the bustling, practical go-getter

busy with the business of living. He heads a long list of American counterCulture dropouts who, for one reason and another, refused to subscribe to the

power of the profit motive, scribbling highways across the continent to thread

together the economic centers reared on the wilderness they despoiled: from

Thoreau and Whitman to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, from Natty

Bumppo and Huck Finn to Faulkner's Ike MacCaslin. But "Rip Van Winkle" is

more than a charming tale of how a twenty-year nap in the Catskills allowed the

town beatnik to outlive the termagent wife who demanded that he work and

earn and provide, so that he could live out his venerable age, beloved by all, on

his own easygoing terms.

The fact that the sexual roles of the husband and wife have been reversed

points to the deeper mythic configuration. Ironically Dame Van Winkle's shrill,

driving tones speak for the patriarchal norms and demand that Rip function in

society as a husband and father should. But Rip has a softer, more feminine

nature: "a simple, good-natured fellow" with "little of the martial character of

his ancestors," "a kind neighbor," and "a great favorite among all the good

wives of the village." "If left to himself, he would have whistled away his life in

perfect contentment; but his wife kept continually dinning in his ears about his

idleness, his carelessness, and the ruin he was bringing on his family." When he

slouched off to the mountains, he was retreating from wife and adult male

responsibilities and retrogressing to the bosom of mother nature. He took his

gun along to justify the excursion, but he was not really there to hunt; he was

* Historical paintings showing the encounter of white men with Indians characteristically depict the whites bathed in light and the Indians overshadowed by the forest, their

figures somewhat obscured by the trunks and foliage from which they have not fully

emerged. Such is the image, from Benjamin West's Pennys Treaty with the Indians (1771;

Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia) to Albert Bierstadf s The Landing of

Columbus (1893 ?; Newark Museum).

seeking the peace of unconsciousness, and that was just what he found:

In a long ramble of the kind on a fine autumnal day, Rip had unconsciously scrambled

to one of the highest parts of the Kaatskill mountains. He was after his favorite sport of

squirrel-shooting, and the still solitudes had echoed and re-echoed with the reports of

his gun. Panting and fatigued, he threw himself, late in the afternoon, on a green knoll,

covered with mountain herbage, that crowned the brow of a precipice. From an

opening between the trees he could overlook all the lower country for many a mile of

rich woodland. He saw at a distance the lordly Hudson, far, far below him, moving on

its silent but majestic course, with the reflection of a purple cloud, or the sail of a lagging

bark, here and there sleeping on its glassy bosom, and at last losing itself in the blue

highlands.

On the other side he looked down into a deep mountain glen, wild, lonely, and

shagged, the bottom filled with fragments from the impending cliffs, and scarcely

lighted by the reflected rays of the setting sun. For some time Rip lay musing on this

scene; evening was gradually advancing; the mountains began to throw their long blue

shadows over the valleys; he saw that it would be dark long before he could reach the

village, and he heaved a heavy sigh when he thought of encountering the terrors of

Dame Van Winkle.12

The shift from the beautiful landscape in the first paragraph to the sublime

landscape in the second is the first warning that nature may be more risky and

threatening than Rip wanted to recognize. In fact, he was not just napping in

the lap of the nurturing mother; he was sinking unwittingly into an oblivion

that would wipe out the years of his manhood. He was "losing himself,"

swallowed up by the "long blue shadows" of the "deep mountain glen, wild,

lonely, and shagged."

The next paragraph tells us that as he was preparing to "descend," there arose

from the womb of darkness first a voice calling his very name, and then a little

old man: an aged child, a homunculus of Rip, dwarfed and emasculated by his

infantile regression. The gnomish figure conducted Rip through the sublime

scenery, finally through a ravine into "a hollow, like a small amphitheatre,

surrounded by perpendicular precipices " There he was initiated into a band

of other aged children, playing games of tenpins and gratifying themselves

orally with drafts of liquor until "at length his senses were overpowered, his

eyes swam in his head, his head gradually declined, and he fell into a deep

sleep." Upon awaking, he was an old man with a rusted rifle; and although

upon returning home he found his wife long dead and himself free to ignore

the hustle of the now-American town, he had bought his independence only at

the cost of his life and manhood. Irving makes Rip's loss of identity explicit:

"Rip's heart died away at hearing of these sad changes in his home and friends,

and finding himself thus alone in the world. . . . He doubted his own identity. ..." Seeing his lost self in his son, now grown to manhood, Rip cried out:

"I'm not myself—I'm somebody else—. . . I'm changed, and I can't tell what's

my name, or who I am!" He was not man enough for the woods, or for the

town.

The "Postscript" to "Rip Van Winkle" supplies, in a few paragraphs, the

296 GELPI
myth underlying the story; it leaves no doubt about the risk to the pioneer from

the great mother and her agents:

The Kaatsberg, or Catskill Mountains, have always been a region full of fable. The

Indians considered them the abode of spirits, who influenced the weather, spreading

sunshine or clouds over the landscape, and sending good or bad hunting-seasons. They

were ruled by an old squaw spirit, said to be their mother. She dwelt on the highest peak

of the Catskills, and had charge of the doors of day and night to open and shut them at

the proper hour. She hung up the new moons in the skies, and cut up the old ones into

stars. In times of drought, if properly propitiated, she would spin light summer clouds

out of cobwebs and morning dew, and send them off from the crest of the mountain,

flake after flake, like flakes of carded cotton, to float in the air; until, dissolved by the

heat of the sun, they would fall in gentle showers, causing the grass to spring, the fruits

to ripen, and the corn to grow an inch an hour. If displeased, however, she would brew

up clouds black as ink, sitting in the midst of them like a bottle-bellied spider in the

midst of its web; and when these clouds broke, woe betide the valleys!

In old times, say the Indian traditions, there was a kind of Manitou or Spirit, who

kept about the wildest recesses of the Catskill Mountains, and took a mischievous

pleasure in wreaking all kinds of evils and vexations upon the red men. Sometimes he

would assume the form of a bear, a panther, or a deer, lead the bewildered hunter a weary

chase through tangled forests and among ragged rocks; and then spring off with a loud

ho! ho! leaving him aghast on the brink of a beetling precipice or raging torrent.

The favorite abode of this Manitou is still shown. It is a great rock or cliff on the

loneliest part of the mountains, and, from the flowering vines which clamber about it,

and the wild flowers which abound in its neighborhood, is known by the name of the

Garden Rock. Near the foot of it is a small lake, the haunt of the solitary bittern, with

water-snakes basking in the sun on the leaves of the pond-lilies which lie on the surface.

This place was held in great awe by the Indians, insomuch that the boldest hunter would

not pursue his game within its precincts. Once upon a time, however, a hunter who lost

his way, penetrated to the Garden Rock, where he beheld a number of gourds placed in

the crotches of trees. One of these he seized and made off with it, but in the hurry of his

retreat he let it fall among the rocks, when a great stream gushed forth, which washed

him away and swept him down precipices, where he was dashed to pieces, and the

stream made its way to the Hudson, and continues to flow to the present day; being the

identical stream known by the name of the Kaaterskill.

In repeating the earlier shift from the beautiful to the sublime, the "Postscript"

presents the great mother both in her beneficence and in her vengefulness. The

Manitou, or Indian spirit, is her emanation, manifesting himself in various

animal shapes to lure the hunter to his death. The fairy tale points the moral.

"Once upon a time .. . a hunter who had lost his way, penetrated" to "the

favorite abode of this Manitou," where he dwelled in the inner sanctum of the

squaw-mother. The details of the scene insist upon the intermingling of

masculine and feminine: "It is a great rock or cliff on the loneliest part of the

mountains, and, from the flowering vines that clamber about it, and the wild

flowers which abound in its neighborhood, is known by the name of the

Garden Rock. Near the foot of it is a small lake, the haunt of the solitary bittern,

with water-snakes basking in the sun on the leaves of the pond-lilies which lie

on the surface." Breaking into this holy of holies where masculine and feminine

spirit are conjoined, the hunter "beheld a number of gourds placed in the

crotches of trees." The violation is completed in his seizure of the gourd, but

the rape is revenged by his death on the rocks in the stream sprung from the

fallen gourd. The concluding sentences remind the reader that this same stream

still flows and gives the mountains their name. "Rip Van Winkle" is a comic

tale, and its protagonist is spared the violent end suffered by the marauder of

the "Postscript." He escaped that extreme fate precisely because he was not

such a hunter, any more than he was a hero like Columbus, but his story

nonetheless illustrates the psychic and moral challenge and risk in the encounter with nature, especially for those softer and weaker than she. And were

there any of us not so?

Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales constitutes the fullest literary exploration of

the pioneer myth. The Deerslayer (1841) tells of Natty Bumppo's initiation into

manhood. The first of Cooper's landscapes in The Deerslayer establishes the

necessity for the pioneer to maintain himself not just within but against the

wilderness:

Whatever may be the changes produced by man, the eternal round of the seasons is

unbroken. Summer and winter, seedtime and harvest, return in their stated order with a

sublime precision, affording to man one of the noblest of all the occasions he enjoys of

proving the high powers of his far-reaching mind, in compassing the laws that control

their exact uniformity and in calculating their never-ending revolutions. Centuries of

summer suns had warmed the tops of the same noble oaks and pines, sending their heats

even to the tenacious roots, when voices were heard calling to each other, in the depths

of a forest, of which the leafy surface lay bathed in the brilliant light of a cloudless day in

June, while the trunks of the trees rose in gloomy grandeur in the shades beneath. The

calls were in different tones, evidently proceeding from two men who had lost their way,

and were searching in different directions for their path. At length a shout proclaimed

success, and presently a man of gigantic mold broke out of the tangled labyrinth of a

small swamp, emerging into an opening that appeared to have been formed partly by

the ravages of the wind and partly by those of fire. This little area, which afforded a good

view of the sky, although it was pretty well filled with dead trees, lay on the side of one of

the high hills, or low mountains, into which nearly the whole surface of the adjacent

country was broken.

"Here is room to breathe in!" exclaimed the liberated forester as soon as he found

himself under a clear sky, shaking his huge frame like a mastiff that has just escaped from

a snowbank. "Hurrah! Deerslayer, here is daylight, at last, and yonder is the lake."13

By a fictional convention as old as storytelling, the journey into nature involves

and narrates an inward journey; the quest represents, as well, an engagement

with the psyche, more specifically with the unconscious. The passage acknowledges immediately that the wilderness presents a temporal as well as a spatial

challenge to the individual ego-consciousness: not just vastness but its unbroken and ongoing cycle. "The eternal round of the seasons" spells the death of

the individual. Nature cares about the ecological system but not about the

particular being, and the cycle absorbs "the changes produced by man" in his

GELPI 297
empt to secure himself against death. That solemn fact affords "to man one

he noblest of all the occasions he enjoys of proving the high powers of his

reaching mind." For the only strategy against the mother who in time

ndlessly devours all her children to spawn the succeeding generation seemed

lie in the powers of consciousness itself; if the mind could "calculate" the

ver-ending revolutions" of the seasons and "compass" the laws that "con

l" them, then consciousness would, in a sense, have comprehended and

ntained the unconscious workings of nature. Henry David Thoreau began

lden with such an intention: "To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn

rely, but, if possible Nature herself!"14 And the circular structure of the book

ntrives to seal off and seal in his consciousness of the cyclic movement.

But the temporal threat is matched by a spatial threat as well. So in Cooper's

cription of the "virgin wilderness," the spring sun in the clear sky lit only the

afy surface," while down below the surface tree trunks rose in "gloomy

ndeur" from "tenacious roots" to form a "tangled labyrinth." Separate

ces called out from the dark womb, lost and searching for the way out. First

e "man of gigantic mould," then another emerged into a "little area, which

orded a good view of the sky." The "liberated forester" exclaimed to his

low: "Here is room to breathe in!... Hurrah! Deerslayer, here is daylight, at

t, and yonder is the lake." The rest of the romance alternates between Lake

mmerglass under the open sky and the surrounding thickets with savage

ngoes lurking in shadow.

When Cooper described nature as the moral and psychological matrix for his

rratives, he had in mind not only memories and impressions of the Hudson

ver Valley, but paintings of those scenes by landscapists like Cole, Durand,

d their successors. Cooper even introduced this passage with a flourishing

erence to the picture "we design to paint." Whafs more, the conception of

e scene, with sun and sky crowning a shadowy wilderness, corresponds to a

pical composition in landscape painting throughout the century. Albert

erstadt's The Rocky Mountains (1863; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New

rk) is just one large-scaled instance. The picture rises from a dark forest

reground, in which an Indian encampment is dimly seen, through various

d lightening shades of earth colors in the middle ground up steep slopes to

e dazzling snows of the mountaintops and one craggy peak blending into the

lliantly clear heavens. And the colossal size of the canvas, more than six feet

 ten, emphasizes the sublimity which reduces the human to insignificance.

The ambiguities which the first landscape in The Deerslayer introduces

ticipate the contrasts between pairs of characters. To begin with, the contrast

tween the two woodsmen who have just broken free of the forest. Hurry

arry took nature as an enemy and matched his immorality to what he took to

 her amorality. In their first conversational exchange he invites Natty to test

mself against the feminine adversary: "fall to, lad, and prove your manhood

 this poor devil of a doe, with your teeth, as you've already done with your

le." Deerslayer's reply immediately sets him off as speaking for nature herself:

"Nay, nay, Hurry, there's little manhood in killing a doe, and that too out of

season. ... " In fictional romances the double aspect of the feminine is

conventionally personified in the contrast between the two principal female

characters, typically a blonde and a brunette. In The Deerslayer Cooper presents

variations on the types in the Hutter sisters: Hetty, docile, virtuous, and

innocent to the point of simple-mindedness; and Judith, whose exotic beauty

and sexual energy are felt by all the men, even Natty, and whose force of

character is felt by the men as threatening. Much of the plot turns on the

crossed relationships of the two pairs, which leaves them all unmarried and

unattached at the end of the book. Hetty naively longs for the crude Hurry

Harry, knowing that he loves Judith, who in turn falls immediately in love with

Natty, who, virgin bachelor that he is, holds himself aloof from all women and

expends his emotional responses on the natural scene.

Cooper's intention is to show that Natty Bumppo does not need any human

love because he is so finely tuned to the beauties of nature and her moral

influence. Here is a verbal picture of Lake Glimmerglass that recalls many of

the works of the period:

But the most striking peculiarities of this scene were its solemn solitude and sweet

repose. On all sides, wherever the eye turned, nothing met it but the mirrorlike surface

of the lake, the placid view of heaven, and the dense setting of woods. So rich and fleecy

were the outlines of the forest that scarce an opening could be seen, the whole visible

earth, from the rounded mountaintop to the water's edge, presenting one unvaried hue

of unbroken verdure. As if vegetation were not satisfied with a triumph so complete, the

trees overhung the lake itself, shooting out toward the light; there were miles along its

eastern shore where a boat might have pulled beneath the branches of dark,

Rembrandt-looking hemlocks, "quivering aspens," and melancholy pines. In a word,

the hand of man had never yet defaced or deformed any part of this native scene, which

lay bathed in the sunlight, a glorious picture of affluent forest grandeur, softened by the

balminess of June and relieved by the beautiful variety afforded by the presence of so

broad an expanse of water.15

Natty's response is a spontaneous overflowing of powerful feelings: "This is

grand!—'tis solemn!—'tis an edication of itself, to look upon!" Wordsworth

would not have recognized the dialect, but he would have recognized

Deerslayer's sentiment that anyone living in such a place should be "moral and

well-disposed."

Chapter II closes with another description of Glimmerglass which might

also, except for the slight rhetorical floridity and the lapses into cliche'd diction,

be placed next to descriptions of the beautiful in Walden:

The spot was very lovely, of a truth, and it was then seen in one of its most favorable

moments, the surface of the lake being as smooth as glass and as limpid as pure air,

throwing back the mountains, clothed in dark pines, along the whole of its eastern

boundary, the points thrusting forward their trees even to nearly horizontal lines, while

the bays were seen glittering through an occasional arch beneath, left by a vault fretted

with branches and leaves. It was the air of deep respose—the solitudes that spoke of

scenes and forests untouched by the hands of man—the reign of nature, in a word, that

8 GELPI
342. Timothy H. O'Sullivan. Black Canon, Colorado River, From Camp 8,

Looking Above, Arizona, 1871. Albumen photograph. 0.203 x 0.276 (8 x io7/8

in). Boston Public Library, Print Department

gave so much pure delight to one of his habits and turn of mind. Still, he felt, though it

was unconsciously, like a poet also. If he found a pleasure in studying this large and, to

him, unusual opening into the mysteries and forms of the woods, as one is gratified in

getting broader views of any subject that has long occupied his thoughts, he was not

insensible to the innate loveliness of such a landscape either, but felt a portion of that

soothing of the spirit which is a common attendant of a scene so thoroughly pervaded

by the holy calm of nature.16

Leatherstocking is an unconscious poet, without the words to articulate his

vision adequately. But the concluding sentence of the passage makes the point

that his receptivity to the physical beauty that nature presents to his senses

gives him "unusual" access to the religious "mysteries and forms" which the

woods symbolized and made visible. Surely Cooper was thinking of paintings

he had seen when, later in the book, he tried to verbalize more fully the moral

effects of sense impressions:

The day had not yet advanced so far as to bring the sun above the horizon, but the

heavens, the atmosphere, and the woods and lake were all seen under that softened light

which immediately precedes his appearance and which, perhaps, is the most witching

period of the four-and-twenty hours. It is the moment when everything is distinct, even

the atmosphere seeming to possess a liquid lucidity, the hues appearing gray and

softened, with the outlines of objects diffused, and the perspective just as moral truths

that are presented in their simplicity without the meretricious aids of ornament or

glitter. In a word, it is the moment when the senses seem to recover their powers in the

simplest and most accurate forms, like the mind emerging from the obscurity of doubts

into the tranquillity and peace of demonstration.17

The remarkable thing about Leatherstocking is that he felt as much in

peaceful harmony with the sublime as with the beautiful. While most men

cowered before nature at her most awesome and overwhelming, "he loved the

woods for their freshness, their sublime solitudes, their vastness, and the

impress that they everywhere bore of the divine hand of the Creator."18 He

loved mother nature for manifesting the father-spirit. He found (and founded)

his identity in the Creator and his visible creation in nature, and so secure was

he in that revelation that he wanted only to live in her pathless woods. But as an

ideal Natty presented two different sorts of difficulty: first, he represented the

rejection of human relationships and social community; and, second, he

represented an ideal unattained and unattainable by ordinary humans living in

community. Leatherstocking and society ended up as adversaries, and so with a

GELPI 299
epening sense of outrage and depression Cooper saw in the advancing waves

pioneers and settlers a corrupt community displacing all that Natty per

nified.

3

The consonance of the real and the ideal: the romantic mystique of nature, of

 sublime as well as the beautiful, rested on that consonance. But it was the

k of the romantic to substantiate the hypothesis in experience and in artistic

pression. Leatherstocking and Hetty Hutter seemed, even to the other

aracters in the novel, special, too good for earthly existence. In Cooper's

ord pictures the moral tended to detach itself from the descriptive details.

oreau urged scrupulous attention to naturalistic data because a fact "will one

y flower in a truth,"19 but the prose of his journals often alternates between

ilosophical abstractions and scientific observation. Cole too drew out the

igious and allegorical significance of his paintings in verses as well as letters

d journals, but the constant readjustment of the real and the ideal created,

ernately, paintings of actual prospects like The Ox-bow of the Connecticut

ver (1836; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), viewed from a deliber

ely elevated and spectacular perspective, and for imaginative distillations of

e sublimity of the Catskills, crowded with concrete details selected back in

e studio from the myriad sketches executed in the forest and field. In much

e same way Bierstadt would at times paint Mt. Hood or the Yosemite Valley

ee fig. 343) and at other times try to compose the many wonders he had

tnessed in the Rocky Mountains or the Sierras into a single canvas.

evertheless, the conviction of the convergence, or coexistence, of the real and

e ideal allowed the romantics to trust personal revelation in nature over

ligious orthodoxies and social institutions, and the gradual subversion of

at ecstatic conviction during the course of the nineteenth century under

ined the romantic synthesis.

It was, of course, the New England transcendentalists who gave the most

hilosophical statement of the correspondence between the real and the ideal,

d between the self and nature in spirit. Ralph Waldo Emerson began his

eat manifesto Nature (written in the same year, 1836, as Cole was painting the

agic allegory of the Course of Empire) with the fullest account he would ever

fer of such an epiphanic revelation. It is a familiar passage, but it demands

xtended consideration because it can be seen as the experiential basis for the

hilosophical reflections of Emerson's subsequent writings. Emerson intro

uces the moment by specifying the eye as the primary organ:

o speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At

ast they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but

ines into the eye and heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and

utward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of

fancy into the era of manhood.20

s in Edwards, the sun is the preeminent type in nature, and as with Emerson's

343. Albeit Bierstadt. Sunrise, Yosemite Valley, c. 1870. Oil on canvas. 0.924 x i.331 (36% x

52% in). Inscribed, l.r.: ABierstadt. Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

fellow-romantics the child symbolizes the individual's new sense of

capacity—not the regression which cost Rip his identity, but the visionary

wisdom to be matured in selfhood. The paragraph goes on to recount Emerson's experience:

Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without

having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect

exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts offhis years, as

the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods is

perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a

perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a

thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing

can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature

cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and

uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball;

I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am

part or parcel of God.

The setting is unprepossessing enough: the icy slush of the Concord common

under the waning light of the early winter evening; but in a few dramatic

sentences the empty twilight is charged with dazzling presence. The reference

to the snake transforms the old image of the serpent who doomed us to sin and

death into an image of rebirth, associated with the child and the New Testa

0 GELPI
ment. Consequently, Emerson says, no calamity can "befall" him as long as he

has the child's eyesight. In "Experience35 he would define "the Fall of man" as

"the discovery we have made that we exist."21 That is, a fall into consciousness,

and so into self-consciousness, which splits mind from matter, subject from

object, psyche from the body it occupies. Emerson's vision subsumes the

shattered and sundered world through the correspondence of self and nature in

the omnipresence of spirit.

The language of the passage measures the experience for us. The first

sentence contains the whole metamorphosis in which the terror of the sublime

is overcome, as it was for Leatherstocking, by a deeper sense of security: "I have

enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear." The next few

sentences distract us from the intensity of the moment through discursive and

explanatory remarks that place the experience in a philosophical and religious

context. Then the compounded negations of "nothing can befall me in life,—

no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair"

turn into full affirmation. "Standing on the bare ground" picks up the participial phrasing of "crossing a bare common" and returns us to the generative

moment, the words now quickened and integrated by the alliteration and

assonance, the logical syntax suspended in the breathless staccato of the

climactic realizations: "—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent

eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate

through me; I am part or parcel of God." The series of linked puns on "I, eye,

ego" makes the distinctions and connections. I am not ego—but eye. I am

nothing, and yet as eye I am. I exist in God—the "I am Who am" of Genesis; yet

God exists in me, I am nothing but his vessel. When the circuit is complete,

nature and the psyche are concentered in being, and the paradox of being both

part and parcel falls away.

A passage which discards egotism with so many first-person pronouns may

seem naive or deceptive, but in specifying "mean egotism" Emerson was

deliberately saying that identity is not merely a function of ego, which defnes

and defends the limits of consciousness, but of another range of psychic

realization, at once more inclusive and integrative, transpersonal as well as

individual, constellating the mysteries above and below consciousness around

the ego. Emerson was making precisely the distinction Carl Jung would make

between the ego and the self, in which the individual discovers identity

through a recognition of the psychological life shared with all beings,

grounded in being itself and individuated in the person. In "Self Reliance"

Emerson described the "aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be

grounded" as "that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life,

which we call Sponaneity or Instinct.... In that deep force, the last fact behind

which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin."22 Thus Emerson's summons, at the beginning of Nature., to make "an original relation to the

universe" becomes a search for our "common origin," and the quest ends by

healing the breach between subject and object and recovering the organic,

holistic relation between self and nature which the fall into consciousness had

opened:"The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the

suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone

and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them."23

This sense of correspondence between self and nature inspired the two great

testaments of Emersonian self-reliance: Waiden and Leaves of Grass. In the fifth

section of "Song of Myself" (1855), which, as the generative moment for Walt

Whitman's epic, is comparable to Emerson's epiphany on the common, the

unification of body and soul into personal identity awakens a sense of participation in the whole scale of being from the Creator himself down to the tiniest

of his creatures:

And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,

And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,

And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women

my sisters and lovers,

And that a kelson of the creation is love,

And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,

And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,

And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones, elder, mullein

and poke-weed.24

Similarly in Waiden (1854) Thoreau describes the lake (think again of Glimmerglass, and of the number of paintings with lakes) as "the landscape's most

beautiful feature" because it is "earth's eye" in which "the beholder measures

the depth of his own nature."25 The "transparent eyeball" again: nature tallying

the seer. No wonder Emerson followed Edwards in taking the sun as nature's

primary type. And no wonder so many romantics described and painted so

many sunrise and sunset scenes: they sing the eye's hymn to the light. Waiden

begins and ends with a cock's crow to the new day: "Only that day dawns to

which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning

star."26 And in "Song of Myself": "We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as

the sun,/We found our own O my soul in the calm and the cool of the

day-break."27

Barbara Novak was perhaps the first art critic to find in the almost obsessive

concern with the texture and tonalities of light, especially among those painters

associated with the luminist style, a visual expression of the philosophical

stance of Emerson and the transcendentalists.28 Luminism designates not a

movement but a style of landscape painting, which is the central concern of this

volume. The term, coined by John Baur in 1954, is defined in terms of "a

polished and meticulous realism in which there is no sign of brush work and no

trace of impressionism, the atmospheric effects being achieved by infinitely

careful gradations of tone, by the most exact study of the relative clarity of near

and far objects, and by a precise rendering of the variations in texture and color

produced by direct or reflected rays."29 Thus luminism as a critical designation

can be considered to look back to Cole and Durand and to include secondGELPI 301
344- Martin Johnson Heade. Duck Hunters in the Marshes, 1866. Oil on canvas. 0.762 x 1.524 (30 x 60 in). Inscribed,

I.e.: MJ.H. 66. Private collection. Photo: Herbert P. Vose (see plate 15)

generation Hudson River painters like Frederic Church, John Kensett, and

Sanford Gifford, as well as painters of the New England sea coasts and harbors

like Fitz Hugh Lane and Martin Johnson Heade, and genre painters like

William Sidney Mount, who portrayed Whitman's Long Island, and George

Caleb Bingham, who caught Mark Twain's Mississippi River world.

In the paintings of Lane and Heade beautiful nature welcomes and sustains

the human presence; the paintings share the stillness and serene composure

that irradiate Walden and Emerson's reflections in verse and prose. The canvases are mostly sky, each object is fixed in the suffusing light, and the light is so

organic to man's world (it came to Emerson, after all, on the town common)

that it shines equally on the streets and sails and harbor of Gloucester, on the

curious hayricks of the Newbury marshes (fig. 344), on the Maine coast and the

beaches of Narragansett Bay. And Huck Finn's description of the dawn he saw

from his river raft is a luminist view that Clemens the river pilot shared with

Bingham's boatmen and trappers:

Not a sound, anywheres—perfectly still—just like the whole world was asleep, only

sometimes the bull-frogs a-cluttering, maybe. The first thing to see, looking away over

the water, was a kind of dull line—that was the woods on t'other side—you couldn't

make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness, spreading

around; then the river softened up, away off, and warn't black any more, but gray; you

could see little dark spots drifting along, ever so far away—trading scows, and such

things; and long black streaks—rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or

jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by-and-by you could see a

streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there's a snag there in a

swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the

302 GELPI
mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a

log cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t'other side of the river, being a

wood-yard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it

anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so

cool and fresh, and sweet to smell, on account of the woods and the flowers; but

sometimes not that way, because they've left dead fish laying around, gars, and such, and

they do get pretty rank; and next you've got the full day, and everything smiling in the

sun, and the song-birds just going it!30

I would even venture to suggest that Emerson's account of a sculptor-friend

who metamorphosed the dawn light into the statue of a shining youth calls to

mind Hiram Powers' white marble figures of Eve and the fisher boy and the

Greek slave girl. Emerson describes the metamorphosis:

He rose one day, according to his habit, before the dawn, and saw the morning break,

grand as the eternity out of which it came, and for many days after, he strove to express

this tranquillity, and lo! his chisel had fashioned out of marble the form of a beautiful

youth, Phosphorus, whose aspect is such that it is said all persons who look on it become

silent.31

White light personified in human form: so preternaturally perfect was the

luminosity of Powers' marble that the spectator could feel, in Hawthorne's

words, that "one of those small blue stains, which sometimes occur in the

purest statuary marble, would convert the Eve of Powers to a monster."32

Powers was able to convince even prudish spectators of the inviolate chasteness

of the nude female form in white marble, and Horatio Greenough could have

chosen no better medium to apotheosize George Washington as the Great

White Father of his country.

4

However, Emerson's serene assertion that "A man is a god in ruins"33 and that

he need but assemble these parts to recover his divine capacity came to seem, to

some, myopic and, to others, vicious in the false aspirations which it raised only

to doom. Edgar Allan Poe understood better than almost anyone else in

Emerson's America the aspiration to the ideal and the terror which defeat

aroused in the would-be seer. "Ligeia," published two years afterNfltar£, turns

on whether human beings can rise to godlike powers and, through strength of

will, exceed the mortal limits of time and space. The story invokes the romance

convention of the blonde and brunette heroines, only to invert it and show the

triumph of the brunette over the blonde. Through his raven-haired Ligeia,

whose "divine" eyes seemed to perceive the "circle of analogies" linking together all the "objects of the universe," the narrator was initiated into "the

many mysteries of the transcendentalism in which we were immersed." When

mortal illness threatened her with the common human lot, Ligeia resisted

death to the very end, desperately addressing God directly with Emerson's own

words: "Are we not part and parcel in Thee?"34 But Ligeia represents the

aspiration of the narrator himself, and after a second marriage to the fair-haired

Rowena, he half-unconsciously willed her death in order that Ligeia could

return in Rowena's body. It is not clear in the story whether Ligeia's resurrection as a zombie was only a delusion of the narrator's drugged and fevered

imagination or a nightmare come true, but in either case the story indicates that

the human effort to realize its godlike pretensions ends in madness, perversity,

and monstrosity. The individual can only pit himself against nature in an effort

doomed except in the creation of an artwork about his own doom. Works of art

that depict the harmony of nature lie; but that lie constitutes the superiority of

art to nature. For "no such paradises are to be found in reality as have glowed

on the canvas of Claude," and "no position can be attained on the wide surface

of the natural earth, from which an artistic eye, looking steadily, will not find

matter of offence in what is termed the 'composition' of the landscape."35 For

Poe the artist3s eye, repelled by nature's deficiencies, compensated by depicting

what the inner eye glimpsed or invented of its own hopeless ideals.

The mystique of light haunts many dark romantic parables. Nathaniel

Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" (1835) can be read as a grotesque

parody on Cooper's theme of the hero's initiation into the ways of the woods.

This young, "good man" left the security of town and hearth and his new wife's

bed to venture into the forest at nightfall, only to discover himself a fiend

among fiends:

The road grew wilder and drearier, and more faintly traced, and vanished at length,

leaving him in the heart of the dark wilderness, still rushing onward with the instinct

that guides mortal man to evil. The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds; the

creaking of the trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while,

sometimes, the wind tolled like a distant church-bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar

around the traveller, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But he was himself the

chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors.36

Because Hawthorne understood Anne Bradstreet's fear of the wilds better than

Emerson could, he imagined his character refusing the security of social and

religious institutions and instead journeying to "the heart of the dark wilderness," "the heart of the solitary woods," where—ironically—he met the townsfolk and church elders in a witches' meeting celebrating the communion of the

human race in evil. Goodman Brown's disillusionment overshadowed the rest

of his life. Emerson sensed the natural world returning his acknowledgment;

but when nature and human kind seemed linked in corruption, nature laughed

Goodman Brown to scorn. For "he was himself the chief horror"; "all through

the haunted forest there could be nothing more frightful than the figure of

Goodman Brown." Hawthorne concludes the story with an epistemological

question that only complicates the dilemma: "Had Goodman Brown fallen

asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?"37 The

daylight world and the nighttime—which was the illusion and which the

reality? Had Brown attained a deeper insight into nature and human nature, or

had he only projected his own conviction of sinful g^iilt on the rest of the

world?

GELPI 303
Hawthorne let the story remain suspended in ambiguity. He had pledged

himself to tell "the truth of the human heart," even in its ambiguity, and it is

clear that for other romantics as well the journey out into nature and the

journey down into the psyche had become very problematical indeed. The idyll

of the Deerslayer became more and more difficult to maintain, and the tragic

implications of the "Postscript" to Rip Van Winkle's excursion into the wilderness returned in full force. Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) recounts

three sea adventures of the protagonist, each longer, more physically violent,

more morally and metaphysically ambiguous than the previous one. The final

voyage takes Pym, on board the Jane Guy, to the ends of the earth, and

beyond. * At the climax of Pym the narrator and crew of thcjane Guy journeyed

farther and farther south, stopping at an island in which everything, including

even the teeth of the natives, was black. Their seeming simplicity and innocence turned out to be calculated duplicity; these primitives were cunning

savages, and only Pym and one companion managed to escape massacre by

Setting off in a small craft on the wide Antarctic Sea with a single captive. Soon

they were caught in an irresistible current driving them to the pole. (Poe's

imagination was drawn to the Arctic regions and the pole as an ultima thule,

just as were the imaginations of explorers and of artists like William Bradford

and Frederic Church.) The water turned white, to the increased terror of the

quavering black man. Propelled with accelerating speed, they were enveloped

in a snowlike precipitation, as sky and sea sublimely met; finally, at the pole

itself, under a darkness illumined by a lurid white glare, a cataract of the white

precipitation parted like a curtain to reveal, as they shot through, a huge,

shrouded figure, immaculately white.

Thoreau said that the only time he was frightened during his sojourn at

Walden occurred when on his walking back the mile or so from Concord one

day, all visible objects and landmarks were obliterated in a snow storm; he felt

disoriented and effaced by the faceless white. In the psyche, as in nature, the

mortal mystery of blackness seemed to yield and point to the ineffable mystery

of whiteness, and so much did Poe seem to his nineteenth-century readers the

man who explored the shadow realm and beyond that even so optimistic an

The black and white symbolism which dominates the imagination of the romantics

betrays a racist bias, just as the conventional associations with the masculine and

feminine betrays a sexist bias. One need only think of the stereotypes of the blonde and

brunette woman, of the treatment of Indians in Cooper's romances or in Irving's A Tour

on the Prairies in terms of the noble savage or the bestial savage, of the treatment of

blacks in Pym or in Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno" (1855). My argument here leads

me to focus on the moral and metaphysical questions which the color and sexual

symbolism were struggling to express; but I also want to acknowledge that the biases

and stereotypes, which in part informed the symbolism, served to perpetuate the

prejudice against and oppression of women and racial minorities in American patriarchal society.

345. William Bradford. Arctic Ice, c. 1882. Oil on panel. 0.203 x 0.305 (8 x 12 in).

Inscribed, l.r.: Wm Bradford. Private collection. Photo: Graham Gallery (not in

exhibition)

idealist as Whitman once confessed, almost reluctantly, to seeing himself as Poe

on a fearful voyage to destruction:

In a dream I once had, I saw a vessel on the sea, at midnight, in a storm. It was no great

full-rigg'd ship, nor majestic steamer, steering firmly through the gale, but seem'd one

of those superb little schooner yachts I had often seen lying anchor'd, rocking so

jauntily, in the waters around New York, or up Long Island sound—now flying

uncontroll'd with torn sails and broken spars through the wild sleet and winds and

waves of the night. On the deck was a slender, slight, beautiful figure, a dim man,

apparently enjoying all the terror, the murk, and the dislocation of which he was the

centre and the victim. That figure of my lurid dream might stand for Edgar Poe, his

spirit, his fortunes, and his poems—themselves all lurid dreams.38

Moby-Dick (1851) is the greatest of metaphysical sea adventures, and it too

hunts the darkness to unmask the mystery of white. On one level at least, the

romance can be read as a testing-out of transcendentalist hypotheses. During

the crucial years after his time at sea, when he began to explore his own mind

and psyche, Herman Melville had discovered Emerson's prophetic pronouncements and ingested them enthusiastically; he said that he loved intellects like Emerson's which dove to the depths of tilings. But soon he came sadly

to admit that Emerson seemed to have a defect of the heart that rendered him

incapable of acknowledging the power of blackness—as, for instance, Hawthorne did. In "The Mast-head" chapter Melville's narrator Ishmael warns the

reader of the self-destructiveness of succumbing to nature on Emersonian

assumptions. "Young Platonists" like himself, aloft in the rigging, were so

lulled by the movement of the ship rocking to the rhythm of the sea and

304- GJSZJPI
346. William Bradford. In Polar Seas, 1882. Oil on canvas. 0.70 x 1.07 (28 x 44 in). Inscribed, on reverse: In

Polar Seas. Painted by William Bradford 1882. Private

collection

by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes

the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul,

pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing

that eludes him; every dimly discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems

to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it.

The next and last paragraph of the chapter undercuts such trusting identification. When the nurturing mother turned vicious, perhaps she only masked the

father's fury; for from the elevation of the masthead the individual could

literally lose himself in "the inscrutable tides of God":

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship;

by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while

this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and

your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at

mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that

transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye

Pantheists!39

The following chapter, "The Quarter-deck," presents for the first time in the

book Captain Ahab's demonic version of transcendentalism. WTien the pious

mate Starbuck berated the captain for obsession with revenge on the white

whale, Ahab explained his outrage in terms of the Platonic doctrine of the

correspondence between nature and spirit, embodied most sublimely in

Moby-Dick:

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living

act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the

mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike

through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the

wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's

naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous

strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I

hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that

hate upon him.

Moby-Dick was merely the symbolic mask for the ultimate truth, and for Ahab

that could only be the Void or a malign God. In either case Ahab had vowed to

strike a blow for human dignity, even in defeat, by turning obeisance to

defiance. Invoking the sun as the traditional type for God's presence in nature,

GELPI 305
347. Francis A. Silva. Schooner Passing Castle Island., Boston Harhor, 1874. Oil on panel.

0.559 x 0.965 (22 x 38 in). Inscribed, l.l.iE A. Silva/74* The Bostonian Society, Old State

House, Boston; Gift of Mrs. Vernon A. Wright, 1939 (see plate 23)

he thundered back to Starbuck: "Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike

the sun if it insulted me."40

Ahab is the most dramatic figure in the book—but doomed; and Melville is

careful to distinguish between Ahab's association of the whale with evil,

whether by divine decree or chance, and IshmaePs growing conviction that the

ambiguity of Moby-Dick's meaning is summed up in his color, or lack of color.

The great chapter "The Whiteness of the Whale" employs a catalogue of

metaphors to evoke IshmaeFs bewilderment. Because both life and death, the

lamb and the polar bear, the wedding veil and the shroud are white, the human

response, in IshmaePs view, has to be ambivalence. The sublime arouses "two

. . . opposite emotions in our minds";41 we are drawn most to what makes us

fear most for ourselves, because the mystery of whiteness seems to promise at

once our apotheosis and our extinction.

Does apotheosis spell the extinction or the completion of consciousness? Or

could it be, to put it more plainly, that the achievement of self—the realization

of the concentricity of the personal and the transpersonal, the finite and the

infinite, the individual and the universal—exacts both the surrender of the ego

in all its protective defences and the utilization of the ego to integrate needs

that press in from other psychic dimensions above and below consciousness? It

was in the ambiguities of these questions that Emily Dickinson, in the early

i86os when she was embarking on her remarkable voyage of self-exploration,

initiated her life-long habit of wearing only white—a symbolic bridal gown,

burial dress, and goddess-raiment all in one. She knew Emersonian moments

in the garden and private moments of ecstatic self-awareness, yet there were

times when she could be as grim about the confrontation with nature as any of

her adventuring male contemporaries. There is no evidence that she read Pym

or Moby-Dick, but she eliminated none of the terror of the disaster by condensing it into two terse, wittily understated quatrains:

Finding is the first Act

The second, loss,

Third, Expedition for

the "Golden Fleece"

Fourth, no Discovery—

Fifth, no Crew—

Finally, no Golden Fleece—

Jason—sham—too.42

Pierre, or the Ambiguities (1852) is Melville's most extended account of moral

and psychological disintegration, written just after Moby-Dick, when he had

hoped that IshmaePs open-eyed stoicism and capacity for human relationships

had delivered him from smashing against the white whale's bulk along with the

rest of the Pequod's crew. Pierre is as complex a book as Moby-Dick, but it is

noteworthy for our argument here that Pierre's gradual collapse accompanies a

shift in the sense of the landscape, even the same landscape, from the beautiful

to the sublime. Pierre grew to young manhood nurtured by the pastoral peace

and loveliness of Saddle Meadows and now loved a fair-haired maiden with the

Wordsworthean name of Lucy, associated repeatedly with white as the color of

chastity and innocence. Pierre felt strangely drawn to a towering, egg-shaped

rock formation (his name, after all, means stone). Known as the Memnon

Stone, it is the symbol of his embryonic self, which should grow to the heroic

proportions of Memnon, the colossus whose statue stood at the Egyptian

Thebes. But the impending tragedy is foreshadowed by the fact that sometimes

the Memnon Stone loomed before Pierre as the Terror Stone. Consequently,

later in the convolutions of the plot, when Pierre found himself involved with

his hitherto-unknown sister Isabel, dark and sensual and alone except for his

love, when their incestuous relationship had driven them away from Lucy and

Saddle Meadows to the hell of New York City, the symbolic change from

country to city is accompanied by a corresponding change in Pierre's vision of

the mountain which dominated Saddle Meadows (Melville ruefully dedicated

the romance to Mt. Greylock in the Berkshires). Where the peak had been

called the Delectable Mountain, with suggestions of Bunyan's allegory of

paradise and Christian redemption, it was now the Mount of the Titans. In

Pierre's prophetic dream, the scattered, broken boulders at the foot of the

mount became the prone figure of the titan Enceladus, cast down from the

heights by the Olympian gods and writhing up, armless in defeat, in a futile

gesture of defiance. Pierre's fate is written in the transition from Memnon to

Enceladus, and he found death at last, together with both the blonde and

306 GELPI
brunette heroines, locked within the stone cell of a prison. Melville invoked the

formula of the Cooper romance in order to demolish it, and he introduced the

sublime description of the Enceladus landscape with a rejoinder—and a

rebuke—to Emerson:

Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the

mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases,

each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood.43

In one way and another Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Dickinson took as

their subject consciousness itself. For them the drama lay less in the mind's

effort to apprehend nature—as it did for Cooper and Emerson, Thoreau and

Whitman—than in the devising of images and plots as symbols of their psyche's

"peculiar" moods and states. An expedition into those unknown regions flirts

with, and often ends in, disaster, and their psychic landscapes and seascapes call

to mind the haunted canvasses of "symbolic" painters like Ralph Blakelock and

Alfred Pinkham Ryder: in Blakelock, spectral meadows, shadowy Indian encampments, towering trees lacily etched against a lurid sky; in Ryder, fragile,

lone boats on the empty sea under an ominously clouded sky, a sublunary world

of impending doom in which the light metamorphoses shapes, or drives them

into shadow. Where Cole painted The Last of the Mohicans, Ryder painted "The

Haunted Palace," Poe's verse-allegory of madness, under the title The Temple of

the Mind (1885?; Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo), and Blakelock spent years in a

mental institution. All of these romantic painters and writers created their own

psychological landscapes, and even a "realist" like Winslow Homer was as

reclusive and ideosyncratic as they. His years at Tynemouth in 1881 and 1882

changed his sense of nature; thereafter he turned from pastoral farm scenes and

sunny spas with light-haired ladies to paint men who risked themselves to the

sea, and statuesque women whose dark brooding matched the sky and water by

which they watched, and finally to paint (often without a human spectator

included in the scene) the elemental contention of wind and wave and rock

which he witnessed all alone during long winters on the Maine coast (fig. 348).

This vision of nature cast its shadow not just on artists and imaginative

writers but also on such historians as Francis Parkman and Henry Adams.

George Bancroft found philosophical confirmation for his progressive reading

of American history in transcendentalism, but Parkman's expedition to the

West and sojourn among the Sioux, recounted in The Oregon Trail (1847), fixed

the tragic sense which informs his later volumes about the encounter of the

French and British with the New World, composed during the same decades in

which Bancroft was writing and revising his History of the United States. The

Oregon Trail offers many sublime prospects which Parkman noted as worthy of

a painter or a romancer:

We were on the eastern descent of the mountain, and soon came to a rough and difficult

defile, leading down a very steep declivity. The whole swarm [of Indians] poured down

together, filling the rocky passageway like some turbulent mountain-stream. The

mountains before us were on fire, and had been so for weeks. The view in front was

obscured by a vast dim sea of smoke, while on either hand rose the tall cliffs, bearing

aloft their crests of pines, and the sharp pinnacles and broken ridges of the mountains

beyond were faintly traceable as through a veil. The scene in itself was grand and

imposing, but with the savage multitude, the armed warriors, the naked children, the

gayly apparelled girls, pouring impetuously down the heights, it would have formed a

noble subject for a painter, and only the pen of a Scott could have done it justice in

description.44

Parkman's experience of the prairies and mountains, of the buffaloes and the

Indians, who themselves seemed to him "a troublesome and dangerous species

of wild beast," led him to view all existence as a biological battle for survival,

dramatized not in the symbol of the leviathan, but—just as effectively—in the

minuscule life of a spring pool:

I lay down by the side of a deep, clear pool, formed by the water of a spring. A shoal of

little fishes of about a pin's length were playing in it, sporting together, as it seemed, very

amicably; but on closer observation, I saw that they were engaged in cannibal warfare

among themselves. Now and then one of the smallest would fall a victim, and immediately disappear down the maw of his conqueror. Every moment, however, the tyrant of

the pool, a goggle-eyed monster about three inches long, would slowly emerge with

348. Winslow Homer. The Artist's Studio in an Afternoon Fqpf, 1894. Oil on canvas.

0.607 x 0.769 (237/8 x 3oy4 in). Inscribed, l.r.: Winslow Homer1804. Memorial Art Gallery

of the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York; R. T. Miller Fund (see plate 31)

GELPI 307
349. Seneca Ray Stoddard. Adirondack*, Barn Rock, Lake Champlain, 1890. Silverprint

photograph. 0.167 x 0.219 (69/i6 x 8% in). The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

quivering fins and tail from under the shelving bank. The small fry at this would suspend

heir hostilities, and scatter in a panic at the appearance of overwhelming force.

"Soft-hearted philanthropists," thought I, "may sigh long for their peaceful millennium; for, from minnows to men, life is incessant war."45

In The Education of Henry Adams (1907) Adams constructed his third-person

autobiography so as to demonstrate how experience stripped him of

eighteenth-century assurances, subverted romantic hypotheses, and made him

a typical modern in his intellectual awareness of moral and spiritual paralysis.

The original subtitle was A Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity. Adams'

initiation into the amoral indifference of nature (now no longer capitalized by

writers) ended in an apocalyptic vision of the whole system dissipating itself

entropically. When Emerson wrote "Nature is symbol of Spirit,"46 he was

revising—and reviving—Edwards' typological sense, but a further declension

in New England belief deprived Parkman and Adams of any typological

conviction at all. Even more than Parkman, Adams was a nineteenth-century

mind which seemed to spell out the exhaustion of the old norms and sanctions.

The twentieth century began with a spirited rejection of romanticism in the

name of modernism. And the modernist aesthetic—advanced by such innovators as Picasso and Stravinsky, Joyce and Eliot—developed explicitly from

350. Seneca Ray Stoddard. The Palisades of Lake Champlain, 1890. Silverprint photograph. 0.165 x 0.217 (6% x 89

/16 in). The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

a sense of radical alienation from nature and argued for the creator's consequent responsibility to devise order from the random and disjointed elements of experience.

5

But the profound need to ground human nature in a primary relationship with

the natural world, the profound longing to source meaning and identity in that

relationship abides and expressed itself in the midst of modernism, in inheritors of the romance like William Faulkner and John Steinbeck and especially in certain poets. The central question in Robert Frost's poetry is: "what

to make of a diminished thing"—diminished because technology has made the

world smaller and more cramped, diminished because skepticism has constricted the range of speculation and vision. Darwinian and pragmatic as his

agnostic father, Frost was New Englander enough to confront nature with the

aspirations he learned from his Emersonian mother: wary of absolutes but

wary, too, of closing off any transcendental possibilities. Peering down into the

peculiarly still and clear waters of a well to read nature, as his forebears had

done since Bradford and Wmthrop, Frost moves from observation tO

tion:

308 GELPI
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,

I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,

Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,

Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.

Water came to rebuke the too clear water.

One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple

Shook whatever it was lay there at the bottom,

Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness!1

Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.47

The hesitant pace, the qualifications, the indefinite pronouns prepare the

reader for the indeterminacy of the ending. "What was that whiteness?" Did

the fact flower into a truth, as Thoreau said it would? It is a conclusion in which

nothing is concluded, and the uniqueness of even so indeterminate a glimpse

through the surface is contained in the repetition of the italicized "Once" in the

final phrase. The sonnet "Design" ponders a drama of death, in which a white

spider kills a white moth on a strangely white heal-all, and asks whether this

tiny insight into the mystery of white conceals—or reveals—"the design of

darkness." In his self-protective ambivalence Frost, like many a woodsman

before him, came to engage nature as a beloved adversary, maintaining an open

space for himself against her encroachment. He could not be Natty Bumppo,

but he strove to contain his contention with her so that he would not turn out

to be Hurry Harry. One of Frost's last poems describes his life-long struggle

with nature as still an honorable draw:

In winter in the woods alone

Against the trees I go.

I mark a maple for my own

And lay the maple low.

I see for Nature no defeat

In one tree's overthrow

Or for myself in my retreat

For yet another blow.48

On the opposite coast Robinson Jeffers urged an opposite solution to the

problem; Jeffers' pantheism drew him to see the quenching of consciousness in

unconscious nature as the only way for ego-ridden individuals to participate in

the divinity of the material universe. Where Emerson as "transparent eyeball"

rejected "mean egotism" for a larger selfhood, where Thoreau saw Emerson's

small pond at Walden as "earth's eye" in which the depth of human nature was

reflected (again remember Parkman's pool), Jeffers extolled the vast Pacific as

"eye of the earth"—timelessly oblivious to human strife:

. . . this dome, this half-globe, this bulging

Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,

Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids that never close;

this is the staring unsleeping

Eye of the earth; and what it watches is not our wars.49

351. James Augustus Suydam. Beach Scene, Newport, 1860. Oil on canvas. 0.241 x 0.413

(9% x 16% in). Inscribed, \.c.\JA.Suydami86o. The Lano Collection. Photo: Geoffrey

Clements

In a late poem which bears comparison with the Frost quatrains above, Jeffers

tells of a vulture which inspected him as possible prey, as he lay on a hillside

above the ocean:

. . . I tell you solemnly

That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be eaten by that beak

and become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes—

What a sublime end of one's body, what an enskyment; what a life

after death.50

Others sought something between Frost's self-defence and Jeffers' selfsurrender. Ezra Pound has been considered an anti-romantic modernist, but

the designation is only partly correct. The Cantos matches Leaves of Grass in the

sustained attempt to affirm a source for personal identity and social order in

natural process. Pound's colossal and sometimes ruthless ego made the effort

particularly vexed, but when that ego was broken in the prison camp at Pisa

amidst the rubble of a world war, he could see as never before. The climax of The

Cantos occurs in Canto 81 when an apparition of the goddess' eyes came to him

in his tent, revealing himself and the natural world anew:

there came new subtlety of eyes into my tent,

whether of spirit or hypostasis,

but what the blindfold hides

or at carneval

nor any pair showed anger

Saw but the eyes and stance between the eyes,

colour, diastasis,

GELPI 309
352. Alfred Thompson Bricher. Seascape, c. 1875. Oil on

canvas. 0.257 x 0.413 (10% x 16% in). Inscribed, 1.1.: ATBRICHER (ATE is in monogram). Mr. and Mrs. Erving

Wolf. Photo: Thomas Feist

careless or unaware it had not the

whole tent's room

nor was place for the full EiScos [Knowing]

interpass, penetrate

casting but shade beyond the other lights

sky's clear

night's sea

green of the mountain pool

shone from the unmasked eyes in half-mask's space.51

Within the natural round, Aphrodite enlightens the human heart, revealing the

power of love to topple ego and free the transformed individual to find a

humble place, secure in the holism of nature:

The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.

Pull down thy vanity, it is not man

Made courage, or made order, or made grace,

Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.

Learn of the green world what can be thy place

In scaled invention or true artistry,

Pull down thy vanity,

Paquin pull down!

The green casque has outdone your elegance.52

One of the most important Chinese characters for Pound combined the

pictographs of the sun and the moon into an ideogram for "the total light

process, the radiation, reception and reflection of light."53 Through "the white

light that is allness," "all things that are are lights." Pound concluded his

translation of one of the Confucian texts with an acknowledgment of "the

tensile light, the Immaculata. There is no end to its action."54 Like the union of

sun and moon, the conventionally "masculine" light is designated here by the

feminine form "Immaculata." A conjunction: not light as spirit-father, but as

mother nature, and light in nature as the coexistence of opposites. On the one

hand, light is shadowed in things, fractured into the color-spectrum; on the

other hand, all things, whatever their shade, are lights.

In the end, Pound came to experience natural process as the operation of

"the total light process." And therefore "learn of the green world what can be

thy place": it is a psychological impulse, a religious and moral imperative to

which most of the writers cited in this essay—Cooper and Emerson and

Melville, Thoreau and Poe, Hawthorne and Whitman and Dickinson—would

have given assent. Or would have wished, with all their hearts, to be able to

lend assent.

310 GELPI
Notes

1. Cf. particularly Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass., 1956) and Nature's Nation (Cambridge,

Mass., 1967).

2. I want to develop my argument about literary attitudes toward landscape by arranging a sequence of

verbal landscapes which stand as analogues for and

comments on the painting of the period as illustrated in

the exhibit and this book.

3. William Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation,

reprinted in The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings,

ed. Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson, rev. ed. (New

York, 1963),!: 100-101.

4. The Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. Jeannine Hensley

(Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 241.

5. The Puritans, i: 143.

6. The Puritans, i: 377.

7. Images or Shadows of Divine Things, ed. Perry Miller

(New Haven, Conn., 1948), 45, 70, 58, 60.

8. Divine Things, 49, 83, 97.

9. Divine Things, 61-62.

10. Divine Things, 109.

11. Irving's account of the first voyage to the New

World occupies Books III and IV of TheHistory of the Life

and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. Cf. Washington

Irving, Works, Geoffrey Crayon Edition (New York,

1882-1883), 10: 201,165.

12. "Rip Van Winkle" was included in Irving's Sketch

Book (1820). Cf. Works, 2:50-76. The passage quoted here

appears on pages 58-59, and the "Postscript^ on pages

75-76.

13. Works of James Fenimore Cooper (New York, 1859-

i86i),5, The Deerslayer, 15-16.

14. The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, Walden Edition (Boston, 1906), 2, Walden, 19.

15. Cooper, The Deerslayer, 33.

16. Cooper, The Deerslayer, 45.

17. Cooper, The Deerslayer, 358.

18. Cooper, The Deerslayer, 299.

19. "Natural History of Massachusetts" in The Writings

of Henry David Thoreau, s, Excursions and Poems, 130.

20. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson,

Centenary Edition, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1903-1904), i. Nature, Lectures and Addresses, 8-10.

21. Complete Works, 3, Essays: Second Series, 75.

22. Complete Works, 2, Essays: First Series, 63-64.

2 3. Complete Works, i, Nature, 10.

24. "A Song of Myself," sect. 5, in Leaves of Grass,

Comprehensive Reader's Edition, ed. Harold W.

Blodgett and Sculley Bradley (New York, 1965), 33.

25. Walden, 206-207.

26. Walden, 367.

27. "Song of Myself," sect. 25, Leaves of Grass, 54.

28. Barbara Novak, American Painting of the

Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American

Experience (New York, 1969), 96-99,105, iio-m, 122-123.

29. The Erittanica Encyclopedia of American Art

(Chicago, 1974), 354-

30. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Sculley

Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty, E. Hudson Long and

Thomas Cooley (New York, 1977), 96.

31. "The Poet," in Complete Works, 3, Essays: Second

Series, 24.

32. "The Birth-mark" in The Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Centenary Edition (Columbus, Ohio, 1974), 10,

Mosses from an Old Manse, 38.

3 3. Complete Works, i, Nature, 71.

34. The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Tales and

Sketches, ed. T. O. Mabbott (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), 2:

313, 3i4, 316, 319-

3 5. "The Domain of Arnheim" in Tales and Sketches, 3:

1272.

36. "Young Goodman Brown" in Nathaniel Hawthorne, 10, Mosses from an Old Manse, 83.

37. "Young Goodman Brown" in Nathaniel Hawthorne, 10, Mosses from an Old Manse, 89.

3 8. "Edgar Poe's Significance" in Specimen Days, Prose

Works 1892. ed. Floyd Stovall (New York, 1963),/: 232.

39. Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford and Herschel

Parker (New York, 1967), 139-140.

40. Moby-Dick, 144.

41. Moby-Dick, 164.

42. Poem 870 in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed.

Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), 2: 647-

648.

43. Pierre, or the Ambiguities (New York, 1957), 402.

44. The Oregon Trail (New York, 1949), 257-258.

45. Oregon Trail, 252, 254-255.

46. Complete Works, i, Nature, 25.

47. "For Once, Then, Something" in The Complete

Poems of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Latham (New

York, 1969), 225. Cf. also p. 120.

48. Poems of Frost, 302, 470.

49- "The Eye" in The Double Axe and Other Poems, ed.

William Everson and Bill Hotchkiss (New York, 1977),

126.

5 o. "Vulture" in The Beginning and the End (New York,

1963), 62.

51. Canto 131 in The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York,

1972), 520.

52. The Cantos, 521.

5 3. Confucius: The Unwobbling Pivot, The Great Digest,

The Analects, trans. Ezra Pound (New York, 1951), 20.

54. Confucius, 187; The Cantos, 179, 429.

GELPI 311

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nt. New York, 1969.

Worthington Whittredge

Exhibition of an American

ogue. Munson-Williams

 N.Y, 1969.

ouise Deshong

ter, Pa., 1925

31 and Nov. 5,1925.

Detail, fig. 330
Index

A

Abrams, M. H., 70

Adams, Henry, 217, 307; The Education

of Henry Adams, 308

After Icebergs with a Painter, see: Noble

Aivazovsky, Ivan K., 230-232; works:

Bay of Naples by Moonlight, 231; A

Beach Scene at Sunset (fig. 264), 232;

The Black Sea (fig. 265), 232; The

Coast at Amalfi, i^ Icebergs, 232;

The Ninth Wave, 232; Rainbow, 232;

Reval (Tallinn) (fig. 263), 231;

Seashore: Calm (fig. 262), 231

Alison, Archibald, 293; Essays on the

Nature and Principles of Taste, 71, 72,

74

Allston, Washington, 14, 28,103,104,

176; compared to Friedrich, 221;

works: American Scenery. Time:

Afternoon with a Southwest Haze (fig.

102), 103; Coast Scene on the Mediterranean (fig. 101), 28,103; Moonlit

Landscape (fig. 13), 103,104,176,184;

see also: Ellis

American Artists Life, see: Tuckerman

American Romantic Painting, see:

Richardson

Anglo-Dutch tradition, 24, 32, in, 255

Annunciation (fig. 224), 177,182; see

also Church

Anthony, Edward, 267, 280

Apocalypse, 69, 74, 81, 90-93; moon

symbol, 90; purgation, 182; rainbow

symbol, 93; wilderness symbol, 186

Apollo Belvedere (fig. 188), 158,165,

182; see: Church

Architecture, 217

Art-Idea, The, see: Jarves

Art-Union (London), 46

Association for the Advancement of

the Cause of Truth in Art, 248-249,

272

B

Babcock, 213

Baldus, Edouard, 267

Bancroft, George, History of the United

States, 160, 295, 307

Barbizon, American, see: Impressionism, romantic

Barbizon school, influence of, 150,151,

214, 216, 269

Barker, George, 282, 283, 287; works:

New Tork—East River—Sunset (fig.

335), 283-285; Sunset—Niagara River

(no. 608) (fig. 327), 282

Barnard, George, 274

Baur, John I. H., 12-15, 97,101,103,183,

214, 237, 301

Beard, James, works: Parson's Pets, 217

Beard, William, 217; works: The Wreckers, 217

Bercovitch, Sacvan, on prophetic selfhood, 69; on typology, 159; landscape as symbol, 73; The Puritan

Origins of the American Self, 159

Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, works: The

Ecstasy of St. Theresa (fig. 222), 177

Bethune, Rev. George Washington, 155,

156,157,160; An Oration Before the

Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard

University, 155,156

Bialostocki, Jan, 74

Bierstadt, Albert, n, 18; cartographic

elements in, 123, 256-258; compared

to Aivazovsky, 232, to Jurgensburg,

229-230, to Saal, 222; influence on

Watkins, 271; luminist works, 121,

215; picturesque views, 32,50;

morality in nature, 127; remarks by

Ludlow, 124; visionary topography,

53,300; Western panoramas, 123-124,

216; works: The Bombardment of fort

Sumter (fig. 301), 123, 256; The Buffalo Trail (fig. 135), 123; Buffaloes on

the Prairie (fig. 133), 123; The Marina

Piccola, Capri (fig. 15), 50; The Rocky

Mountains, 298; Storm in the

Mountains (fig. 58), 53,124; Sunrise,

Tosemite Valley (fig. 343), 300; Sunset

on the Prairie (fig. 134), 123, 230, 256;

Surveyor's Wagon in the Rockies (fig.

132), 123; View from the Wind River

Mountains, Wyoming (fig. 136), 32,

123; Wreck of the "Ancon" in Loring

Bay, Alaska (fig. 90), 93, 98

Bingham, George Caleb, 14, 28, 49,

106, 302; works: The Jolly Flatboatmen (fig. 43), 49,106

Black, James Wallace, 269, 280; works:

Artists Falls, North Conway (New

Hampshire) (fig. 307), 269

Blakelock, Ralph Albert, 146,151, 215,

307; works: The Sun, Serene, Sinks

into the Slumberous Sea (fig. 185), 151

Bloch, Lauren, works: View of New

Amsterdam, 255

Blunt, John S., 14,104; works: New

Tork Harbor at Sunset (fig. 103), 104;

Picnic on Long Island, 104

Bogolyubov, Aleksey Petrovich, 229

Bradford, William (artist), 18; Arctic

photos, 126,139, 304; drawings, 136;

influences on, 124; photos, 53,139;

morality in nature, 127; visionary topography, 53; works: Artie Ice (fig.

345); Arctic Scene (fig. 139), 126;

Coast of Labrador (fig. 137), 126; Extended Section of the Front of a Glacier

(fig. 57); Fishermen3s Homes, Near

Cape St. Johns, Coast of Labrador (fig.

52), 50,126; Ice Dwellers Watching the

Invaders (fig. 56), 53,126; In Polar

Seas (fig. 346), 53; Labrador Coast

(fig. 138), 126; Repairing the Fishing

Lugger (fig. 152), 135; Schooner (fig.

159)

Bradford, William (governor), 291

Bradstreet, Anne, 291, 295, 303

Brady, Mathew, 274

Brett, John, 219, 221, 224; works: The

British Channel Seen from the Dorsetshire C/#f (fig. 230), 219; The Glacier

ofRosenlani, 219; The Norman Archipelago, 219

Bricher, Alfred, n, 18,53,131, 215, 288;

quasi-scientific, 282; works: Boats on

the Shore (fig. 290), 288; Grand

Manan (fig. 7); Morning at Grand

Manan (fig. 55), 53,131; Morning Sunlight, Narragansett Bay (fig. 47), 49;

Narragansett Beach—The Turn of the

Tide (fig. 143), 131; Rocks in Surf (fig.

297), 49; Seascape (fig. 352), 49; Time

and Tide (fig. 144), 131

British style, 213, 214, 219

Brown, George Loring, 14, 213

Brown, J. G., 217

Bryant, William Cullen, 244, 295

Burgis, William, 255

Burke, Edmund, 69, 70, 72-73, 77, 84,

293; Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful, 70, 73

Burnet, Thomas, The Sacred Theory of

the Earth, 70

Bushnell, Horace, 156,157,178,179-180,

183; on Emerson, 183; Nature and the

Supernatural, 156,182,183; Reverses

Needed, 178,179; Sermons for the New

Life, 156

C

Cadmium colors, see: chemical dye

colors

Calame, Alexandre, 227

Calvinism, 156,157,159,177,183

Camera lucida, see: Drawing machines

Camera obscura, see: Drawing machines

Camera, stereo, 270, 278, 279

323
Casilear, John W., 239, 240, 242, 252,

258; works: Hudson Highlands (fig.

284)

Cassatt, Mary, 217

Chase, William Merritt, 213

Chemical dye colors, 15-16, 88-90,108,

in, 121,150, 269

Chubb, Frederick Y., works: Claverack

Creek, 215

Church, Frederic E., n, 16,17,18,120-

121,146,155-190, 215,302; Arctic voyages, 139,304; compared to Allston,

176,184, to Cole, 162,162-166,170,

172,177, to Cooke, 220, to Gifford,

185, to Kensett, 166,185-187, to Saal,

222; composition, 17, 32, 36, 39, 46,

50, 53,120-121; drawings, 238, 251,

262-263; gradation, 184-185; influenced by Humboldt, 121,139,158, by

Ruskin, 175,178, by Turner, 174-175;

light and atmosphere, 158,162,168,

170,172,175,178,183,184-185; nonmanner, 167,168-170,172,177; the

picturesque, 36; rainbow symbol, 93;

signature as pun, 180; sketches, 168,

174; sunsets, 108,183; traditional sublime, 73, 75, 88-94; typological

sources, 155-162,175,177,180,185;

visionary topography, 53; works:

Andes of Ecuador (fig. 186), 17,53, 98,

121, 155, 156, 158, 159, 174,177,179, 180,

187; Aurora Eorealis (fig. 190), 121,

158,174,178; Aurora Borealis (fig.

191), 158,170; Aurora Borealis (fig.

192), 158,170; Beacon OffMt. Desert

(fig. 88), 46, 90,121,169; The Catskill

Creek (fig. 197), 163,173; Charter

Oak} 160; Christian on the Borders of

the Valley of the Shadow of Death, 160;

Christian and his Companions by the

River of the Water of Life, 160;

Cotopaxi (fig. 225), 17,53,121,174,

176,179,180-181,182,183,184,185,187;

The Deluge, 160; Grand Manan Island, Bay ofFundy (fig. 53), 50,121,

175, 222; The Heart of the Andes, after

Church (fig. 187), 179; Icebergs,

Newfoundland (fig. 211), 170; The

Icebergs (The North) (fig. 18), 121,172;

Labrador (figs., 215-217), 172; Landscape Sunset (fig. 208), 169; Magdalena River, New Granada (Ecuador)

(fig. 283), 239; The Meteor, 158; Morning in the Tropics (fig. 128), 17, 36,121,

174,184; Moses Viewing the Promised

Land (fig. 193), 160,168,170,177;

Mt. Desert (fig. 87), 90,169,172; Mt.

Desert, Moonlight (fig. 189), 158,170,

256; Mt. Ktaadn (fig. 194), 36,121,

160; New England Scenery, 160;

Niagara, 17, 82, 85, 93,116,120-121,

179; Our Banner in the Sky, 168; The

Ox-Bow (fig. 19), 32,120,168; The

Parthenon (fig. 29), 17, 38,121,185;

The Plague of Darkness, 160; Quebec

Viewed from the Chaudiere, 160;

Rainy Season in the Tropics, 93, 216;

Reverend Thomas Hooker and his

Party. . ., 160; Study of Landscape

and Sky (fig. 219), 175; Study of a

Sunrise (fig. 221), 177; Sunrise Off the

Maine Coast (fig. 214), 50,121,170,

174; Sunset (fig. 89), 36, 90,121; Sunset, Hudson, New York (fig. 209);

Twilight (fig. 6); Twilight on the Kennebec, 121; Twilight, KShort Arbiter

Twixt Day and Night" (fig. 205), 39,

121,168; Twilight in the Wilderness

(figS. 204, 206-207), 17, 36, 90, 121,

166-167, 168,170, 174,176, 181, 182,

183,184,185,187; The Vale of St.

Thomas, 216; West Rock, New Haven,

160, 211

Churrigueresque, 177

Civil War, n, 80, 93,109,117,123, 242;

decade after, 217-218; photography,

139, 179, 274-275

Claude Lorrain, 24, 25, 32, 33, 80,170,

174,175, 303; see also: Varrall

Clouds, unidentified photo (fig. 210),

170; see: Ruskin; Church, light

Coe, Benjamin, see: Drawing manuals

Cole, Thomas, n, 13, 295; compared to

Gifford, 38, to Friedrich, 221, to

Ivanov, 228, to Kensett, 162,165-166;

conception of time, 164-165; didacticism, 71, 76, 78-80; focus on sky, 169;

Gilpin's formula, 163,165; light, 162;

picturesque, 32-33, 76-78; sketches,

172, 239; sublime, 69, 75~76,106, 293,

295, 300; on Turner, 74; wilderness

theme, 106, 293; "Essay on American

Scenery," 69, 75, 76-77, 78,106;

works: American Lake Scene, 28;

CatskiU Creek (fig. 69), 33, 77, 78, 85,

106; The Clove, Catskills (fig. 20), 32,

34,106; Course of Empire series, 71,

76, 295, 300; The Cross in the Wilderness (fig. 196), 162; Expulsion from the

Garden of Eden (fig. 67), 76, 293;

Home in the Woods (fig. 198), 163-165,

167,172,182; Lake Scene, 228; Landscape with Tree Trunk (fig. 68), 76;

Niagara, 75-76; The Pilgrim of the

Cross (The Vision) (fig. 195), 162,177;

The Ox-bow of the Connecticut River,

32,300; Roman Campagna, 38;

Schroon Mountain (fig. 200), 164-165,

167,183; Summer Sunset (fig. 21), 33,

34,106; View Across Frenchman's Bay

from Mt. Desert Island, After a Squall

(fig. 107), 106,169; Voyage of Life

series, in

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 72

Colman, Samuel, works: Storm King

on the Hudson (fig. 148), 46,132

Color glazing, 103

Cooke, Edward W, 220-221, 224;

works: On the Nile (fig. 235), 220

Cooper, James Fenimore, 292, 295,

298-299, 307, 310; The Crater, 295;

The Last of the Mohicans, 295; Leatherstocking Tales (The Deerslayer), 296-

300,304

Crayon, The, 31,107, 240, 243, 245;

"Elementary Drawing," 244

Critique of Judgement, see: Kant

Cropsey, Jasper E, 14, 213, 216; album

of drawings, 239; compared to Gifford, 38; influenced by Cole, 123; and

liiminism, 121, 216; works: Bareford

Mountains, West Milford, New Jersey

(fig. 302), 123, 256; Evening atPaestum (fig. 27), 38,123; The Hudson

River at Hastings (fig. 287); Italian

Campagna (fig. 129), 123; Lake

George (fig. 130), 123; Mt. Washington

from Lake Sebago, Maine (fig. 131), 123

Currier, Frank, 216

Curtis, G. E., 282, 283, 287; works:

Horse Shoe Fall, Moonlight (no. 79)

(fig. 328), 282

D

Daguerreotypes, see: Photographs

Dahl, J. C., 222; works: Kronborg by

Moonlight, 222; Sailing Ship at

Copenhagen, 222

Dickinson, Emily, 306, 307,310

Drawing machines, 40, 258; camera

lucida, camera obscura, 258, 259

Drawing manuals and instruction

books, 40, 43, 44, 242, 245, 248, 249;

Anglo-Dutch tradition, 32, 43;

Bowen, John T, 249, 250; Chapman,

John, 253, 254-255; Coe, Benjamin,

250, 251; drawing from nature, 243-

244; linear bias, 249, 250; Lucas,

Fielding, 44; Otis, Fessenden Nott,

243, 245; Peak, Rembrandt, 250;

Varley, John, 44; see also: Durand;

Gilpin; Ruskin

Drawings, see: Graphic arts

Dreyer, Dankvart, 226; works: View of

Assens, 226

Diicker, Eugen, 232; works: Evening at

Sea (fig. 266), 232

Diisseldorf school, 123,127

Durand, Asher B., 31-34,43,107,108,

215, 216, 245, 246; on atmosphere, 34,

36; compared to Cole, 295; on

draftsmanship, 248-249, 252; "Letters

on Landscape Painting," 31, 33,107,

245-246, 248, 249, 252, 263; nature

worship, 31, 34, 39, 245, 246-248,

249; personal drawing style, 258-259;

works: American Wilderness (fig.

108), 107; Kaaterskill Clove (fig. 23),

34,107; Kindred Spirits, 295; Landscape with Birches (fig. 109), 107; Sunset (fig. 22), 33,107

324
Duveneck, Frank, 216; works: Turkish

Page, 216

Dyce, William, 219; works: PegwellBay,

Kent—A Recollection of October sth,

1858 (fig. 234), 219

Eakins, Thomas, 12; draftsmanship, 251,

253; French sources, 217; genre, 49,

215; photography, 288; psychological

realism, 146,148-150, 218, 287-288;

works: Beach atManasquan, New

Jersey, 288; The Gross Clinic, 217; Max

Schmitt in a Single Scull (fig. 179),

49,148, 215; Sailboats on the Delaware

River, 288; Sailing (fig. 180), 150;

Shad Fishing at Gloucester on the Delaware River (fig. 45), 49; William

Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure

of the Schuylkill River, 217

Eckersberg, C. W., 24, 222, 225, 226;

works: American Sailing Ship, 225;

Portrait ofThorwaldsen, 225; Russian

Ship at Anchor (fig. 247), 225

Edwards, Jonathan, 292, 300, 308; Images or Shadows of Divine Things, 292

Elements of Drawing, see: Ruskin

Elliot, Charles, 213, 216

Ellis, George B., works: Moonlight (fig.

220; after Allston), 176,184; see also:

Church

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 17, 71, 78,155,

302, 303, 307, 308, 309,310; The

American Scholar, 98; influence on

photography, 269-270, 272; Nature,

98,106, 183, 300-301, 303; Over-Soul,

73, 98,155,185; Representative Man,

97; on self-effacement, 71, 72,102,

166, 301; "Self Reliance," 301; sources

in Kant, 71, 72, 78; Thoughts on Art,

71; The Transcendentalist, 72; transparent eyeball, 28, 72, 98,166,183,186,

300-301

Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful, see:

Burke; Sublime and beautiful

Essays on the Nature and Principles of

Taste, see: Alison

"Etruscan School," 221

F

Farrer, Henry, 18,138, 213, 215; works:

Beached Boat (fig. 289), 249

Farrer, T. C, 18, 213, 215, 248

Faulkner, William, 295, 296, 308

Fauvel-Gouraud, J. B. E, 268

Fenton, Roger, 267, 270

Fitzgerald, E Scott, 295

Folk art, 24,115,134, 267, 275-276; see:

Primitivism

Foubert, Emile, 227

Frederickson, George M., 218

Friedrich, Caspar David, 24, 74, 78, 83,

90, 221-222, 231; works: The Large

Enclosure Near Dresden (fig. 71), 78;

Mist (fig. 237), 221; Monk by the Sea

(fig. 70), 78; View of a Harbor (fig.

238), 221

Friis, Hans Gabriel, 227

Frith, Francis, 267, 270

Frost, Robert, 295,308; "Design," 309

Fuller, Margaret, 103

G

Gage, F. B., 280

Gardner, Alexander, 274; Photographic

Sketchbook of the War, 274

Genre, 49,105,106, 215, 216-217, 292

Gensler, Jacob, 224; works: Beach at

Laboe (fig. 245), 224

Gerdts, William, 18, 227

Gettysburg Address, Lincoln, 98,182

Gifford, Sanford, n, 16,18, 28, 211, 214,

237, 240, 242, 251, 302; compared to

Cooke, 220, to Gensler and

Haushofer, 224, to Lear, 219, to

Zacho, 227; light and atmosphere,

36, 86, 88,117,118, 214; luminist elements, 86-87, n8,136, 215, 237, 255;

obituary, 185; picturesque elements,

36, 38-39; sources, 117; works:

Adirondacks (fig. 272), 136, 237; Coming Rain, Lake George (fig. 341); The

Desert at Siout, Egypt (fig. 126), 46;

Hook Mountain, Hudson (fig. 84), 28,

50, 86, 256; Indian Summer on

Claverack Creek (fig. 127), 227; The

Katadin Tea Party (fig. 285), 240;

Kauterskill Falls, 36; Lago Giardini

(fig. 267), 237; Logo d'Orta (fig.

268), 136, 237; Mt. Mansfield (fig. 26),

36, 98; October in the Catskills (fig.

4), 36,185; On the Nile (fig. 39), 46;

Palmer Hill, Catskill Mountains (fig.

269), 136, 237; River Scene by

Moonlight (fig. 86); Roman

Campagna (fig. 28), 38; The Ruins of

the Parthenon (fig. 30), 38,118,185;

Shelburne, New Hampshire (fig. 153),

136; 1868 Sketchbook, 136; Sketchbook IV, 36; Sunset (fig. 125), 118;

Sunset in the Adirondacks, 36; Twilight

in the Adirondacks, 50, 86; Twilight on

Hunter Mountain (fig. 85), 36, 86-87,

118,150,185; View at Lake George (fig.

276), 136, 237;^. Winter Twilight (fig.

233), 118, 219

Gilmor, Robert, 78

Gilpin, William, 32-33, 36, 40, 43, 44,

163,165-166,182, 293; works: An Explanation of the Shapes and Lines of

Mountains (fig. 203), 165,182; Lake

Windermere (fig. 199), 163

Ginsberg, Allen, 296

God in nature, 24, 28, 31,33, 70, 78, 98,

106,184-185, 305

Graphic arts, n; drawings, 134-138,

237-265; effects of light and atmosphere, 75, 135,136,163,170, 250, 262-

263; printmaking and draftsmanship,

109,147, 252-253; prints as models, 75,

174, 252; Society of Painters in Water

Colors, 217; Turner watercolors, 72;

see also: Photography; Drawing

manuals; Picturesque; Panoramic

composition; Luminism

Gurlitt, Louis, 222; works: Coast Near

Molle (fig. 241), 222

Guy, Francis, works: View of Baltimore

from-Chapel Hill, 255-256

Guy, Seymour, 217

H

Hall, G. H., 216

Hamilton, James, 14,131, 229; works:

What Are the Wild Waves Saying?

(%• 49)

Harper's Magazine, 155,156

Hart, William, 39, 40, 216, 237, 250;

works: Moonlight on Mt. Carter,

Gorham (fig. 293), 250; Upland

Meadow (fig. 31), 39; White Mountain

Range from Jefferson Hill (fig. 292),

250

Harte, Bret, 218

Hartmann, Sadakichi, History of American Art, 214

Harvey, George, 14

Haseltine, William S., n, 14,132, 237,

238, 251; compared to Preller, 222;

works: Capri (fig. 17); Castle Rock,

Nahant (fig. 146), 132, 282; Egg Rock,

Nahant (fig. 273), 237; Marina Piccola, Capri (fig. 16); Mt. Desert (fig.

280), 237, 238; Rocks at Nahant (fig.

296), 251; Rocks at Nahant, Massachusetts (fig. 147), 132, 282

Haushofer, Maximilian, 224; works:

View of the Mountains (fig. 246), 224

Hawes, Joel, 156

Hawes, Josiah J., see South worth, Albert S. and Hawes, Josiah J.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 97, 98,100, 217,

307; House of the Seven Gables, 97;

Scarlet Letter, 97; "Young Goodman

Brown," 303-304

Heade, Martin Johnson, 11-18, 23, 36,

72,108,115-117,184,185, 213, 215, 216,

217, 292,302; charcoals, 213, 253-254;

compared to Friedrich, 221, to Gensler and Haushofer, 224, to Kuinji,

230, to Lane, in, 116,135, to Melbye,

225, to Rorbye, 226; luminist composition, 46, 81-84, n6,117,135, 253-

255; marshes, 23, 46, 83-84,115,116,

135, 253-254; sublime, 80, 84,302;

works: Approaching Storm: Beach

Near Newport (fig. 79), 23, 84; Becalmed, Long Island Sound (fig. 249),

325

E
46, io6,117, 225, 232; The Coming

Storm (fig. 51), 50; Duck Hunters in

the Marshes (fig. 344), 302; Great

Florida Sunset (fig. 124), 117; Gremlins in the Studio, 217; Harbor at Rio

de Janeiro (fig. 122); Lake George (fig.

75), 81-82,116, 213, 256; Marshfield

Meadows (fig. 40), 46,116; Marshfield

Meadows, Massachusetts (fig. 3);

Newburyport Marshes (fig. 42), 46,

253; Newport Sunset, 215; Omotepec

Volcano, Nicaragua (fig. 123), 116; Rio

de Janeiro Bay (fig. 121), 116; Rye

Beach, 224; South American River

(fig. 25), 36,116; 7#£ Stranded Boat

(fig. 120), 50,116, 221; Sunset, Harbor

at Rio de Janeiro (fig. 122), 116; Sunrise on the Marshes (fig. 77), 83,116;

Sunset on Newbury Marshes (fig. 76),

83,116; Thunderstorm, Narragansett

Bay (fig. 10), 46, 49; Thunderstorm

Over Narragansett Bay (fig. 63), 72,

84,184,185, 214, 217; Twilight on the

Marshes (fig. 41), 46, 253; Twilight on

the Plum Island River (fig. 78), 84,

253

Healy, G. P. A., 216

Henry, E. L., 217, 218

Hicks, Edward and Thomas, 115

Hill, J. W., 213, 215

Hillers, Jack, 102,139,140; works:

Mouth ofZion Park (fig. 162), 140,

283; Tosemite Falls Cliff, California

(fig. 99), 102; Tosemite Valley (fig.

100), 102

Homer, Winslow, 12,14; compared to

Aivazovsky, 232, to Jurgensburg, 230;

draftsmanship, 147, 253; genre elements, 49, 147, 215, 216-217; psychological realism, 146,147-148, 218, 307;

works: An Adirondack Lake (fig. 44),

49,147, 215; Artist's Studio in an

Afternoon Fo# (fig. 348), 148, 307;

Breezing Up, 217; The Bridle Path,

216; Dad's Coming (fig. 177), H, 49,

147, 253; High Tide: The Bathers (fig.

298), 49,147, 253; Long Branch, New

Jersey (fig. 176), 147; Prisoners from

the Front, 216; Promenade on the

Beach (fig. 178), 49,148; The Ship's

Boat, 232; Snap the Whip, 217; Waiting for Dad, 253

Hovenden, Thomas, 217

Howells, William Dean, 218

Hudson River school, n, 12,18, 99,115,

212, 213, 218; composition, 24;

draftsmanship, 239; luminist elements, 108,131-134,138,183; painters,

12,108, 214, 295, 301-302;

 aRocky

Mountain school," 12

Humboldt, Alexander von, 121,139,157,

185; Personal Narratives and the Cosmos, 157

Hunt, S. V., Long Island Sound (fig.

226; after Suydam), 184; see also:

Church

Hunt, William Morris, 13, 213, 215, 216,

251-252, 259

Huntington, Daniel, 213, 215, 216

I

Imagery, allegorical or scriptural: Chosen People, 155,159, 175, 181, 186, 291;

light/morality, 127,158, 292; light/redemption (cross), 135,180,181, 182,

185,186; national identity, 17,108,

120,156, 216, 295; nature as Eden, 75,

90, 97,106,124,163, 270, 275, 292,

293; nature's Bible, 157,184,187; New

World/New Jerusalem, 69,159,182,

291, 292; regeneration, 179, 300;

Revelations, 90-93,156,180,182,183,

186, 291, 292; sun/Spirit (Christ),

162, 177, 292

Images or Shadows of Divine Things, see:

Edwards

Impressionism, romantic (American),

12,13, 93,138,146,150-151, 214, 216;

see: Blakelock; Hunt, William

Morris; Inness; Johnson, David;

Martin, Homer Dodge; Whistler

Inchbold, J. W, 220-221; works: The

Certosa, Venice, from the Public Gardens (fig. 236), 220

Inness, George, 12,13, 36,150, 213, 214,

215, 216, 251; works: The Close of Day

(fig. 24), 36,150; The Lackawanna

Valley (fig. 181), 150; LakeNemi (fig.

182), 150-151; The Monk, 216; Peace

and Plenty, 216

Interior of the Dominican Chapel of the

Rosary, Puebla Mexico (fig. 223), 177;

see also: Church

Irving, Washington, Christopher Columbus, 295; "Rip Van Winkle," 296-

297

"Itinerants," 229

Ivanov, A. A., 228-229; works: Pontine

Marshes (fig. 257), 228

J

Jackson, William Henry, 139-140, 283;

works: The Upper Twin Lake, Colorado (no. 1012) (fig. 161), 140, 283

Jacksonian optimism, u, 105,109,164

James, Henry, 218, 251; "A Landscape

Painter," 101-102; The Madonna of the

Future, 217; Roderick Hudson, 217

Jarves, James Jackson, 13-14, 86, 88, 213;

The Art-Idea, 15, 86, 213

Jeffers, Robinson, 309

Johnson, David, 99,108, 214, 216, 237;

works: Chocorua Peak, New Hampshire (fig. no), 108; Tongue Mountain, Lake George (fig. 274), 99,108,

138, 237

Johnson, Eastman, 12,14, 46; genre,

49,146-147, 216; works: The Cranberry Harvest, Nantucket Island (fig.

46), 49,146; The Hatch Family, 216;

Lambs, Nantucket (fig. 175), 49,146;

Not at Home, 216

Jung, Carl, 301

Jurgensburg, M. K. Klodt von, 229-

230; works: Highway in Autumn,

229-230; Ploughing (fig. 260), 230;

Timbered Landscape at Noon, 230

K

Kamenev, Lev Lvovich, 229; works:

Landscape, 229

Kane, Elisha Kent, 139

Kant, Immanuel, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 78,

80; Critique of Judgement, 70, 71-72

Karolik Collection, 12,17, 214, 238

Kennedy, David Johnson, 135,136, 238,

259; works: Entrance to Harbor—

Moonlight (fig. 8); Moonrise in A Fog

(fig. 282), 238; Ship Ashore on the Atlantic Beach (fig. 151), 135

Kensett, John E, n, 13,18, 23, 24, 27,

108,114-115,162, 302; compared to

Cole, 162-166, to K0bke, 226, to

Melbye, 225, to Preller and Saal, 222;

composition, 165-166, 211-212, 213,

214; draftsmanship, 138, 243, 250, 251;

engraving, 252; panoramic elements,

39-40, 53; silence and light, 84-86; serial views, 115; works: Beach at

Newport (fig. 2), 86,115, 212; Beacon

Rock, Newport Harbor (fig. 59), 53;

Catskill Waterfall, 212; Eaton's Neck,

Long Island (fig. 83), 53, 86,115, 212;

An Inlet of Long Island Sound (fig.

118), 114; Landscape (fig. 227), 212;

Lake George (figs. 228, 229), 212;

NarragansettBay (fig. 12); New England Landscape (fig. 270), 237;

Newport Coast (fig. 82), 86,115; North

from Storm King (fig. 288);

Shrewsbury River, (fig. 202), 24, 53,

165-166,167, 225; Shrewsbury River

(fig. 81), 85,102; Sunset, Camel's

Hump, Vermont (fig. 80), 39, 85,114,

165; View Near Cozzens Hotel, West

Point (fig. 243), 39, 98,114, 222, 262;

Water Scene, Newport (fig. 119)

Kerouac, Jack, 296

Kilburn, Benjamin W, 280-282; works:

Flume above the Boulder (no. 122) (fig.

326), 282

King, Clarence, 271-272, 275-276, 282

K0bke, Christian, 24, 25, 226; works:

Danish Coast, 226; Frederiksborg

Castle, 25; Shore Scene (fig. 251), 226;

View from Kastelsvolden (fig. 250),

226; Zealand Landscape, 226

Kuindji, Arkhip I., 230; works: Morning on the Dnieper (fig. 261), 230

326
Kyhn, Peter W. C, 227

L

La Cour, J. A. B., 227; works: Sen

Scene with Rocky Coast (fig. 253), 227

LaFarge, John, 213, 215; Flowers on a

Window Ledge, 216; Paradise Valley,

216; Vase of Flowers, 216

Lagorio, Liev F., 229; works: Crossing

the Terek (fig. 258), 229; Ship at Sea,

229

Lambdin, George, 216

Lane, Fitz Hugh, n, 12,13,14,15,16,17,

18, 23, 25, 78,108-113, 302; abstract relationships, 44; compared to

Aivazovsky, 231, Dahl, 222, Friedrich,

221, 224, Heade, in, 135,185,

Prommel, 224; composition, 40-43,

46, in, 134, 278; contemplative sublime, 80, 81, 302; contribution to

luminism, 113; geometric elements

in, 42-43, 259-261; lithography, 109,

252; topographical elements in, 40,

237, 255, 258; works: Babson andEllery Houses, Gloucester (fig. 37), 46,

in, 261; Boston Harbor (fig. 239), 42,

in, 221, 231; Bracks Cove, Eastern

Point (fig. 115), in; Brace's Rock (fig.

74), 46, 81, 84,102,112; Brace's Rock

(fig. 91), 46, 81, 84, 98,102,112,185;

Brace's Rock (fig. 114), in; Brace's

Rock, Brace's Cove (fig. n), 46, 81, 84,

102,112; Brace's Rock, Eastern Point

(fig. 116), 46, 84,102,112; Brace's

Rock, Eastern Point, Gloucester (fig.

117), 46, 81, 84,102,112; Christmas

Cove, Maine (fig. 35), 43, ni; Entrance of Somes Sound from Southwest

Harbor (fig. 72), 43, 80, 98, in;

Gloucester Harbor at Sunset (fig. 34),

42, in; Looking Westerly from Eastern

Side of Somes Sound Near the Entrance

(fig. 303), 258; Lumber Schooners at

Evening on Penobscot Bay (fig. i), in;

Norman's Woe (fig. 32), 44, 50,102,

261; Norman's Woe (fig. 33), 50,102,

261; Norman's Woe, Gloucester (fig.

61), 44, 71, 78,102; Owl's Head,

Penobscot Bay, Maine (fig. 113), 43,

in; Salem Harbor (fig. m), in; Ship

"Starlight" in the Fog (fig. 112), in;

Ships and an Approaching Storm Off

Owl's Head, Maine (fig. 73), 80, 84,

102, in; View in Town Parrish (fig.

38); Western Shore of Gloucester Outer

Harbor (fig. 271), 237

Langenheim, Frederick, 270, 280

Langenheim, William, 280

Lear, Edward, 219, 221; works: Khanea,

Crete (fig. 231), 219; Sunset on the

Nile (fig. 232), 219; View on the

Campagna of Rome, 219

Le Gray, Gustave, 267, 287

"Letters on Landscape Painting," see:

Durand

Leutze, Emanuel, 213

Lier, Adolf, 224

Light, see: Imagery; Luminism; Picturesque; Sublime and beautiful

Longfellow, Henry W., Hiawatha, 97

de Loutherbourg, Philip J., works: Avalanche, or Ice-Fall, in the Alps. . .

(fig. 64), 74

Lucas, Fielding, see: Drawing manuals

Ludlow, Fitz Hugh, 124, 271

Luminism, classic, 23, 24, 86, 87, 88,

106, 108,117, 118, 142, 254, 256, 270

Luminism, defined: Andrus, 31, 55;

Baur, 12,14, 301-302; Ferber, 237;

Gelpi, 301-302; Huntington, 155,185;

Naef, 288; Novak, 17, 23-29; Powell,

72, 73, 78-80; Richardson, 15-16;

Stebbins, 211, 213, 215, 216; Wilmerding, 98-102

Luminism, European parallels to, 24,

25, 44, 69, 78-80, 213, 219-233

Luminist, anonymity (artistic), 17, 25,

26, 28, 43, 7i, 72,102,148,167, 170,

172; color, n, 15-16, 88, 90,108,115,

116,117,126,131, 262; composition, 13,

28, 36, 39-40, 46, 49, 72, 73, 78, 80,

81, 86, 98, 105, 114,123, 131, 254-255,

261; gradation, 15, 77-78,184-185, 301;

light, n, 25, 40, 69, 85, 86,104, 108,

116,118,126, 214, 262-263, 292, 293,

303; measure, 23, 28, 40,123, 252, 259,

261; serial views, 111-115,116,142; silence, 27, 28, 42, 69, 72, 73, 77, 80, 81,

84, 98,101, 259; space, 13, 36, 69, 72,

73, 78, 81-84, 85-86,105,108,114,120,

123, 256, 259; time, 25, 27, 69, 72, 98,

259

Luminist movement, 9,11,14; mature,

108-114, 216; phases of, 109,146-151,

211; precursors, 14,103-108; within

cultural context, 217-218; see:

Luminism, European parallels to

M

Macchiaioli, 227

Martin, Homer Dodge, 12,138,146,

150,151, 214, 215, 216, 230; works:

Landscape, Fort Ann (fig. 158), 138;

Landscape, Mt. Marino (fig. 157), 138;

On the Upper Hudson (fig. 183), 151

Martin, John, 74-75, 76, 93; works: Belshazzar's Feast (fig. 66), 75; Deluge,

75; Joshua Commanding the Sun to

Stand Still, 75; Paradise Lost, 75; see

also: Willis

Matthiessen, F. O., American Renaissance, 97, 98,101, 217

McCosh, James, 157,158,159,177; Typical Forms and Special Ends in Creation, 157,159,177

Meditation by the Sea, anonymous (fig.

150), 18,134

Melbye, D. H. Anton, 225, 233; works:

A Frigate and a Brig Under Sail (fig.

248), 225; Marine, 225

Melville, Herman, 97,100,178, 217,

304-307, 3io; Moby-Dick, 97,100,

304-306; Pierre, 97, 306

Michelangelo, works: Creation of the

Sun and Moon (fig. 218), 175,182; see

also: Church

Mignot, Louis Remy, 136, 255; works:

New Tork at the Entrance of the Hudson from Hoboken (fig. 300), 136, 255

Milton, John, Paradise Lost, 74-75, 76

Modern Painters, see: Ruskin

Monk, Samuel, 70, 72

Moore, C. H., 215

Moore, N. A., 213

Moran, Edward, 215

Moran, John, 280

Moran, Thomas, 215, 216; works: Scene

from Hiawatha, 217

Morgenstern, Christian, 222

Mount, William Sidney, 13,14, 28, 53,

101, 217, 302; compared to Soroka,

228; composition, 13, 49,105; as

luminist, 105; works: Crane Neck

Across the Marsh (fig. 106), 53,106;

Eel Spearing at Setauket (fig. 256), 28,

49,101,105, 228; Farmer's Nooning

(fig. 98), 101,105

Muybridge, Eadweard J., 98,140, 277-

279; works: Horse and Rider in

Motion (fig. 322), 279; Valley of the

Yosemitefrom Glacier Point (no. 33)

(fig. 93), 98,140

N

National Academy of Design, 76, 213,

215, 246, 251

Naturalism, see: Burke; Burnet; Kant

Nature, see: Typology; Imagery; Sublime

Nature, duality in, see: Sublime and

beautiful

Nature and the Supernatural, see:

Bushnell

Negatives, photographic: dry plates,

283; glass plates, 138, 267, 269, 274;

wet plates, 138, 282, 283

Nevins, Allan, 218

Newman, Roderick, 215

Niagara, 282; see: Church; Cole;

Noble, Rev. Louis

Noble, Rev. Louis, After Icebergs with a

Painter, 121; as Church's companion,

93,175-178; as Cole's biographer, 75,

164; on Niagara, 75

Noble, Thomas S., 216

O

Olana, 121,146,157,170,177, 216

327
On the Aesthetic Education of Man, see:

Schiller

Oration Before the Phi Beta Kappa

Society of Harvard University, see:

Bethune

O'Sullivan, Timothy H., 99,139, 274-

278, 279, 282, 283; compared to

Heade, Gifford, Kensett, 270, 274,

to Lane, 140; time as theme, 276-278;

works: Alkaline Lake, Carson Desert,

Nevada (fig. 160), 140; Ancient Ruins

in the Canon De Chelle, New Mexico

(fig. 320), 276; Black Canon, Colorado

River, From Camp 8, Looking Above,

Arizona (fig. 342); Canon of the Colorado River, Near Mouth of San Juan

River, Arizona, 276; Desert Sand Hills

Near the Sink of Carson (fig. 318),

276; The Field Where General

Reynolds Fell (fig. 316), 274; Green

River, Colorado (fig. 321), 277;

Pyramid and Tufa Domes (fig. 317),

140, 275; Rock Carved by Drifting

Sand (fig. 319), 276; Summits of the

Uinta Mountains, Utah Territory (fig.

97), 99

Over-Soul, see: Emerson

p

Page, William, 213

Painting in America, see: Richardson,

E. P.

Panchromatism, 283

Panoramic composition, 17,36,46, 49,

53, 219, 254-255; and the picturesque,

36, 38, 39-40,50,53; seascapes, 40-46,

53; sequential photography, 278;

topographical, 40, 254-258; Western

views, 216; see also: Gilpin; Picturesque

Pantheism, 12, 221, 269, 272,309; see:

Transcendentalism

Paradise Lost, see: Milton

Parkman, Francis, The Oregon Trail,

307, 308, 309

Parthenon, 38-39, 118, 185

Peak, Rembrandt, see: Drawing manuals

Pencillings By the Way, see: Willis

Peredvizhniki, see: "Itinerants"

Personal Narratives and the Cosmos, see:

Humboldt

"Photogenic drawing," 267; see also:

Photography

Photographic prints, 38,53; albumen

prints (figs. 9, 57, 93, 96-97, 99~ioo,

160-165,168-170, 308-323, 342);

daguerreotypes (figs. 305-306), 267,

268, 269, 274; picture postcards, 287;

platinum prints (figs. 171-174, 336-

339); salt print (fig. 307), silver prints

(figs. 8, 94-95,166-167, 286, 330-334,

349-350); stereographs (figs. 323-329,

335), 270, 279, 280, 283

Photography, n, 78, 97,138-145, 267-

288; light in, 267-269, 271, 274, 277,

278, 279, 287; phases, 267; and

luminism, 138-145, 288; sequential exposures, 277, 278, 279

Picturesque, the, 43, 212, 245, 251, 293;

composition, 35-39,50, 270; formula,

32-34; seascapes, 44,53; see also:

Gilpin; Panoramic composition

Plein-air, 34, 97,106,163,174, 239, 240,

246, 262; see also: Drawing manuals

Poe, Edgar Allan, 307, 310; "The

Haunted Palace," 307; "Ligeia," 303;

Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 304

Pound, Ezra, The Cantos, 309-310

Preller, Friedrich J. E., 222; works:

Norwegian Coast at Scudesnaes (fig.

240), 222

Prelude, The, see: Wordsworth

Pre-Raphaelites, compared to

luminists, 213-214, 219

Price, Uvedale, 212, 293

Primitivism, 23-24; see: Folk art

Pringle, James, 15

Prior, T. A., works: Tower and Castle of

Heidelberg (fig. 212; after Turner),

170,174; see also: Church

Prommel, Julius, 222-224; works:

Copenhagen Harbor (fig. 244), 224

Progressive Drawing Book, see: Drawing

manuals, Lucas

Psychological realism, 146,147-148, 218,

287-288, 307

Puritan Origins of the American Self,

The, see: Bercovitch

Puritan theology, 69, 73, 97, 291-293;

Calvinist influence on Church, 155-

162; see also: Typology; Sublime,

traditional; Sublime and beautiful;

Edwards

R

Rand, Henry L., 144-145, 285-287;

works: Across the Bay, Gloucester (fig.

336), 145, 286; Bass Harbor Marsh

(fig. 174), 145; Beach, Fox Dens Point

and Norwood Cove (fig. 173), 144;

Cloisters and Isolated Rock, Suttonys Island (fig. 171), 144; Island House Slip,

Thick Fq0 (fig. 338), 144, 287;

Moonlight on the Upper Saranac (fig.

339), 144, 287; Qff Sandy Hook (fig.

172), 144, 287; Somes Sound, Looking

South (fig. 337), 145, 286

Reverses Needed, see: Bushnell

Richards, Frederick DeBourg, works;

Across the Marshes (fig. 149), 132

Richards, William Trost, n, 18,127-131,

132, 215, 216, 217, 240-242, 248; compared to Saal, 222; composition, 255,

259; draftsmanship, 138, 237-238, 249,

250, 251, 252, 255, 259, 261, 288; drawing manuals, 243-244, 250, 251; on

nature, 244-245; quasi-scientific, 138;

works: Coastal Scene (fig. 154), 138,

238; East Hampton Beach (fig. 294),

49; Lake Squam from Red Hill (fig.

340), 138; The League Long Breakers

Thundering on the Reef (fig. 54),

50-53; Lighthouse on Cape Cod (fig.

60), 53-55,132; Moonlight on Mt.

Lafayette, New Hampshire (fig. 281),

238; On the Coast of New Jersey (fig.

48), 49; Paradise, Newport (fig. 155),

138; Paradise Valley, Newport (fig.

156), 138; Rocks by the Sea(fig. 291),

249, 282; A Rocky Coast (fig. 278),

249; Shipwreck (fig. 295), 49; Sketchbook B, 138; Waves (fig. 304), 259,

288

Richardson, E. P., 179; American

Romantic Painting, 15-16,18, 214;

Painting in America, 15

Bimmer, William, 216; works: Flight

and Pursuit, 216; The Dying Centaur,

217

Robinson, H., works: He was Transfigured before Them (fig. 201; after

Raphael), 165,182-183; see also:

Church

"Rocky Mountain school," see: Hudson River school

Romantic realism, 12, 71, 74, 216, 269

Romanticism, 15, 300

Rorbye, Martinus, 226-227; works:

Beach atBlokhusene (fig. 252), 226

Rosa, Salvator, 32, 33

Ruskin, John, 31, 32, 33, 34-35, 78, 107-

108; cloud types, 36,108; color in

drawing, 134; color mixing, in; on

draftsmanship, 245, 248-249; Elements of Drawing, 107,134, 248;

Modern Painters, 31, 32, 34-35, 78,107,

in, 174-175,182, 213, 248-249; on

symmetry, 112; photography, 272;

spirituality in atmosphere, 175,182;

visionary topography, 53

Russell, A. J., 274; works: Weber Valley,

from WilhelminaPass, Utah (fig. 315),

274

Ryder, Albert P., 14, 215, 307; works:

The Temple of the Mind, 307

s

Saal, Georg, 222; works: Nordkap, 222;

View ofTrondhjem in Norway (fig.

242), 222

Sacred Theory of the Earth, see: Burnet

Salmon, Robert, 14, 28, 44,104-105,

268; compared with Eckersberg, 225;

works: Boston Harbor from Castle Island (fig. 36), 44,105; Boston Harbor

from Constitution Wharf (View of

Charlestown, 1833) (fig. 14), 28, 44,

105; Moonlight Coastal Scene (fig.

328
io4), 44,104; Wharves of Boston (fig.

105), 44,104-105

Schiller, Friedrich, 72; On the Aesthetic

Education of Man, 72

Schinkel, K. F, works: Landscape Near

Pichelswerder, 221-222

Selfridge, Thomas O., 276

Sermons for the New Life, see: Bushnell

Sewall, Samuel, Phaenomena quaedam

Apocalyptica . . ., 292

Shattuck, Aaron Draper, 99,137-138,

237, 242, 259; works: Lake George

(fig. 275), 99,137-138, 237, 259

Sheldon, George, Hours with Art and

Artists, 213

Silva, Francis A., 49,127,131, 215; compared with Prommel, 224; works:

Indian Rock, Narra0ansett Bay (fig.

145), 131; Schooner Passing Castle Island, Boston Harbor (fig. 347); A

Summer Afternoon at Long Branch

(fig. 50), 49

Sketch clubs, 239, 240; Horicon, 242

Smillie George, 214

Smith Russell, 15

Society for the Advancement of Truth

in Art, see: Assoc. for the Advancement of the Cause of Truth in Art

Soroka, Grigory, 228; works: The

Fisherfolk (fig. 255), 228

Soule, John P., 270, 279, 280; works:

Haying Scene (no. 147), 280; Marine

Study by Moonlight (fig. 323), 279,

280; North Conway and White Mountains—from Sunset Hill (no. 78) (fig.

324), 280; Thompson's Cascades—

Soulrt Delight (no. is) (fig. 325), 280

Soulier, Charles, 270

Southworth, Albert S., works: Lemuel

Shaw, 269; Self-Portrait, 269

Southworth, Albert S., and Hawes,

Josiah J., 268-269; works: Unidentified Plots, Mt. Auburn Cemetery,

Cambridge, Massachusetts (fig. 305),

268; W. Read and S. O. Mead,

Mausolea, Mt. Auburn Cemetery,

Cambridge, Massachusetts (fig. 306),

268

Stacy, G., 280

Steinbeck, John, 308

Stereo camera, see: Camera, stereo

Stereographs, see: Photographs

Stereoscopic companies, 267, 280

Stieglitz, Alfred, 116,144

Stillman, William, 271

Stoddard, Seneca Ray, 18, 99,116,142,

144, 242; luminist qualities, 143, 283;

works: Adirondacks, Barn Rock, Lake

Champlain (fig. 349); "The Giant"

Keene Valley, Adirondacks (fig. 166),

143; The Horicon Sketching Club (fig.

286), 142, 242; Lake George (fig. 167),

143; Lake George, Black Mountain

from the Southwest (fig. 333), 283;

Lake George, French Point from South

(fig. 334), 283; The Letter «S» Ray

Brook (fig. 8), 143; Little Tuff er Lake,

Adirondacks (fig. 330), 283; Moonlight

on Lake George (no. 1380) (fig. 329),

283; The Palisades of Lake Champlain,

1800 (fig. 350); Split Rock Mountain,

Lake Champlain (fig. 331), 283; Twin

Mountains, Lake George, Deer's Leaf,

Bloomer Mountain (fig. 332), 283;

Upper Saranac Lake, East from

Saranaclnn (fig. 94), 99; Upper

Saranac Lake, South from Saranac

Inn (fig. 95), 99

Sublime and beautiful: defined, 292,

293, 300; in Cole, 75-76, 293-295, 298;

in Durand, 295, 298; as light/white,

292, 293, 302, 303, 304, 306, 309, 310;

as masculine/feminine, 292, 293, 296,

297-299, 308, 310; myth of pioneer,

295, 296-300, 303; national identity,

69, 295; Puritan sources, 291-294,

300, 308; literary imagery, see:

Cooper; Frost; Hawthorne; Jeffers;

Irving; Melville; Twain; Poe;

Pound; and Adams; Bancroft;

Emerson; Parkman; Thoreau

Sublime, contemplative, 69-71, 72, 73,

78, 84, 86, 88, 93; see also: Emerson;

Heade; Kant; Lane; Luminist silence; Transcendentalism

Sublime, traditional, 69-71, 72, 73, 75,

76, 84, 88,109, H7,139,179;

Apocalypse, 69, 74, 81, 90-93; sacred

history, 90-93,179; wilderness

themes, 69, 73, 75, 9O, 93,106,186,

291, 297; see also: Sublime and beautiful; Bierstadt; Burke; Church; Cole

Suydam, James A., 14,50,134,184,185;

works: Beach Scene, Newport (fig.

351), 50; see also: Hunt, S. V.

Swedenborg, Emmanuel, 72

T

Tabor, Isaiah, 272

Tait, A. F., 217, 218

Thayer, Abbott, 213

Thoreau, Henry David, 28, 97, 98-99,

121,139,155, 217, 296, 309, 310; influence on photography, 269-270, 272;

Walden, 97, 298, 301

Thoughts on Art, see: Emerson

Tirrell, George, 14

Topography, 40, 255-258; English topographers, 244; geological surveys,

271-272, 275, 276; see also: Panoramic

composition

Transcendentalism, 17, 77, 78, 97,155,

300, 305; Kant as source, 71-72; Unitarian, 156,157; see also: Emerson

Transparent eyeball, see: Emerson

Tryon, Dwight, 214

Tuckerman, Rev. Henry Theodore, 155,

211, 242, 246; American Artists Life,

155; on Gifford, 212-213;,on Kensett,

211-212

Turner, J. M. W., 32, 72, 74, 211; influence on Church, 174-175; works: The

fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons

(fig. 62), 72, 74; The Snowstorm:

Hannibal and his Army Crossing the

Alps (fig. 65), 74,175; see also: Prior

Twain, Mark, The Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn, 296, 302; Innocents

Abroad, 217, 218

Typical Forms and Special Ends in Creation, see: McCosh

Typology: defined, 291; of the Elect,

159-160,177,179,183,185,186; historical/geographical application, 156-160,

177-178,179,180,185,187,292, 308; see

also: Edwards

V

Van Beest, Albert, 238, 255, 258; works:

New Bedford from Fairhaven (fig.

279), 238

Vance, Robert, 270

Vanderlyn, John, works: Ariadne

Asleep on the Isle ofNaxos, 293

Varley, John, see: Drawing manuals

Varrall, J. C., works: Embarcation of the

Queen ofSheba (fig. 213; after

Claude), 170,174; see also: Church

Vedder, Elihu, 213, 215, 217; works: Lair

of the Sea Serpents, 217

View of Gloucester, anonymous (fig.

277), 237

W

Watkins, Carleton, n, 18, 99;

luminist themes, 142, 270; stylistic

evolution, 270-274; works: Berkshire

Ranch, 273; Cape Horn, Oregon (fig.

314), 273; Columbia River (fig. 312);

Down the Valley, Tosemite, 271; Half

Domes, Tosemite (fig. 164), 142, 283;

Merced River, Tosemite Valley (fig.

165), 142, 283; Mirror Lake, Tosemite

(fig. 96), 99, 283; Mirror View, El

Capitan, Tosemite (no. 38) (fig. 309),

271, 288; North Dome, Tosemite (fig.

163), 142, 283; A Storm on Lake Tahoe

(California) (fig. 311), 273; The Three

Brothers—4480 Feet—Tosemite (fig.

308), 270; Tu-Toch-Anula, or El Capitan, 3/00 Feet High, Tosemite (fig.

310), 271; Washington Column, 2,082

Feet Tosemite (no. 81) (fig. 9), 283;

Winter View of Cape Horn From Bridal Veil (fig. 313), 273; Tosemite Valley

from Sentinel Dome (no. 03), 273; see

also: King

Weber, Paul, 251

Weir, John E, works: Gun Foundry,

329