Emerson’s ‘Nature’ and the commons
By: Douglas Mccarthy
Tags: Public Domain, Openglam, Art History, Museums, Open Access

‘Emerson’s Nature and the Artists’ considers Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal 1836 essay and continues Tyler Green’s examination into how artists have impacted America, its culture, intellectual life, and the idea of the American nation. Remarkably for an art history publication, all of the artworks in the book were sourced from art museums and libraries with open access policies.

Tyler, what inspired you to write this book?

I started writing a kind of biography of the artist and photographer Carleton Watkins in 2011. As Watkins is most famous for his work at Yosemite in 1861, 1865–66, and 1878–79, and as those 1861 pictures were believed to be primary in informing the invention of the national park at Yosemite, I knew I was going to have to re-open the history of the Yosemite Idea (which historians had not much examined in about 70 years). Through my research, I came to realise how important Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ideas, especially in Nature, were to key Yosemiteans such as Thomas Starr King, Frederick Law Olmsted, and very likely to Watkins too. The more I researched Emerson’s journals, notebooks, correspondence, essays and especially his 1836 book Nature, the more I saw how his ideas informed much American art, and all the way through precisionism in the 1920s-40s.

The other inspiration was open access itself. One reason I picked Watkins to write about in 2011 is that I knew that his work was particularly well held by open access institutions, which helped make the book affordable to write. Still, that project reminded me of the bizarre corruption that is the image-fee model: my Watkins book was published by University of California Press. Yet the University of California’s Bancroft Library charged me image rights fees, and so too the University of California’s Hearst Museum (whose fees were so high I could not afford them).

How did Emerson view the public commons and how relevant is his vision to today’s digital world?

In 1835, the town of Concord, Massachusetts asked Emerson to give an address to mark the town’s 200th anniversary. Emerson researched Concord’s history, and realised that the common in the middle of the town — mostly an agricultural space shared by many townfolk, but also a site of public gathering — was descended from an old English practice. He talked about it in his 200th anniversary lecture. At just about the same time, Emerson is beginning to write Nature, his first book and arguably the most important non-fiction book written in America between the Revolution and the Civil War. In the third paragraph of Nature, Emerson builds the commons idea into his landmark definition of “landscape,” a word that was then new to American English:

‘The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their land-deeds give no title.’