Jonathan Wordsworth et al., William Wordsworth and the Age of English Romanticism (1987)
Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom And Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (1959)
Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-75 (1980)
Bryan Wolf, Romantic Re-Vision (1982) (especially chapter on Thomas Cole)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School (1987)
John Wilmerding, ed., American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850-1875 (1980)
Philip G. Terrie, Forever Wild: Environmental Aesthetics and the Adirondack Forest Preserve (1985)
Elizabeth McKinsey, Niagara Falls: Icon of the American Sublime (1985)
Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 1995; The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005)
Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (1995)
John Conron, American Picturesque (2000)
Linda S. Ferber, The Hudson River School: Nature and the American Vision (2009)
Also helpful are these websites on the Hudson River School:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_River_School (includes many relevant links)
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/hurs/hd_hurs.htm
Romanticism was arguably the single most important influence on American notions of landscape that emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We remain heirs to the romantic tradition, which is strongly present in environmentalist thought right down to the present.
Key generalization: romanticism was an example of, and also a reaction against, the secularization of western European culture and religiosity that typified the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and after.
Against the threat of scientific materialism and empiricism, romantics rediscovered god/spirituality in nature.
Take Thomas Cole's "View from Mt. Holyoke...After a Thunderstorm" (1836) as our leitmotif for this lecture. Although it may at first appear to be a realistic depiction of an actual landscape--and you can in fact climb Mt. Holyoke in central Massachusetts to gaze down on an abandoned oxbow of the Connecticut River that looks at least somewhat like this painting--the oxbow in this canvas is a profoundly constructed, symbolic representation of eternal return, the cyclical nature of history, the conversion of wilderness into pastoral, the rise and fall of civilization: behind this seemingly realistic landscape image lies a vision of apocalypse and the sublime. If you watch (and re-watch) the visual analysis of this canvas in the lecture, you'll see just how complicated and constructed an image it is.
You can also study the painting for yourself on the Metropolitan Museum website, which includes a lovely high-resolution reproduction:
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/08.228/
The Wikipedia entry on this painting may also be helpful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oxbow
Remember the importance of the French Revolution for English romantics, especially the poet William Wordsworth: after an initial attraction to revolutionary ideals, a subsequent negative reaction to the excesses of the Terror and Napoleon, eventually led many English romantics like Wordsworth toward a retreat into individualistic encounters with Nature.
John Martin's "The Bard," (1817): the romantic poet as a lone prophet in sublime landscape of wilderness can stand as a symbol of this romantic role:
http://interactive.britishart.yale.edu/art-in-focus-wales/185/the-bard
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was a crucial figure, with his moment crossing the Simplon Pass in the Alps in his long autobiographical poem The Prelude serving as a paradigmatic encounter with the Sublime: the vast force of Nature as deity:
The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
And in the narrow rent, at every turn,
Winds thwarting winds bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light—
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first and last, and midst, and without end.
Romantics sought out the sublime in particular places: mountaintop, chasm, cataract, thunderstorm, rainbow.
Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757): the sublime was dark, large, awesome, terrifying, painful, whereas the beautiful, in contrast, was orderly, smooth, polished, pleasurable. The Sublime was a surrogate for God in Nature. (Equally important in laying the intellectual foundations for these romantic concepts was the German philosopher Immanuel Kant's Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, published a few years later after Burke's book in 1764 and critiquing Burke for inadequate attention to the psychological origins of the human experience of the sublime and the beautiful--but not translated into English until 1799.) The first edition of Burke's book can be viewed here: https://archive.org/details/enqphilosophical00burkrich/page/n5/mode/2up
William Blake attacked Newton's physics as a mechanistic empiricism that obscured the energy/spirit behind "reason."
Romanticism was also a reaction against emerging industrialism and cities; in England, John Constable, J. M. W. Turner pioneered important forms of landscape painting, with Constable focusing on rural pastoral scenes, and the extraordinarily productive and influential Turner exploring different aspects of the sublime.
Americans viewed their own revolution as successful, avoiding the excesses of the French Revolution's Reign of Terror and the despotism of Napoleon, so were often more optimistic about combining romantic and progressive ideals than were their European romantic counterparts. The question they pondered was the proper relation of their new republic to Nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) was probably the single most important figure in American romanticism, enormously influential to his contemporaries even though he's not much read today. His book Nature (1836) served as a manifesto for Transcendentalism, an influential American version of romanticism. Emerson's injunction to readers was to experience nature and the universe directly, as living prophets, with a kind of mystical optimism suffusing the text.
Nature is readily available online if you want to try reading more of it, though you are not required to read more than the excerpt we've given you in this week's readings. You'll find it in various formats at Project Gutenberg:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29433
and you'll find a PDF of the first edition at
www.archive.org:
https://archive.org/details/naturemunroe00emerrich
Henry David Thoreau, (1817-1862) was a disciple of Emerson's who famously retreated to Walden Pond from 1845-7 to act out the romantic dream of a direct encounter with Nature, with a prophetic imagination unencumbered by society. Thoreau as a much more direct observer than Emerson, but both saw Nature as infused with Spirit.
Thomas Cole (1810-48) helped create a whole new genre of wilderness landscape painting, with a darker and more complicated relationship to romantic conceptions of American nature.
French artist Claude Lorraine's pastoral paintings of the 17th century were a key source of compositional conventions artists used in depicting romantic landscapes; his motifs include vegetative framing, idling foreground figures, rustic bldgs, stream or road holds foreground and middle ground together, grazing animals, etc., all of which are employed by romantic painters.
I used Claude's painting "Pastoral Landscape" (1648) to illustrate these ideas in the lecture, and you may want to rewatch the part of the lecture that analyzed this painting. You can view it on the Yale Art Gallery website here:
http://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/9747
American painters faced the problem of painting historical epics in North American landscapes that in comparison with Europe were seemingly without history. So instead they sought to infuse the land with a moral vision, embracing wilderness landscapes as the ultimate terrain for encountering the sublime--for standing face-to-face with God.
American artists sometimes felt apologetic for the lack of historical depth to their national landscape, which had none of the classical ruins or monuments of Greco-Roman antiquity that were so abundant in Europe. So they turned to wilderness and monumental natural wonders as a romantic alternative.
The presence of the Sublime inevitably shapes even "non-human" landscapes. Romantic artists depicted America as primordial wilderness, Garden of Eden, original paradise, paradise regained.
Cole's landscapes express dramas of God, humanity, Nature, and declension. His remarkable series of five canvases for the narrative sequence called The Course of Empire (1833-6) depicted the rise of fall of European civilization from Savagery to Pastoral to Consummation of Empire to Destruction to Desolation. You can view this sequence of paintings on the excellent, fully illustrated, Wikipedia entry for this great five-canvas work, originally commissioned to hang over the fireplace of the home of New York City merchant Luman Reed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Course_of_Empire_(paintings)
All past empires (in Cole's view and in the general historical understanding of his time) had risen from pastoral innocence into imperial glory only to fall back into decadence and savagery. Edward Gibbons' six-volume work onThe History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1789, published and beginning to be widely read almost exactly during the birth years of the American republic) was a well-known work supporting this general view. Cole's landscapes recapitulated this cyclical historical view of a republican rise into, and an imperial fall from, civic republican virtue.
In these five canvases, the distant mountain stands as witness to the human drama in the foreground, a symbol of the divine presence that remains constant throughout, even if different stages of civilization are very different in the honor and respect they do or do not offer this divine witness to their own history.
The pastoral state seemed to Cole to be the ideal social and civic condition, akin both to republican Athens and to the (also republican) American frontier. Like many other Americans, though, he worried whether the republican virtue of this pastoral moment could survive the temptations of empire.
Would the young American republic fall into the vices that had brought down the Roman empire?
Cole's view from Mt. Holyoke (painted right in the middle of his work on the Course of Empire series) can thus be interpreted as more anxiety-laden, potentially more sinister, than it may appear at first glance. The fertile lowlands become signs of what? A pastoral landscape of republican virtue? Or early signs of imperial decadence? The curve of the river (echoed by the flock of birds circling overhead) becomes a symbol of cyclical time--hence, possibly, of the rise and fall of empire. And the strange clearings on the far hillside seem to form Hebrew letters that may be read (from above or below, in the eyes of humanity or the eyes of God) either as Noah or Shaddai (the Almighty).
As more and more of the American landscape transformed away from the romantic wild, leisure-class tourists made increasing efforts to visit wild nature for themselves.
Resort hotels like the highly influential Catskill Mountain House (1823) became romantic escapes from urban life: it and the landscapes surrounding it became among the most popular of artistic subjects, the hotel itself absorbed into an icon of the sublime. Some of the classic views of this famous resort hotel are conveniently gathered on its Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catskill_Mountain_House
Catskill Mountain House served as a home base for Thomas Cole and many other artists who created the paintings that encouraged so many other people to visit these places as tourists.
Romantic landscape paintings helped shape the tourist travel experience (and vice versa) through the conventions of picturesque representation.
Landscapes were composed, framed, and thematized as paintings according to principles set forth by William Gilpin in his 1792 Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty, Picturesque Travel, and on Sketching Landscape. If you're interested, you can peruse it here:
https://archive.org/details/threeessaysonpic00gilp
The picturesque tradition formalized and standardized Claudian and other romantic principles of landscape representation.
In the Lower Hudson Valley, the New Jersey Palisades and the Hudson Highlands around West Point served as a popular location for picturesque steamboat excursions: guidebooks indicated favorite views, standardizing travelers' experience to match what they had already seen in the paintings they viewed in New York galleries. Farther upstream were the Catskills (site of the famous Catskill Mountain House) and, farther north still, the Adirondacks, which we'll explore later in the course.
But the ultimate monument to romantic American exceptionalism was Niagara Falls: a natural wonder grander and more sublime than anything Europe could offer, serving as a surrogate for the historical depth of European landscapes that otherwise seemed lacking in America.
There is an excellent overview of Niagara's history, with many good illustrations, on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niagara_Falls
It was probably the single most frequently painted and photographed icon in the entire North American landscape, capable of being assimilated to sublime, picturesque, republican nationalism, popular spectacle, an endless variety of symbols.
These are nicely captured in the framing words that surround Edward Hicks's The Falls of Niagara (c 1825), which I showed in lecture and which you can view here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Falls_of_Niagara
Niagara also became key destination for tourism, with the resulting crowding producing the sense of an increasingly commodified landscape that eventually became a symbol of lost sublimity that would influence the creation of national parks in the western United States during the second half of the nineteenth century.
Niagara began to be used advertisements as early as 1830s: hair restorers, Nabisco Shredded Wheat, even the 1953 Hollywood film noir Niagara starring Marilyn Monroe.
Circle back one more time to Cole's View from Mt. Holyoke: the 19th century was a turning point for American relations with landscape: America as wilderness, garden, Nature's Nation, commodity, empire.