 American landscape artists |
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"We are so accustomed to the domesticated landscape of America that it is hard to imagine the untouched, primeval wilderness it once was."
"The verbal and visual decriptions which appeared in early nineteenth century magazines, novels, and travel books helped popularize the notion that the earth's greatest wonders awaited discovery on this vast, uncharted continent."
Dialogue with Nature, Corcoran Gallery. p. 8.
America's wild landscapes became associated with the picturesque and the sublime in the late eighteenth century period before the discovery of scenic monumentalism throughout the far western frontier in the ninteenth century.
America's landscape heritage, by J. Siry
Transition to a national style
Washington Allston, 1779-1843.
Italian landscape, 1828.
An example of the picturesque as a focus in painting.
Asher B. Durand, 1796-1886.
Kindred Spirits
1849
Oil on canvas
46 x 36 in (116.8 x 91.4 cm)
The New York Public Library, New York City
Thomas Cole and William Cullen Bryant communing with wild nature, a definitive moment in our national past was portrayed by Asher B. Durand a year after Cole's untimely death.
Thomas Cole, 1801-1848.
Kaaterskill Falls, 1826, Hudson Valley, New York.
Another painting by Cole, after his return from the Mountains, was "The Falls of the Cauterskill," the last word being here written as it is commonly pronounced, though the proper original spelling of the word is Kaaterskill, meaning the kill, or stream, of the Kaater, or male wildcat, or lynx, an animal which is still often met with in this region.
This picture of the Falls was purchased by Colonel Trumbull, the celebrated historical painter, and two others by Dunlap and Durand, celebrated artists, to whom Cole was thus introduced, and thus, by the aid of these three distinguished friends, the attention and patronage of the public, far and wide, was secured by Cole, though at that time but twenty-four years of age. Trumbull then said to him : "You surprise me, at your age, to paint like this. You have already done what I, with all my years and experience, am yet unable to do."
There is no one whose name, either as author or artist, is more prominent, in connection with There Catskill Mountains and the country around, than Thomas Cole, N. A., who has left behind him, as enduring memorials of his fame, "The Course of Empire," "The Voyage of Life," and other paintings of high artistic merit and fame. Mr. Cole was a native of England, but came to this country, with his father's family, when nineteen years of age. After enduring the privations of poverty for years, as an engraver, a traveling portrait painter, and in other callings and pursuits in life, he, at length, by the force of his talents, genius, industry, perseverance, and patient and enduring toil and study, became one of the most eminent and successful landscape painters in the world. To his warm personal friend, pastor, and biographer, Rev. Louis L. Noble, formerly of Catskill, we are indebted for a full, able, and interesting record of the life, labors, personal character, and success in his profession, of Mr. Cole.
As Cole early visited the Catskill Mountains, and afterwards, for many years, on to the end of life, had his family residence and studio near the village of Catskill, in full view of all the higher summits of the range, he had, from the first, a peculiar interest in them, and an ardent and enthusiastic attachment to them. Of his first excursion up the Hudson River, his biographer thus writes:
" From the moment when his eye first caught the rural beauties clustering round the cliffs of Weehawken, and glanced up the distance of the Palisades, Cole's heart had been wandering in the Highlands, and nestling in the bosom of the Catskills. It is needless to say that he followed its impulses, at his earliest liberty, in the Autumn ensuing."
Martin Johnson Heade, 1819-1904.
Singing Beach, 1863, New Hampshire.
Frederick Edwin Church , 1826-1900.
Niagara, 1857, New York - Canada border.
Albert Bierstadt, 1830-1902.
In the Sierra Nevada, 1875-77, California.
Winslow Homer, 1836-1910.
Blueboat, 1892, The Adirondack Mountains, New York.
The Arid Regions
Georgia O'keeffe, 1887–1986.
Taos Pueblo, 1934
Alfred Steiglitz, 1864-1946.
Old and New Manhattan, 1900
Charles Sheeler, 1883-1965.
American (Industrial) landscape, 1930
American Landscape
1930
Oil on canvas
24 x 31 in. (61 x 78.8 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York"The ungainly name "Precisionism" was coined by the painter-photographer Charles Sheeler, mainly to denote what he himself did. It indicated both style and subject. In fact, the subject was the style: exact, hard, flat, big, industrial, and full of exchanges with photography. Photography fed into painting and vice versa. No expressive strokes of paint. Anything live or organic, like trees or people, was kept out. There was no such thing as a Precisionist pussycat. Sheeler's work records the displacement of the Natural Sublime by the Industrial Sublime, but his real subject was the Managerial Sublime, a thoroughly American notion. And though Precisionism broadened into an American movement in the late twenties and early thirties, Sheeler's work defined its essential scope and meaning.
"The son of a steamer-line executive in Philadelphia, Sheeler took his first art classes under William Merritt Chase at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1903 and, in the now familiar pattern of other American modernists-to-be. Made a movie with Paul Strand in 1920s about the city and used Whitman poetry to portray a place, ironically as absent of people as Whitman;s poetry is filled with people.
Edward Hopper (1882-1967)
Road in Maine
1914
Oil on canvas
24 x 29 inches
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Corn Hill (Truro, Cape Cod)
1930
Oil on canvas
28 1/2 x 42 1/2 in. (72.4 x 108 cm)
The Mary and Sylvan Lang Collection
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX"Edward Hopper, the best-known American realist of the inter-war period, once said: 'The man's the work. Something doesn't come out of nothing.' This offers a clue to interpreting the work of an artist who was not only intensely private, but who made solitude and introspection important themes in his painting.
"He was born in the small Hudson River town of Nyack, New York State, on 22 July 1882. His family were solidly middle-class: his father owned a dry goods store where the young Hopper sometimes worked after school. By 1899 he had already decided to become an artist, but his parents persuaded him to begin by studying commercial illustration because this seemed to offer a more secure future. He first attended the New York School of Illustrating (more obscure than its title suggests), then in 1900 transferred to the New York School of Art. Here the leading figure and chief instructor was William Merritt Chase.
Hudson River
Hudson valley looking south at Albany, New York.
Art in the form or paintings and photography have left a documentary record of the look and recent alterations of landscape the way soils, tree rings and shells reveal to us the changes in the land from the geological past.
America's frontier landscape heritage
