Romanticism and the American Landscape: sublime and luminist paintings

One reason why we can speak of the landscape painting as the expression of the artist's personal psychological dynamics, or more generally, as the expression of spiritual and religious metaphors centered on the idea of America as a paradise, is that people of the time thought of the landscape in these intensely symbolic ways. We also know that, in most cases, the landscape which these artists painted was a nostalgic landscape because the landscape setting in the United States had already changed before they painted it. To Ralph Waldo Emerson and the transcendentalists, nature and god were synonymous. A less religious but very widespread interpretation was the idea of America as the "Garden of the World."  But this interpretation of the land was made at a time when the wilderness was being destroyed, seemingly in the name of cultivation. Thomas Cole himself wrote about this transition saying that in Europe, the primordial features of the land had long been destroyed; but America was rapidly approaching this state of replacing the sublimity of the wilderness with cultivation. Yet, he says, in the scenes of nature which have not been touched by cultivation, the mind of man can find an emotional fulfillment and association with eternal thoughts. If nature and God were so closely associated, and nature could be destroyed, then God could be lost as well, and with that loss, humanity would be lost. The landscape was not only God; it was also the book of God. The painter who painted the landscape, painted the book, choosing which passages or texts to transcribe and how to transcribe it.  If Cole and other landscape painters of the period thought in those terms, then we might ask if the American landscape painting, which shows absolutely no signs of the pain and death we saw in European romantic art, are actually, in a different way, expressing the same theme of pain and the destruction of humanity.

Cole's painting The Oxbow shows him to be much quite close to the moderately Romantic sensibility of Constable, using the landscape as the site of a personal sense of discovery, although the personal also functions as a metaphor for the social.
 

Cole: The Oxbow: The Connecticut River near Northampton, 1846

The conflict inscribed in this painting may represent more than a conflict between the savage wilderness and the cultivated land that we see in the distance; it may represent one which was particular to Cole.  The imagined landscapes of Cole's paintings may be symbolic of a psychological battle: a battle between a father and a son, a battle between a new school of painting and painting tradition, as both the "son" and new painting struggle to emerge and define themselves.  In this case, the passing storm is a sign of the psychological struggle to realize his personal vision, and the painting is a metaphorical battle of conquest, defeat, and reversal in order to achieve liberation.  Liberation for the artist is liberation from existing traditions. The wilderness foreground of the painting is reenvisioned as the distant golden valley.  This is the painting where Cole comes closest to the British artists he studied under and the painting where, like John Constable, he uses the landscape to make a personal statement and nationalist statement at the same time.

Frederick Allen Church: The Spiritual Sublime and a "higher sort of landscape"

Church:  Cotopaxi, 1862 Church:  Heart of the Andes, 1859

Church was one of the most successful painters in the 19th century, thought of as the leading American artist by Americans and in Europe, regarded as the successor to the leading European landscape artists.  His paintings eventually achieve a synthesis of a sense of the landscape as a spiritual cathedral of the imagination without denying the truth of naturalism or the presence of the human being. The Heart of the Andes and Cotopaxi are alike in this respect.  They are further alike in Church’s working methods.  Like Cole, he wanted to paint a “higher sort of landscape” by which he meant a landscape of moral meaning.  Unlike Cole, Church traveled through South America, recording in sketches everything he saw and later combining these sketches into imagined landscape.  What Cotopaxi achieves, which Heart of the Andes did not, is the creation of the spiritual through the interaction of color and light and their reflections in the sky and on water.  In the end, though, to the eyes of people living today, Church’s paintings, despite the high level of technical achievement they embody, are bombastic, too given to the rhetoric of a cosmic spiritual vision to communicate the innate qualities of an American landscape.

Luminism

John Kensett: Lake George, 1869 Bierstadt: In the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California, 1868

The luminist tradition is the one which is most closely related to the transcendentalist ideas of Emerson.  The luminist paintings are somewhat different from artists like Cole, Church and Bierstadt.  Although Church and Bierstadt create remarkable paintings of the way light falls on nature, the role of light in the luminist painting does seem to be more symbolic and mystical.  The clarity of these paintings is striking and very unlike anything which was developing in Europe at this time.  It is also more than just an interest in light: it is an attitude toward things in nature, a subjective rendering of the object in which the artist's feelings are transferred to the object so intensely that there actually is no sense of the artist.  Rather than saying that they seem to anticipate surrealism, as some books suggest, I would describe their style as a type of super- or hyper-realism, with a degree of intensity that makes the paintings seem almost impersonal. This is a poetry of things, in which the poet become almost anonymous. The landscape and nature become a smooth, mirror-like world/surface, clarified by the artist and seemingly rationalized.  These paintings create a very purified and planar effect at the same time that they appear to render nature accurately.  The sense of the brush stroke is nearly eliminated; there is a linear clarity in addition to the sense of planes--the planes recede into distance but there is no overlapping.