While committed to the natural sciences, he was "always concerned with including a spiritual dimension in his works". He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters. All rights reserved.Frederic Edwin Church was an American landscape painter born in Hartford, Connecticut. Web site comments and questions, contact: © 2005 National Humanities Center. Toolbox Library: Primary Resources in U.S. Memory | Progress | People | Power | Empire Toolbox: The Gilded and the Gritty: America, 1870-1912 How did they reconceptualize their sense of national identity? In the aftermath of the Civil War, how did Americans look back and look forward?ĭuring this period, how did Americans promote the re-union of the nation? In what ways do Garland's "The Return of a Private" and Wister's The Virginian (See below.) comment upon Bierstadt's representation of the West?.How does the definition of America offered in the antebellum landscapes differ from that offered in the landscapes painted after the Civil War?.Why would audiences be drawn to Bierstadt's "transformative" landscapes in the wake of the Civil War?.What emotions does each landscape evoke?.What does the light suggest in each painting?.Reaching its zenith in the mid 1860s, it waned by the mid 1870s. According to critic Lee Mitchell, his paintings assert "a transformative power for a distinctly national landscape identified with the Far West." The vogue for his style was short-lived. So moved was he by the experience that he captured their journey in The Oregon Trailmen, covered wagons, horses, cattle lumbering across a valley floor lit by a resplendent golden sunset. On one of his Western excursions he encountered a party of German immigrants making their way to Oregon. To considerable popular acclaim he offered his audiences paintings like Storm in the Mountainsgrand, melodramatic views of Rockies and other Western peaks. At twenty-three he returned to Germany to study art and upon his return claimed the West as his subject. Born in Germany in 1830, his family came to New Bedford, Massachusetts, when he was two. If Cole introduced Manifest Destiny into American art on a minor chord, Albert Bierstadt carried it to a crescendo. The painting shows him leading his congregation through a bright pristine wilderness. He founded Hartford, which became the nucleus of the Connecticut Colony. Thomas Hooker, a Puritan divine who escaped persecution in England by fleeing to Massachusetts, left Massachusetts in 1636 over a dispute about voting. His Hooker and Company is the first representation of Manifest Destiny in American art. When Cole died in 1848, the mantle of American landscape painting passed to his student Frederick Edwin Church. It depicts a sunlit, placid valley and a silvery oxbow lake swept by a thunderstorm. In his work he tried to capture a vanishing arcadia. Cole introduced the sublime and the idea of the picturesque landscape to America. In 1825 he moved to New York and found a market for his landscapes and sketches. To explore what this shift from east to west meant for representations of national identity, we invite you to compare two sets of thematically related landscapes, one painted before the War, one after.īorn in England in 1801, Thomas Cole and his family immigrated to Philadelphia in 1818, where he taught himself to paint. After the Civil War, once the issue of nationhood had been resolved, the West became the locus of the national soul. At first, of course, artists focused on the landscape of the East, but by the 1830s that Eden had been lost to industry. Lacking such markers of ancient heritage as ruins and castles, Americans defined themselves through the nature they saw all around them, finding distinction and prominence in their forests, mountains, canyons, and cataracts. In the early nineteenth century visual artists began to define American national identity through landscape painting.
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