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In this richly illustrated volume, featuring more than fifty black-and-white illustrations and a beautiful eight-page color insert, Barbara Novak describes how for fifty extraordinary years, American society drew from the idea of Nature its most cherished ideals. Between 1825 and 1875, all kinds of Americans--artists, writers, scientists, as well as everyday citizens--believed that God in Nature could resolve human contradictions, and that nature itself confirmed the American destiny. Using diaries and letters of the artists as well as quotes from literary texts, journals, and periodicals, Novak illuminates the range of ideas projected onto the American landscape by painters such as Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, Asher B. Durand, Fitz H. Lane, and Martin J. Heade, and writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Frederich Wilhelm von Schelling. Now with a new preface, this spectacular volume captures a vast cultural panorama. It beautifully demonstrates how the idea of nature served, not only as a vehicle for artistic creation, but as its ideal form.
[...]... an old and a new sublime; the ecological concerns elaborated in the chapter on the axe, train, and figure; the emphasis on the importance of the spiritual and nationalist context in which landscape paintings were executed and received; and the implications of the identification of God with Nature Several subsequent American landscape studies have taken their lead from scholars of European landscape, ... reserve The main theme of this book is conveyed by its title, Nature and Culture: the conversion of the landscape into art, the evolution of an American culture and its relation to Western art and culture at large Emerson, ever obliging, may have finished my title when he quoted Plato, as was his habit: “He said, Culture; he said, Nature; and he failed to add, ‘There is also the divine.’” B N., October... closely linked through preference and tradition to the premodern era That era made a significant contribution to landscape art in the western world and should be included in considerations of the great landscape painting of the nineteenth century, along with that of England, Germany, and France It also held strongly to ideas of faith and spirit and to investing the land with a sacrality that had not... problematics of European landscape (which do not dovetail perfectly with the American circumstance) Still missing, however, is an extension of the attempt, made in my last chapter, to situate nineteenth-century American landscape painting in the larger context of the art of the Western world Surely, such comparative studies are long overdue and would further assist the field of nineteenth-century American art... read in the landscape paintings of the post-Darwinian generation—in Homer, for example But the difficulties of reading out from the paintings and reading in from the social context have arranged themselves into two somewhat antagonistic parties Both see the artwork in very different conceptual perspectives This conflict implicates the issues of picture and text, and of the painting as art and as documentary... almost two thousand years of belief has been neglected.24 When science has entered in, post-Darwinian anxieties have sometimes been read too early (through current hindsight) into the paintings, against the resistance of the landscape painters and their public to any disruption of providential belief Science did ultimately change the perception of space, time, and light, and the signatures of that... most religious orthodoxies in American obligingly expanded to accommodate a kind of Christianized pantheism Ideas of God’s nature and of God in nature became hopelessly entangled, and only the most scrupulous theologians even tried to separate them If nature was God’s Holy Book, it was God The implications of this for morality, religion, and nationalism make the concept of nature before the Civil War... projected on nature, ideas that strove to reconcile America, nature, and God In Errand into the Wilderness, Perry Miller suggests that Nature not to be too tedious—in America means the wilderness.”3 In Virgin Land, Henry Nash Smith speaks of the American agrarian dream as the Garden of the World.4 In The American Adam, R W B Lewis suggests the idea of Adamic innocence before the Fall.5 To these three (nature. .. wilderness in the early nineteenth century The ravages of man on nature were a repeated concern in artists’ writing, and the symbol of this attack was usually “the axe,” cutting into nature s pristine and thus godly—state In his “Essay on American Scenery” (1835), an essay that articulates the spirit that was to dominate much American landscape painting for thirty years, Thomas Cole found America’s wilderness... nature came only with the realization that nature could be lost Given the indissoluble union of God and nature at this moment, the fate of both God and nature is obvious A future mourning the loss of faith and consumed with ecological nostalgia was not far away But though the nineteenth century acknowledged its fears to some extent, it worked hard to reconcile the various myths, to retain God and nature . Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 www.oup.com ISBN-13: 97 8-0 -1 9-5 3058 6-9 ISBN-10: 0-1 9-5 3058 6-8 ISBN-13: 97 8-0 -1 9-5 3058 7-6 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 0-1 9-5 3058 7-6 (pbk.) Oxford is a registered trademark of. Barbara. Nature and culture : American landscape and painting, 1825–1875 / Barbara Novak. — Rev. ed., with a new preface. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 0-1 9-5 1035 2-1 ISBN:. references and index. ISBN: 0-1 9-5 1035 2-1 ISBN: 0-1 9-5 10188-x (pbk.) 1. Landscape painting, American. 2. Landscape painting 19th century—United States. 3. Landscape painters—United States—Psychology. I.