The Visual Creation of the State Apparatus, Nineteenth Century American Landscape Paintings

A thesis submitted to the College of Arts of Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Arts

by

Jonathan J. Hacker

May, 2019

Thesis written by

Jonathan J. Hacker

B.A., Kent State University, 2015

M.A. Kent State University, 2019

Approved by

______John-Michael H. Warner, Ph.D. Advisor

______Marie Bukowski, M.F.A. Director, School of Art

______John R. Crawford-Spinelli, Ed.D., Dean, College of the Art TABLE OF CONTENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..iii

LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………………………….…………………….………..iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………………………..……………………………..v

CHAPTER I. Ideology and Rhetoric in Nineteenth Century American Landscapes……………………………..1

II. The Visual Creation of the State Apparatus Through Experiential Ideologies….…………..…8

III. Conclusion…………………………..……………………….…..………………………………………………….....….31

IV. FIGURES………………………………………………………………………………………………..………………..……34

V. BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..37

iii LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

1. View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, After a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow, 1835-36……………………………………………………………………………………………………………34

2. Twilight in the Wilderness, 1860…………………………………………………………………………….…….35

3. Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, 1863.……………………………………………………….……..….……36

iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To those who instill the love of learning, and lovingly guide us in the direction we must go.

I am yours.

Thank you to my parents for my love of nature, art, and education, and for encouraging me in my pursuit of all three. To Dr. Carol Salus and Dr. Diane Scillia, for helping me find, explore, and develop my topic, may you both enjoy your retirement! To Dr. John-Michael Warner who redirected my research, teaching me to embrace theory which, under his guidance, then became a driving force in my thesis. I would also like to thank my thesis committee and other members of the faculty for contributing to my experience at Kent State in pursuing my masters degree. And finally, to my friends, who have been a constant source of motivation and support.

Just like this thesis, “a painting is never finished, it just stops in interesting places.”

– Anonymous

v 1

CHAPTER 1

IDEOLOGY AND RHETORIC IN NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICAN LANDSCAPES

One way the United States represented itself as a nation in the nineteenth century, and ultimately sought to define itself, was through its’ landscape. Embedded with nationalistic overtones, images and general accounts of the landscape often became idealized portraits of the nation which, as suggested by art historian Angela Miller, implied a “collective identity that was…unmistakably American.”1 An identity that was created through artists’ use of visual rhetoric in the depiction of the landscape to speak to, and illustrate, the predominant nineteenth century ideologies of national pride. For the contemporary audience the experience of looking at representations of the landscape in the nineteenth century became what Miller characterized as a “soul-expanding ritual of national self-affirmation.”2 In this thesis I will be examining my theory of how the artist’s personal history and depiction of the landscape plays a role in the experience of the art patron and viewer of the finished work.3 To this end I will be examining Thomas Cole’s View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, After a

Thunderstorm—The Oxbow, 1835-36 (fig. 1), Frederic Church’s Twilight in the Wilderness, 1860

(fig. 2), and Albert Bierstadt’s Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, 1863 (fig. 3), as examples of how

1 Angela Miller, “Everywhere and Nowhere: The Making of the National Landscape,” American Literary History, 4, no. 2 (1992): 208. 2 Angela Miller, “Everywhere and Nowhere: The Making of the National Landscape,” 211. 3 In this discussion, the term experience refers to direct observation and past participation as something that has been personally encountered or lived through: the act, or process of perceiving events or reality: and the events that make up an individual’s life, based on the conscious past.

2 the visual creations of the landscape can further be interpreted as images that depict a sense of

American nationalism itself—the idea of America. Experience

By examining how these nineteenth century American landscape paintings functioned as nationalistic images, it becomes apparent we need to consider the deeper significance of how they were intended to be interpreted and how they can be understood as one of the vehicles for national ideals. Dissecting these thoughts involves not only considering what the landscape meant ideologically to the artist and subsequently the viewer, but also looking critically at how the landscape was composed. What do representations of the nationalized landscape mean ideologically? How do depictions of the landscape function? And, how is the artist present and what is their role in using the landscape to create imagery that conveys the abstract principles of the nation?

In exploring these questions of interpretation and intent, a two-fold idea emerges that connects the notions of ideology, with the inherent experience of the landscape, being depicted with equal importance. Indeed, the experience in these depictions of nature and perceived through the act of looking are just as important as the national ideology being presented, in creating the ritual of national self-affirmation—the two being inherently intertwined in what I consider an experiential ideology. As such, it seems that understanding these two notions

(ideology and experience) become necessary for this discussion of landscape paintings as images of a collective national identity. Landscapes which serve as the mechanism of national thought and are understood and delivered through personal experience.

Numerous scholars have explored concepts of experience, such as John Dewey’s theorization of nature as experiential, Henri Lefebvre’s emphasis on importance of the

3 everyday, or Michel de Certeau’s articulation of experience by means of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Although Dewey, Lefebvre, and de Certeau are most often cited, Göran

Therborn’s Marxist discussion of experience, filtered through national ideology, resonates more closely with my discussion here of experiential ideology, in which the objective is to examine both landscape paintings as a representation of nationalism and the painter as an individual who gives it meaning.

Therborn enters this discourse primarily through ideology, his formal definition of which states “[t]he operation of ideology in human life basically involves the constitution and patterning of how human beings live their lives as conscious, reflecting initiators of acts in a structured, meaningful world...interpellating human beings as subjects.”4 Established in his project: The Power of Ideology and the Ideology of Power, Therborn further articulates that to study ideology is “to focus on the way it operates in the formation and transformation of human subjectivity.”5 Here, Therborn takes philosopher Louis Althusser’s concept of ideology as subject producing—“transform[ing] individuals into subjects”6—and explores how ideology develops with the individual and their personal experiences.

The individual as subject can take on two meanings in this context; one suggesting the individual is the subject in terms of what the work of art is about, while another suggesting the individual is controlled by the visual apparatus or more accurately by the ideas presented (as

4 Göran Therborn, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology, (London; Redwood Burn Ltd, 1980), 15. 5 Therborn, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology, 4. 6 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus,” “Lenin and Philosophy” and Other Essays, Monthly Review Press 1971, translated by Andy Blinden, 35.

4 one is subject to a monarch or to a higher authority).7 Subject as meaning and subject as controlled set up the basis for Therborn’s fundamental understanding of how ideology works through what he refers to as “subjection-qualification.”8

For Therborn, subjection refers to the process of the individual becoming subjected in either meaning of the term (subject or controlled). Once this subjection is established, Therborn asserts that a qualification is needed for the concept of ideology to be understood and internalized by the viewer. It is here, in the qualification of the subject, that experience becomes an important element in understanding ideology. Qualification effectively suggests that interpreting the actual or implied subjection requires an understanding of the societal roles or position of the artist and the viewer—their class, education, regional affiliations, etc.— as well as the historical context in which the work of art (the apparatus) is created.9 Essentially,

Therborn contends we cannot understand and internalize an ideology unless it speaks to our personal lives and social interactions, as shaped (or qualified) through our experiences. As such, ideology accepts experience through the connection of the viewer and the work of art that serves as the vehicle to present it.

Further, Therborn writes “ideologies subject and qualify subjects by telling them, relating them to, and making them recognize: what exists… what is good… and what is possible.”10 The notion of “what exists,” in the context of this discussion, is the visual depiction of the landscape as the artist and the viewer experience it. The manicured fields and sunlit hills

7 For Althusser and Therborn, this subjectivity is created through the process called interpellation which refers to the formation and any change in subjectivities. 8 Therborn, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology, 17. 9 Therborn, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology, 50-58, 97. 10 Therborn, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology, 18.

5 as seen from a tourist overlook in Cole’s The Oxbow give the viewer the experience of seeing what exists in the developing nation. The notion of “what is good,” then emphasizes what is desirable in the landscape as the artist and viewer understand it—whether this notion be the beauty of the landscape, as in the detailed nature of Church’s Twilight in the Wilderness, or what is good about the usable landscape in service to the nation. Finally, “what is possible” considers the future of the landscape as the artist and viewer desire it. According to this,

Bierstadt’s western landscape of expansionism and manifest destiny in Rocky Mountains

Lander’s Peak negates the here and now and pushes the landscape into futurity, with the possibility to speak to the ambitions and fears of the viewer.11

The degree to which one of these functions is emphasized over the others shifts in response to changing national outlooks and contemporary events. This provided artists with new ways to address how their audience and patrons interacted with the landscape, visual depictions of it, and how they saw it used within the broader national ideal. The chosen landscape depictions by artists of the Hudson Valley School—The Oxbow, Twilight in the

Wilderness, and Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak—exemplify the ideas of subjection- qualification and illustrate these three notions of ideology formation (what exists, what is good, and what is possible), giving credit to the role of the artists in shaping ideological perceptions.

In other words, analyzing the artists’ intent illuminates the role of the artist in the construction, shaping, and reshaping of the national discourse, framing the nation in reaction to those changing attitudes of experience from contemporary events and ideas.12

11 Therborn, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology, 17-18. 12 Framing the nation, “Framing America,” as a concept of this ideological framework is also a teachable survey-based idea, as seen in the American art history survey text Framing America:

6

It can be argued that nineteenth century artists inherently created a metaphorical and allegorical representation of the nation through the landscape, drawn from the local experience and constructed to include the abstract ideals of the nation. Reconciling the artist’s choice of depicting the local experience or the national abstraction—subject versus controlled—opens the door to examine how artists constructed images of the nation that were at once deeply ideological yet still remarkably familiar and ultimately appealing to the contemporary viewer.13

Using experience with the landscape to personify and illustrate ideological thought, points to the direct role of the artist in choosing how these ideas should be presented. Indeed, while the artist may work within the boundaries of market and artistic value, they have some autonomy and objectivity in the visual creation of national ideology, and even the larger national ideal, within their work. With this understanding, we can begin to examine how artists like Cole,

Church, and Bierstadt inherently altered and made visible the artist’s and the audiences’ connection with the nation through the landscape.14

A Social History of American Art by Frances Pohl (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2002). The idea that works of art were not only speaking to the artists, patrons, politicians, and the people, but ultimately form a “social history” of the nation becomes a profound basis for interpreting the ideology behind the art. 13 Here, as discussed by Angela Miller, local experience refers to the artist and viewers experience with a localized regional landscape, while the national abstraction references an imagined abstract community being personifies in the painting. Angela Miller, “Everywhere and Nowhere: The Making of the National Landscape,” 217. 14 Linda Ferber, “’Nature’s Nation’: The Hudson River School and American Landscape Painting, 1825–1876,” History Now 45 (Summer 2016), The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, accessed February 9, 2018, http://oa.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/art-music-and- film/essays/natures-nation-hudson-river-school-and-american-landscape. As art historian Linda Ferber notes, the conceptualization of experience, or participation and involvement occurs when the landscape is reimagined and nationalized by the artist through the introduction of visual concepts including the awe-inspiring sublime, the harmoniously beautiful, and the sometimes charmingly picturesque.

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In the following chapter “Experiential Ideologies; The Visual Creation of the State

Apparatus,” I will explore landscape representation and land use as a manifestation of the artist’s and viewer’s experience and add to the discussion an analysis of their experience with nationalism. This argument will also become problematized by means of looking at how the artist might not have been complicit or might not have known they were complicit in presenting their experience within a nationalist construct. By examining the artists’ outlook on the landscape, I will also address the degree to which the they use their experience in depicting an ideological landscape or the degree to which ideological experience is placed onto the work after the fact. Borrowing from Therborn, I will approach the landscape paintings in terms of what exists in the painting, what is good about the landscape in the painting, and what is possible for the future of that landscape being depicted.15 It is not my intention to fully answer these issues, but rather add to the discussion on American nationalism in nineteenth century

American landscape paintings.

15 While these three questions “what exists” “what is good” and “what is possible” are articulated through Therborn’s words, I will simply use these as a jumping off point for a discussion on how the landscape can be approached through these lenses.

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CHAPTER 2

THE VISUAL CREATION OF THE STATE APPARATUS THROUGH EXPERIENTIAL IDEOLOGIES

In the early half of the nineteenth century, one standing in the American landscape saw it through a spiritual lens for the virtuous nation as well as offering endless practical resources

(such as wood, coal, iron, and agricultural land) for building the productive nation. The ideas of a spiritual connection between nature and nation were often paired together. In many instances this association of productivity, with the perceived endless bounty found in nature, was just as palpable and powerful in the national rhetoric as interpretations of the divine. The interaction between the sacred landscape and the exploitable landscape of potential makes interpretations of many images two-fold. One interpretation of the landscape speaks to the vast wilderness as a substitute for God’s promised existence, while another interpretation brings to mind the growing potential of the state. This pairing can be understood in a popular series of essays published in The Knickerbocker in 1835, titled “Our Own Country,” by New York politician James Brooks. Brooks declares that:

God has promised us a renowned existence, if we but deserve it. He speaks this promise in the sublimity of Nature. It resounds all along the crags of the Alleghenies. It is uttered in the thunder of Niagara. It is heard in the two oceans, from the great Pacific to the Bay of Fundy… The august TEMPLE in which we dwell was built for lofty purposes. Oh! that we may consecrate it to LIBERTY and CONCORD, and be found fit worshippers within its holy walls.16

16 James Brooks, “Our Own Country: The Times,” The Knickerbocker, May 1835, pp, 424-425, further quoted in Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825- 1875, (Oxford University Press, 2007), p.15.

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In very broad terms, popular statements such as Brooks’ describes a mythical place that encourages spiritual connection and enlightenment, the wilderness both as the physical embodiment of God to be enjoyed and as a gift from God to be used for noble purposes. Brooks poignantly voices a connotation that appears throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the commonly held reassurance that America is “God’s country.” The visual depiction of an untouched wilderness thus created a view of the American landscape that fit the construct of being so beautifully perfect as to conjure ideas of paradise, the Garden of

Eden, and the biblical promised land bestowed with greatness and consecrated by God. While that last statement is a sweeping generalization, and not all American landscape artists equated national pride with blatant spirituality, this association nonetheless was often associated with early American landscape paintings as a way to interpret them with a deeper significance and ideological national connotation.17

In many ways the distinctive thoughts in the traditional view of the American landscape show the artists’ ability to follow closely and react to changes in the rise of the nation as it developed throughout the century.18 Artists allowed and pressed the individual local

17 This notion is discussed and used in a wide a body of texts, such as; American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth Century Art and Literature, ed. David C. Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), Barbara Novak’s Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting 1825-1875 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), William Cronon, “Telling Tales on Canvas,” in Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), and others. 18 This awareness in the nineteenth century bears a striking resemblance to how twentieth- century philosopher Jerome Neu classified the three stages of the organic theory of the state, as laid out in Plato’s Republic. Neu classifies, “the state as analogous to the individual, the state as super-individual, [and] the individual as subordinate to the state. Jerome Neu, “Plato’s Analogy of State and the Individual: “The Republic” and the Organic Theory of the State,” Philosophy 46, no. 177 (1971), pp. 238.

10 experience to interact with the broader national construct Itself. Additionally, the role of the artist is understood through the ways the depictions of the landscape transformed to match the changing aspects of how the individual and the nation were interrelated, embracing and challenging the contemporary positions on American values, ideologies and the nation’s future.

The allegorical and metaphorical connotations of this assertion on the role of the artist can be addressed in three distinct ways they personify the landscape (using the three subjection qualifications—what exists, what is good, and what is possible—articulated by

Therborn) in order to cultivate the nation-state apparatus. While these three qualifications can be argued to exist in every painting presented in this discussion, the degree to which the artist chooses to emphasize one over the other furthers an understanding of these distinct personifications. One way is through a landscape that gives birth to the state. Here, the nation is found in both the picturesque and moralizing images of nature, ultimately expressed through the idea that from what exists in nature, the state is born. By mid-century the emphasis shifts to another, reflecting the rising tides of conflict and division. Using the sublime landscape, the idea is reflected that in nature what is good in the nation is preserved. Around the same time, the third major personification of the landscape comes through the harmonious landscape, created as one speaks to what is possible in the landscape that expands the nation through westward expansion and the ideas of Manifest Destiny.

THE LANDSCAPE THAT GIVES BIRTH TO THE NATION

Considering the first personification of the landscape (the landscape that gives birth to the nation), the visual interaction between the two constructs of nature, spiritual and productive, often situated within a single composition, ultimately becomes a representation of

11 two forces pitted against one another—an internal dynamic of the wild and the refined, virtue versus progress. The meeting of these two ideological forces, virtue and progress, is integrated in perhaps one of Thomas Cole’s most well-known paintings, The Oxbow. While this was a specific contemporarily known location (the Connecticut River Valley seen from the popular tourist viewpoint on top of Mount Holyoke) Cole abstracts and conceptualizes our understanding of this view and uses it to illustrate broader ideas of nature being altered in the name of the expanding nation.

In The Oxbow, the left side is entirely a wild landscape, an almost dangerous wilderness with torrential storms darkening the sky. A thick underbrush suggests nature that exists untouched, just as God created it. This stands in sharp contrast to the opposite side of the valley, were a cultivated landscape stretches far into the distance, an agrarian landscape bathed in a warm light that illuminates every perfectly manicured field and garden. The two structures of nature presented create an image of wilderness versus civilization where the two seem to survive in a perpetual, uneasy state of coexistence.

Cole's use of the landscape to confront us with the ideas of the state, embodied in nature and yet removed from it, shows the artist's willingness to address the nation’s history and its use of the landscape to create itself. In Cole’s 1836 “Essay on American Scenery,” the artist foresaw this fate of the wilderness. He wrote:

In looking over the yet uncultivated scene, the mind's eye may see far into futurity. Where the wolf roams, the plough shall glisten; on the gray crag shall rise temple and tower—mighty deeds shall be done in the now pathless wilderness; and poets yet unborn shall sanctify the soil.19

19 Thomas Cole, “Essays on American Scenery,” American Monthly Magazine n.s. 1 (January 1836), in Sarah Burns and John Davis, American Art to 1900: A documentary History, (Berkley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2009), 270.

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Cole’s “Essay on American Scenery” alludes to the inevitable destiny of this uncultivated wilderness giving way to the national construct. The rhetoric employed by Cole presents the national construct as, in his words, “freedom's offspring—peace, security, and happiness,” the greater spirit of the nation being carved out of the American landscape.20 Thus, Cole’s view of the valley presents the conventions of art historian Linda Ferber’s “charmingly picturesque” visual panorama of the nation reaping the bounty of God’s gifts in nature through progress and civilization.

Art historians including Angela Miller, Barbara Novak, Martin Berger, as well as environmental historians William Cronon and Alan Wallach, have addressed Cole’s use of the charmingly picturesque to discuss that The Oxbow demonstrates his understanding of contemporary America nationalism through pride in the landscape. Through Cole’s use of his experience on Mount Holyoke and his ardent love of nature, The Oxbow presents both a picturesque and moralizing image of nature prevalent throughout the early nineteenth century.

Because of a national pride in the idea of divine providence and the inevitability of the nation to be nurtured out of the perceived uninhabited landscape, interpreting The Oxbow further conjures images of nature’s nation.

Described by cultural historians, the idea of nature’s nation is personified by nature waiting to be used by civilization in the advancement of the nation.21 Art historians like Miller

20 Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” Reprinted in John McCourbrey, American Art: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965), pp 108, as further quoted in Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, “The Oxbow by Thomas Cole: Iconography of an American Landscape Painting,” Metropolitan Museum Journal, (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1984), p. 71. 21 As discussed from Perry Miller’s, “The Romantic Dilemma in American Nationalism and the Concept of Nature,” in Natures Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1967), discussed in

13 note that the philosophy of nature’s nation ultimately allowed artists to visually address the cultural progress of the nation, as well as its ambitions as a prosperous republic, through its use of the wilderness.22 In the spirit of this idea, even Cole’s wilderness is not completely inhospitable or uninhabited, as Cole places himself hidden within the thick underbrush— looking back at the viewer—as if beckoning us to join him. Here Cole could serve as a stand-in for the nation itself, hidden in the wilderness waiting to be brought out.

Additionally, by placing the viewer further in the wilderness, the vantage point among the brush provides a construct where Cole allows us to be distanced from the drama unfolding in nature. Instead he gives us the opportunity to experience that cultivated landscape from a distance. In such a way, effectively removing the specificity of place and providing a position to look down on progress in general, with what art historian Albert Biome refers to as the

“magisterial gaze” (a theme common in nineteenth century American landscapes).23 This gaze looking down on what exists presents a view from where we have the opportunity to marvel at the landscape and the abstract accomplishments of the nation, born out of nature, as if they are our own.24 Further, by obscuring the borderlands between the wilderness and the cultivated state (that interstitial space where the agrarian landscape meets the wild), the image

Angela Miller’s “The Fate of Wilderness in American Landscape Art: The Dilemmas of ‘Nature’s Nation’,” in A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History, ed. Alan C. Braddock and Christoph Irmscher, (Tuscaloosa; The University of Alabama Press, 2009), pp. 85- 109. 22 Angela Miller’s “The Fate of Wilderness in American Landscape Art: The Dilemmas of ‘Nature’s Nation’,” in A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History, ed. Alan C. Braddock and Christoph Irmscher, (Tuscaloosa; The University of Alabama Press, 2009), p. 86. 23 Alan Wallach, “Making a picture of the View From Mount Holyoke” in American Iconology ed. David C. Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 89-90. 24 Martin Berger, Sight Unseen; Whiteness and American Visual Culture, (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California; 2005), 75-76

14 is composed in such a way to help focus the viewer to question how far the state has already pushed into the wilderness and how much has been tamed in the name of the nation. The complexity of Cole’s image with the presence of nature’s nation and the magisterial gaze has been explored by Berger as a “cultural paradigm revealing the ‘ideology of expansionist thought.’”25 This is deceptively simple, yet an incredibly complex artistic practice employed by

Cole (here and in many of his images) to solidify the idea that the viewer is part of the larger imagined nation responsible for the settlement seen in the distance.26

However, the ambiguity of this work opened the door for interpretation of the symbolism Cole used. The viewer’s own experience with their class, education, background, affected their perception and interpretation of the image.27 This ambiguity can be seen in components such as the symbolism of the name of God, using the Jewish spelling, carved into the distant hillside that could be read as God’s blessing on progress or as progress desecrating that landscape created by God. Likewise, the birds circling in the sky forming a question mark over the wilderness, can possibly be seen as Cole questioning whether the wilderness should be cultivated, or whether the wilderness could be cultivated, depending on the contemporary

25 Albert Biome, The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting, c. 1830-1865 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 21, 1, as discussed in Martin Berger, Sight Unseen; Whiteness and American Visual Culture, (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California; 2005), 76. 26 This term was used by scholars in another field of border studies, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London; Verso, 1983 and 2006). I will use this phrase throughout this discussion in reference to the broader national community that, as discussed earlier in light of “the local,” is an imagined construct. 27 Angela Miller, “Everywhere and Nowhere: The Making of the National Landscape,” 215.

15 viewer's point of view.28 The former speaking to the ideological national self, and the latter speaking to the “can-do” attitude of the national spirit.

The artist's complicity is further recognizable through the merging of the observational experience of the artist with the use of the physical landscape. Cole’s own love of nature is palpable in his presentation of the landscape, alluding to the nation embodied in nature. In the end, interpretations of The Oxbow were (and are) often identified as “celebratory and nationalistic.”29 Recognizing the product of the nation through the sunbathed towns and cultivated fields is celebrated while the nation’s inherent ability to civilize the wilderness and prosper in the face of hardship and adversity can be considered nationalistic—an image of civilization prospering in the face of Cole’s storms and unyielding landscape.

However, in an interesting twist, it appears the artist may not have believed in the creation of a celebratory national ideology. It is interesting to consider this within the larger exploration of the visual rhetoric and ideological dynamics of the artist’s own experience lending to the creation of the landscape painting. In Cole’s “Essay on American Scenery,” he expressed his dismay at the national progress narrative, saying:

I cannot but express my sorrow that the beauty of such landscapes is quickly passing away—the ravages of the axe are daily increasing—the most noble scenes are made destitute, and oftentimes with barbarism scarcely credible in a civilized nation. The wayside is becoming shadeless [sic], and another generation will behold spots, now rife with beauty, desecrated by what is called improvement; which, as yet, generally destroys Nature's beauty without substituting that of Art.30

28 William Cronon, “Telling Tales on Canvas.” in Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 42. 29 Angela Miller, “Everywhere and Nowhere: The Making of the National Landscape,” 212. 30 Thomas Cole, “Essays on American Scenery,” American Monthly Magazine n.s. 1 (January 1836), in Sarah Burns and John Davis, American Art to 1900: A documentary History, (Berkley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2009), 271.

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In his own words, Cole rejected ideological nationalism, in what he viewed as the unnecessary destruction of nature. This rejection does not easily fit with the idea of the celebratory

American national landscape, a tradition of depiction steeped in ideological praise through nature’s nation, which Cole is often cited as creating.31

In his journal from 1838, Cole further articulated his dissatisfaction with how his art was viewed. He wrote:

I do feel that I am not a mere leaf painter—that I have loftier conceptions than any mere combination of inanimate and uniformed Nature. But I am out of place[,] everything around except delightful nature herself is conflicting my feelings. There are few persons of taste & no real opportunity for the artist of Genius to develop his powers. The utilitarian tide sets against fine arts.32

In this unassuming passage, Cole has agency as seeing himself as more than a landscape painter. Cole blurs the boundaries between an artist wanting to preserve nature and wanting to use it to address grander ideas. In many ways the dichotomy of nature as something that should be protected and something that should be used is reflected in Barbara Novak’s point of view that the nation’s identity is “both constructed and threatened by the double-edged symbol of progress, the axe that destroys and builds, builds and destroys. The paradoxe of this relationship to nature is sharply revealed in the ‘civilizing’ of the land. Progress toward

America’s future literally undercut its past,” Novak’s “double-edged symbol of progress.”33

31 Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye; Landscape Representations and American Cultural Politics, 1825-1875, (Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1993), 65. 32 Thomas Cole, “Thoughts and Occurrences,” May 19, 1838, New York State Library, Thomas Cole Papers, 1821-62, in Sarah Burns and John Davis, American Art to 1900: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 242. 33 Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875, 135.

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The fact that Cole's journals and essays reveal he was privately conflicted about the idea of the national progress narrative that we often associate with his landscapes like The Oxbow, should only be taken as a counterpoint to problematize how we interpret the artists experience and intent in this discussion. What makes Cole the recognized father of the American landscape genre was not that he was the first to depict the landscape (by no means the case argued here) but rather his ability to reimagine the landscape in ways that make it a nationalizing subject.

In creating a holistic view of the nation in works like The Oxbow, in which Cole stands in for the broader national construct in the wilderness and the viewer is provided a position to look down on the progress of the nation, the question then becomes: How does an artist express the individual within the larger nation? Perhaps more pressing in discussing the mid- nineteenth century becomes the question of what happens when that national construct breaks down, or the virtuous nation becomes tarnished? In response to these questions the remaining two personifications of the landscape (the landscape that preserves the nation and the landscape that expands the nation) emerge almost simultaneously in the second half the nineteenth century.

THE LANDSCAPE THAT PRESERVES THE NATION

For Miller, the idea of nature’s nation—so poignantly expressed in The Oxbow—relies on the notion of an unspoiled landscape that can give birth to a prosperous nation, giving validity to why it is so often successfully embodied in the untouched wilderness.34 However, the suggestion of an ideal nation being born out of nature changes when that very landscape

34 William Cronon, “Telling Tales on Canvas,” in Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 80.

18 becomes spoiled, as in the decades leading up to the Civil War. By mid-century, the ideologies of a virtuous state born out nature (that of nature’s nation) largely become questioned as the looming Civil War of the 1860s threatens to divide the nation. In order to address this, some artists like Church used the landscape to embody the national conflict. This embodiment can be seen symbolically through the use of nature in works such as Church’s Twilight in the

Wilderness, 1860, Niagara, 1857, and Cotopaxi, 1862, in which the landscape becomes a stand- in for the larger nation. The same embodiment can be seen metaphorically through American iconography in works such as Our Banner in the Sky, 1861, in which the clouds and stars form the American flag in the sky.

In Twilight in the Wilderness, Church also utilizes the principle of Boime’s magisterial gaze, just as Cole had done in The Oxbow. The artist places the viewer in the wilderness with the opportunity to look possessively down on the calm lake in the valley below and on to the divine light of providence setting behind the mountains in the distance. In a painting that has similar ideological characteristics to the progressive narrative that Cole interpreted in The

Oxbow, Church’s Twilight in the Wilderness presents nature removed from a sense of place and waiting to be inhabited. However, Church removes the functioning civilization present in Cole’s valley and returns the entire scene to nature. In Church’s imagined nation there is no settlement to look towards, no plowed fields to admire, and no infrastructure to produce the national output. Church goes so far as to remove the human figure in the wilderness that in

Cole‘s work we could interpret as the personification of the nation. The removal of human activity creates an image that, on the surface, allows the viewer to explore the details of nature

Church has given in its place—details such as the gnarled trees in the foreground with an eagle

19 resting proudly on one of their branches, the wooded mountains just beyond the rocky outcrop in the foreground, and the wispy clouds that pass over all of it in a fiery blaze.

Countless discussions by art historians have centered on Church’s use of detail that characterize many of Church’s large scale landscapes throughout the mid-century, such as

Jennifer Raab’s “Precisely These Objects: Frederic Church and the Culture of Detail,” John Davis’

“Frederic Church's ‘Sacred Geography’,” and Franklin Kelly’s “Frederic Edwin Church and the national landscape.”35 His passion for detail came from his experience of reading scientific texts by naturalists such as Alexander von Humboldt who argued for artists to “seize… on the true image of the varied forms of nature… a unity in diversity of phenomena; a harmony, blended together all created things, however dissimilar in form and attribute.”36 His passion was also drawn from popular publications by art theorists such as John Ruskin who, in his five volume thesis Modern Painters, 1843-1888, argued for accurate depictions of natural forms as the foundation of a perfect and honest painting.37 The practice of detail used by Church as noted by these scholars, and especially by Raab, brought about “celebratory, as well as conflicted responses” from viewers with experience in the landscape and observing other works in the

35 Jennifer Raab’s article and subsequent book “‘Precisely These Objects’: Frederic Church and the Culture of Detail,” The Art Bulletin 95, no. 4 (2013), 578-596, explores Church’s use of detail as a means to construct his images, John Davis’ article “Frederic Church's ‘Sacred Geography’,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 1, No. 1 (1987), 78-96, looks at Church’s detail in depictions of holy religious sites as a method of connecting the viewer with the sacred space, and Franklin Kelly’s book “Frederic Edwin Church and the national landscape,” (Smithsonian Books; 1988), further examines Churches use of detail in the imagining of the nation. 36 Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, trans. E. C. Otté, (London: Henry G. Born, 1849-58), vol 1, 24, quoted in Raab, “Precisely These Objects,” 580. 37 Virginia Wagner, “Geological Time in Nineteenth-Century Landscape Paintings,” Winterthur Portfolio 24, No. 2/3 (1989), pp. 153-163, Accessed: December 3, 2018, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1181263.

20 same genre.38 For some contemporary viewers, the use of detail left Church in the habit of

“crushing himself beneath his subject…sacrific[ing] general effect to a multiplicity and elaboration of detail,” as one critic wrote in 1863.39 For others, Church’s use of detail provided an experience to lose oneself in the landscape, encouraged by Church to use opera glasses to isolate the details and remove the distraction of the surrounding environment. Church thus, according to Raab, allowed the viewer to experience images like Twilight in the Wilderness in two ways, “as a whole, with the naked eye from a relative distance; and as isolated details from a magnified proximity.” 40 A choice between the landscape as a whole or as a composition of individual parts creates a pull between the individual and the whole, evident in the difference between the entire image that commands attention and the profusion of detail that demands scrutiny. In such a way, Church engages the viewer in the idea of the state apparatus that blurs the boundaries between the individual experience as the isolated detail, and the national abstraction in the landscape as a whole. The indulgence of detail, in works like Twilight in the

Wilderness, serves the critical function of allowing the viewer to pause and examine the work, while creating the sense of harmony and fascination. The act of looking creates the local experience, or a quick reminder of what their local experience is, within the nation. Once

38 Jennifer Raab, “‘Precisely These Objects’: Frederic Church and the Culture of Detail,” The Art Bulletin 95, no. 4 (2013), 578. Accessed: February 23, 2019, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43188855. 39 Raab, “Precisely These Objects,” 579. 40 Raab, “Precisely These Objects,” 583. While Jennifer Raab’s stated goal in this article was to “emphasize the visual and epistemological rather than the political or ideological” I feel her discussion on Church’s use of detail endorses my assertion that his works speak to the ideological imagined community of the state, or the creation thereof.

21 recognized, and when viewed as a whole, these details present a deeper ideological understanding of the landscape.

Significant for that contemporary time period, Church presents an untouched wilderness that, as Cronon notes, “remains unhurt by profane human hands” but still is no less affected by the conflict leading up to and through the Civil War.41 By removing evidence of civilization, Church creates a composition that encourages the viewer to see the landscape removed from the conflicts that civilization creates. Because of the connection with the viewer's own experience, with their fears of the looming events leading to war of the 1860s and their individual beliefs about that war, the landscape preserves the construct of the state by preserving the idea of the larger imagined nation. Unlike Cole, Church gives no indication of who is part of the broader imagined community. Instead, the open-endedness inherently means that while the idea of the nation is American (as shown in the wilderness of Maine) the particulars of the imagined community that makes up that nation is open for interpretation.

This is not to say that Church creates a national apparatus by ignoring the divisiveness of the Civil War. To argue such a point would be to ignore the political upheaval that was felt in every aspect of daily life. Instead, Church creates an effective state apparatus by connecting the viewer on an intimate level with the landscape we know to be part of the nation. Instead of emphasizing regional divides by depicting a distinctively northern landscape, or one that can be easily placed, a shift in attitude can be seen that represents a push to redefine how the landscape can speak to the American national construct. In such a way Church is presenting a landscape that, by not corrupting the state towards one side or another, or even attempting to

41 Cronon, “Telling Tales on Canvas,” in Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts, 80.

22 draw it out, profoundly preserves it. And, by moving from an image of nature giving birth to the nation to one of nature preserving suggests a shift to address this perseverance.

Fundamentally, Church creates an image of the sublime in Twilight in the Wilderness. In a 2002 article by Robert Doak titled “The Natural Sublime and American Nationalism: 1800-

1850,” he describes the sublime as a changing concept throughout the nineteenth-century. By citing philosophers Edmond Burke, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Weiskell, Doak notes that, “the hallmarks of the natural sublime” are often associated early on with ideas of “horror” and

“astonishment,” “chaos,” “size,” “irregular disorder,” and “anxiety.”42 However, this interpretation is not always the case and does not always provide the full complexity of this idea. In terms of American artist Washington Alliston’s sublime, he “condemns the early conception of the sublime and instead pushes towards a “moral sublime,” further noted by

Doak as “avoiding implications of violence by positing a protective and beneficent nature.”43 By allowing for a shift in the idea of the sublime, the artist can denote not only power and chaos but morality in the work as well. This is addressed by art critic Earl Powell in an essay on the

"American Sublime," in which he articulates the concept of a "transcendental sublime." As also addressed by Doak, the transcendental sublime emphasizes “’spiritual calm’ and the ‘illusion of space, infinity, and quiet,’ further adding that ‘a contemplative view of nature displaced terror and majesty’.”44 Such a concept can be used to describe the sublime in Church’s mid-century

42 Robert Doak, “The Natural Sublime and American Nationalism: 1800-1850,” Studies in Popular Culture 25, No. 2 (2002), 14. 43 Doak, “The Natural Sublime and American Nationalism: 1800-1850,” 17. 44 Earl Powell, "Luminism and the American Sublime," American Light: The Luminist Movement 1850-1875. Ed. John Wilmerding. (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1980), 69, as discussed in Doak, “The Natural Sublime and American Nationalism: 1800-1850,” 17.

23 symbolic works like Twilight in the Wilderness—a transcendental sublime through which the viewer is left with a sense of a spiritual space, infinity and quiet. When constructing a national apparatus, Church then avoided Miller’s spoiled nature and allowed the viewer to examine the details of the nation and create their own national construct, from the transcendental sublime, based on their own experiences of spiritual peace, infinity, and quiet contemplation of the landscape.

However, just as discussed with Cole’s The Oxbow, this interpretation can be problematized by Göran Therborn’s discussion on ideological contradictions, in which differences in qualification between two viewers (based on differing class, regional affiliations, education, etc.) can establish a competing understanding of the nationalist thought presented in the landscape.45 This contradiction is based on how the viewer interprets the work through their own experience and thus can result in clashing understandings of the work—creating differences between viewers or intensifying those that already exist.

An example of this contradiction can be seen in Church’s Twilight in the Wilderness when considering his use of detail throughout the composition across the valley and into the distance on the other side. For Church’s audience in the North, paintings of the northern landscapes were a celebration of the nation and, as art historian Eleanor Jones Harvey notes, “a prewar exemplar of America’s power and majesty.” However, for the viewer from the South that depiction of the northern landmark meant that America’s power and majesty was squarely held in the North.46 This interpretation draws out the contradiction that comes from a work of

45 Göran Therborn, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology, (London; Redwood Burn Ltd, 1980), 22. 46 Eleanor Jones Harvey, The Civil War and American Art, (Yale University Press; 2012), 235.

24 art meant to be inclusive while at the same time presenting a depiction of the artist’s experience with the landscape in his own backyard. Further, it raises the questions of how the viewer interpreted the subjection-qualification presented—whether the viewer is a part of the subject matter (as could be argued with the northern viewer looking at a landscape that is familiar to them) or subjected to the national idea (established through the landscape, as could be argued with the southern viewer examining an undoubtedly northern landscape).

While these ideas problematize the landscape that preserves the nation in relation to mid-century events, it is important to remember another personification grows out of the mid- century use of nature. Simultaneously, as images such as Church’s Twilight in the Wilderness question the established national construct and express the desire to preserve the ideal nation as a whole, other artists envisioned the persistence of the state through its growth and expansion.

THE LANDSCAPE THAT EXPANDS THE NATION

During the same period that artists like Church are looking to preserve the nation through ideological images of the landscape, as discussed above, artists also started looking towards, and reacting to, expansionist sentiments in the mid-century. The latter point of view caused Americans to look outwards from their imagined community towards the broader contexts of America spreading from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This isn’t to suggest that it was purely for a sense of escapism from conflict in the East (although that could be argued), but rather for the fascination that came from the unexplored western landscape.

Even before Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis of 1893 popularized the term and solidified the idea of the “frontier,” the region largely took on a broad idea of simply being

25 different than the eastern landscape of Cole and Church. For artists depicting the American spirit, the West provided a subject many had never encountered before. As noted by historian

Archibald Hanna: “The ideal West [had] never been crystallized into a final form but varied from individual to individual.” However, he points out “two features, which are basic to the idea of the West and very closely related to each other, are [the ideas of] ‘otherness’ and

‘remoteness.’”47 It became an exotic land where both the “remoteness” of its physical appearance and the “otherness” of its native cultures became an integral part of the region’s mystique and appeal to the Euro-American audience in the East. As such, the American West became understood through the convention of the harmoniously beautiful, which seems to closely align with the early transcendentalist views of American Nationalism. This exoticism gave rise to these western images fostering the ideals of the frontier, nationhood, and

American national identity in the West.

In 1863, after returning from an expedition of the Rocky Mountains, Albert Bierstadt painted one of his early Rocky Mountain scenes, Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak. In keeping with his training from Düsseldorf, this painting is a composite view of sketches, field studies, and impressions gathered while on the expedition.48 In the foreground he presents an Indian encampment sitting on the edge of a peaceful lake. In the far distance of the painting stand the sun lit Rocky Mountains, presented as an impenetrable wall of jagged rock and snow (including a peak that the artist named after the leader of the expedition Frederick William Lander). In the

47 Joshua C. Taylor, America As Art, (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 140. 48 While this was a common practice for many artists to pull together sketches and field notes into one composition in their studio, Bierstadt is most known to have done this to great effect—often imagining large parts of his landscape as a way to make it more entraining and experiential (and certainly more marketable).

26 same way Cole’s wilderness helps define the cultivated landscape, the Native American encampment stands in for the notion of the other, allowing the perceived notion of a “civilized” nation to be understood.49

The act of blending multiple views, ideologies, and imagined spaces into one harmonious composition (as Bierstadt had done), mirrors the contemporary literary technique of the infinite moment used famously by popular nineteenth century romantic authors such as

Robert Browning, Wordsworth and later, James Joyce.50 The infinite moment, as described by

English literary historian Ashton Nichols, “emerges out of the ordinary and [is] described as infinite… because they break down the normal balance of the flow of time, bestowing on certain instants a profound feeling, a feeling more important for itself than for any particular attempt to interpret its significance.”51 Ultimately, in a visual context, the infinite moment is produced by an image that layers itself and compresses time into an instant to produce a moment of revelation for the viewer. In the practice of Bierstadt, this is produced through the artist piecing the work together out of detailed vignettes that ask the viewer to pause. In such a way the viewer is led to an epiphany through the work solidifying the popular opinion of

Americans’ right to expand West, to push the Native American encampment out, and claim the land as their own. This visual rhetoric emphasizes the ideas by visual and cultural historians,

49 This is a trope that artists like Cole have used as well, however, it takes on significant meaning in the context of this discussion, the idea that Native Americans in the nineteenth century were perceived to be the embodiment of the savage, the wild, and the uncultivated wilderness. 50 For many of these authors, the idea of the infinite moment takes on the form of monologues that reveal multiple layers of the characters’ emotion, leading them to a deeper understanding of their temperament and the world around them. 51 Ashton Nichols, “Browning’s Modernism: The Infinite Moment as Epiphany,” Browning Institute Studies, 11 (1983), 88.

27 such as Martha Sandweiss, William Cronon, Brian W. Dippie, and Nancy K. Anderson, that images of the West celebrated the “imagined” nation of the West.

Despite all of the geographic and ethnographic detail in Bierstadt’s painting, leading contemporary viewers to take his entire composition as a straightforward representation of the landscape, it is now considered a “fictional construct,” in the words of Nancy Anderson.52 Yet, the minute details and adherence to popular American rhetoric of westward expansionism emphasizes the role of the artist in creating the image with the visual rhetoric of nationalism. In this manner, Bierstadt’s bright sunshine and the warm lush valley has been interpreted as the rich golden landscape awaiting the farmer’s plow, creating an image that led many contemporary viewers to argue that Bierstadt’s painting was “too true and too powerful to be questioned.”53 Through this, Bierstadt’s painting becomes a mythic landscape where the mere use of the sun is interpreted as a symbol of hope, success, and God’s blessings on the American people to overcome this rugged landscape. However, there is no allegorical figure of progress in

Bierstadt’s work, no figural representation of pioneers leading the charge westward, nor any indication that this is a wilderness begging for the structure and order associated with colonization as there are in other images of Westward expansionism such as Emanuel Leutze's

1861 mural, and mural study, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way and John Gast’s

1872 painting Westward-Ho. This leads to a different experience of Biesrtadt’s painting that leaves it open for the viewer to make their own way into the landscape.

However, unlike the straightforwardness of Cole’s dichotomy between the wild and the

52 Nancy K. Anderson, “Curious Historical Artistic Data,” Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts, (Yale University Press, 1994), p. 10. 53 Anderson, “Curious Historical Artistic Data,” Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts, p. 10.

28 refined presented entirely through the landscape, the presence of the Native Americans as a stand in for the landscape waiting to be “civilized,” and the subconscious appeal to push them out in the name of progress, ultimately raises further questions about who belongs in the nation. Additionally, with the contemporary conflict of the Civil War separating the eastern audience, Bierstadt’s work raises questions about where everyone fits in the reimagined nation in the West. What has been uncovered from this line of questioning is an understanding that a more complex impression of the West was available to the nineteenth century audiences from its visual representations—more complicated than the traditional dichotomy of cultivated versus wild, hostile versus hopeful, or “the other” versus the familiar may suggest.

In questioning the common assumptions of the western frontier by the nineteenth century audience, historian David Wrobel points out that due to the tendency to overuse the idea of the “mythic West” with such enthusiasm “we are left to wonder in astonishment at the intellectual limitations of nineteenth century Americans.”54 Did they truly hold that the

American West was unlike anything else in the world, a unique landscape God had created just for them? A region uncharted, with unknown opportunities awaiting them? Did they truly hold that the American West was a region so hostile that it needed the light of civilization to make it flourish? Ultimately, because the western frontier was not readily associated with the turmoil of Civil War—and Miller’s spoiled landscape as discussed earlier—images of the West provided the opportunity for a renewal and continuation of nature’s nation.

54 David M. Wrobel, “Global West, American Frontier,” Pacific Historical Review 78, no. 1, (2009): 1-2, accessed September 9, 2017, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/phr.2009.78.1.1.

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But the experience that Bierstadt depicted in Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, is a complete construct that works to intensify the ideological implications of the landscape; the divine light of providence beckoning the viewer forward, while the towering mountains block the path westward, and the Native Americans already part of that imagined community.

However, its ideological success as a national construct depends on the viewer ignoring the fact that it is not a physical location within the nation, which in itself presents a palpable contradiction. For those who did not, or could not, recognize the imaginative nature of

Bierstadt’s landscape, and took it as fact, it became an ideological symbol of the nation and of westward expansionism.

When Bierstadt’s painting was recreated to be mass produced as an engraving, a description to promote its marketability, believed to have been written by Bierstadt himself (or at the very least approved by him), added to the ideological symbolism by falsely describing the composite image as possessing “a geographical and historical value, such as few works by modern artists have obtained… It is the only correct representation of a portion of our county of which we as yet know comparatively little.”55 The visual idea produced by that statement accompanying the painting only helps to emphasize the notion that, for the viewer wanting to see it as an accurate depiction of the West, it serves as a strong visual of the nation, no matter how accurate it might be.

55 “A. Bierstadt’s Great Picture, The Rocky Mountains, Engraved By James Smilie” (New York: E Bierstadt, 1863), printed testimonial, Library of Congress, Rare Books and Special Collections Division, Printed Ephemera Collection, in Sarah Burns and John Davis, American Art to 1900: A documentary History, (Berkley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2009), 504.

30

However, problematizing this, for those who knew it was a constructed landscape and could not overlook its imagined mountains and composite structure, the ideology rang hollow and the artist’s and the viewer’s experience came into question. One unidentified critic from the time wrote of Bierstadt’s 1866 painting Storm in the Rocky Mountains-Mt. Rosalie (of similar subject matter to Rocky Mountains Lander’s Peak) in Watson’s Weekly Art Journal, “the whole science of geology cries out against him… juxtapositions may be in accordance with the artist’s recipe for the picturesque [but they are a] heartless violation of nature,” when describing Bierstadt’s western rock formations.56 As art historian Nancy Anderson points out, the ideological interpretations of Bierstadt’s landscape often fail because the viewer wants to read them as topographic depictions of the West, with the accuracy perceived in works by the detailed images of Church.57 Indeed, the ideological construct of Bierstadt lies in the fact that his depictions of the West were more often about the ideas presented than the physical landscape, a slight shift from other landscape depictions of the same time. Anderson offers that

“Bierstadt invented the epic western landscape—the landscape that might carry a Rocky

Mountain, Sierra Nevada, or Yosemite title but was always, in the end, about the American quest, however illusory, for peace and prosperity in a new golden land.”58

56 Nancy K. Anderson, “Curious Historical Artistic Data,” in Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 12. 57 Anderson, “Curious Historical Artistic Data,”12. 58 Anderson, “Curious Historical Artistic Data,”14.

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CHAPTER 3

CONCLUSION

The emphasis of this discussion rests on the coalescing of the three original questions that shaped this discussion: What is the landscape: What does it mean ideologically? How does the landscape function? and, What is the role of the artist: How is the artist present? In exploring these questions, the choice of three nineteenth century landscape paintings—

Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow, Frederic Church’s Twilight in the Wilderness, and Albert Bierstadt’s

Rocky Mountains Lander's Peak—present three case studies that illustrate the personifications of the landscape that address what the landscape means ideologically to contemporary viewers in the time they were created. Further, how the landscape functions through the ideas of what exists, what is good, and what is possible. And additionally, illustrate the role of the artist in using visual rhetoric to establish the physical matrix of the ideological state apparatus that speaks to the artist’s and the viewer’s own experience. The point here is not to argue that these three images alone illustrate the full range and scope of American visual rhetoric in the nineteenth century, or the full complexity of how artists approached existing ideologies with their work. Rather, the choice of these paintings rests on their usefulness to explore the nuances of these questions as they related to the notions of ideology, as they can be further used to examine other woks of art as well.

Ultimately, this discussion on the artist’s ability and role in creating the idea of the nation, through their depictions of the landscape in the nineteenth century, comes down to the changing nature of the artist's relationship between the viewer and the work as a production of

32 the national ideals. First, In the early decades of the century, the artistic output of the nation largely addresses the notion of the landscape that gives rise to the nation. Here, the state is found in both the picturesque and moralizing images of nature, created for the virtuous and determined citizen. This idea, seen in Cole’s painting, emphasizes what exists as a way to address the ideological function that from nature the state is born and the nation is nurtured.

By mid-century the focus shifts with the rising tides of conflict towards the second personification as an idea of the landscape that preserves the nation. The sublime landscape is seen as a means of challenging ideas of national divisions on the eve of the Civil War. The sublime is emphasized in paintings, like Church’s, that personifies the landscape through the ideological construct of what is good in order to allow the viewer to establish their own imagined national construct. This ultimately cultivates the idea that in nature the fundamental ideological state is preserved. And finally, at the same time the landscape takes on a simultaneously new meaning that is presented as a way of reconciling the divided nation and looking to the west to expand the nation. The harmonious landscape seen in Bierstadt’s image that emphasizes what is possible, created as one that yearns to be a part of that nation and cultivating ideas of what is possible, when the nation pushes its boundaries.

Fundamentally, the artist’s role is understood in the way they paint the nation as they are taught, through their own experience and social backgrounds and through preexisting ideologies. This is seen in the individual local experience as a product of the landscape giving birth to the nation, the individual being able to find themselves in the landscape that preserves the nation, and the individual for which the landscape expands the nation. However, the artist is not always complicit or in agreement with the ideology being represented or implied, an idea

33 suggested through the problematizing of the artist’s depiction and use of the landscape in the previous chapter. This points to a potentially broader path in the study of nineteenth century landscape paintings, one that looks not only at how the artist presents meaning to the landscape, how the artist gives the landscape agency, and the role of the artist as artist-viewer and artist-creator, but also to further explore how the audience plays a key role in completing the ideological construct present in the work of art. In future research, the full complexity of experiential treatment of ideology and the artists involvement can be explored. This research path can particularly benefit from exploring the marketability of the artist and their work, as well as the inclusion of other artists working in the same vein, and exploring how the viewer participated with new modes of interaction with the landscape; such as photography, prints, experiential panoramas and stereoviews popular in the nineteenth century.

From this preliminary research however, one significant takeaway is that American landscape paintings are not as simple to understand as they seem. While this sounds counterintuitive, the course of this research has suggested traditional interpretations of landscape depictions as nationalistic images that, as Angela Miller points out, implied a

“collective identity that was…unmistakably American,” only consider the artist and the viewer as a complicit participant—complicit in establishing, shaping, and reshaping that identity while largely overlooking the very experience of the artist being represented and the role of the viewer in interpreting the the ideological construct presented.59

59 Angela Miller, “Everywhere and Nowhere: The Making of the National Landscape,” 208.

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FIGURES

FIGURE 1. Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, After a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow, 1835-36. Oil on Canvas, 130.8 × 193 cm (51 ½ × 76 in). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, New York. Source: Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cole_Thomas_The_Oxbow_(The_Connecticut_River_near_Northampton _1836).jpg

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FIGURE 2. Frederic Church, Twilight in the Wilderness, 1860. Oil on Canvas, 101.6 × 162.6 cm (40.0 × 64.0 in). Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio. Source: Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Twilight_in_the_Wilderness_by_Frederic_Edwin_Church_(3).jpg

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FIGURE 3. Albert Bierstadt, Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, 1863. Oil on Canvas, 186.7 x 306.7 cm (73 1/2 x 120 3/4 in). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, New York. Source: Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Albert_Bierstadt_-_The_Rocky_Mountains,_Lander%27s_Peak.jpg

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