Spires and Cathedrals Artistic and Poetic Renderings of Yosemite’S Divine Features

Religion and the Arts 22 (2018) 95–113 RELIGION and the ARTS brill.com/rart Spires and Cathedrals Artistic and Poetic Renderings of Yosemite’s Divine Features Gregg Heitschmidt Surry Community College Abstract In the latter half of the nineteenth century, especially between 1859 and 1872, Union officers and enlisted men, scientists and explorers, artists and writers traveled westward. Surveyors appraised and mapped; expeditionary members explored and then wrote, hoping to convey the wonders they had witnessed. The western wilderness was an enormous expanse, one that as easily represented commercial possibilities as it did a new ideal. Nevertheless, the western wilderness also mesmerized and inspired, pro- voking a type of awe and wonderment in its languorous canyons, exploding fumaroles, bubbling hot springs, and soaring granite spires. From the Rockies to the Sawtooths, from the Cascades to the Tetons, the mountains of the American West mystified and hypnotized those who saw them. The Sierra Nevadas, in particular, became the locus for artists and writers. Their paintings and publications, in turn, inspired entire groups to travel to the Yosemite Valley in order to ponder the sublime beauties of Nature found there. Through the paintings and sketches of Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, and through the meticulous journal entries and travel narratives of Clarence King and John Muir—whose work as a Naturalist eventually helped establish the Valley as a National Park—Yosemite captured the imagination of the American people, as its spires, cliffs, and waterfalls had been artistically transformed from mere tourist destinations into sites of divine revelation. Keywords sacred – landscape(s) – expeditions – mountains – Yosemite Valley – Albert Bierstadt – Thomas Moran – Clarence King – John Muir © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/15685292-02201005Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 03:16:50AM via free access 96 heitschmidt … [T]he artist ought to tell his portion of … history as well as the writer; a combination of both will assuredly render it more complete. albert bierstadt … [W]ild parks [are] Nature’s cathedrals, where all may gain inspiration and strength and get nearer to God. john muir ∵ During the second half of the nineteenth century, the American West was an ideal space where postbellum citizens, facing the political and economic upheavals caused by the Civil War, could rebuild themselves both commer- cially and spiritually. An expansive wilderness, a seemingly unbounded geog- raphy, and emerging markets not only represented possibilities of economic growth, sustainability, and a place for national reunification, but those nearly boundless expanses—especially those landscapes interrupted with precipi- tous mountain peaks—symbolized a new place where the Divine presence could be both felt and contemplated. An author in the January 1873 edition of Littell’s Living Age, a weekly publication that included writings from both American and English newspapers and magazines, wrote: “Any one under the habitual influence of religious feeling surrendering himself to the impressions of natural scenery [in the West] will not only find its beauty and grandeur wonderfully heightened, but his own soul calmed and heightened” (16). And, as Lynn Ross-Bryant maintains in her article, “Sacred Sites: Nature and Nation in the u.s. National Parks,” the “European aesthetic experience of the sublime that connected nature and culture had transformed in the United States into religious experience of God in nature, as creation and revelation were merged,” especially in mid-nineteenth century America (36). God’s revealed presence was particularly evident in the West’s abundant mountain ranges; mountains, especially, became sacred places for individuals to contemplate nature’s wonders, and to wander about, awestruck by their majesty. This splendor is evident not only in paintings by Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, but also exem- plified by writers like John Muir and Clarence King. Muir and King rendered Religion andDownloaded the Arts from 22 Brill.com10/02/2021 (2018) 95–113 03:16:50AM via free access spires and cathedrals 97 magnificent vistas and commanding mountainscapes using pen and paper, an observant eye, and a sensitivity to the rhythm and beauty of land; artists like Moran and Bierstadt captured the mystique and vastness of the Ameri- can wilderness through exquisite artistry and meticulous renditions of landscape space. These artistic and poetic renditions of wilderness space helped embolden pilgrims traveling west—especially those who were searching for spiritual regeneration and a new beginning. Albert Bierstadt undertook his first journey out west in 1859 as a member of the Lander Expedition.With a letter of introduction from Secretary of War John B. Floyd, as Alan and Jourdan Houston carefully detail in their article, “The 1859 Lander Expedition Revisited,” Bierstadt traveled alongside several other artists, carefully documenting the scenery through a series of sketches and paintings as the expedition moved westward (57). Once he returned home, Bierstadt began work on his painting, The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak. Finishing it in 1863, he created the work that “contributed most to his emerging reputation as an American landscapist” (69). Able to travel west again in 1863, and after he had successfully exhibited Lander’s Peak, Bierstadt was this time accompanied by Fritz Hugh Ludlow, a travel writer. Ludlow, as Eleanor Harvey argues in her work, The Civil War and American Art, did for Bierstadt what “Louis LeGrand Noble had done for Frederic Church”: he regularly whetted the “public’s appetite for scenic paintings” (62). Once he arrived in Yosemite, Bierstadt wrote: “We are now in the Garden of Eden I call it. The most magnificent place I was ever in, and I employ every moment painting from nature” (qtd. in Harvey 62). Using similar language in his own travel narrative, Ludlow wrote in 1864: “If report was true, we were going to the original site of the Garden of Eden” (The Atlantic Monthly 740). His choice of phrasing, “Garden of Eden,” is precisely the same as that of Bierstadt and rather striking: both men view, and then write about, the Yosemite Valley as edenic, a near paradisical scene that is sacred and sublime. One of Bierstadt’s depictions of this sublime view is Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California (1865), a marvelous depiction of an edenic scene, and one that exudes a certain profundity within the Valley’s stillness (fig. 1). And though Harvey contends that the “valley [is] baptized with light,” the baptism is only partial, as half the valley is darkened by twilight shadows (62). Thus the partial subduing bespeaks the sacred: the partly lit east face of El Capitan, the light- hued glacial grays contrasted with the rich, dark browns of the cathedral-like spires, and the verdant plant and tree life whose colors are slightly muted by dusk. Notably, Bierstadt’s shady scene places artist and viewer alike east of this new Eden: whether prelapsarian or not is ambiguous, since all human and animal life is absent from the canvas. The lack of living creatures, either Religion and the Arts 22 (2018) 95–113 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 03:16:50AM via free access 98 heitschmidt figure 1 Albert Bierstadt, Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California, 1865. Oil on canvas, 64½″ × 96½″. Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham ab. animal or human, creates a complicated tension. Is the Creator at rest, silently glorying in and contemplating His own creation? Are humans waiting to enter the paradisical scene or only permitted to study its beauty from afar? Similar to Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California (1865), Bierstadt’s also stunning Sunset in the Yosemite Valley (1869) depicts an unpeopled space, pro- viding what Kate Ogden contends in her essay, “California as Kingdom Come,” is a “timeless, simultaneously wild and pastoral” wilderness space (24) (fig. 2). Ogden also suggests that the Yosemite Valley was attractive not just as a place of respite, but “for a spiritual experience in the equivalent of a mountain cathedral” (24). The language Ogden uses should not be surprising, especially since, throughout his article, Ludlow refers to himself and Bierstadt as “pilgrims to the Yo-semite.” And where else do pilgrims travel, except to visit holy sites? Ludlow—using language from St. John’s book of Revelation—further insists the valley is sacred when he writes of his view at Inspiration Point: the scene is as a “new heaven and new earth,” his words “beggared for an abridged transla- tion of any Scripture of Nature” (746). Though both Nature and Bierstadt’s art are silent, Ludlow’s travel writer’s voice noisily echoes across the Valley’s floor and against the polished glacial rock of domes and spires. His prose is replete with religious language, references, and allusions, enticing readers to come wit- ness the beatific Yosemite Valley. Religion andDownloaded the Arts from 22 Brill.com10/02/2021 (2018) 95–113 03:16:50AM via free access spires and cathedrals 99 figure 2 Albert Bierstadt, Sunset in the Yosemite Valley, 1868. Oil on canvas, 36 ¼″ × 52 ¼″. The Haggin Museum, Stockton ca. Bierstadt spent seven weeks in Yosemite, as Ludlow documents, painting, sketching, and refining his artistic renditions of Yosemite’s splendors. Ludlow recounts how Bierstadt, along with other artists, notably Seth Frost and Henry Hitchings (who, like Bierstadt, were both from Massachusetts near Boston, and had accompanied Lander on his 1859 expedition) sat in a “divine workshop,” studying the various colors as the light and shadow shifted, and scrutinizing the “living landscape” (749). Ludlow further claims that the artists learned more in their seven-week stay in the valley than if they had studied at the “feet of the greatest masters” (749). Rather than learning by imitation, an artist studying the American landscape—especially Yosemite, a site replete with lofty granite walls, soaring waterfalls, and geology formed by cataclysmic events—was more emboldened to create his own unique style.

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