Read an Excerpt
Excerpt from:
American Impressionism (Second Edition)
CAPTURING THE GLORIES AND INTRICACIES OF nature was the primary goal in American art for much of the nineteenth century, supplanting traditional academic doctrines and the supremacy of classical prototypes. Naturalism had been born in Europe, but the allegiance to nature may have been more complete in America, with its lack of an academic artistic tradition. When Impressionism later penetrated this country, its modernism ironically coincided with another new gain for American artists-their first truly cosmopolitan academic training. At the same time the traditional milieu that offered this training was gradually disintegrating in Europe. One of the distinctive features of American Impressionism was the way in which it reconciled Impressionist and academic practices.
“Nature” in the narrower sense of “landscape” had an intense appeal for Americans in the nineteenth century, although that appeal developed slowly. Few landscapes are known from the eighteenth century (and none from the seventeenth), and the occasional European landscapes that were imported represented the security and tradition of the Old World rather than the dangers or mysteries of the New. Only as civilization progressed and the hostility of the wilderness became a distant memory did nature begin to be seen by Americans as a “New Eden,” a blessing from the deity and a reflection of Holy Scripture, rather than a hazard or a curse. This new attitude of the early nineteenth century swiftly found interpreters. The greatest was Thomas Cole, who portrayed the beauty and sublimity of the American wilderness. His best efforts were devoted to elaborate historical and allegorical landscapes, often in series such as his 1836 Course of Empire (plate 2) and Voyage of Life (1840). In these ambitious scenes nature was the conduit for romantic expressions of man’s temporality and insignificance in the face of God’s omnipotence. Cole subscribed not only to the continued belief in the supremacy of history painting but also to the tenaciously held academic principle that compositions-created by the artist’s imagination-were superior to pictures that mechanically transcribed nature.
While that principle held sway, there was little interest in the carefully observed effects of nature, in light and color and atmosphere. Early nineteenth-century landscape painting in America, as in Europe, evinced a far greater regard for the majestic, for formidable mountains with towering peaks, dense forests, massive cliffs and chasms. But gradually the emphasis changed; indeed, the history of landscape painting during the nineteenth century can be viewed as a shift from the solid and substantial to the ephemeral, from forests and mountains to light and atmosphere, from the timelessness of classical art to the transience of Impressionism.
Names and definitions of art movements are always controversial, and this is true of both the earliest native art movement in this country, the Hudson River School, and its more recently identified offshoot, Luminism. The aesthetic of the Hudson River School seems to encompass two basically dissimilar approaches. The art of Thomas Doughty and Thomas Cole was anthropocentric, with nature manipulated to express a dialogue between man and his Maker, as in Cole’s Course Of Empire. The so-called second generation of Hudson River School artists—what I see as the real Hudson River School—was quite different. Whether in the more humble, contained paintings of Asher B. Durand or the exotic panoramas of Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt, these artists recorded their subjects with respect, even reverence, for the deity’s creativeness.
For those artists known as Luminists—participants in a movement that began in the mid-1840s, reached its apogee from 1855 to 1865, and declined in the 1870s—reverence for nature was as profound as it was for the “mainstream” Hudson River School artists. Sanford Gifford, John F. Kensett, Fitz Hugh Lane, and Martin Johnson Heade are the primary painters now identified with Luminism, but almost every landscape master working from about 1845 to 1875 investigated to some extent the effects of atmosphere as colored light.
Luminism obviously refers to an emphasis on the effects of light, and it is not coincidental that the term Luminists was first applied not to mid-century artists like Gifford but to the American Impressionists. Historians now see Luminism as an almost worldwide aesthetic at mid-century, shared by American artists with colleagues particularly in northern European countries such as Denmark and Russia. This concern with light and its effects, however, was especially strong in the United States, and although it was engendered by very different motivations from those that introduced Impressionism, Luminism as an expression of light was a precursor of the later movement.
Another facet of Impressionism that fascinated American artists was color, and, although there is little in our painting that compares with the work of Delacroix, American art was often seen by both natives and others as primarily coloristic. In the early nineteenth century American artists and patrons responded with tremendous enthusiasm to the portraiture of Sir Thomas Lawrence and the revolutionary genre painting of David Wilkie, both imbued with the vigorous chromaticism and bravura brushwork associated with Romantic art, while French art remained identified with Neoclassical drawing, modeling, and design.
Color remained a primary concern of American critics throughout the century, whether a painter was admired or condemned. This emphasis was underscored by the opening in New York of the Dusseldorf Gallery in April 1849. Art training and production in Dusseldorf, Germany, was recognized here and in Europe as the acme of professional achievement, and many talented young Americans studied there from the late 1830s through the 1850s. The Dusseldorf Gallery allowed a comprehensive evaluation of those artistic achievements, and, despite the anxieties engendered by nationalist predilections and the rivalry of competitive art organizations in New York, the gallery’s ongoing exhibition was well received during the 1850s. Yet the Dusseldorf paintings were viewed, correctly, as hard and mechanical, expertly drawn but especially deficient in color—in invidious comparison to American art.
From the first, American landscapists were concerned with creating a palpable atmosphere. This concern seems to have been based more on recognizing the power of art to achieve a warm and agreeable result than on any perception of uniquely American qualities. The seventeenth-century French painter Claude Lorrain was considered the great master of atmosphere in landscape. Working in Italy, Claude was not only the spiritual mentor of successive American landscape painters but the subject of the first American essay on landscape painting. The anonymous writer of 1796 suggested that no artist had ever surpassed Claude, since he had exhausted all the varieties of landscape experience. Nonetheless, the next several generations of Americans tried to rival him or at least pay homage to his invention. This was true of Thomas Cole and of Cole’s even more famous contemporary, Washington Allston. Numerous other mid-nineteenth-century American landscapists, including some of the Luminists, learned from Claude. Gifford, for example, was not only the most Claudian in composition and overall conception but also the painter who amplified the master’s conception of a warm, pervasive, hazy light. Like Claude, Gifford seems to have fully developed this atmospheric concern in Italy, in his Lake Nemi of 1856-57 (plate 3), but quickly domesticated it in his American landscapes and in those painted later in Europe, the Near East, and North Africa.
Gifford’s art was within the Hudson River School aesthetic; George Inness’s developed from that aesthetic and in reaction to it. He was the primary American landscapist to respond to the more personal moods of nature, as did the French Barbizon artists—Jean Baptiste Corot, Theodore Rousseau, and others—and his painting marks the high point of the American counterpart. While Inness voiced an antipathy toward Impressionism, his art shared with it an overriding concern for creating a palpable atmosphere, one that united all forms of nature within it and drew forth an empathetic response from the viewer. The work of Inness’s later years can be seen as the beginning of Tonalist landscape. Tonalism was a movement that flourished in America from about 1880 to about 19 15, devoted primarily to landscape painting and related to late Barbizon manifestations in France and the United States. The artists who practiced it were most concerned with poetic evocations of nostalgia and reverie, accomplished either by the domination of one color-especially gray, gold, or blue-over all others or by the emphasis on a colored atmosphere or mist through which forms were perceived, often dimly, and which produced an evenness of hue throughout.
Much art is made to embody permanence, timelessness: portraiture records an individual for the ages, landscape insures the memory of a place, and historical pictures memorialize great and valorous deeds. Yet these very works, established as icons, embody their opposites; for the portrait stops time as time cannot be stopped, and later appearance gives lie to the durability of the image. In American landscape, temporality was a concern from the first. Early in their careers Asher B. Durand, Jasper Cropsey, and William Sontag followed Cole in a devotion to landscape and to painted allegories of the passage of time, but at mid-century such serial presentations merged with naturalistic landscapes, sometimes related to identifiable geographic locations. Depicting the seasons in individual works increasingly occupied American landscapists: Cropsey specialized in autumnal pictures and George Durrie in winter scenes. Concerns for time of year, time of day became ever more prominent, as did paintings of autumn and twilight hours. In fact, the popularity of Impressionist pictures can be seen partly as a reaction to the close tonality and faint gloom so popular in these dusky scenes.
While light, color, atmosphere, and transience are among the primary formal concerns of Impressionism, they did not spring full-blown into American art at the end of the 1880s, nor were they a wholesale importation. They had informed the strategies of our earlier landscape painters, however different their motivations. But in seeking out an aesthetic continuum in the art of the Hudson River School, the Luminists, and the Barbizon-oriented landscapists, we must not obscure the fact that Impressionism represented a radical break with the past. It bespoke a new alignment in our art conditioned by the experiences of younger American painters abroad in the post-Civil War years.
