AMERICAN ROMANTICISM: INTRODUCTION

AMERICAN ROMANTICISM

• Often associated with the terms “American Renaissance” and “Transcendentalism”

• Poets: William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson

• Prose Writers: Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville.

VISUALIZING AMERICAN ROMANTICISM:

THE HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL• The first coherent school of American art,

the Hudson River painters, helped to shape the mythos of the American landscape

• Thomas Cole (1801-1848)

• Asher B. Durand (1796-1886)

• Frederick Church (1826-1900)

• Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902)

Thomas Cole,

“The Falls of

Kaaterskill” (1826)

• “

Thomas Cole, The Oxbow (View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm, 1836)

Asher Durand, “Kindred Spirits” (1848)

Asher Durand, “Kindred Spirits” (1848)

• In it Durand depicts himself, together with Cole, on a rocky promontory in serene contemplation of the scene before them

• In the foreground stands one of the school's famous symbols--a broken tree stump-- what Cole called a "memento mori,” i.e., a reminder that life is fragile and impermanent; only Nature and the Divine within the Human Soul are eternal.

• Tiny as the human beings are in this composition, they are nevertheless elevated by the grandeur of the landscape which surrounds them

Frederic Edwin Church,

“The Natural Bridge” (1852)

Alfred Bierstadt, “Emigrants Crossing the Plains” (1867)

Alfred Bierstadt, “Looking Up the Yosemite Valley” (ca. 1865-67)

VISUALIZING AMERICAN ROMANTICISM:

THE HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL• Though influenced by European Romantic painting, they

tried to define a distinct vision for American art • Began with the grand views of the Hudson Valley and

surrounding Catskill Mountains in NY• They celebrated the vast resources and magnificent

landscapes of the new nation (“Nature’s Nation”)• Depicting a wilderness in which man is small in

comparison but still formed an essential element in a divine harmony

• As Thomas Cole maintained, if nature were untouched by the hand of man--as was much of the primeval American landscape in the early 19th century--then man could become more easily acquainted with the hand of God

VISUALIZING AMERICAN ROMANTICISM:

THE HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL• Influence of Transcendentalists on Hudson River

School• Emerson had written in his 1841 essay

“Thoughts on Art” that painting should become a vehicle through which the universal mind could reach the mind of mankind,

• Thus: Hudson River painters believed art to be an agent of moral and spiritual transformation.