“There are those who through ignorance or prejudice strive to maintain that American scenery possesses little that is interesting or truly beautiful – that it is rude without picturesqueness, and monotonous without sublimity,” lamented Thomas Cole, landscape painter, in his Essay on American Scenery of 1835. The principal villain whom Cole had in mind was an eighteenth-century Englishman, the Rev William Gilpin, Prebendary of Salisbury, schoolmaster, and inventor of an extremely influential set of formulae for the appreciation of a beautiful landscape. According to Gilpin, apostle of the “picturesque”, most of the American wilderness was simply too desolate to be considered beautiful – let alone paintable – lacking as it did the necessary harmonious balance between hills, water and trees. The sheer vastness of the landscape was the main problem, typified by the continent’s lakeland scenery: “Among the smaller lakes of Italy and Switzerland, no doubt, there are many delightful scenes,” Gilpin had snootily intoned, “but the larger lakes, like those of America, are disproportioned to their accompaniments: the water occupies too large a space, and throws the scenery too much into the distance.”

Thomas Cole, together with his many American followers and successors – painters such as Frederic Edwin Church, Sanford Robinson Gifford, Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran – spent their lives attempting to overturn what they saw as the fusty old aesthetic prejudices of the European mind. Their self-appointed task was that of proving that the American landscape did, after all, have its own kinds of beauty, interest and power. Their efforts led to the creation of a powerful and compelling indigenous tradition of landscape painting, albeit one that has never received a great deal of attention or exposure over here. “American Sublime” at Tate Britain, which draws together about 100 of their most impressive pictures, borrowed from...

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