Date: 30-11-1999
Owning Institution:
Publication: Sunday Telegraph Features      
Subject:   18th Century  19th Century  

“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 museums, institutions and private collections all over the United States, is the first serious exhibition devoted to the subject – an invitation to visit what remains, for many people in this country, virgin territory.

Characteristically large in scale, the heroic landscapes created by the American pioneers of the genre, in the 1840s and 1850s, were works of art with a big point to make. America, they claimed to reveal, was God’s own country, the one great chunk of Creation yet to be sullied by commerce, manufacture and the general interference of man. Its vast tracts of unspoiled “wilderness” were what the garden of Eden must have looked like, so if American scenery did not happen to match the prevailing aesthetic criteria for landscape beauty, then too bad: new criteria of beauty would simply have to be invented.

The process can be seen in action in Church’s large and ambitious depictions of Niagara Falls. Confronted with a natural phenomenon of such awe-inspiring scale, and so thoroughly incompatible with the customary schema of Western European landscape painting – the conventional foreground, middle ground and distance, all framed perhaps by a couple of artfully placed trees – Church painted a new kind of picture, one with almost no sense of traditional “composition” at all. In his Niagara Falls from the American Side, one of the prize borrowings of the show at Tate Britain, the falls are seen from the vertiginous vantage point of a rocky outcrop. To look into the painting is to look down. Its centre is occupied by an inchoate whirl of foaming, tumbling water, a maelstrom of spray, mist and reflected and refracted light, complete with a small prismatic “bow” wrought by sunshine on spume in the bottom right-hand corner – all depicted with great care and precision.

The way in which he turns each tumbling cascade into a kind of solidified blur suggests that Church worked to some extent from contemporary, long-exposure photographs of moving water. But his debts to previous painting are slight. The picture does not present itself as a “view” but attempts instead – rather like an I-Max film, the format of which Cole’s canvas interestingly and not entirely coincidentally anticipates – to draw the spectator into the experience of overwhelming, sublime nature. Church had been Thomas Cole’s only pupil, and in painting Niagara he was rising to a challenge issued in his teacher’s Essay on American Scenery. Like the still uncharted territory of the American West, Cole had seen Niagara as a vast and as yet unexplored opportunity for painters: “That wonder of the world! – where the sublime and beautiful are bound together in an indissoluble chain. In gazing on it we feel as though a great void had been filled in our minds – our conceptions expand – we become a part of what we behold! At our feet the floods of a thousand rivers are poured out – the contents of vast inland seas. In its volume we conceive immensity; in its course, everlasting duration; in its impetuosity, uncontrollable power.” It was Church’s achievement to translate that sense of awe into the language of art.

The status of painters had never been high in America, thanks largely to the iconoclastic Puritans’ abiding distrust of visual art – tainted by association with the damned idols and images of Catholicism, from which the Pilgrim Fathers had hoped to escape forever when they set up their first colonies in the newly discovered continent. But during the middle years of the nineteenth century, all that changed. Landscape painters came to form a secular priesthood, hymning the great natural wonders – the world’s largest waterfall, the Grand Canyon, astonishing mountain ranges and plains teeming with buffalo and antelope – with which an omnipotent God had deigned to bless his chosen people. The chosen people in question were of course, as far as the painters and their audience were concerned, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans. They were the settlers who, as they battled their way along the Santa Fe Trail from Missouri to the Southwest, or followed the Oregon Trail west, found themselves confronted by scenery of unimagined wildness and grandeur. They were the townspeople and citydwellers of this new society: the “tradesman” or “attorney” described by Ralph Waldo Emerson, “who comes out of the din and craft of the street, and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again.”

The sense of a sudden, surprising encounter with a scene of great natural beauty – a sort of pioneer aesthetic – is frequently conjured up by the nineteenth-century American landscape painters. The viewpoint is often set high, as if to suggest that the painter has just come around the corner of some mountain pass to behold what he now, with such reverent fidelity to geological fact and atmospheric conditions, lays before his audience’s wondering eyes. The sense of an illimitable vastness – which, the Rev Gilpin had argued, was what made American scenery so uninteresting and unpaintable – was precisely what painters such as Church, Moran or Gifford attempted to replicate in their paintings. Gifford became fascinated by the way in which evening sunlight can seem to transform landscape into a golden sea of vast extent. He cultivated effects of dazzle, painting pictures that resemble overexposed Claudes or Turners, the implication being that there is no end to American beauty. For his part, Moran cultivated a wide, panoramic format in his paintings of the Far West, such as Nearing Camp, Evening on the Upper Colorado, as if to emphasise the limitlessly majestic sweep of the western desert landscapes. The cinemascope amplitude of such work was to have little influence on subsequent painters (save perhaps, subliminally, the Abstract Expressionists, who worked on a similarly sublime scale albeit using a very different pictorial language); but it worked its way deep into the imagination of those later mythologisers of the pioneer spirit, the Hollywood producers, directors and designers who turned the western into one of the quintessential genres of American cinema.

Leaving aside a dwarfed homestead or two and the occasional, matchstick-sized, wonderstruck pioneer, the American scene shown by the landscape painters of the nineteenth century is remarkably, conspicuously empty. Its emptiness was regarded as the mark of its innocence and its splendour – and was also seen, implicitly, as an invitation to colonise and to occupy. The commonly held belief, that America was God’s gift to the Christians who had come to live there, was in this way enshrined in paint. The people missing, the people for whom there is literally no room in such a view of America, are of course the Native Indians, who make virtually no appearance whatsoever in this art. To include them would have been to intrude unwelcome reminders that this Eden perpetuated in oils was, also, the site of one of the most coolly efficient genocides in history. Every great civilisation, as the saying goes, is founded on a crime; but that particular truth was buried deep by America’s pioneering landscape painters.

Just as the Indians were fast disappearing, along with the buffalo and the antelope, so too were the unspoilt landscapes which these artists set out to record and to celebrate. Bits of it have been preserved, in the national parks, but much has been submerged beneath the endless suburban sprawl of modern America. The painters themselves must have known that the views which they were relaying to an eager and curious public would soon be overrun by them, and thus transformed forever. This may explain the curious mood of nostalgia that seems to permeate so many of these pictures of what was, at the time, a present reality. As the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville noted, while visiting America as early as the 1830s, “It is the consciousness of destruction, of quick and inevitable change, that gives such a touching beauty to the solitudes of America. One sees them with a sort of melancholy pleasure; one is in some sort of a hurry to admire them.”