Imagination in 19th Century American Landscape Art:
Poetry, Science, Aestheticism
How could we possibly get a handle on “imagination” as it pertains to the visual arts? It is so vast a topic that it boggles the imagination! For the purposes of this 10-minute presentation I focus on a particular moment in the history of American art, from 1840 through the 1870s, which marks a high point in landscape art. It was also, not coincidentally, a time when imagination was recognized and championed as essential equipment of the artist, complicated by the fact that the definition of “imagination” metamorphosed over those four decades. Juxtaposing text and image, we explore a sequence of positions articulated by three major artists. Thomas Cole (1801-1848) represents the poetic; his pupil Frederic Church (1826-1900), that of science; and the expatriate James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) displayed affinities with Aestheticism. All three were linked by the Hudson River: Cole lived in Catskill, Church in Hudson, and Whistler attended nearby West Point, where he studied drawing with Robert Weir. Throughout this period artworks continued to be measured by the yardstick of accurate representation, articulated as “truth to nature” by John Ruskin: the most influential critic of the 19th century and Whistler’s nemesis. Even as critics denied artists the freedom to experiment with nature, however, they persisted in discussing the role of imagination in the creation of a work of art. Examining the pictures and reading the writings of the artists and their contemporary critics, we begin to penetrate this dialectic of the real and the imaginary so central to 19th c. landscape imagery.
Preliminary Bibliography
Katherine Emma Manthorne, Tropical Renaissance: North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839-1879. Washington, D.C. and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989, esp. Ch. 3, pp. 67-89. “Cataclysm and Creation: Church and the Question of Terrestrial Origins”
Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century. Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience. NY: Harper & Row, 1979. (2nd ed.), esp. Ch. 3, pp. 61-79, “Thomas Cole: The Dilemma of the Real and the Ideal”
James McNeill Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. NY: Dover, 1967 (rpt; 1st ed. 1890), esp. Ten O’ Clock Lecture, pp. 131-159.
