Wilton, Andrew and Tim Barringer. American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820-1880 [Exhibition Catalogue]. New York: Princeton University Press, 2002.

There are no doubt those—and by those I mean those who clothe themselves in the guilt-ridden cynicism of the postmodern academic stance—who would view the very concept of an American Sublime as oxymoronic. It is fair to say that for many non-Americanists, American landscape paintings of the nineteenth century, for all of their moments of brilliance, are relegated to that portion of the mind piled high with butter churns, bedwarmers and dust-covered cuspidors: moribund sentimentalities from less socially enlightened times. An extraordinary exhibition and accompanying catalogue, American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820-1880, offers contrary and abundant evidence that the wilderness of North and South America indeed stirred its artists to that state of mind described by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant (whether you believe that Nature itself is sublime or whether the sublime is a mental sensation induced by Nature is still up for grabs).

Organized by the Tate Britain, London (eventually the show ventured to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and The Minneapolis Institute of Art), "American Sublime" assembled some one hundred works by the usual suspects (names familiar to Americans, but generally not to the British): Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Frederic Edwin Church, John Frederick Kensett, Sanford Robinson Gifford, Martin Johnson Heade, Fitz Hugh Lane, Albert Bierstadt, and Thomas Moran. Accompanying the detailed catalogue entries are two short essays by Andrew Wilton (“The Sublime in the Old World and the New”) and Tim Barringer (“The Course of Empires: Landscape in America and Britain, 1820-1880). Brief but useful biographies of these and other artists are also provided, compiled by Graham C. Boettcher.

Wilton’s starting point in “The Sublime of the Old World and the New,” naturally, is a discussion of Edmund Burke’s concept of the sublime as understood by nineteenth-century Americans who found themselves face-to-face with unspoiled Nature in all its splendor, such as Lieutenant William Clark (of Lewis and Clark fame). A distinct variety of the sublime—that of reverential awe rather than the loneliness or angst often associated with works by Caspar David Friedrich or Carl Carus—is, as the book points out, more in line with British sensibilities. Far from sentimental, however, the works in American Sublime explore that reverence in often exhilarating ways.

In his assessment of the sublime, Wilton deftly details the transformation of priorities from history painting to landscape; J.M.W. Turner, in insisting that his large canvases be hung low so as to bring the viewer more directly into his tempests and snowstorms, serves as a crucial precursor to the American sublime (an interesting accompanying exhibit at the PAFA related the work of Turner to that institution). Oft-heard terms such as Hudson River School (a geographically constrictive term coined, according to painter Worthington Whittredge, by a derisive critic) and Luminism (never a unified movement) are questioned as to their usefulness. Nor, he points out, were those touted as Luminists—as far as can be discerned—ever true adherents of the transcendental movement. As Wilton points out, however, they shared with Emerson a sense that it is the “city-dweller” who will come to understand and appreciate the sublime aspects of Nature—that the ascent from rural denizen to urban sophisticate ushers in the ability to comprehend the enormity of the truths being revealed.

Technique is given primacy over labels. Wilton maintains that much of American landscape painting is characterized by a “pragmatic building up of the picture surface touch by touch which varies greatly in effect from painter to painter, but which rarely obtrudes itself as a distinctly painterly ‘style,’” which often “strikes unaccustomed eyes as dry and academic.” He admits, however, that American painters are comparable to European academic painters of the period and that regardless of a lack of “eloquent brio,” painters such as Cole and Church created powerful statements in search of the sublime. It was this ongoing quest for sublime experience that led these artists to the Catskills, Ecuador, and the American West. The interest in “wilderness”—wherever found—unites these artists, who sought their inspiration far from an urban existence ever growing in complexity and industrialization.

Tim Barringer, in “The Course of Empires: Landscape in America and Britain, 1820-1880,” further discusses the development of American landscape painting in Jacksonian America in terms of a parallel rise in the genre in Britain. Several of the artists in question, of course, were born in Britain—Joshua Shaw, Thomas Cole and Thomas Moran. Barringer makes the argument that Cole’s Course of Empire is not, as generally thought, an allegory of Jacksonian America’s imperial aspirations (as Alan Wallach has argued), but of Britain’s (that would certainly help explain the presence of a Stonehenge-like cromlech in the second work in the series, The Arcadian State). It has been suggested that Cole devised the series after a particularly unpleasant stay in England in 1829.

The catalogue itself (as well as the exhibition at PAFA) moves thematically—almost in the tradition of Cole’s serial paintings. From categories ranging from “Wilderness” and “The Course of Empire” to “Explorations” and “The Great West,” American Sublime sets out to move beyond the concepts of Hudson River School and Luminism to redefine American landscape painting in terms of themes inherent to these artists, who all sought the sublime in various ways. Especially valuable is the catalogue’s exploration of how the notion of the sublime developed from British-inspired landscapes to inherently American views, such as Moran’s Grand Canyon of the Colorado (1892).

An interesting and debatably meaningful connection is missed, however—Edmund Burke, as well as Lewis and Clark, Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt, belonged to the Masonic fraternity. As holders of the “Sublime Degree of Master Mason” (the highest of the three degrees), they would have undergone the initiations and teachings of the Craft of Freemasonry—infused with Enlightenment ideals—that are designed to instill in the initiate a sense of wonder and awe with Nature. The term “sublime” began to be used in conjunction with Masonry at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The second degree, “Fellowcraft,” is particularly designed to foster the study and admiration of science and Nature.
This is not to suggest that their experiences as artists were wholly shaped by their training as Freemasons, for as De Witt Clinton, himself a Grand Master of the Masons in the State of New York, noted:

…the cultivation of science, the embellishments of taste, and the sublime and beautiful work of art, have certainly existed in ancient, as they now do in modern times, without the agency of Freemasonry.

Nevertheless, the fraternity certainly promoted the study of the natural world, in terms not unlike those of other descriptions of the sublime. In its description of the charges of the Fellowcraft degree, Cornelius Moore’s The Craftsman and Freemason’s Guide (1859) suggests that:

…and intimate acquaintance with the great book of nature will show you the wisdom, power and beneficence of the Creator; it will teach you lessons of humility, fervency, faith and charity, and fit you to play your part in the drama of human life, with honor to yourself, and with credit to the fraternity.

The trouble with—and strength of—the American wilderness was that it was free of “associations” with European culture and history; imagination was required of American artists to translate their perceptions into spiritually meaningful paintings. One could venture to say that America created its own interpretation of the sublime, different than its European counterparts; basing their perceptions on geological insights and spiritual awakenings in the midst of pure wilderness, these artists—as American Sublime so powerfully reveals—nevertheless sought to invoke a sense of awe without the angst.

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