Landscape Art, American

The paintings of American landscape art may be viewed as historical documents that reveal much about attitudes toward the natural environment. Yet, they should also be viewed as historical actors that have shaped individual and public responses to the land.

Since the sixteenth century, with the arrival of European settlers in the Americas, painted landscapes have been powerful agents of cultural change, inspiring economic investment, luring colonists, informing scientists, guiding military ventures, inciting tourism, and encouraging preservation.

The Colonial Era. The idea of "America" began to take shape in the European imagination with the aid of the writings and paintings of adventurers such as John White (fl. 1570s-1593), a participant in the English navigator Sir Walter Raleigh's scheme to found the first British settlement in Virginia. White's paintings, depicting lush forests, peaceful Native American villages, and limpid waters teeming with fish, presented America as a land of abundance, ripe for settlement.

All through the colonial era, artists such as the Dutchman Adrian Danckers (fl. 1670s), the London-trained portraitist John Smibert (1688-1751), and the British colonial administrator Thomas Pownall (1722-1805) created images of thriving ports, orderly towns, and scenic wilderness sites such as Niagara Falls, New York.

Using the conventions of European landscape art, including framing trees and structured progressions of light and dark, they imposed what was to their audiences a recognizable visual order onto the American land. Although landscape art was still a minor genre in this era, it helped to familiarize both Europeans and Euro-Americans with the appearance and potential of the continent.

After Independence: The National Era (1780-1860). Landscape painting grew slowly in popularity through the first few decades after the Elnited States declared its independence. With the emergence in the 1820s of the country's first important group of landscape painters—often called the "Hudson River school"—landscape art became a major form of artistic and cultural expression.

In the hands of artists such as Thomas Cole (1801-1848), Frederic Church (1826-1900), and Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), it participated in what was then a central cultural preoccupation: the creation of a distinctive national identity. The artists' expansive, light- suffused wilderness landscapes, painted with careful attention to natural detail, exalted the American land as one of God's most sublime creations, a source of patriotic pride, and the key to national identity.

Although extensive clear-cutting of forests, strip mining, and other industrial and agricultural ventures were then rapidly transforming the face of the American land, the artists of the Hudson River school, and indeed most nineteenth-century American landscape painters, tended to avoid portraying such scenes.

They instead favored images that celebrated either the untouched, Edenic character of the American wilderness or, in paintings of settled landscapes, the easy, harmonious relationship between humans and the natural world. Much rarer are artistic expressions of the negative impact that humans could have on the natural environment.

These include Sanford Gifford's Hunter Mountain, Twilight (1866, Terra Museum of American Art), which depicts sunlight fading over a valley of tree stumps, and Cole's pair of paintings of the landscape near his Catskill, New York, home—View on the Catskill, Early Autumn (1837, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and River in the Catskills (1843, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)—painted six years apart to show the depredations wrought by the arrival of the railroad and extensive agriculture.

Late Nineteenth Century-Early Twentieth Century. In the years after the Civil War both nationalist themes and wilderness subject matter faded from American landscape painting as it was transformed by wave after wave of European influences, including the French Barbizon and Impressionist styles. Although some artists continued to seek out rugged natural sites for their subject matter, as did Winslow Homer (1836-1910) in his oils of the wave-pounded margins of the Maine coast, most artists in these years turned to domesticated landscapes.

George Inness (1825-1894) and Edward Bannister (1828-1901), for example, both working in a Barbizon-inflected mode, painted rutted roads wending across pastureland and snug farmhouses folded into copses. These paintings, with their gentle colors and soft, misty atmospheric effects, often seem suffused with nostalgia for a vanishing pastoral America.

The more generally upbeat American Impressionists such as Childe Hassam (1859-1935) and William Merritt Chase (1849-1916) embraced warm, blond colors, sparkling light effects, and pleasant, vacationtime subject matter. Their paintings of white sand beaches and clapboarded New England churches offered their viewers a pictorial refuge from the abrasions of modernity.

Another group of artists, the New York-based Ashcan school, rejected the pretty canvasses of the American Impressionists as elitist and superficial. These artists, including John Sloan (1871-1951) and George Luks (1867-1933), turned their attention to urban, industrial scenery, painting the grittier aspects of New York life with murky colors and slashing brushwork.

Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Landscape painting never regained in the twentieth century the prestige and prominence it had attained in the nineteenth, yet it continued to be produced in a wide range of subjects and styles. Many artists in the early decades of the century felt the allure of European modernism and sought to apply its lessons in their depictions of the American landscape. Arthur Dove (1880-1946), for example, in his abstract paintings, evoked the sensations and appearances of the natural world through the orchestration of colored forms.

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) created spare images of New Mexico's arid country that convey her spiritual and emotional connection to the land, whereas Stuart Davis (1894-1964) produced raucous, brightly colored, Cubist-inspired evocations of New York City and Rockport, Massachusetts. Other artists chose a more realist mode.

The sleek images of the American industrial scene by Charles Sheeler (1883-1965), especially his series of paintings of the Ford automobile factory in River Rouge, Michigan, and the empty streetscapes by Edward Hopper (1882-1967) pose questions about the place of humans in the technologically oriented modern world.

Realist landscape art enjoyed a brief ascendancy during the Great Depression of the 1930s. A number of artists used their landscapes to dramatize the human and environmental traumas of the era. Alexandre Hogue (1898-1994), for example, produced sober images of the abandoned farms, dead livestock, and wind-blown soil of the Dust Bowl. Others, such as Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) and Grant Wood (1892-1941), offered soothing and inspiring images of energetic American workers, fertile cropland, and small-town camaraderie.

As abstraction tightened its hold on the American art scene in the years after World War II, landscape almost disappeared from view. Not until the 1970s, with the impetus of the Bicentennial and the environmental movement, did it begin to reemerge. Artists such as Neil Jenney (b. 1945), Alex Katz (b. 1927), Neil Welliver (b. 1929), Jennifer Bartlett (b. 1941), Alexis Rockman (b. 1962), and Jacqueline Bishop (b. 1955) have created extraordinarily varied landscapes, ranging from nonrepresentational to hyperrealistic, from ironic to reverential.

Their works offer satiric send-ups of suburbia, metaphorical landscapes of the human psyche, and anxiety-ridden images of a threatened Earth. Running through much of the landscape art of this time is a sense of impending spiritual and environmental crisis.