One of the achievements of the artists represented in this exhibition was to establish a specifically American response to the scenery of the 'New World'. In this they were strongly influenced not only by British painters, but also by the work of American writers. Below is a brief description of some of the most influential works, in each of which the American landscape plays a defining role.

Washington Irving (1783-1859)
Rip Van Winkle, 1819
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, 1820

Washington Irving's two short stories quickly created myths of American life and landscape in colonial times. Rip Van Winkle begins during the war of American Independence (1775-83), and tells of a farmer living in a village built by Dutch settlers at the foot of the Catskill Mountains, in upper New York State. Irving makes the most of the sublime scenery of the mountains, where Van Winkle falls asleep, and dreams of the seventeenth-century explorer who gave his name to the Husdon River, with the crew of his ship, the Half Moon. He awakes twenty years later to find America is no longer a British colony.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow also draws on ancient superstitions and folk-tales, though it is set in a carefully described geographical location: a village established by Dutch settlers in a little valley among hills overlooking 'the mighty Hudson' river. Set during the 1790s, the tale turns on the rivalry in love between a school teacher, Ichabod Crane, and the trickster Brom Bones, which results in Crane's terrifying encounter with a phantom 'headless horseman'.

William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)
Thanatopsis, 1821
The Prairies, 1834

Bryant was the eminent writer, poet, and editor of the New York Evening Post who appears with Thomas Cole in Asher Durand's painting of Kindred Spirits. He also delivered Cole's funeral oration, which elevated the painter to the status of a national hero, and emphasised the parallel roles played by painters and poets in the celebration of the natural world. Bryant wrote Thanatopsis when he was seventeen; the poem, which urges readers to 'Go forth under the open sky, and list / To Nature's teachings', was hugely successful, and later became the subject of a painting by Durand shown in this exhibition.

The Prairies describes the untouched landscape of the West, 'unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful', which Bryant savours knowing that the 'advancing multitude … soon shall fill these deserts.'

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)
The Pioneers, 1823
The Last of the Mohicans, 1826

Sometimes described as America's first best-seller, The Pioneers is the first of a series of novels known as the Leather-stocking Tales, featuring an American hunter and frontiersman, Natty (Nathaniel) Bumppo, nicknamed 'Leather-stocking' because of his long deerskin leggings. The novel is set in 1793-4, in a new settlement on Lake Otsego, near the centre of New York State. Cooper investigates the tensions between the settlers' interaction with the landscape as they develop a more complex society, and the ways of life established by Leather-stocking and the American Indians before their arrival.

The Last of the Mohicans is centred around Lake George, a celebrated beauty spot in New York State (which Cooper calls 'Lake Horican'). It was partly owing to the associations created by Cooper that artists in this exhibition painted views of this lake. Set in 1757, during the war between Britain and France, the novel's main theme is the clash between the culture of the Native Americans and that of the white settlers. Its two central figures, both in some sense 'outsiders', are most at home in the wilderness: a younger Natty Bumppo, the white man raised among American Indians and known as 'Hawk-eye', and his friend, Chingachgook, one of the last of the ancient race of the novel's title.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
The Song of Hiawatha, 1855

Longfellow's long narrative poem is an epic, mythical story of the adventures of an American Indian born on the shores of Lake Superior and brought up in a forest setting described in vivid detail. Longfellow claimed to have based his work on Native American mythology: Hiawatha has supernatural powers, including a pair of enchanted moccasins which enable him to stride through the forest a mile at each step. The episode in which the hero slays an evil magician, known as the Pearl-Feather, provided the subject matter for three paintings by Thomas Moran, shown in this exhibition.