 |
 |
21 Feb - 19 May 2002
|
Introduction
| Room Guide
| Maps
| Timeline
| Biographies
| Literature
| Events
Room Introduction
| 1
| 2
| 3
| 4
| 5
| 6
| 7
| 8
Room 1: Wilderness
|
The term 'Sublime' connoted an imaginative response to natural phenomena involving
a 'delightful horror' prompted by potential danger or the unknown.
All these were to be found in the untamed American landscape, which however differed from that of
Europe, where the traces of history - castles, abbeys, battlefields - were commonplace.
For Thomas Cole, the first major American painter to devote himself to the wilderness,
'American associations are not so much of the past as of the
present and the future'.
|
|
John Frederick Kensett (1801-1848)
A Reminiscence of the White Mountains , 1852
Oil on canvas
Manoogian Collection
More about this work...
|
Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823-1900)
High Torne Mountain, Rockland County,
New York, 1850
Oil on canvas
The Saint Louis Art Museum,
Eliza McMillan Fund
More about this work... |
|
American history was in the making.
The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 linked the Hudson River with the Great Lakes, opening a major trade route
inland from New York and confirming the city's dominance of the American economy.
The Hudson passed through wilderness areas of great beauty and there was soon a vogue for rural tourism among
wealthy New Yorkers.
The Catskill Mountain House hotel was favoured by tourists and artists. A journey to the Catskills in 1825 inspired
Thomas Cole to paint a series of wilderness scenes including Landscape with Tree Trunks,
shown in this room, a founding masterpiece of the American sublime.
While the use of dramatic contrasts of light and dark derives from European sources,
Cole incorporates many distinctive elements in his new vision of landscape: the geology, the autumn colours, and the
tiny figure of an American Indian.
Kindred Spirits by Asher Durand, also shown here, pictures Cole in the Catskills with his friend, the nature
poet William Cullen Bryant. It is a memorial to the birth of a new American aesthetic. |
|
