21 Feb - 19 May 2002

Room Introduction | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8

 Room 6: A Transcendental Vision 

If American artists were excited by the grandeur of mountains and waterfalls, they also responded to the openness and silence of lakes and seas. Many were attracted to the coast of New England or New Jersey, celebrating the clarity of light and breadth of horizon such landscapes offered.

Fitz Hugh Lane (1804-1865) Brace's Rock, Brace's Cove, 1864 Oil on canvas Terra Foundation for the Arts, Daniel J Terra Collection More about this work...

Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904) Sudden Shower, Newbury Marshes, about 1865-75 Oil on canvas Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of Theodore E Stebbins, Jr, BA 1960, in memory of H John Heinz, III, BA 1960 and Collection of Mary and James W Fosburgh, BA 1933, MA 1935, by exchange More about this work...

Ralph Waldo Emerson, leader of the philosophical movement known as 'Transcendentalism', evoked a landscape of luminous spaces and infinite distances that 'leaves me nothing but perpetual observation, perpetual acquiescence and perpetual thankfulness'.

This mood of sacramental calm informs the compositions of the mature Kensett, and of Martin Johnson Heade and Fitz Hugh Lane. Heade, an associate of Church, evolved a long horizontal format that enabled him to lay emphasis on the flat horizon, and brought a metaphysical intensity to bear on the permutations of an abstract pattern of hayricks. Lane, based in the small fishing port of Gloucester, Massachusetts, was a topographical view-painter who crystallised the clarity of coastal light in his simple yet subtle records of the natural settings in which the seafaring community lived their practical lives.

Both Heade and Lane depict a wide variety of climatic conditions, and sometimes choose to paint skies threatening violent storms. The moment they select, however, is always one before the storm actually breaks, an ominous calm holding everything in breathless suspense, when the onlooker is forced into a state of heightened expectancy which is the very essence of transcendental sublimity.