Nature and Culture : American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875, With a New Preface: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875, With a New PrefaceIn this richly illustrated volume, featuring more than fifty black-and-white illustrations and a beautiful eight-page color insert, Barbara Novak describes how for fifty extraordinary years, American society drew from the idea of Nature its most cherished ideals. Between 1825 and 1875, all kinds of Americans--artists, writers, scientists, as well as everyday citizens--believed that God in Nature could resolve human contradictions, and that nature itself confirmed the American destiny. Using diaries and letters of the artists as well as quotes from literary texts, journals, and periodicals, Novak illuminates the range of ideas projected onto the American landscape by painters such as Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, Asher B. Durand, Fitz H. Lane, and Martin J. Heade, and writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Frederich Wilhelm von Schelling. Now with a new preface, this spectacular volume captures a vast cultural panorama. It beautifully demonstrates how the idea of nature served, not only as a vehicle for artistic creation, but as its ideal form. "An impressive achievement." --Barbara Rose, The New York Times Book Review "An admirable blend of ambition, elan, and hard research. Not just an art book, it bears on some of the deepest fantasies of American culture as a whole." --Robert Hughes, Time Magazine |
Contents
Part Two | 39 |
Part Three | 117 |
Part Four | 171 |
Notes | 233 |
Selected Bibliography | 265 |
Illustration Credits | 275 |
281 | |
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Common terms and phrases
Agassiz Albert Bierstadt Ameri American Art American artists American landscape American Painting Archives of American Asa Gray attitude beauty Bierstadt Boston Caspar David Friedrich Claude Claudian clouds Cole's concept Constable's Course of Empire Creation Cropsey culture Darwin divine Durand essay esthetic feeling figure flower Frederic Edwin Church Friedrich geology Goethe Gray Hawthorne Henry Hudson River Humboldt ideal ideas Italy James Jarves John Journal landscape art landscape painting landscapists Lane Library light luminist Martin Johnson Heade mid-century mind moral mountains Museum of Art nature nature's nineteenth century Noble noted observation Oil on canvas Olana panorama philosophical Photograph picture picturesque plant poetry pragmatic Quoted in ibid railroad rhetoric rocks Rome Ruskin scientific seems sense spirit sublime symbol Thomas Cole Thoreau tion tradition transcendental trees truth Tuckerman Turner University Press West Whittredge wilderness William William Wetmore Story Worthington Whittredge wrote York