48. Kaaterskill Falls in autumn as painted by Thomas Cole in 1826. On a ledge above the falls stands a lone figure of a Native American. Both he and the American wilderness, Cole suggests, are threatened by the advance of modernity and the cult of progress.
In the last years of the eighteenth century the factory came to America. The rise of industry, combined with rapid population growth and mass immigration, led to the replication in the United States of the social conditions seen in Britain’s industrial cities. The lives of those who dwelt in the cellars around New York’s Five Points were every bit as bleak as those who lived in the cellars of London’s infamous Seven Dials. But in America, beyond the teeming cities of the East Coast, lay a vast continental wilderness of endless acres and enormous potential. The bountiful wealth and sheer scale of the land were taken, by some, as proof of divine providence. American nature appeared pristine and perfect, and the dream of taking possession of this colossal prize rapidly took hold. In 1803 Thomas Jefferson purchased the territory of Louisiana from the French government for the embarrassingly modest sum of $15 million, and by the 1830s the first of the homesteaders had begun to head westwards on the Oregon trail. By the 1840s the American drive for westerly expansion had a name: ‘Manifest Destiny’. America’s mission, wrote the originator of that term, the columnist and editor John L. O’Sullivan, was ‘to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions’. To Sullivan and millions of Americans that mission was unquestionable, sanctioned both by God and by reason.
Nineteenth-century America was a nation of unbridled ambition and vaulting confidence. Yet on matters of high culture Americans were gripped by something akin to an inferiority complex. When it came to the arts, young America deferred to old Europe. An American national style had emerged in the years after independence and the war of 1812. The dominant genre – perhaps inevitably – had been historical painting, but by the 1830s the initial growth pangs of the nation were over and a new generation of American painters went in search of a new subject and a new form of national art. They found that subject not in the heroic deeds of great men but in the empty stillness of the Catskill mountains and along the banks of the Hudson River in New York State. There they stumbled upon a landscape unlike anything that existed in Europe, a landscape that almost demanded to be painted so that the news of its discovery could be better disseminated.
In the hands of this new generation, landscape painting – traditionally a poor relation among the artistic genres – was elevated as rarely before. It was fêted and empowered so as to play a commanding role in the creation of a new national myth. In this new American art, natural history was to stand in for history itself. Canyons, mountains and waterfalls were to replace the classical ruins of the old world – so beloved by European landscape artists. Thus through landscape and the representation of her nature, America was to find new strands to her emerging identity and reinforce her sense of fundamental exceptionalism. The artists in question became known as the Hudson River School, as it was up that watery highway that they travelled to find their landscapes and escape from urban life and urban subject matter. The work of the Hudson River painters spanned two generations, and the school included women as well as men, but the artist who led the way, becoming America’s greatest landscape painter, was Thomas Cole.1
British by birth, Cole was from Bolton, in Lancashire, one of the fiery crucibles of the Industrial Revolution. His family moved to Philadelphia in 1818. Like Wright of Derby, the young Cole had watched as industry ravaged the English landscape around him, imbuing a deep reverence for untamed nature and an understanding of its inherent fragility. In his adopted homeland Cole embarked on a long, difficult and unconventional path towards his vocation. Moving to New York in 1825, he achieved his first successes, winning the admiration and patronage of the wealthy George W. Bruen. With the money from those early sales Cole funded expeditions to the Catskill mountains, painting landscapes that were later sold to influential, old money New Yorkers with whom Cole’s ideas as well as his art struck a chord. It was at this time that Cole befriended the artist Asher Durand, who became another of the Hudson River painters.
Cole produced multiple paintings of the Catskill mountains, starting in 1824 and returning to the same landscape and the same themes year after year. The area had been opened up to tourists who travelled up from New York City a few years earlier, but Cole’s landscapes, particularly those of the stunning Kaaterskill waterfalls, established the region as America’s first natural tourist attraction. Before the national parks, before Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon, it was to the Catskills that Americans came to commune with nature. Those unable to make the pilgrimage were – through the power of art – still able to revel in the knowledge that their nation possessed a natural, God-given beauty like that of no other.
In 1829 Cole returned to Britain, where he studied the works of Turner, once even meeting the great man in his London gallery. Travelling on, Cole headed to the Continent and embarked upon the customary tour of the galleries, where he saw the works of the old masters and generated hundreds of sketches. It was on his return to America that he became the true and vocal champion of the American landscape, refuting both on canvas and in his writings the then widely held belief that American nature lacked true beauty and the solidity that came through associations with the past – by which was meant a past that Europeans had been present to witness. The American landscape was supposedly virgin and free from the stamp of history. The Native Americans, with all their ancient associations with the land, were unthinkingly discounted. The idea that underpinned much of Cole’s work – the idea of the sublime, the involuntary thrill that comes from contact with an untamed landscape – had been imported from Europe. America was by no means alone in the nineteenth century in looking to landscape art and nature in order to forge new forms of romantic cultural nationalism. The work of artists on both sides of the Atlantic imbued nature with a spiritual essence that connected the viewer to God. Whether it was the Hudson River Valley, the English Lake District or the Black Forrest of Germany, the inner spirit of the nation was said to reside somewhere out there, in the wilderness.
Yet in America, despite its vast size, the wilderness was under threat. As the population boomed and progress drew millions westwards, land was cleared for crops and cattle. Thomas Cole’s paintings preserved on canvas parts of the American landscape that many felt should be preserved in reality. In a restless, forward-facing nation Cole’s voice was important. His paintings and those of his contemporaries provided America with a necessary counterbalance.
49. One of the key painters of the Hudson River School of America, Frederic Edwin Church produced highly romanticised landscapes on giant canvases. Like Thomas Cole, he regarded the American landscape as a divine creation and proof of American exceptionalism.
Painters, along with poets and novelists, offered a nostalgic call for what had been recently lost and a note of caution as to what appeared threatened. Cole himself was a conservationist in the most basic sense, sceptical of the thrusting abrasiveness of American progress and confident in the belief that a society that loses contact with nature loses contact with both God and morality. Cole helped ignite a debate about the costs of progress and the value of the American wilderness that was to continue through the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Thoreau, John Muir and all the way up to Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring and the advent of modern environmental consciousness.
Cole was the first among equals within the Hudson River School, but other artists, such as Asher Durand and Frederic Edwin Church, stood with him in their reverence of nature. In 1857 Church painted another of America’s national wonders, Niagara Falls. The enormous canvas rapidly won national and international praise. So popular was the painting that when it was put on display at a New York gallery a 25-cent charge for admission was imposed. Within two weeks 100,000 people had paid for their chance to view what one periodical descried as ‘the finest oil picture ever painted on this side of the Atlantic’.2Some visitors viewed the painting through binoculars, as if they were at the falls themselves rather than looking at a painterly rendition of them. Church’s masterpiece then toured the nation before crossing the Atlantic to be displayed in London and in Paris at the 1867 Exposition Universelle.