In an essay published in 2011 entitled ‘Rethinking “Luminism”’, I attempted to develop a social-historical basis for studying American landscape painting in the period 1840–80 – roughly the lifespan of the Hudson River School.1 Artists associated with the school – among them such well-known figures as Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt and John F. Kensett – flourished during the 1840s, 1850s and 1860s. However, from the mid-1850s onward their work came under increasing critical attack. By the late 1870s, the newly invented label ‘Hudson River School’ reinforced a growing critical consensus that the artists in question were now passé.2 In 1883, Clarence Cook, a long-time critic for Horace Greeley’s New York Daily Tribune and probably the most astute observer of the New York art scene from the 1850s on, could write, ‘Nothing more alien to what is recognized as art everywhere, outside England at least, has ever existed than the now defunct or moribund school of landscape once so much delighted in as the American school, but now so slightingly spoken of as the Hudson River School.’3

Cook stood for the advanced taste of his day. By the late 1870s, he was championing Blake, Thoreau and Whitman in literature, and Albert Pinkham Ryder, William Merritt Chase, Frank Duveneck and Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the visual arts.4 The sharp distinction he drew between ‘what is recognized as art everywhere’ and the productions of the ‘moribund’ Hudson River School followed logically from his aversion to anything that smacked of the academy or academic routine, and from his fascination with Barbizon painting and the work of Courbet and Manet.5 In 1883, Cook was willing to acknowledge that the Hudson River School ‘had played its part and played it well’ in ‘the pleasant and peaceful if a trifle tame and tedious days “before the war”’.6 Yet by setting up an antithesis between the academic (the Hudson River School) and the avant-garde, the provincial and the cosmopolitan, he obscured a historical dynamic that was already at work in the 1850s and 1860s within the school itself.

Cook’s was an influential voice in the debates of the period and it would be wrong to fault him for a lack of historical perspective. However, more recent commentators have tended to compartmentalize movements within the New York art world and have thus failed to appreciate the extent to which aestheticizing tendencies were already present in the work of artists active in the 1850s and 1860s. The problem has been compounded by ‘Luminism’, a term invented in the 1950s and applied to the work of such artists as Kensett, Sanford Robinson Gifford, Martin Johnson Heade and Fitz Henry Lane.7 John Baur, Barbara Novak and John Wilmerding, among others, defined ‘Luminism’ as a movement that epitomized an indigenous or native style, thus furnishing what in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s seemed to be a compelling answer to the once ubiquitous question: ‘What is American about American art?’8 ‘Luminism’ – both the term itself and the arguments that accompanied it – has proved a formidable obstacle in the way of understanding the evolution of the Hudson River School and later movements in nineteenth-century American painting. Although most scholars now place the term in scare quotes, signalling scepticism or disbelief, ‘Luminism’ has shown remarkable staying power.9 In ‘Rethinking “Luminism”’, I argued that the phrase ‘aestheticizing tendencies’ more precisely described developments within the Hudson River School during the period 1840–80, and that a historical account of these tendencies necessarily involved an analysis of class, taste and the institutionalization of the category fine or high art.

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To make my case, I pursued three interrelated arguments. First, I maintained that however much their scholarship was distorted by nationalist belief, Cold War ideological imperatives and collecting preferences, the early students of ‘Luminism’ identified tendencies or currents in mid-nineteenth-century American landscape painting that contrasted with, and in some respects stood in opposition to, the Hudson River School ‘mainstream’ – Cole, Church, Bierstadt and Thomas Moran among others. I call these tendencies ‘aestheticizing’ because they led to a seemingly autonomous art in which formal qualities took precedence over subject matter.

Second, I argued that the appearance of aestheticizing tendencies in American landscape painting in the period was inextricably bound up with the growth of New York City’s bourgeois fractions, which, as the historian Sven Beckert and others have shown, coalesced to form a unified bourgeois class or bourgeoisie in the years immediately following the Civil War.10 My argument here mainly concerned the class’s evolving cultural needs, especially its need to institutionalize, and thereby exert control over, the definition of art.

Third, I attempted to show that, far from being an offshoot of the Hudson River School or a peripheral phenomenon, the aestheticizing tendencies under consideration originated within the school, and their appearance could be attributed to the contradictory needs and expectations of artists, patrons and publics (none of these terms, I would add, can be separated from the issue of class). These tendencies represented a radical shift in meaning and artistic value. The growing popularity during the 1840s, 1850s and 1860s of the painted sketch as well as more finished small-scale landscapes anticipated the aesthetic exclusivity that increasingly defined fine or high art in the United States during the decades following the Civil War.

I began the essay with a quotation from Adorno’s Minima Moralia: ‘The aestheticism of the nineteenth century cannot be understood internally … but only in relation to its real basis in social conflicts.’11 By invoking Adorno at the beginning of a study devoted to opposing tendencies within the Hudson River School, I hoped to signal not only my alignment with the critique of ideology associated with the Frankfurt School, but also my belief that it is impossible to produce a historical account of aestheticism, or for that matter almost any artistic phenomenon, by treating it as a Ding an sich, a thing in itself that conforms to its own inherent or immanent laws of development. Thus, with the epigraph, I hoped to prepare the reader for a critique of earlier attempts to explain ‘Luminism’ – the arguments put forth by Baur and especially Novak, who tried to develop an analytical vocabulary from sources ranging from the nineteenthcentury American critic James Jackson Jarves, a favorite of Baur’s, to Heinrich Wölfflin. In American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, which appeared in 1969 and remains in print, Novak characterized American art not only in terms of ‘the real’ and ‘the ideal’ à la Jarves, but also in terms of a stylistic pathology in which ‘Luminism’ falls on the side of the classical in Wölfflin’s well-known cyclical scheme and is often associated with the primitive.12 Like Baur, Novak asserted that the term ‘Luminist’ could be applied to artists as different as Lane and Kensett. In both instances, Novak’s claims were based on what could be called ‘pseudo-isomorphism’ – apparent formal similarities that in effect override differences in cultural context and social function. Thus, according to Baur, Novak and Wilmerding, Heade, along with Lane, epitomized ‘Luminism’ despite the crucial differences in background, training, culture and historical context that separated these two artists from each other and from a more culturally and sociologically coherent group of New York painters, which Novak et al also considered ‘Luminists’, including Kensett, Durand, Gifford and James A. Suydam.13

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In addition to anticipating my critique of immanent theories of stylistic development – theories central to Novak’s and others’ efforts to define ‘Luminism’ – I intended the epigraph from Adorno to set the stage for my main argument: that the emergence of aestheticizing tendencies in mid-nineteenth-century American landscape painting was based in social conflict and, in particular, the conflicts that accompanied the coalescence of the new bourgeois class that emerged during the Civil War. By conflict I do not mean only violent confrontations between classes or class fractions, although the history of New York City in the mid-nineteenth century is replete with such conflicts, perhaps most famously the 1849 Astor Place riots and the draft riots of 1863.14 I mean as well the way in which a class can unselfconsciously or, as it were, instinctively work to advance its interests in the face of opposition from other classes. In the case of a dominant class like New York’s newly powerful bourgeoisie, the class would want to maintain and augment its economic, political and cultural hegemony.

1 John F. Kensett, Long Neck Point from Contentment Island, Darien, Connecticut, 1870–2, oil on canvas, 39 × 62 cm. Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; gift of the Women’s Committee, 80.51.

Broadly put, I am concerned with the relation between the social (the domain of classes and class relations) and the aesthetic (the domain of art). Adorno’s statement implies that the social forms the ‘real basis’ for the aesthetic. Thus in order to account for ‘Luminism’, or what I prefer to call aestheticizing tendencies, it is necessary to analyse the relation between the social and the aesthetic – in this instance between, on the one hand, a newly powerful bourgeoisie and, on the other, aestheticizing tendencies in the mid-nineteenth-century New York art world.

To begin with the aesthetic, consider Kensett’s Long Neck Point from Contentment Island, Darien, Connecticut [1] a view of a sunset over Long Island Sound that the artist painted between 1870 and 1872.15 A close study of the painting reveals the artist’s attentiveness to nuances of light, colour and atmosphere. Such details as the sailboat that pierces the horizon line, the spit of land – Contentment Island – that extends into the Sound in the distance, the clumps of grass that straggle into the water at the lower right, the rocky shoreline and trees in the middle distance – these details make credible a composition that otherwise appears to verge on abstraction. The basic arrangement of forms is disarmingly simple. The horizon line divides the painting into two unequal rectangles. The sky, with its combination of soft pinks, blues and greys, occupies more than two-thirds of the canvas. The pale blue of the water contrasts with the luminescent pinks of the sky. The shoreline and trees break up what would otherwise be a banal composition. Linking earth and sky, they close off the right side of the composition and form a contrast with the left, which opens onto a space that extends beyond the edges of the canvas. These contrasts between left and right and top and bottom set up a palpable tension between the three-dimensional space Kensett represents and the canvas’s two-dimensional surface.

Long Neck Point from Contentment Island readily speaks to what today might be called aesthetic sensibilities. Indeed, it appeals to nothing much more than the viewer’s capacity for visual pleasure. However, the mid-nineteenth-century art public for the most part assumed that a painting should tell a story, teach a lesson, depict a subject of national or religious significance. When, for example, Thomas Moran exhibited Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone [2] in 1872, a mammoth seven-by-ten-foot canvas celebrating one of the nation’s greatest natural wonders, the painting proved to be a popular sensation. Congress purchased it that same year and put it on display in the Capitol rotunda where, two years later, it was joined by a companion piece, Moran’s Chasm of the Colorado.16

3 Frederic Church, Heart of the Andes, 1859, oil on canvas, 168 × 302.9 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Margaret E. Dows, 1909, 09.95.

Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone embodied on an epic scale the ambition present in the work of leading Hudson River School artists. Consider Frederic Church’s Heart of the Andes [3], a work that glossed American imperial aspirations. The painting excited great popular enthusiasm when Church exhibited it in New York and London in 1859.17 Or take Albert Bierstadt’s Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak of 1863 [4], another work that exemplifies the Hudson River School. This large canvas, which includes in the foreground scenes in a Shoshone village, was carefully calculated to gratify the curiosity of eastern audiences about western scenery and the ongoing conquest of Native American tribes. Two years after he exhibited the painting at the National Academy of Design’s annual exhibition, Bierstadt sold Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak for $25,000, at the time the highest price ever paid for an American painting. 18

Even though Kensett was closely associated with the Hudson River School, his mature paintings stand at a far remove from the work of Church and Bierstadt, a fact contemporary critics readily acknowledged.19 Kensett’s paintings teach no lessons in patriotism, offer no paeans to Manifest Destiny. Landscape is no longer sublime spectacle but an occasion for reflection (literally in the case of Kensett’s Long Neck Point from Contentment Island). Indeed, it barely registers that for all their careful detail, the canvases he painted between the mid-1850s and his death in 1872 depict American scenes. Moreover, Kensett’s painting is tiny by comparison with such works as Church’s Heart of the Andes. Its size – 39 × 62 cm – indicates that the artist anticipated an audience of one or at most two viewers at a time as opposed to the crowds that lined up to see Heart of the Andes. The painting thus offered a more private, a more personal or subjective experience, than the works of mainstream Hudson River School artists – an experience in which the viewer focuses on the artist’s choices, his technique, his touch. The viewer might appreciate the extraordinary – one might say photographic – exactitude of Long Neck Point from Contentment Island, but if the painting can be considered a record of the appearance of nature, it is also a record of a second nature. For it was the artist’s sensibility, his refined perception of qualities of light, colour and atmosphere, and his unique way of translating visual experience into an artistic language or code that the viewer also admired. And that admiration was then reflected back upon the viewer, for the appreciation of Kensett’s painting required skills associated with connoisseurship.20 As observed earlier, subject matter has lost most of its importance: the painting functions more as an embodiment of a rarefied artistic sensibility than as a record of the appearance of a place. Viewers’ capacity for appreciation, their cultivated aesthetic sensibility, their aspiration to what the influential art journal the Crayon called ‘the ideal of Art’, demonstrated their love of art – what Pierre Bourdieu has sardonically described as ‘l’amour de l’art’.21

4 Albert Bierstadt, Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, 1863, oil on canvas, 186.7 × 306.7 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1907, 07.123.

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And it is to Bourdieu that we must now turn to account for the transformations of taste that led to the rise of the aestheticizing tendencies I have been describing. Bourdieu argues that in the nineteenth century, a striving for ‘distinction’ lay at the core of bourgeois identity.22 By ‘distinction’ Bourdieu means possession of the competencies and skills, like those associated with connoisseurship, that were needed to properly appreciate works of art. A taste for art resulted from a privileged background and lifestyle – Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’. Although a product of education, it was often thought of as innate. Ultimately it defined an insuperable social barrier between those who were blessed with it and those who were not.

If we accept Bourdieu’s argument, then it stands to reason that the appearance of aestheticizing tendencies in mid-nineteenth-century American landscape painting coincided with and was, indeed, integral to the emergence in the 1860s of an increasingly powerful and unified bourgeoisie – a class that was working towards securing its cultural hegemony through the creation of the Metropolitan Museum and other institutions of high art that could set standards of taste for society as a whole.23 But cultural hegemony was not only a matter of institutions. The ability to appreciate art primarily in terms of form and aesthetic sensibility was to become a feature of the class’s claims to ‘distinction’, in effect legitimatizing its drive for cultural hegemony.

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In this respect, Kensett’s career is symptomatic.24 Born in 1816, he was trained as an engraver but in his early twenties decided on a career as a painter. In 1840, he travelled to Europe in the company of Durand and two younger landscapists, John Casilear and Thomas Rossiter. He remained for seven years, studying art and producing landscapes for the New York and London art markets. By all accounts, he had a congenial personality and a gift for what today would be called ‘networking’. While still in Europe, he corresponded with Abraham M. Cozzens, Robert Hoe, Henry Marquand, Frederick Sturges and Robert Olyphant – financiers and industrialists with an interest in art. (Olyphant, a merchant in the China trade and later a railroad executive, became a close friend and the artist’s chief backer.25) Kensett also counted among his friends and patrons the collector-clergymen Henry W. Bellows, Elias Magoon and Samuel Osgood, the politician Hamilton Fish, the historian George Bancroft, the publisher George P. Putnam, and the writers William Cullen Bryant, Nathaniel Parker Willis and George William Curtis. In 1848, shortly after his return to the United States, Kensett was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design. He was elected a full academician a year later. His election to membership of the Century Association that same year was, according to John Howat, ‘central, perhaps key, to his career at this time’, but it was also the inevitable outcome of the connections and alliances he had formed during the preceding eight years.26 Kensett was an early member of New York’s powerful Union League Club, which was founded in 1863, and the principal organizer of the League’s art exhibition at the 1864 Metropolitan Sanitary Fair. He was also a founding trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, at his death in 1872, president of the Artist’s Fund Society.27

Kensett’s artistic evolution is inseparable from the roles he played in the New York art world, not only his close identification with his patrons and friends and the institutions that enabled patronage, but also, more generally, with the outlook and interests of an emerging bourgeoisie. His success – from the mid-1850s on he was ranked on a par with Church and Bierstadt, the leading figures of the American School – can be attributed not only to whatever talents he possessed, but also to a sharp instinct for what was wanted. As John Paul Driscoll writes, in the mid-1850s, the painter ‘shifted from the more conventional anecdotal picturesque mode derived from the tradition of Cole and Durand, to the quiet openness, light, and simplification of form, color and composition that is now recognized as his mature style and associated with the phenomenon of “luminism”’.28 This shift, which came at a moment when new aesthetic criteria were being put forth in the pages of the Crayon and elsewhere, could not have been at all fortuitous.29 The line that stretches from Kensett’s Newport and Shrewsbury River paintings of the later 1850s to the minimalist landscapes that comprise the ‘Last Summer’s Work’, as it is now called, accorded with both the artist’s inclinations and a growing demand for rarefied art forms. Critics lauded Kensett’s art not only for its fidelity to nature, but also for its ‘refinement’. And as Melissa Trafton has observed, the term ‘refinement’, so often used by Kensett’s contemporaries to characterize his art, stood for ‘opposition to popular taste associated with commercialism, and eventually [in the post-Civil War period, to] affiliation with European [aesthetic] values’.30 ‘Refinement’ was a notable feature of American culture during the 1850s and 1860s, and it went hand-in-hand with the class’s striving for distinction.31

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Kensett’s career reached its apex in the early 1860s, after which his art began to lose critical favour. In 1864, in a scathing critique of the five paintings he contributed to the art exhibition at the New York Sanitary Fair, Cook condemned Kensett’s work as superficial and monotonous, a charge that other critics later levelled against his art.32 Kensett died in 1872 and for a brief moment his reputation soared. A retrospective exhibition filled the National Academy of Design’s galleries with his work; an executors’ sale of the contents of his studio generated a frenzy of enthusiasm and reaped the then stupendous sum of $130,000.33 In 1874, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in deference to the memory of one of its artist-trustees, mounted a memorial exhibition.34 Thereafter Kensett’s reputation along with that of the Hudson River School went into precipitous decline.

Still, to paraphrase Cook, Kensett had played his part and played it well. No artist of the preceding decades had been more identified with the New York bourgeoisie and its interests, and none had done more when it came to making artistic sensibility the subject of art. As we have seen, Kensett’s late landscapes stood in opposition to the more popular forms of Hudson River School painting. They thus presaged the school’s demise even as they anticipated the aesthetic exclusivity that Cook had long advocated and that would characterize so much of American painting in the decades ahead.

1 Alan Wallach, ‘Rethinking “Luminism”: Taste, Class, and Aestheticizing Tendencies in Mid-Nineteenth Century American Landscape Painting’, in Nancy Siegel (ed.), The Cultured Canvas: New Perspectives on American Landscape Painting (University of New Hampshire Press: Durham, New Hampshire, 2011), pp. 115–47.

2 See Gerald Carr, ‘Initiating and Naming “The Hudson River School”’, Thomas Cole National Historical Site Newsletter (Fall 2011), pp. 5–6. For a discussion of the context in which the term first appeared, see Kevin Avery, ‘A Historiography of the Hudson River School’, in John K. Howat (ed.), American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School (Metropolitan Museum of Art: New York, 1987), pp. 3–4.

3 Clarence Cook, ‘Art in America in 1883’, Princeton Review, vol. 11 (May 1883), p. 312.

4 Clarence Cook, ‘Society of American Artists’, New York Daily Tribune (11 April 1880), p. 7, cited in Barbara Jean Stephanic, ‘Clarence Cook’s Role as Art Critic, Advocate for Professionalism, Educator, and Arbiter of Taste in America’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Maryland, 1997), pp. 82–3.

5 See Cook, ‘Art in America in 1883’, pp. 315–16.

6 Ibid., p. 312.

7 See J. Gray Sweeney, ‘Inventing Luminism: “Labels are the Dickens”’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 26, no. 2 (2003), pp. 93–120. John Baur first coined the term. See Baur, ‘American Luminism: A Neglected Aspect of the Realist Movement in Nineteenth-Century American Painting’, Perspectives USA, vol. 9 (1954), pp. 90–1.

8 See Baur, ‘American Luminism’, op. cit.; Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience, 3rd edn (Oxford University Press: New York, 2007; orig. publ. 1969); John Wilmerding (ed.), American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850–1875, Paintings, Drawings, Photographs (National Gallery of Art: Washington, DC, 1980).

9 See, for example, Katherine E. Manthorne and Mark D. Mitchell, Luminist Horizons: The Art and Collection of James A. Suydam (National Academy of Design Museum and School of Fine Arts and George Braziller: New York, 2006).

10 See Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge University Press: New York and Cambridge, 2001); Frederic Cople Jaher, The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles (University of Illinois Press: Urbana, 1982); Edward Pessen, Riches, Class, and Power Before the Civil War (Transaction Publishers: New Brunswick, 1990; orig. publ. 1973); E. Digby Baltzell, Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class (Transaction Publishers: New Brunswick, 1989; orig. publ. 1958); Peter Dobkin Hall, The Organization of American Culture, 1700–1900: Private Institutions, Elites, and the Origins of American Nationality (New York University Press: New York, 1982).

11 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (Verso: London, 1978), p. 93.

12 Baur was deeply influenced by Heinrich Wölfflin and Henri Focillon, leading proponents of formalist theories of art history (see Sweeney, p. 98, n. 11). Novak twice refers to Wölfflin directly in American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, pp. 5, 81, and his influence is apparent throughout the book. See Jochen Wierich, ‘Mutual Art History: German Art History and American Art’, in Barbara Groseclose and Jochen Wierich (eds.), Internationalizing the History of American Art (Pennsylvania State University Press: University Park, 2009), pp. 54–7.

13 Manthorne and Mitchell, ‘Luminism Revisited, Two Points of View’, in Luminist Horizons, p. 124, distinguish between Heade and Lane, on the one hand, and the group of New York artists that included Kensett and Suydam. They see the latter group as ‘luminists’ who advanced an aestheticizing or, as they put it, ‘modernist’ aesthetic, but they fail to grasp the social and historical dynamics underlying this development.

14 See Peter Buckley, ‘To the Opera House: Culture and Society in New York City, 1820–1860’, unpublished PhD thesis (State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1984); see also the informative and well-documented Wikipedia entry regarding the draft riots, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_draft_riots>, accessed 5 March 2013.

15 For Kensett’s late work, see Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, ‘The Last Summer’s Work’, in John Paul Driscoll and John K. Howat (eds.), John Frederick Kensett: An American Master (Worcester Art Museum in association with W. W. Norton: New York and Worcester, 1985), pp. 136–61.

16 See Joni Kinsey, Thomas Moran and the Surveying of the American West (Smithsonian Institution Press: Washington and London, 1992), pp. 43, 63–6, 95, 115–16, 149–50.

17 See ‘Heart of the Andes’, in Natalie Spassky et al., American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art II: A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born Between 1816–1845 (Metropolitan Museum of Art: New York, 1985), pp. 269–75; J. K. H. (John K. Howat), ‘Heart of the Andes, 1859’, in Howat (ed.), American Paradise, op. cit., pp. 246–50; Frank Kelly, Frederic Edwin Church (National Gallery of Art: Washington, DC, 1989), pp. 54–8.

18 ‘The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak’, in Spassky et al., American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art II, op. cit., pp. 321–6.

19 See, for example, James Jackson Jarves, The Art Idea, ed. Benjamin Rowland, Jr. [1864] (The Belknap Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1960), pp. 190–3.

20 Between the 1850s and 1870s, American collectors grew increasingly sophisticated. Many factors influenced this development: critics’ efforts to educate the art public, the expansion of the art market, the appearance of art dealers, new art institutions, especially the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Connoisseurship was especially important when it came to Kensett’s art, a point I develop further below. See Melissa Geisler Trafton, ‘Critics, Collectors, and the Nineteenth-Century Taste for the Paintings of Frederick Kensett’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of California, Berkeley, 2003), pp. 77–8. Trafton’s dissertation is the most comprehensive study of Kensett to date.

21 See Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbell, The Love of Art: European Museums and their Public, trans. Caroline Beattie and Nick Merriman (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 1990); originally published as L’Amour de l’art (Éditions de Minuit: Paris, 1966).

22 See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critque of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1984).

23 See Alan Wallach, ‘The Birth of the American Art Museum’, in Sven Beckert and Julia B. Rosenbaum (eds.), The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2010), pp. 247–56.

24 For Kensett’s biography, see Mark Sullivan, ‘John F. Kensett, American Lansdcape Painter, unpublished PhD thesis (Bryn Mawr College, 1981), pp. 2–81; John K. Howat, ‘Kensett’s World’, in John Paul Driscoll and John K. Howat (eds.), John Frederick Kensett: An American Master (Worcester Art Museum in association with W. W. Norton: New York and Worcester, 1985), pp. 15–47; see also Driscoll, ‘From Burin to Brush’, ibid., pp. 49–135; and Trafton, ‘Appendix A: Chronology of Kensett’s Life’, in ‘Critics, Collectors and the Nineteenth-Century Taste for the Paintings of Frederick Kensett’, op. cit., pp. 351–9.

25 See ‘Olyphant, Robert Morrison’, Archives Directory for the History of American Collecting,
<http://research.frick.org/directoryweb/browserecord.php?-action=browse&-recid=6332>, accessed 15 May 2013.

26 Howat, ‘Kensett’s World’, op. cit., p. 35.

27 Ibid., pp. 40–7.

28 Driscoll, ‘From Burin to Brush’, op. cit., p. 99.

29 Edited by William Stillman and John Durand, son of the painter Asher B. Durand, and drawing upon the talents of well-known writers and poets, the Crayon is usually if somewhat mistakenly remembered as an American vehicle for Ruskin’s ideas. Ruskin played an important role in the early years of the journal but, as Janice Simon has shown, under the influence of German idealism, it evolved a Unitarian-Transcendentalist critique of Ruskin. See Janice Simon, ‘The Crayon 1855–1861: The Voice of Nature in Criticism, Poetry, and the Fine Arts’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Michigan, 1990). For an earlier discussion, see Roger B. Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840–1900 (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1967). See also William James Stillman, The Autobiography of a Journalist (Houghton, Mifflin and Company: Boston and New York, 1901), vol. 1, pp. 222–31.

30 See Trafton, ‘Critics, Collectors and the Nineteenth-Century Taste for the Paintings of Frederick Kensett’, op. cit., pp. 11–13.

31 In a chapter entitled ‘Domesticating the Sublime’, Angela Miller has characterized the work of Kensett, Gifford et al., as ‘atmospheric luminism’, which she links to refinement and the feminization of American culture during the 1860s and 1870s. See Miller, ‘Domesticating the Sublime: The Feminized Landscape of Light, Space and Air’, in The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1993), pp. 244–88

32 See Clarence Cook, ‘Exhibition of Pictures at the Sanitary Fair’, New York Daily Tribune (16 April 1864), p. 12.

33 See Howat, ‘Kensett’s World’, op. cit., pp. 46–7; Eleanor Jones Harvey, The Painted Sketch: American Impressions from Nature, 1830–1880 (Dallas Museum of Art: Dallas, 1998), pp. 101–4.

34 See Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives, ‘Museum Exhibitions 1870–2011’, p. 82,
<http://libmma.org/digital_files/archives/
Museum_Exhibitions_1870-2011.pdf>, accessed 15 April 2013.