Nature Transcendent

The first theme explores the self-conscious and idealized articulation of the American and Canadian national visions. The painters of the Hudson River School, including Asher Durand, John Kensett, Jasper Cropsey and Frederic Church, created a stylistic identity for the characterisation of American landscape painting. These artists’ formula combined a spiritually infused idealisation of landscape with a meticulous detailing of nature. They expressed a uniquely American co-existence with a transcendent nature, even when inevitable technological and agricultural advances are depicted. In such works, scale often played a role in grandiloquently conveying the promise of “manifest destiny.” The expansionist vision of the Hudson River School continued to be advanced in the 1860s and began with Albert Bierstadt and his contemporaries such as Thomas Moran, through the influence of photography and the taming of the colour range employed by the earlier generation.

Luminism, a competing trend to the Hudson River School, favoured a smaller contemplative scheme. This movement placed a substantial emphasis upon rendering atmospheric phenomena and the effects of both direct and reflected light. In addition, the philosophical, ideological, and commercial concerns of Martin Johnson Heade, Fitz Hugh Lane and George Inness, as well as the innovations of John Kensett, will provide significant material for consideration.

Some of the leading figures of Canadian painting during these years were Lucius O’Brien, Homer Watson, John Fraser, F.A. Verner and Frederic Bell-Smith. As they were strongly influenced by American contemporaries – like Albert Bierstadt - and by the Luminist movement, the character of this cross-influence will be addressed. Other Canadian artists created picturesque images of the charms of Quebec winter landscapes and villages or the recently developing towns of Ontario, according to local audience tastes.

In this section, parallel developments in photography – from the panoramic studies of A.J. Russell, William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan, Benjamin Baltzly and William Haggerty to the Luminist sensibilities of Edward Steichen – will be examined and discussed in terms of painterly ambitions, nationhood and the Western Frontier.